I'm reflecting on this opinion piece in the New York Times about Shirley Jackson's story, The Lottery. It claimed that readers became very disturbed from reading the story. I read it in school, perhaps elementary school or maybe junior high school. That detail I don't remember. What I do remember is that there was a surprise ending to the story. What I don't think happened at all was me becoming disturbed and, further, most if not all of my classmates didn't get disturbed by reading the story as well. So I began to ponder whether reading it as a kid is different from reading it as an adult.
Some years ago I learned that to make good meaning about what one is reading, the reader needs to supply the context, which the writer might only hint at. Is The Lottery simply a story, the context supplied within and thus to be read for itself, or is it intended as a metaphor of some kind, so the context needs to be applied to the events in the larger society? I doubt that I considered it as a metaphor when I read it as a kid and I'm not even sure that I knew what a metaphor was at the time of this reading. (I do recall that we learned about metaphors and similes at the same time, but where that was in my school trajectory I can't recall.) If considered simply as a story, is The Lottery disturbing? Can it still be a good read even if it is not disturbing?
I'm not sure whether what follows are good answers to these questions, but they make some sense to me. Admittedly, answering a question with a question is not completely satisfying, but it is what I will do here. Are we so inured to violence in fiction, TV, the movies, and video games that none of it seems disturbing? Or might it be that some of it remains disturbing but which bit that is would be very hard to predict in advance? I recall as a kid having nightmares after watching The Giant Behemoth on TV, the scene where the monster steps on a car and crushes it terrorized me for some time thereafter. I was in elementary school then. There were, of course, many movies I saw when I was older that were frightening at the time of viewing; Psycho comes to mind, but I don't recall nightmares from most of them or lingering dark thoughts. Perhaps Repulsion and The Pianist (both directed by Roman Polanski) were disturbing, but it is now so long ago and these were not childhood memories of those movies, so they are not as strong.
My guess it that a person will find a story disturbing if it triggers a fear that is preexisting within that person and perhaps makes the person reflect on that fear in a different light. As an adult, reading a story metaphorically might bring that many more possible fears into play. If that happens the story is no longer merely entertainment. It becomes a form of ethical instruction.
Ruth Franklin, the author of the Times opinion piece, wants us to consider the benefits of this ethical instruction, even when it comes at the price of being disturbed. This may be meant partly as a counterargument to all the book censoring seemingly going on. But it also may be meant for readers like me, whose access is unrestricted by censors but who may nonetheless opt for "comfortable fiction," which for me is now mainly murder mysteries. They do provide entertainment, but they don't challenge the reader on ethical grounds; at least there is not much of a challenge.
I confess that for my own self preservation I read much less of the newspaper than I used to, including fewer opinion pieces. So reading Franklin's piece is more exception than rule for me. Much of it is just too depressing and my curiosity is not engaged by most of the non-opinion pieces. The intersection of what is good news and what is a good read seems rather slight for me now. And if I develop sufficient guilt feelings regarding my ignorance, by reading the posts of friends in Facebook on some news item, I can do a bit of self-education then and there, even if that leaves me a bit behind the times. Keeping up with everyone else does not provide motivation for me.
Yet short stories rarely find their way into my routine. Instead it's book-length fiction and sometimes book-length non-fiction, some magazine non-fiction, TV series perhaps on Amazon or Netflix, or the occasional full-length movie. Franklin's piece is an urging to expand the repertoire to include challenging short stories on a regular basis.
I actually have a prior disposition for doing short story reading, as indicated by this page on short stories called Appetizers that I made early during the Pandemic. The page is part of a Website to encourage college students to read more. The issue for me that remains is how to select interesting and challenging stories. I suspect that my sense of taste is not so common, if not entirely unique to me. In other words, just because a friend liked it doesn't mean I will like it as well. I'm willing to engage in some experimental consumption, in which there will be misses as well as hits. But I'd want a decent batting average.
Maybe after trying this for a while, I will write another post to consider how I've managed this question about selection of readings. But I'll only do this if what I come up with seems to be working. All I can promise now is to give it a serious try.
