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Imaginary Lines

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Viking

The New Leader, December 1962, 20–22

Once at the planetarium, while the show was on, I fell into a doze, or a daze, leaning back comfortably, peering into the artificial starry cloudlessness. Words were issuing from some indeterminate place in the man-made night. And as I listened half-asleep, my eyes glazed but not closed, of a sudden there flashed across the sky great white arcs, with numbers. The apparition caused a brief interval of confusion in my mind: between the perceiving of these startlingly sharp lines and the recognition that they were not a prodigious happening in the real sky, but a mere human invention to illustrate the meridians which can be theoretically drawn as a means of specifying longitude. In that unbalanced interval, I experienced a moment of truly apocalyptic terror.

And, without the fright, there is a somewhat related painting by Charles Demuth. It represents a calm bunching of angled roofs and a belfry. But for present purposes, the main point is: The sky is filled with arbitrary lines that repeat the forms of the architecture.

Both of these examples might help define the particular quality of Shirley Jackson’s imagination, most notably her ways of shifting between the real and the fancied. It is a trick on which she has worked out many variants. And it is managed with especially appealing success in her piece of fanciful realism, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a story told in a style as limpid as brooks used to be, before the days of progress.

This novel is exceptionally well built as regards the ways in which the characters serve to bring out the poetic functions of one another. The younger sister (Mary Katherine, “Merricat”) bristles with odd judgments and intolerant discriminations (in keeping with Miss Jackson’s likings for the lore of demonology). By contrast, the elder sister, Constance, becomes wholly believable in her patient simplicity. She is so prompt in helpfulness she never gets to the stage of recrimination, except when she blames herself.

The contrast is heightened ironically by the character of Uncle Julian, who is invalid to the extent of childishness, and who takes the maternal Constance’s constant attention as a matter of course, even while also taking it for granted that she was guilty of the crime for which she had been tried and acquitted. (It is a judgment in which many of the neighbors concur, so that Constance’s virtue is even somewhat like that of a savior crucified between thieves, though you can depend upon it that, in a Shirley Jackson character, any traits on the “saintly” side will have their special twists.)

In the midst of all the turmoil, something like high comedy arises from the ingenious notion of having Uncle Julian at work collecting data on the crime, while at the same time his mind wanders, so that, at particularly tense moments in the unfolding of the plot, he forgets which character is which, and falls into outbursts of righteous indignation that are quite irrelevant.

Against all three of these inmates in the “Castle” there is Cousin Charles, a fairly ordinary fellow whose average nature in this ingeniously tangled setting makes him almost heinous. We also tend to see the story largely through the eyes of Merricat, who is outstanding in Shirley Jackson’s catalogue of little demons, and who rounds out the pattern by her intuitive notions about Cousin Charles as “‘demon” and “ghost.” The villagers perform dynamic roles in the development, too—nor should we forget Jonas, Merricat’s cat, whose role as a person serves well, again and again, to keep the pot of the narrative aboiling.

One could not here discuss in detail the handling of the plot itself without somewhat spoiling the story for those readers who prefer to find out such things for themselves. But some observations can be noted. Except for a bit of padding, the story is told with perfect mastery, particularly in the way the interrelationships among the cluster of characters is handled.

The best kinds of “surprise” and “suspense” are those that one experiences when re-reading a book. The appeal of a story is soundest if it does not depend for its effect upon the reader’s sheer ignorance of the outcome. In the case of the narrative of these odd inmates in what becomes a very run-down “Castle,” we could strike this compromise:

For those who want the one-time kind of surprise and suspense (the book that is to be used once and thrown away), this story has the twist that can fully meet their demands. It is a story built around the reminiscing on a crime, the arsenic poisoning of several people (plus, we should note in the interests of imagery, much incidental concern with poison mushrooms). But the essential attitudes toward this crime are built up so integrally, the reader’s ultimate interest is not confined to “who dun it” curiosity: rather, the book’s best appeal is grounded in the fact that, when the disclosure comes, it is made to mesh perfectly with the salient traits of the characters. This is a more permanent advantage.

The novel’s virtues, then, in sum: An exceptionally well-assorted bouquet of characters; a fanciful ending built out of quite real beginnings; a disclosure that, because of its relation to the kind of essence we find in characters, can go on being a disclosure after you know of it. (Ibsen is, to my mind, the greatest master of this economic test of form.) As for possible nays: The book, though not long, is a bit expanded beyond necessity; and the expansions tend to involve sheerly internal modes of repetition rather than references to life in general. But decidedly, the ayes have it.

The quality of Shirley Jackson’s imagination can be most readily illustrated by comparing and contrasting this newest work with her well-known story, “The Lottery.” Lurking in ordinary human sociality there is always a kind of embarrassment, insofar as the “villagers’" ways are not the ways of the writer’s dreaming, storytelling self. Accordingly, when the writer “extrapolates” from this situation and its modes of estrangement, thoroughly tracking down the implications of it by drawing imaginary lines that go in the same direction but much farther, conditions are set to conceive of someone victimized by an unresolvable malaise. Thus, through the “freedom of the imagination,” the embarrassments that are but lurking in ordinary social situations can be translated into terms of an excess (as when, in “The Lottery,” the “villagers” meet in everyday cordiality to choose by lot from among their numbers a scapegoat whom they stone to death).

In the present, longer story, the theme of such implicit estrangement is worked out much more fully, and with much greater psychological depth (for the remarkable thing about this book is that beneath its apparent simplicity there is an exceptional range of subtlety and complexity). Merricat’s superstitious magic is a kind of improvised protocol, to make up for the fact that savages so often institutionalize the symbolic treatment of awkward personal relationships which the “civilized” do not even know exist.

Indeed, the contemporary “esthetic” cult of primitive ritual may center largely in the need of poets and storytellers to improvise protocols for the handling of troublesome situations that are not otherwise recognized, situations that we “don’t have a word for,” but that go on recurring and plaguing us nonetheless. Shirley Jackson’s playful recourse to the imagery of estrangement, the primitive and the infantile should best be thought of thus; it is the fanciful expansion of problems as realistically local to the age as bridge clubs and Westchester County.

If you keep “The Lottery” in mind, in reading the book you will see what an interesting step this new plot takes. It works out a system of moral accountancy whereby the menacing principle of the “villagers” becomes transformed into a friendly principle, and in such ways that the “resolution” builds up a kind of imaginary womb-heaven, where one’s needs are taken care of by the friendly principle, without effort on one’s own part.

The name of the problematical family in the book is the “Blackwoods.” So while you read you might on the side note each time the words “black” or “wood” appear, reminiscent of the fatal role of the black wooden box in “The Lottery.” When you put all these references together, I think you will see how that very name ambiguously epitomizes the nature of the plot. And, incidentally, in tracking down just those two words, in watching how they tie things up, you will discover for yourself the astounding kind of complexity implicit in the imaginary lines of this charming book’s apparent simplicity.

Drama

Well, a dramatist is a professional gambler. He prefers playing with loaded dice.

—The Philosophy of Literary Form (336)