Between as if and is: On Shirley Jackson

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Notes

¹ I borrow “to look awry” from Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan bases his argument about visuality upon Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors: in order to see the death’s head in the foreground of the painting, the viewer has look obliquely at it rather than straight-on. Zizek’s point of departure is Shakespeare’s representation of grief in Richard II: Busby, addressing the Queen, speaks “Looking awry upon your lord’s departure,/Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail;/Which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadows/Of what is not.” Zizek writes, “If we look at a thing straight on, i.e., matter-of-factly, disinterestedly, objectively, we see nothing but a formless spot; the object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look at it ‘at an angle,’ i.e., with an ‘interested’ view, supported, permeated, and ‘distorted’ by desire” (12–13). Zizek relates this visual economy to the Gothic: what is the glimpse of the monstrous Other “if not the Lacanian real, the pulsing of the pre-Symbolic substance in its abhorrent vitality? But what is crucial for us here is the place from which this real erupts: The very borderline separating the outside from the inside” (14–15).

² Jackson’s domestic sketches may have been inspired in part by the popularity of Art Linkletter’s radio program House Party, which ran on CBS Radio (and briefly on ABC Radio) from 1945 to 1967. This daily, half-hour broadcast invariably concluded with the segment, “Kids Say the Darnedest Things,” in which Linkletter interviewed schoolchildren between the ages of five and ten. The popularity of the segment led to the publication of two books, Kids Say the Darndest Things (1957) and its sequel, Kids Still Say the Darndest Things (1961), both illustrated by Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame. Taken together, Jackson’s sketches, the Linkletter program, and Peanuts – along with such sentimental periodicals as The Saturday Evening Post – would provide a rich cultural archive for an exploration of the construction of American childhood in this anxious decade: specifically, the tension between a clear fascination with the uncanny knowingness of children and the imperative to keep it in close check and under surveillance.

³ Franklin observes, “Savages is recognizably a book by Shirley Jackson, owing not least to its gentle touch of the macabre” (305). For instance, the book concludes with a parodic archival document that demonstrates the evidence of a poltergeist in the house. Franklin’s biography was based on exhaustive and assiduous research, not least of the Jackson archive in Library of Congress, where the manuscripts are located. She states, “an early draft [of Savages] went further [toward the topoi of the Gothic], with an episode in which Jackson is visited by a ghostly former resident of the house they have just moved into. But in the final version she toned this down, choosing instead to suggest a homier mode of the uncanny by claiming that the furniture left behind by the previous owners had its own opinions about its arrangement” (305–06).

⁴ Franklin points out that some reviewers of Savages recognized the deep continuities in Jackson’s work. Joseph Henry Jackson, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, “found Savages, in its own way, as uncanny as Jackson’s other work, in part because of the ‘chilling objectivity’ with which she depicted the children’s fantasy life: ‘any parent will recognize the other world into which children can withdraw at an instant’s notice, and the helplessness of the adult faced with it’” (325).