the Castle

Where to start... I finished raiding a bibliography, reread an essay, and read an essay on Jackson's earlier novel The Sundial which was sort of related to my topic. Unfortunately, the library's website wasn't cooperating, so I'll have to do that library list today. I made some notes pertinent to my thesis while reading articles about The Castle a few weeks ago, but I was focusing primarily on the paper I was writing at the time, and as I only had a few days for it, I tried to ignore thoughts about my thesis, thus the rereading. Luckily, my topic is a little out there compared to all of the Jackson scholarship I've encountered - there isn't very much of it. Shirley Jackson's been largely ignored since her death in 1965, and most of what's been written is about "The Lottery" or The Haunting of Hill House, though We Have Always Lived in the Castle probably comes in third.

And not to sound like a whipper-snapper or a cocky youth who will soon realize she knows less than she thought she did (I like to think I've passed that milestone, thank you), most of the things I've read about The Castle have made me wonder if these critics are actually reading the book. They present some very astute arguments and then throw in these blatant errors that leave me completely baffled. One I read the other night said something about the sisters subsisting on their foremothers' preserves in the cellar from here on out, but Merricat has already told us that "Each year Constance and Uncle Julian and I had jam or preserve or pickle that Constance had made, but we never touched what belonged to the others; Constance said it would kill us if we ate it" (61). Even more shocking, though, was the same critic's seemingly benign substitution of Merricat for Constance: he wrote that Uncle Julian liked to see Merricat reading, but Merricat tells us that "he liked to see Constance reading in the evening" (3). What makes this slip preposterous is that Uncle Julian, in his damaged mental condition, believes Merricat to be dead and never once acknowledges her existence.

But let's talk about me. My thesis topic, if I may remind us all, has to do with the narrator's tendency, in the wake of catastrophe, to reorganize the past by superimposing causality onto it. The "in the wake of catastrophe" bit is important but I don't have to make an argument about it outside the introduction because it's rather self-explanatory: the story is told (narrated, composed) after a catastrophe, i.e., the near-total destruction of their home. The part that I have to argue is the superimposition of causality... but "causality" is the wrong word... Maybe it's not.


Michael Andre Bernstein writes that, “Especially in the face of catastrophe […] [w]e try to make sense of a historical disaster by interpreting it, according to the strictest teleological model, as the climax of a bitter trajectory whose inevitable outcome it must be.”

In all three novels, the disaster is the climax, that's certainly true, and Merricat's assertion that "The people of the village have always hated us" (6), certainly has the ring of a bitter trajectory. Maybe I need to jump right into a close reading with this one... What I'm most interested in currently (to answer anyhoo's question about questions) is Merricat's use of "always" and "never," and how these are contradicted by actual temporal markers or a lack thereof. She throws these words out a lot, so compiling my list will take time (which is kind of punny). I had thought about finishing Bernstein's book (Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History) before doing the close readings, but it's not like I don't have time to reread The Castle, it's kind of a short book (214 pages), and taking extensive notes on it needs to be done sooner rather than later. So that's my task for tonight.

That and not thinking about what it is that I can't stop thinking about which is circular, much like this sentence.