Violence and the Sacred

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) When Shirley Jackson's Lottery was first published June 28, 1948issue of New Yorker, readers' response was totally unanticipated. As Peter Kosenko puts it, hundreds of letters poured that were characterized by 'bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse.'1 What seemed to be cause of this unprecedented reaction was not simply Jackson's depiction of a whole village (including children) modern civilized US region of New England engaged a primitive sacrificial ritual but her uncanny portrayal of village and its inhabitants as no more and no less than average. There was coalmine owner Mr. Summers, Mr. Graves, postmaster, Martins, Dunbars, Delacroix, Hutchinsons, widowed Mrs. Watson and her grown-up son, Mr. and Mrs. Adams, Old Man Warner, all getting on business of choosing (by means of a public lottery) and stoning to death that year's victim. As we come to learn course of a narration that deceptively opens with fresh warmth of a full-summer day and that refuses to betray its horrible denouement until very end of story, this is an annual ritual vaguely associated an old fertility rite: 'Lottery June, corn be heavy soon', Old Man Warner reminds his fellow-villagers.2 The fact that ritual is performed (at least by majority of villagers) without much conviction suggests a desacralized context within which ritual practices have become divorced from their affective base and overall social system that made them meaningful as valuable sources of communal strength and renewal. What survives is a Kafkaesque killing machine3 that continues to operate absence of communal values and irrespective of individual worth, actions or history of human beings caught up it. What is truly remarkable (and for this reason all more disturbing) about Jackson's story is that it succeeds addressing its readers from two temporal and moral dimensions simultaneously. Thus, on one hand, Lottery addresses us from ahistorical perspective of allegory, forcing us to confront violence at foundations of any community and to accept scapegoating as a universal mechanism of strengthening communal bonds. On other hand, story (published three years after end of World War 2) functions as a chilling index to humanity's recent history and to a violence which (far from universal or eternal) is product of a secular enlightened modernity that has banalized evil rendering it unremarkable, an integral part of bureaucratic existence of normal, average citizens, like ones Jackson so meticulously portrays: the men . . . speaking of planting and rain, the women, standing by their husbands, children engaged boisterous play - all a hurry to get through their horrid ritual in time ... to get home for noon dinner.4 The question whether violence is an integral part of structural logic of human civilization or whether it is merely one (multiform and ambivalent) historical manifestation of it has remained central fields of social anthropology and psychoanalysis since publication, at end of nineteenth and beginning of twentieth centuries, of three works that continue to be seminal for our understanding of function of sacred; namely, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert's Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions ( 1 899), Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913). Despite controversy these works have given rise to and irrespective of degree to which their scientific validity has been attested to or outright rejected (as is case Freud's narrative of primal horde and murder of father), it is important to note one of basic premises of these books, i.e., assumption that sacred and social are inseparable. …