On a warm, sunny June morning, village residents gather in the tranquil main square. They’ve assembled to conduct an ancient ritual, the meaning of which has been lost to time. One by one, they draw slips of paper from an old wooden box.
If you went to school in the United States after 1950 or so, you probably know how this story ends (and if you don’t, be prepared for a 75-year-old spoiler): The person who draws a slip with a black dot is stoned by all of his or her neighbors.
Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” which first appeared in The New Yorker in the issue of June 26, 1948, is now so familiar as a cultural touchstone that it can be surprising to learn how shocking it originally seemed. The story went viral, in the way a short story could back then. Couples read it together and debated what it meant. Over 150 letters flooded into The New Yorker’s offices, more mail than the magazine had ever before received for a work of fiction. Readers called the story “outrageous,” “gruesome” and “utterly pointless”; some canceled their subscriptions. I spoke to one of those readers more than a decade ago, and she still remembered, some 60 years later, how deeply the story had upset her.
When “The Lottery” was published, three years after the end of World War II and at the start of the Cold War, many readers speculated that, given its apparent themes of conformity and cruelty, it was an allegory for McCarthyism or the Holocaust. Over the years, it has become a reliable reference when discussing some social development or troubling trend. People have heard its echo recently in the policies of Donald Trump’s MAGA populism or in the perceived excesses of the censorious mob. In Harper’s Magazine, the critic Thomas Chatterton Williams used it as a metaphor for cancel culture, which he suggested was a contemporary analogue to stoning. For the humorist Alexandra Petri, it served as the basis for a parody about the absurdities of the U.S. health care system.
But reading “The Lottery” as a connect-the-dots political commentary misses the primary source of the story’s power: its ambiguity. Jackson deliberately declined to wrap up the ending neatly for her readers, some of whom (in a foreshadowing of the reaction to the finale of “The Sopranos”) asked whether The New Yorker had accidentally left out an explanatory final paragraph. That’s why it has retained its relevance across the decades: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its unsettling open-endedness. The story works as a mirror to reflect back to its readers their current preoccupations and concerns, which is why readers could see McCarthy in it 75 years ago and Trump in it today. That quality is also what makes reading “The Lottery” for the first time so distressing — reminding us of the vital service literature can perform when we allow it to disturb us.
Today, readers across the political spectrum seem to be losing their appetite for literary discomfort. Activists on the far right have been successful in banning books from libraries and school curriculums that contradict conservative mores, particularly those with L.G.B.T.Q. themes — a drastic step that threatens freedom of thought. More liberal readers, too, have shown a reluctance to tolerate fiction that ruffles their political sensibilities — especially in the world of young adult fiction, where several high-profile writers have canceled or delayed books dealing with subjects that have generated controversy. A few weeks ago, the best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert decided to delay the publication of a new novel set in the mid-twentieth-century Soviet Union after online commenters, citing the conflict in Ukraine, protested that the novel sounded like it cast Russia in a romantic light.
It’s true that what reads as discomfort for one person can feel like aggression to another. Still, the idea that authors should work to avoid offending anyone is a recipe for bad writing. When we use social or political litmus tests to evaluate literature, to borrow a line from the critic Wesley Morris, “It can be hard to tell when we’re consuming art and when we’re conducting H.R.” If we view intellectual dissonance as a problem to fix rather than an opportunity for discussion, our cultural climate suffers. The lack of an easily digestible message is why a short story caused outrage in readers when it first appeared — but it’s also the reason we’re still talking and thinking about it 75 years later.
I was reminded again of that quality in 2017 by a different story in The New Yorker. Just as the #MeToo movement was getting underway, “Cat Person,” a short story by Kristen Roupenian, went viral for very similar reasons. The story is an account of a relationship conducted mainly by text and culminating in a bad date followed by worse sex, ending — like “The Lottery” — with a bombshell that readers are left to process and interpret on their own. The reaction was not unlike the reaction to “The Lottery.” “People get angry when they can’t figure out what something means,” Ms. Roupenian told me. “But the discomfort is the meaning.”
Great writing can entertain, enlighten and even empower, but one of its greatest gifts to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka once wrote. Stories like “The Lottery” create waves in that frozen sea. We stifle and censor them at our peril.
Ruth Franklin is the author of “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
