The Man in the Woods

Abstract

[...]The New Yorker's miniature Jackson revival acknowledges and extends the platform which, as her biographer Judy Oppenheimer details at some length, paid enough for her writing to allow her to be the primary breadwinner of the Jackson-Hyman household.2 I dwell on this publishing tradition at length because, in many ways, 'the medium is the message', as Jackson's contemporary Marshall McLuhan put it in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964); I would argue that the shock value of Jackson's fiction is heightened by the fragmented, multifarious nature of a magazine's content. [...]he comes across a small cottage at the end of the road he's been following, this is the extent of the information we are given about him, except that he has travelled far, but is unsure about where he has come from, where he is, or where he hopes to go. Merging this smothering-house motif with the mythic resonances of 'The Lottery', this newly unearthed story crystallises many of the concerns central to Jackson's writing, as Christopher becomes embroiled in an age-old ritual that is indifferent to his status as an individual, seeking only to draw him into its endlessly repeating cycles of death and renewal, violence and shelter, magic and domesticity. 3 First published in The New Yorker on 26 June 1948, the story generated an unprecedented number of complaint letters to the magazine in the weeks that followed. 4 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) is a useful reference point in this regard. 5 Laurence Jackson Hyman, interviewed by Cresside Leyshon, The New Yorker, 21 April 2014, <http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tumer/this-week-in-fiction-shirley-jackson> [accessed 4 August 2014].

Shirley Jackson, 'The Man in the Woods' CThe New Yorker, 28 April 2014)

Recently excavated from 'among twenty-six unsorted cartons of her work sent to the Library of Congress' by her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson's latest posthumous short story, 'The Man in the Woods', is a fitting continuation of her legacy.1 Indeed, its publication in The New Yorker in April is a useful reminder of the role played by magazines and periodicals in the development of the uncanny, gothic, or horrific short story more generally. For much of the twentieth century, writers like Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates contributed stories to literary publications like Collier's and Harper's, and to 'women's' magazines such as Mademoiselle, as much as to Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. Indeed, as attested to by the Guardian Weekend 'Winter Fiction Special' (21 December 2013), which featured eerie tales by Lionel Shriver and Jeanette Winterson (among others), as well as by The New Yorker's own back catalogue, the tradition is by no means obsolete. Jackson, a once-famous American writer of dark fiction, whose work was critically and commercially neglected during the latter half of the twentieth century (following her untimely death in 1965), was a major figure in this magazine culture, publishing the bulk of her short fiction (both gothic and realist) in everything from The New Yorker and Playboy to Cosmopolitan and Women 's Home Companion.

The New Yorker's decision to publish 'The Man in the Woods' (less than a year after they featured the less overtly supernatural 'Paranoia' [5 July 2013], also previously unpublished) therefore effectively recreates the environment in which mid-century readers would originally have encountered Jackson's short fiction. Her surviving family members have worked diligently to gather many of her unpublished and uncollected stories into anthologies: The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966) and Come Along With Me (1968), both edited by her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Just an Ordinary Day (1996), edited by two of her children, Sarah and Laurence. Doing so opens up the unsettling world of her fiction to a new generation of book-buying readers who might never have come across her work otherwise. At the same time, The New Yorker's miniature Jackson revival acknowledges and extends the platform which, as her biographer Judy Oppenheimer details at some length, paid enough for her writing to allow her to be the primary breadwinner of the Jackson-Hyman household.2 I dwell on this publishing tradition at length because, in many ways, 'the medium is the message', as Jackson's contemporary Marshall McLuhan put it in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964); I would argue that the shock value of Jackson's fiction is heightened by the fragmented, multifarious nature of a magazine's content. A collection undeniably immerses the reader in the apparently inescapable world of panic and uncertainty conjured up by her writing. However, to come unexpectedly across something like 'The Lottery' (Jackson's infamous tale of small-town ritual sacrifice) in the midst of reviews, non-fiction pieces, and rather more realist tales, is to be plunged into this unpredictable, hostile and alienating world almost without warning, just as her characters so often are.3

Nor is Christopher, the male protagonist of 'The Man in the Woods', an exception in this regard. We first meet him walking along a path that soon tangles itself in dense woodlands, where a stray cat begins to follow him. Until he comes across a small cottage at the end of the road he's been following, this is the extent of the information we are given about him, except that he has travelled far, but is unsure about where he has come from, where he is, or where he hopes to go. Two strong, taciturn, rustically clad women unhesitatingly invite Christopher into the house, a stone construction the interior walls of which are covered in strange markings. They introduce him to the 'host', who is rather more chatty but equally mysterious, and considerably more welcoming than the protagonist had expected. I won't spoil the ending, but there are distinct echoes here of the fourteenth-century Middle-English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and of other mythological traditions that are older still.4 Greek mythology is directly evoked in the form of the women's names: Aunt Cissy, short for Circe, famous for turning Odysseus's men into pigs; and Phyllis, which is also the name of a young mythological woman who transforms into a nut tree following her suicide.

As these names seem to imply, the themes of metamorphosis and the preternatural qualities of the natural world are central to the story, which is suggestive rather than explicit in its use of such imagery. The host is called Mr Oakes; the house is surrounded by trees that press ominously against the windows; and all three inhabitants wear green belted robes and go barefoot. These details may alert readers familiar with the central premise of James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1922), or indeed with the Fisher-King motif in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published the same year, as to where the story is going (and that the young man won't be going anywhere else in hurry). Matters come to a head when the protagonist's feline companion wins a battle against the house cat, Grimalkin, prompting an exchange between the women that implies that more is going on here than simply territorial rivalry. Nevertheless, Jackson's narrative voice is unobtrusive, stating facts without overtly directing the reader's interpretation of them. As Laurence Jackson Hyman, Jackson's son, mentions in an interview with Cressida Leyshon in the 21 April 2014 issue of The New Yorker, his mother wished her readers to work things out for themselves, rather than holding their hands and explaining what is going on - an authorial stance which demands considerable readerly effort and attention, while augmenting the sense of confusion and unease that permeates her stories.5

This effect is produced primarily by means of a notably economical style, and it is through this sparse narration that the fear both described and evoked by the story first emerges. We are told, in a sentence that calls to mind Robert Frost's perennially evocative poem The Road Not Taken' (1920), that 'Christopher had come into the forest at a crossroads, turning onto the forest road as though he had a choice, looking back once to see the other road, the one he had not chosen, going peacefully on through fields' (p. 65). We later learn that he had been attending college (presumably a perfectly ordinary mid-twentiethcentury American one), but, as he tries to recall why he left, he can only state, 'frankly', "'I don't know why.'' [...] "I don't know why," he repeated. "One day I was there, in college, like everyone else, and then the next day I just left, without any reason except that I did'" [emphasis in original] (p. 67). What is especially chilling about this detail is that it suggests that slipping out of the 'everyday' world and into the strange, threatening realm of myth and ritual is something we could find ourselves doing without realising it, and with an ease that is horrifying. At the same time, here, like so many of Jackson's characters, Christopher makes little effort to struggle against either his amnesia or the oddness of his current situation, while the narrative voice itself remains flat, almost affectless, and unnervingly matter-of-fact in the presentation of increasingly frightening events.

Indeed, Christopher's hosts participate actively in maintaining the dearth of background information or explanation that characterises the story, though we are left unsure as to whether this is because they think that their guest already knows exactly what's going on. Phyllis ushers Christopher into the house, saying simply, 'Come along, please. I shouldn't keep you waiting' (p. 65). Treating him more like an anticipated guest (and indeed a distinguished one at that) than a random traveller seeking shelter, Phyllis behaves here in a manner that is sufficiently 'off to set alarm bells ringing, but also potentially banal enough to leave us in the same situation as Christopher - doubting our own unease. After he is fed and stays the night, the host shows him around the house, keeping up a patter which extends rather than allays these fears. When Christopher remarks 'It's a very old house, isn't it?' Mr Oakes responds "'Very old," [...] as though surprised by the question.' He continues, confusingly, 'A house was found to be vital, of course' (p. 68). This is but one example of the way in which the host and the women talk as if Christopher understands completely the situation and the house he finds himself in (they say 'of course' with an incantatory frequency), and in his puzzlement and politeness, 'helplessly', Christopher never corrects them (pp. 66, 68). It would therefore be misleading to say that he is their prisoner; it is more that he is somehow manoeuvred into imprisoning himself.

For exactly this reason, warmth and welcome are always to be treated with suspicion throughout Jackson's work: 'The Lovely House/A Visit', 'The Rock', and 'The Story We Used to Tell' all imply this strongly; Eleanor Vance's seduction by the eponymous Hill House (in The Haunting of Hill House [1959]) is perhaps the most familiar example of this trope. The fear is not so much that the warm, welcoming home will turn out to be just the opposite, but that it might be dangerous precisely because it never wants to let you go - because its embrace is forever - and because the very cosy invitingness of Jackson's haunting houses tricks those who stumble into them into feeling that they belong there. A visit paid to an unknown house is always the most perilous of activities in Jackson's oeuvre. Those who already live in a house are part of its darkness and therefore apparently impervious to it; but those who intrude upon it from without are liable to become victims of its acquisitive nature. Merging this smothering-house motif with the mythic resonances of 'The Lottery', this newly unearthed story crystallises many of the concerns central to Jackson's writing, as Christopher becomes embroiled in an age-old ritual that is indifferent to his status as an individual, seeking only to draw him into its endlessly repeating cycles of death and renewal, violence and shelter, magic and domesticity.

The fact that 'The Man in the Woods' pivots around images and narrative patterns familiar both from mythology and from Jackson's own work does not, however, detract in any way from the pleasure of reading it, nor from the freshness and power of the ways in which she employs her materials. Laurence Jackson Hyman notes in the interview mentioned above that '[Kenneth] Burke often pointed out that, while Stanley was a serious scholar of myth and ritual, Shirley's work embodied it'.6 In other words, and as 'The Man in the Woods' amply demonstrates, to read her work is to catch a privileged glimpse of what a modem myth might look like.

Dara Downey

Footnote

1 Laurence Jackson Hyman, interviewed by Cressida Leyshon, The New Yorker, 26 July 2013, <http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tumer/this-week-in-fiction-shirley-jackson-2> [accessed 4 August 2014].

Footnote

2 See Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1988).

3 First published in The New Yorker on 26 June 1948, the story generated an unprecedented number of complaint letters to the magazine in the weeks that followed.

4 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) is a useful reference point in this regard.

Footnote

5 Laurence Jackson Hyman, interviewed by Cresside Leyshon, The New Yorker, 21 April 2014, <http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tumer/this-week-in-fiction-shirley-jackson> [accessed 4 August 2014].

Footnote

6 Laurence Jackson Hyman, April 2014 interview.