curious architecture in shirley jackson

larks, katydids, poisonous mushrooms, and houses that are definitely haunted

Oct 08, 2023

Before we dive into our close reading of Shirley Jackson’s writing today — a quick poll. I’m mostly just curious! But I have a few ideas I’ve been toying with for new content types around here, and I’d love to know what’s resonating with you.

Okay — now to the fun stuff.

The first sentence of every story is a door to a new world.

Asked, I’m sure you could recall at least four or five famous book openings, from “Call me Ishmael,” or “I am an invisible man,” to “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Anyone who has studied literature, at any level, has likely spent at least a few hours listening to a lecture or participating in a class discussion about the sheer power of the opening words in a novel. Perhaps because those first utterances of a new story wield a magnificent and transportive potential.

“First sentences are doors to worlds.”

-Ursula K. LeGuin

During my PhD, I spent hours of class time and in private study every week close reading every single syllable of the opening sentences of all the novels I was reading for coursework and exams. In them, time and again, I found meticulous maps of the worlds I was entering. Clues into the voice and stance of the narrator; even subtle hints at exactly what was to come.

Deeper than foreshadowing, these paragraphs conjure doorways into new places, mindsets, ways of existing — and the rhythms, tones, and vibes of how the first paragraph all fits together help us understand whether the door we’ve come to has a warm welcome mat at the ready or has perhaps laid some fabulous trap, awaiting our entrance, anticipating our trust.

photo of muddy road in forest — Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash

Then, there are those book openings that settle over you like a cool mist, stealing your sense of direction, and daring you to take another step. These first sentences are doors to haunted houses, portals to those stories where you’re more likely to feel lost than found, at least for a time.

Last week, I wrote all about the portal-fantasy genre of fiction via Neil Gaiman’s perfectly spooky story, Coraline. In that story, a hidden and locked door forms a literal portal to a world of doppelgängers and duplicities.

For me, no novels have a mistier, stranger, or more daring front door than those of the brilliant, bizarre Shirley Jackson — author of novels like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as that terrifying short story you probably read in high school and immediately repressed: “The Lottery,” in which a town ritualistically stones a woman to her death.

Jackson’s unsettling first paragraphs

To close read the first paragraphs of Jackson’s spooky classics, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is to tune into a masterful frequency, where the vibrations and textures of every single word—every syllable—work together to create a fantastic microcosm of the world we’re entering.

(I’m reminded of the stellar little miniature town, tediously built and tended to by Adam Maitland in Beetlejuice, the place where the titular haunt lives and rules over his tiny, artificial world. That’s another story about another haunted house, in which the lovely irony is that the living haunt the dead.)

In Jackson’s novels, we’re treated to adroit first paragraphs that work a bit like Adam’s miniature town does in Beetlejuice: they establish a general map of what’s to come. And yet, like every good ghost story, they also introduce that impossible, untouchable mystery that convinces you to keep exploring, even as your gut tells you it’s time to run like hell.

brown and black concrete building — Photo by Eleanor Brooke on Unsplash

“The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable,” writes A.M. Homes in her introduction to a collection of Jackson’s short stories. “Jackson writes with a stunning simplicity; there is a graceful economy to her prose as she charts the smallest of movements….[She] works with precision; she sees things as if she’s zoomed in and has got life under a magnifying glass. And it’s not just any glass, but one with a curved owlish lens, so that perhaps we see and know a little more than usual” (emphasis mine).

This graceful, precise economy of words introduces a delightful reading challenge. I’ve modeled in other essays how to closely read a single paragraph, and have shown my own process in action. Today, I want to take a slightly different approach to getting into a close reading.

In the two paragraphs I’m closely reading today — each one the first paragraph from one of Jackson’s best-known novels — I want to pay attention to three things, specifically:

Setting - I’m curious about the positioning of the text. Do we know where we are? Do we have a clear sense of place, either in physical reality or in our sense of time?
Voice - Whose voice, and therefore stance and perspective, are we reading? What do we learn about our teller from the opening paragraph?
Promises - What expectations, or promises, are made by this first paragraph? Do I have a sense of what will happen next?

“Jackson works with precision; she sees things as if she’s zoomed in and has got life under a magnifying glass. And it’s not just any glass, but one with a curved owlish lens, so that perhaps we see and know a little more than usual.”
-A.M. Homes

The first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Okay, full disclosure. The first time I read this paragraph, I stopped and read it ten more times because oh my god, the writing. If you were wondering what Homes meant, above, about Jackson’s “curved owlish lens” in her writing, or how she “works with precision,” you’re getting it here, in action, right before your eyes.

Let’s look at the three areas I wanted to unpack to see what I mean by that:

Setting - where are we? Well, we’re “looking at” Hill House — a “not sane” place that is filled with “upright” walls, “neat” bricks, “firm” floors, and “sensibly shut” doors. We’re in a place filled with contradictions, in other words: a not sane place, we might assume, would be filled with broken, shabby, or off-kilter things. And yet, the “not sane” Hill House is filled with sensible and upright fixtures. What a curious architecture. We’re getting a general shape here—an architectural logic, a real sense of place, undermined immediately by the idea that this house stands alone, it stands firmly in place, but it is filled with darkness.
Now, let’s sit on that first sentence for a moment: it is built from two curious halves, each of which forms its own independent clause (or complete sentence). Broken in half by a semi-colon (that tricky punctuation intended to connect two otherwise individual statements), the sentence does a lot of work conjure unspoken, but clearly connected energy, flowing between disparate ideas.
In fact, one might say that the first sentence is a miniature lesson in the uncanny: its very grammatical structure gives us a clue about the fissures and tensions within Hill House, but perhaps moreover, the architecture of the sentence establishes the architecture of the novel itself. This is a place of profound, even uncanny, contradictions. This is a place that houses oppositions; this is the home of the unhome.
Photo by Ján Jakub Naništa on Unsplash

Now, if we can say that Jackson takes a magnifying glass to her stories, let’s zoom in, even closer, to take a deeper look at the first sentence:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality
;
even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Some observations about this first sentence:

We are talking in absolutes in the first half (“No live organism can continue…”) and then in relativity in the second half (“are supposed, by some, to dream”) — what do we make of this tension between an absolute truth and a supposition?
We also have a tension between “absolute reality” and the “dream,” or unreal spaces, inhabited by and in the unconscious mind. What is a ghost story if not this contrast, rendered into language?
We have the question of what it means to “exist sanely,” with its implied, but unstated opposite: existing insanely, or perhaps, not existing at all.
And we have the most economic usage of a semi-colon, perhaps of all time.

white and black concrete house near green trees under white sky during daytime — Photo by Nathan McDine on Unsplash

So, now, in my close reading process, I’m starting to get shivers. This is getting good. To keep myself focused, I ask myself what feels sticky or still mysterious to me:

At this point, I’m a bit stuck on this idea of “absolute reality,” and how, for this narrator, no one can be expected to survive long without imagination, fantasy, or dreams. Crafty, our narrator speaks with a kind of declarative, almost scientific authority. And yet, a kind of subjectivity is leaking through. Is the absolute as absolute as it seems, or as our narrator wants us to believe?

In other words, if I believe the narrator here, I’m admitting with them that no one can be expected to survive in a world without ghost stories.

An excerpt from a lecture Jackson gave in the 1950s seems relevant here:

“I am particularly interested in reality right now, because I am writing a novel in which reality is the key issue. It is a novel about a haunted house and a group of people who go to live in it and make observations upon the psychic manifestations to which they are subjected. Now, no one can get into writing a novel about a haunted house without hitting the subject of reality head-on; either I have to believe in ghosts, which I do, or I have to write another kind of novel altogether.”
-Shirley Jackson, “How I Write” (emphasis mine)

Voice - who is our narrator? From what perspective is the story being told? We don’t have a clear introduction to our narrator (like we will in We Have Always Lived in the Castle); rather, we’re brought into the story via a kind of classic, distant 3rd-person narrator who speaks with a certain authority and clarity—an almost intimate knowledge—of Hill House.
This is a confident, knowing voice. As noted above, the first sentence is two curious declarations, connected via semi-colon — this is someone who speaks well, writes confidently, and thinks complexly. This is also someone who, presumably, believes in ghosts.
Questions I have before reading on: What does it mean for the narrative if the narrator believes in ghosts? Is this story about ghosts, or about proving that ghosts are real? Neither? Both?
Promises - what do I believe will happen next, based on the first paragraph? Well, this doozy of a first paragraph has set me some serious expectations. Perhaps the biggest of all is that I’m in the hands of a deft, intelligent writer. I expect a kind of narrative tightness—that “graceful economy”—to carry me across this story, which seems to be about a haunted house and the people who want to spend time there. I expect I will learn more about the precise brand of “darkness” that Hill House holds within, and perhaps that I’ll learn about the lonely dreamers—those who are divorced from reality in some stark way—and why they’re drawn to the darkness of this haunted place.

Without any real spoilers: I will indeed get to enjoy all of these things by reading this novel.

Okay — let’s look at another first paragraph, this one from Jackson’s final novel.

The first paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

First of all: gobsmacked. Every time I read it. Who writes like this!? Damn, it’s so good!

Okay. Now, let’s take each of my areas of curiosity and build them out:

Setting - where are we? We’re inside the mind of Mary Katherine Blackwood, who is 18 and wishes she was someone, or something, else. She says she’s had to be content, but it sounds like she isn’t. I’d imagine we’re in a dirty space, because Mary Katherine (who we’ll learn is called Merricat) doesn’t like bathing, which seems like a strange thing to lead with, but, hmmm. Okay. I don’t have much sense of setting other than this clear placement inside Merricat’s mind. I’m not sure what’s happening or why Mary Katherine has started telling me this story. I also don’t know where I am, despite being planted firmly in someone else’s psyche. This is a little hint about the story ahead: I’m likely to feel a bit out of place, maybe even a little confused about where I am — and maybe Mary Katherine wants it that way.
Voice - who is telling us this story? Mary Katherine. Let’s unpack her voice a bit. Unlike that confident, omniscient tone of Hill House, the simplicity and staccato rhythm of Mary Katherine’s sentences makes me think she’s a bit young, maybe even immature for 18. Her introductory traits—the things about herself she decides to disclose first—are also a bit simplistic and strange. This is a blunt, straightforward voice. But there’s also a lot of weirdness and mystery here—for example, how can she just casually drop that her whole family is dead? And why did she wait that whole first paragraph — rambling about werewolves and her fingers — before telling us?
Now, let’s think perspective: we’re operating in first-person here—Merricat is using first-person “I” to tell us who she is and a little bit about herself. Merricat seems to have some strange obsessions or beliefs, as evidenced by her werewolf comments. Mary Katherine is…weird. That’s what I’m getting here.
Promises - what do I expect next? I really hope we find out why the heck her family is all dead. Why does she live with her sister? Is that her only sibling? Why does she dislike what she dislikes; why does she like what she likes? (Will we find out any reasonings for these preferences?)

So: the opening paragraph establishes a lot about Merricat, but nothing feels certain or clear beyond her perspective. I get the sense, as a reader, that I’m going to learn what Merricat wants me to know — even the things, like her dislike for dogs, that seem extraneous or innocuous.

But what makes this novel so fantastic is that nothing—no detail—ends up being extraneous or innocuous. This is that “graceful economy” at work, where each word, carefully and intentionally selected, becomes a puzzle piece in a truly puzzling psychological landscape.

brown and white concrete house — Photo by Abbilyn Rurenko on Unsplash

Another thing we gain from this “graceful economy” of prose? An adherence to the promises and perspectives we’re given from the start. As the story unfolds, and as we get to know Merricat at the careful psychological distance she maintains from us, we learn why she and Constance are living together, why Merricat carries the beliefs she does, and what happened to the family. And when you come back to this first paragraph, after finishing the novel, you realize what was right there—right from the start—all along.

In January of 1958, Shirley Jackson wrote to her parents, asking for any information and photographs they could send her about the Wincester House in California:

“the reason for this is my new book; it is to be about a haunted house, and i can’t seem to find anything around here; all the old new england houses are the kind of square, classical type which wouldn’t be haunted in a million years.”

A month later, she wrote to Carol Brandt:

“Local people tell me that there is a house in a little town about fifty miles away which is haunted. The people there see the ghost and talk to her. They do not ordinarily engage visitors but everyone thinks that if I wrote them and told them I was doing a book they would invite me to come and meet their ghost. I am not going to do it because I am scared.
Best,
Shirley”

When we encounter those precise, magnificently rendered introductions to both novels, we encounter the meticulous craft of a woman who, despite her fears, seems to deeply respect the unknown, even to revere mystery, to believe — despite so much endless, absolute reality — in ghosts.

For me, this is the most powerful element of her prose: that remarkable thread of belief in the uncanny, in the impossible, that weaves intricate webs of contradictions, that brings to life those ideas long laid to rest by rational thinking. Jackson’s writing conjures those dizzying, unreal encounters with everything you’ve been told can’t possibly be real and makes you wonder, what if it is? What if absolute reality isn’t absolute, at all?

a woman standing in front of a window in a dark room — Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash

Your turn.

Okay: what do you make of these first two paragraphs? Was there anything about the setting, the voice, or the promises of the texts that you noticed? Leave a comment to share.