Hangsaman

"I’m interested in it from a research point of view. I’m curious about the role it served for Jackson herself, because it comes after ‘The Lottery’ , but before The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle . We’ve been touching on the role of the porous and sometimes shaggy novel. What I like about this book, from the perspective of horror, is that it starts off with a sinister act of what seems quite clearly to be sexual assault in the garden of her family home with a family friend, and then she goes to university—an all-women’s college in northeast America, which conjures up Bennington College, where Shirley Jackson lived for a spell while her husband Stanley Hyman was teaching there. The experiences that unfold are horrific, because of the psychological precarity of Natalie that’s been alluded to at the outset. They are horrific because of who she is; the events which inflect her world view. I think it was Sartre who spoke about existentialism in terms of not being properly born, or not having fully come into the world (and Beckett heard him say this, and identified strongly). Similarly, because Natalie has not been fully nurtured by her parents, she is someone who cannot cope with external reality, or the friction of external reality against her interior reality. Her inner life consists of this untended friction and the slow breakage it causes. I love all the symbolism around the tarot the book incorporates—the lady of the hangman. Natalie’s last name is Waite, which I think is a reference to Arthur E Waite, who wrote a guide to the tarot in the early 19th century, a popular layman’s book. And—not to rush to the end—but it culminates in all these strange experiences, in which you’re not sure what’s real and isn’t real. The end totally shifts register. You have to consider the book as a whole to grapple with the ending, which is one of the reasons the book was hugely critiqued at the time. Critics just did not know what was happening. Her biographer, Ruth Franklin , has offered that the uncertainty of Natalie’s perception bled into uncertainty around her character, which made it difficult for the reader to access. But I think she does a typically sensational job with atmosphere, and what it was like to be a woman at that time—the 1940s, coming into the 1950s, when there was a huge flux in gender roles following the upheaval of the second world war. It was a time when we saw a surge in multiple personality disorders in women because of the conflicting societal roles that were then coming to the fore, the deep schisms that appeared within women who could not fathom who they were now supposed to be. I think she captures that deep, deep anxiety and uncertainty that’s inherently gendered so well. Also, it’s a campus novel. That really appeals to me as well. The strange shift that can happen when people are confined to a condensed geographic location. I love Shirley Jackson’s later novels too, but I have huge affection for Hangsaman . I think it does mean something, but I don’t know if it means one is more disturbed than another. I think some of us are more interested in a genre like horror because of what’s already inflected our world view. I mean, I’m always surprised by what other people find horrific, or scary, or unhinged in my writing. With Follow Me to Ground , there was quite a gendered response—women would say, ‘I loved your book, I loved that Ada was so uncompromising’; men would say, ‘great book, very scary.’ We have this female character who is pursuing her desires in a violent way: women read it as liberating, men as threatening. To be very reductive. So I think some people see things as horrific that others see as matter of fact. Carmen Maria Machado said it better: that being a woman is inherently uncanny because your experiences are questioned as a matter of course. So I do think it’s just about one’s orientation, and the world one has seen and experienced. That sets you up to have a higher or lower tolerance, or to see things through a certain prism. But I do think different writers are drawn to different aspects of human psychology when they are deciding what to write about. Some of us are drawn to the realm of pathology and trauma, because of what it tells us about human experience. Not necessarily because one has a great love for violence or the obscene, but because of how humans interact in those situations, what’s being brought within our field of cognition. Again, what are you being made to question? What might you come away knowing that you didn’t know before?"