[REVIEW] The Haunting of House Hill

[rfmcdpei]

While completing my convalescence, I read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting, a renamed version of her classic 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House published as a tie-in for the dismal 1999 movie featuring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones that was a remake of a much superior 1963 original. Jackson is most famous for her short story "The Lottery,"

Comments

[chrishansenhome]

In re "The Lottery", I wonder if you could expand on the subtle flaws you see in it. Not that I would say it's flawless, but I'm curious.

[rfmcdpei]

My problem lies with Jackson's use of the concept of the scapegoat. In "The Lottery," the scapegoat is selected on completely arbitrary grounds. In the real world, scapegoats are picked on non-arbitrary grounds. If Jackson was intending her story to be a commentary on the modern world, there's the slightest bit of disconnect.

[chrishansenhome]

Well, you know, perhaps an even deeper sense of arbitrariness can be found in how people these days are made scapegoats: it's the luck of the draw that determines whether one is born white in a rich country or a person of colour in a poor one. God plays dice with our genes, and thus genetics arbitrarily assigns one person to the scapegoat role and another one escapes.

Just being contrary and persnickety.

[rfmcdpei]

This is true, but I think that "The Lottery" misreads the process of picking a scapegoat because of its implications that the process isn't arbitrary. My take, of course.

Freud and "the uncanny"

[sandor_baci]

Well, Randy, you sent me googling. I found Alix Strachey's translation, read it through, and picked out this sentence as the only bit of meat inside paragraph after paragraph of husk --

"A particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one."

Give yourself space, will you, to expand your comments on why THE HAUNTING (why not BRIDE OF CHUCKY?) is so striking an example of what Papa Freud meant -- I'd like to read more of your analysis.

Re: Freud and "the uncanny"

[rfmcdpei]

Ah, sorry. Freud thought that the uncanny was the repressed familiar brought back to the conscious mind without the mind being aware of it.