I can’t help but feel as though I’ve failed Shirley Jackson
somehow. When a story is so pointedly
distinct from the expectations provided by its subject matter and so greatly
revered (or so a brief amount of research tells me) by its target audience, I
have to conclude that my complete disengagement with the material must be
rooted in my own shortcomings as a reader.
Whether I’m defective or not, though, The Haunting of Hill House failed to hold my interest, and my
slipshod analysis of what it is that Jackson was really trying to do here won’t
be fun for any of us. In lieu of that,
here’s my breakdown of why I not only didn’t get into this story thoroughly
enough to experience whatever emotional turn it was geared for, but why
I’m not even all that interested in doing so.
I’ve got no problem with Jackson choosing to center the
story around Eleanor’s reaction to Hill House rather than the manifestations
within it. Internal conflict is arguably
more integral to storytelling than the external stuff, and I won’t hold a story
to the promise implied by its title if the content is good enough. No, my difficulty with Hill House was more a product of my never understanding what the
conflict actually was. It’s easy to point to issues Eleanor is
trying to deal with--the death of her mother, her desire for friendship, the
lack of control over her life--but I was rarely able to connect those conflicts
to the particulars of any given scene.
Eleanor’s loneliness isn’t enough to justify the long, long stretches of
banter exchanged between the core characters, and the quartet’s persistently whimsical
attitude towards everything--not even
a ghost at the door can stop them from dropping one-liners--made unclear to me
what was actually at stake. Characters
went from being unnaturally friendly, to unnaturally critical, to unnaturally
brave with a rhyme and reason that I couldn’t decipher, to the point that by
the end of it I just stopped caring.
As noted, my confusion might not be Jackson’s fault. She can’t control how perceptive her readers
are, or how long their attention-spans might be. What she can
control, however, is how inclusive her story is to the reader, and I felt like
I was being shut out of the story in a lot of respects. I recognize that POV standards might not have
been as stringent at the time of the novel’s publication as they are today
(though I consider Hill House a
decent example of why POV stability is important), but even discounting the inconstant
head jumping, I rarely felt connected enough with Eleanor’s experience to
sympathize with her on any level. It might
have been the regular use of telling over showing--Hill House is described as bad
and awful and terrible as soon as we see it, even if descriptions demonstrating
the point are a long time coming--and it might have been my inability to
understand the characters’ behavior at any given time. It’s rare that I nitpick technical details in
my reviews of published work, but I really feel that the application of some
basic storytelling principles--close POV, concrete details, showing over
telling--could have done a lot to connect me to Eleanor and whatever story was
trying to be told through her.
I would have preferred clearer conflict, harder details, and
more accessible connections between the story’s events and the characters’
reactions to them. Maybe I stumbled
right past the point of the work, and to make such changes would have
compromised Jackson’s whole endeavor, but at the end of the day I wasn’t
entertained. I was really unentertained,
in fact, which damns the novel on the only scale that matters to me.
I had a similar response to THoHH when I finally put the book down a few days ago. I'm a concrete thinker and I have to think about logistics for my living. So I'm not one who prefers storylines that aren't clearly defined, or are lacking answers to the questions that arise throughout a book.
ReplyDeleteBut I had a similar reaction. There's been so many other people that gave the book great acclaim, so clearly they got more from it than I did, so I probably wasn't clever enough to get it. It happens.
That being said, also agree with you that this book was written for a different audience, for a different time. I guess what worked then doesn't work for me now.
The telling bothered quite a bit as well. It just felt...heavy-handed by the author. For me, it just seemed like a short-cut. For me it came across very much in the same vein of: "Oh, trust me, it's scary. It's vile. It's so wrong and evil. But nevermind me trying to explain why I felt that way or what specifically was so evil about its appearance. Just take my word for it."
I respect your honesty, Jeremy. I think that if I hadn't been trained to read this book from an academic perspective, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much either. I took it at face value and actually enjoyed the witty banter, but the book didn't scare me or leave me feeling like I had learned something new about myself or my world. Perhaps, it really was more of a mental exercise on Jackson's part.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most insightful about your response is not really about the book. You start off feeling like you failed the author and that struck me as very interesting. And something that tells a lot about who you are and how you approach your writing. I think most writers do expect the reader to just accept what they say in the pages. Then most readers seem to feel that if they didn't like the story it was the fault of the author. But it is interesting that you feel that you failed her instead of her story just not working for you.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I agree with your assessment that part of why you didn't like the story is because it was hard for you to identify what the real conflict was. I do think that is why I felt so disappointed by the ending.