“An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”: Shirley Jackson on The Problem of Evil

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

One way to gain insight concerning horror writers’ fiction and the techniques that the writers of such literature employ is to study actual specimens of the genre. Chillers and Thrillers has already examined such stories in some detail, including H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room,” Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” and Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-man.” In addition, Chillers and Thrillers has considered the film The Descent and Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome in thorough detail. As a result of these studies (and others that are note quite as detailed), much concerning the art of writing horror fiction has been learned and shared. Perhaps these studies have also suggested the critical tools, techniques, theories, and approaches that one can take, on his or her own, to better understand the tricks of the trade. Chillers and Thrillers will continue to “murder” these stories in order “to dissect” them, so that this blog’s faithful followers and occasional readers can gain and share whatever insights Chillers and Thrillers may offer, beginning with Shirley Jackson’s masterful tale, “An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.”

Her story opens as the omniscient narrator introduces the unlikely protagonist, Mr. John Philip Johnson, sharing with the story’s readers Johnson’s view of the world. It is unduly optimistic--naively optimistic, one might suggest--like that of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, whose view of the universe as representing, despite its moral and ontological limitations, “the best of all possible worlds,” an optimism that is attacked, quite effectively, each in his own way, by writers as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Young Goodman Brown”), Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (Candide), and the Marquis de Sade.(Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue). Leibnitz’s view of the world is assailed, again, in part, by Jackson, in “An Ordinary Day.”

Mr. Johnson’s view of the world is (or, at least seems to be) much like that of Voltaire. Johnson, like the philosopher who wrote “Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil,” apparently believes that this is “the best of all possible worlds” (although, as readers will soon learn, appearances of belief, as of appearances otherwise, can be deceiving). Jackson, through her narrator, supplies hints that her protagonist’s ostensible optimism may not be supported by the actual state of the world. For example, he has had to have his shoes resoled, and this “resoling” suggests that the universe is not the perfect place that it may, at times, appear to be, for the fact that Mr. Johnson’s soles have worn out, needing to be replaced, suggests that good things even as trivial as the soles of shoes--and, perhaps, as significant as the souls of men and women--can degrade. This intimation of entropy, of erosion, of gradual degradation, if not of evil, is reinforced by the narrator’s reference to the sidewalk upon which Mr. Johnson steps as he leaves home as being “dirty” and by the narrator’s observation that only “some” of the people at whom Mr. Johnson smiles bother to return his smile.

Although his kindness wins them over, at first, other characters are not nearly as trusting of Mr. Johnson as he seems to be of them. When he offers a child the carnation he has bought for his lapel, the baby’s mother studies him “for a minute” before smiling at him, as her innocent child has done, upon the receipt of the flower, suggesting that she, having experience of the world, does not, unlike her child, automatically trust strangers bearing gifts. This mother’s initial distrust of Mr. Johnson is mirrored, a few moments later, by another mother’s suspicion of him when he offers to watch her child for her while she tends to the men who are moving her furniture. (The rest of the small crowd gathered at the scene are more interested in inspecting her worn furniture than they are in lending her a hand.) Her suspicion--she “turned and glared at him distrustfully”--prompts him to add, “We'll sit right here on the steps.” The child, a boy, is allowed to go to Mr. Johnson, who offers the lad a “handful of peanuts” from his pocket. The boy initially refuses the offered peanuts because “his mother did not allow him to accept food from strangers.” While the mother supervises the movers, Mr. Johnson reassures the boy that he will like his new home in Vermont. As he goes about town, having chosen a random route (“he did not follow the same route every morning, but preferred to pursue his eventful way in wide detours, more like a puppy than a man intent upon business”), Mr. Johnson does one good turn after another to all whom he encounters, including animals: he feeds a peanut to “a stray dog” he encounters on his way.

Jackson’s narrator frequently advises readers of how good Mr. Johnson himself feels, possibly as a result of his optimism and possibly as a result of the good deeds that he does. For example, as he sets out from home, at the beginning of the story, “Mr. John Philip Johnson shut his front door behind him and went down his front steps into the bright morning with a feeling that all was well with the world on this best of all days, and wasn't the sun warm and good,” and, after he watches the woman’s son, he steps “happily. . . Feeling the warm sun on his back and on the top of his head.”

He matches two young people who are too much in a hurry and too concerned with work to live their lives, paying them for the day they will miss by going on a date, the expenses of which Mr. Johnson pays in advance. He continues to offer peanuts to those whom he meets--a gull, a panhandler, a bus driver--and advises a couple who are seeking an apartment to rent of the vacancy left by the mother and son who have moved to Vermont. (This act is especially helpful in such big cities as New York, in which finding any apartment is difficult.) His good deeds continue until it is time for him to return home:

After his lunch he rested; he walked into the nearest park and fed peanuts to the pigeons. It was late afternoon by the time he was ready to start back downtown, and he had refereed two checker games, and watched a small boy and girl whose mother had fallen asleep and awakened with surprise and fear that turned to amusement when she saw Mr. Johnson. He had given away almost all of his candy, and had fed all the rest of his peanuts to the pigeons; and it was time to go home. Although the late afternoon sun was pleasant, and his shoes were still entirely comfortable, he decided to take a taxi downtown.

On his way home, he saves a taxi driver from losing money on a horserace. After the driver agrees to take the money home to his wife that a fare had given him to bet on a horse, Mr. Johnson gives the driver another ten dollars to bet on a different horse on another day, convincing the driver that astrological signs are against the horse winning the race that the driver has been tipped about the horse’s winning.

Finally, arriving back at his apartment, Mr. Johnson is greeted by his wife. They enquire as to one another’s day. He tells her that his has not been difficult; hers, she says, has been only “so-so.” She then recites the incidents of her day: she “accused” a woman at a department store “of shoplifting,” “sent three dogs to the pound,” “quarreled” with a bus driver and complained about his conduct to his supervisors. Based upon Mr. Johnson’s kind and considerate behavior throughout the day, readers are apt to think that Mr. Johnson would be horrified by his wife’s conduct. Therefore, his reaction comes as something of a shock. “Fine,” he says, and then, observing that she looks “tired,” suggests that they “change over tomorrow”--in other words, she will play the angel to his devil.

The story ends upon the same sort of commonplace note with which it began, as Mr. Johnson, enquiring as to what is for dinner and told “veal cutlet,” replies, “Had it for lunch.” The ordinariness of the lives of this couple, each of whom does good or evil in the course of their daily lives and is able, by a mere act of the will, to alternate between these modes of conduct enhances the story’s horrific quality, for it suggests that anyone and everyone--people as seemingly normal and ordinary as Mr. Johnson and his wife--can be either good or evil, or, indeed, both, and the duality of all human beings as agents, simultaneously, of both good and evil is the message of Jackson’s story. Men and women, Jackson suggests, are capable of choosing to be good or evil--or, at least, to act in good or evil ways. They have free will.

Her story suggests how much good or evil can be done by seemingly insignificant acts of kindness or malice. Mr. Johnson’s matching of the young couple might result in a happy, lifelong marriage between a young woman and a young man who, before, were in much too great a rush to earn a living to appreciate life or, indeed, themselves or other people, just as Mrs. Johnson’s accusation (perhaps unfounded) of a shopper’s theft could become a lifelong impediment to the individual, should a conviction result, in seeking employment or retaining a position. Obviously, most people would agree that it is better to do good than to do evil, but, Jackson’s story also suggests that, given the choice of behaving one way or the other, most people choose to behave both ways, either simultaneously or alternately, and that those who are suspicious of other people’s seemingly good intentions may, therefore, have good reason, indeed, to be suspicious. To choose to do good only at times is to choose to do evil, for to truly choose to do good would mean to renounce evil entirely--something that people do not seem to want to do or, perhaps, to be capable of doing.

Readers may be reminded of the lesson that Goodman Brown learns in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” that all men and women are both good and evil; that sin is innate and inescapable; and that all human deeds, therefore, are, even when good, tainted with evil. It is this theme, the idea of original sin, that Leibnitz’s optimistic philosophy ignores and that Jackson’s story, like “Young Goodman Brown,” Candide, and Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue ultimately underscores.

Morality “Under the Dome”

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King has been writing for a long time. His first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974. A natural-born storyteller, King has also learned a multitude of storytelling tricks over the years. I’ve mentioned a few already, in previous posts concerning Under the Dome. Here’s another: misdirection, or what I like to call the bait-and-switch technique.

Car dealers like Big Jim Rennie know and practice this trick, offering a limited number of low-price new cars to the public but announcing, when potential customers arrive, that all these vehicles have been sold; however, for just a little more (usually thousands of dollars), the dealership can put the buyer in a similar car. The low-price model is the bait; the switch occurs when the dealer offers to sell a different model for a higher price.

The bait-and-switch scene in Under the Dome to which I refer takes place shortly after the riot at Food Town (the “food fight,” as I like to call it). (Incidentally, the reader learned that the purpose of the riot was to provide the basis for beefing up the town’s police force by as many as eight additional special deputies; Big Jim wants his own well-armed militia, just as President Obama has called for his own private civilian police force, which, the president says, should be as well armed as the U. S. military.) During the riot, one of the thugs who works for Big Jim threw a rock that smashed Georgia Roux’s jaw and knocked out a quarter of her teeth. Torie McDonald collected the teeth and took them to Dr. Joe Boxer, the only dentist in Chester’s Mill, hoping that he could reimplant them. However, Joe, who works strictly on a cash basis, refuses to cooperate, unless he’s paid in advance, as always, for his services, even though he was just treated free of charge by physician’s assistant Rusty Everett for minor injuries that he’d sustained during the food fight. Joe is more concerned with getting home so he can stash the basketful of frozen waffles he’s stolen from the supermarket during the looting of the store than he is with helping a fellow resident of Chester’s Mill. Rusty, Colonel Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara, and high school history teacher Chaz Bender try to persuade Joe to perform the operations, even to the point of threatening him with violence. This incident comprises the bait portion of the bait-and-switch scene. The reader expects to see this conflict through to its conclusion, looking forward to seeing whether and how Rusty, Barbie, and Chaz persuade Joe to do the right thing.

The switch portion occurs as Chief Peter Randolph, accompanied by Deputies Freddy Denton, Jackie Wettington, and Linda Everett and Special Deputies Junior Rennie, Frank DeLesseps, Carter Thibodeau (the last two of whom are among the same men who, assisted by Georgia Roux, beat and raped Samantha Bushey) arrive, weapons drawn, to arrest Barbie--seven police officers to arrest one man! To prevent his being killed for “resisting arrest,” Barbie immediately raises his hands, surrendering, and keeps them raised even after Thibodeau charges forward and punches the captive in the stomach, doubling him over. The chief announces, “I’m arresting you for the murders of Angela McCain, Dorothy Sanders, Lester A. Coggins, and Brenda Perkins.” Angela and Dorothy (“Dodee”) were killed by Junior; Lester and Brenda, by Junior’s father, Second Selectman Big Jim Rennie, but Barbie is being framed for their murders. The colonel had anticipated his arrest on one trumped-up charge or another, although it is doubtful that he suspected he’d be taken into custody for the murders of four individuals.

The use of situational irony, which is what the bait-and-switch technique really amounts to, takes the reader by surprise enhancing the effect of the follow-on situation that is presented in lieu of the one that the initial situation suggests will occur. In this scene, King demonstrates that he is adroit at its use. So completely has he drawn the reader into the conflict between Joe, Rusty, Barbie, and Chaz, concerning the replacement of Georgia’s teeth that the reader is unprepared for the arrival and arrest of Barbie by Chester’s Mill’s finest (although Barbie himself has foreshadowed this incident several times well before this scene takes place).

As I mentioned in a previous post, the central theme of this novel seems to be provided in a quotation of Jimi Hendrix: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” I also mentioned King’s tendency to divide his characters into two camps, so that there is a dichotomy of “us” against “them.” Often, in the past, such dualities have consisted of children vs. adults, of Democrats vs. Republicans, of women vs. men, of religious folk vs. secular folk, and although some such divisions continue in Under the Dome, King’s latest novel shows a maturation of his thinking concerning politics, religion, and social issues. He seems to have come to an understanding that the world is not so easily divisible into good and evil, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. He seems to have developed a broader, deeper view of life, in which even a Republican like Julia Shumway can be heroic; where adults can recognize children’s talents and treat them as individuals rather than as pesky stereotypes; where religious faith need not be grotesque and absurd; and where men and women, despite the battle of the sexes, can battle alongside one another, for either good or evil.

In the past, King has largely defined evil as a threat to the community. Many of his novels, from ’Salem’s Lot onward, have an invasion plot, in which the menace arrives from outside, to infect and corrupt a small town which, although not perfect, not Eden, has been, nevertheless, a good place to raise one’s children or in which to grow up. In Under the Dome, the evil doesn’t come from outside; the evil is already in Chester’s Mill, chiefly in the form of Big Jim Rennie, but in many others as well, including his son Junior; Pete Randolph, Deputy Frank Denton, and their special deputies Georgia Roux, Frank DeLesseps, Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau; in the drug addict Phil Bushey (“The Chef”) who abandoned his wife Samantha and their child Little Walter; in the apathetic dentist, Joe Boxer; and in Big Jim’s fellow selectmen, Andy Sanders and, to a lesser degree, the pain pills-addicted Andrea Grinnell. Through these individuals, King defines, or redefines, evil. Evil is a love of power, such as afflicts Big Jim Rennie. Evil is bullying others, a pastime, with fatal consequences, enjoyed by Junior Rennie and his cronies. Evil is Phil Bushey’s abandonment of his wife and son. Evil is emotional, physical, and sexual assault, such as Frank DeLesseps, Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau, with Georgia Roux’s assistance, committed against Samantha Bushey. Evil is siding with evil because it benefits oneself, as both Andy
Sanders and the Reverend Lester Coggins do in cooperating with Big Jim in his political and criminal undertakings. Evil is Joe Boxer’s callous indifference to human suffering, unless, of course, the one who is suffering can pay up front and in cash for Joe’s dental services. Evil is the love for power or self-aggrandizement, which frustrates the power of love.

At the end of the bait-and-switch scene, one of King’s characters summarizes the distinction between good and evil that is foundational to Under the Dome, and the difference is entirely pragmatic, even, perhaps, quantifiable at times. Goodness is helping others; evil is hurting others. Although philosophers, theologians, and social scientists may argue about what it means, exactly, to help someone else and what it means, exactly, to hurt someone else (can perceived help really be harmful, for example, as when one enables another person to remain in a condition, such as alcoholism or drug addiction, that is injurious to his or her health?) and whether, to help someone else, it may be necessary to also hurt him or her (as dentists and physicians must hurt patients on occasion in order to treat them), King’s distinction, voiced by Rusty Everett, concerning Barbie’s medical treatments of wounded rioters and looters, seems a good starting point for such a basic understanding of morality:

[Deputy Linda Everett says, to her husband, physician’s assistant Eric, or “Rusty,”] “Four people, Eric--didn’t you hear? He killed them, and he almost certainly raped at least two of the women. I helped take them out of the hearse at Bowie’s. I saw the stains.”

Rusty shook his head. “I just spent the morning with him, watching him help people, not hurt them” (526).

Perhaps, in this exchange, King suggests another instance of evil. Linda is confronted with two versions of Barbie: helpful or hurtful. The former is supported by the testimony of her husband, a physician’s assistant whose dedication to the community is unquestioned, if not unquestionable. The other version, that of the hurtful Barbie, is supported by the allegations of Chief Randolph and the likes of Special Deputy Frank DeLesseps, and Junior Rennie. The only evidence specified against Barbie is the discovery of his Army “dog tags in Angie McCain’s hand.” The evidence is enough to convince Linda, but not enough to persuade Rusty, who finds their discovery in the hand of one of Barbie’s alleged victims “convenient.” The willingness or unwillingness to believe allegations against someone is a matter of faith, and the conclusions to which one comes concerning such allegations is often a matter of choice rooted in human understanding, or in the understanding of human nature, and there is yet another of King’s divisions of “us” and “them” involved in this matter, as a brief discussion--or debate--between Linda and Rusty, as Barbie is being “hustled out to the Chief’s car and locked in the backseat with his hands still cuffed behind him,” makes clear:

She stopped. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with you? Did you miss what just happened here?”

“Rusty, she was holding his dog tags!”

He nodded slowly. “Convenient, wouldn’t you say?”

Her face, which had been both hurt and hopeful, now froze. She seemed to notice that her arms were still held out to him, and she lowered them.

“Four people,” she said, “three beaten almost beyond recognition. There are sides, and you need to think about which one you’re on.”

“So do you, honey,” Rusty said (527).

Although some of King’s dualistic divisions are more superficial than others and are based upon stereotypes, the moral distinction he makes at the end of his bait-and-switch scene stands out as one that is profound. Although not entirely free of difficulties and more or less debatable, his stance that one can determine good from evil based upon whether a person’s behavior is helpful or harmful to others is worthy of serious thought, as is his suggestion that choice itself, including the choice to believe or to disbelieve the potentially injurious allegations that people make against others as an action which can be hurtful and, therefore, evil, if it is based upon deceit, ignorance, naiveté, the need to please others, self-aggrandizement, an uncritical acceptance of others’ statements or evidence, or any of a number of other false foundations, is good or evil. The surety for such decisions, King suggests, is not merely knowledge of the facts (or alleged facts), the evidence, as it were, but also of the person. Linda is wrong to believe that Barbie is guilty of murder and rape because of the (planted) evidence she’s made aware of, whereas Rusty is right to believe in Barbie’s innocence, despite such “evidence,” for he has worked alongside the man and has seen, with his own eyes, Barbie’s compassion, courage, and commitment to helping, not hurting, others.

As is often the case with King’s fiction, there is much more to the action than a moment’s chill or thrill. What King’s chief rival, Dean Koontz, says, not about Under the Dome, and not about morality, but about the exercise of the intellect, is true of human behavior in general and, as King indicates, helps to separate good from evil and right from wrong: “Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.”

from The Dark Descent

Today’s post carries no byline because it’s really a summary of observations by David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent (Tor, NY, 1987), which he makes in his introduction to the anthology of creepy short stories by such authors as Stephen King, John Collier, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Harlan Ellison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Charles L. Grant, Thomas M. Disch, Theodore Sturgeon, Clive Barker, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Tanith Lee, Flanner O’Connor, Ramsey Campbell, Henry James, Gene Wolfe, Charles Dickens, Joyce Carol Oates, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Algernon Blackwood, Philip K. Dick, and other names worth the dropping, to wit:

[Horror stories] clustered around the principle of a real or fake intrusion of the supernatural into the natural world, an intrusion which arouses fear (4-5).

It is Lovecraft’s essay that provides the keystone upon which any architecture of horror must be built: atmosphere. . . . What this means is that you can experience true horror in, potentially, any work of fiction, be it a western, a contemporary gothic, science fiction, [or] mystery. . . . as long as the atmosphere follows. This means that horror is free of the supernatural (5).

Hartwell includes a quotation of David Aylward:

To them [those who don’t read horror] it is a kind of pornography, inducing horripilation instead of erection. And the reader who appears to relish such sensations--why, he’s an emotional masochist. . . (Revenge of the Past, as quoted in The Dark Descent, 5-6).

Hartwell resumes his own voice, arguing his ideas on his topic:

[Edmund Wilson] sees. . . literature as evolving in a linear fashion into fantasies of the psyche removed entirely from supernatural trappings. Any audience interested in these trappings is regressive. He sees no value to a modern reader in obsolete fiction (7).

As horror has evolved in this century, it has grown significantly in the areas of “the morbidities of the psyche” and fantasies of “a world in which, prosaic though it is, we can find no firm foothold on reality (7).

Hartwell includes a quotation of Jean-Paul Sartre:

In order to achieve the fantastic, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to portray extraordinary things. . . . Either it [the fantastic] does not exist at all, or else it extends throughout the universe.. . (The Fantastic Considered as a Language, as quoted in The Dark Descent, 7-8).

Hartwell resumes his own voice, arguing his ideas on his topic:

Contemporary horror occurs in three streams. . .: 1. moral allegorical [,] 2. psychological metaphor [, and] 3. fantastic. These modes are not mutually exclusive, but usually a matter of emphasis (8).

[Moral allegories] are characteristically supernatural fiction, most usually about the intrusion of evil into consensus reality. . . . These arte the stories of children possessed by demons, of haunting by evil ghosts from the past. . . stories of bad places (where evil persists from past times), of witchcraft and satanism. . . . They are often written by lapsed Christians, who have lost their firm belief in good but still have a discomforting belief in evil. Stories in this stream imply or state the Manichean universe (8).

In speaking of stories and novels in this first stream, we are speaking of the most popular form of horror fiction today, the commercial bestseller lineage of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and a majority of the works of Stephen King. . . . This stream is the center of category horror publishing (8-9).

The second group of horror stories, stories of aberrant human psychology embodied metaphorically, may be either purely supernatural, such as Dracula, or purely psychological, such as Robert Bloch’s Psycho. What characterizes them as a group is the monster at the center. . .--an overtly abnormal human or creature, from whose acts and on account of whose being the horror arises (9).

Stories of the third stream have at their center ambiguity as to the nature of reality, and it is this very ambiguity that generates the horrific effects. Often this is an overtly supernatural (or certainly abnormal) occurrence, but we know of it only by
allusion. Often, essential elements are left undescribed so that, for instance, we do not know whether there was really a ghost or not. But the difference is not merely supernatural versus psychological explanation: third stream stories lack any explanation that makes sense in everyday reality--we don’t know, and that doubt disturbs us, horrifies us. This is the fiction to which Sartre’s analysis alludes, the fantastic. At its extreme form, from Kafka to the present, it blends indistinguishably with magic realism, the surreal, the absurd, all the fictions that confront reality through paradoxical distance. It is the fiction of radical doubt. . . . In the contemporary field it is a major current (10).

Third stream stories tend to cross all category lines but usually they do not use the conventional supernatural as a distancing device (10).

At the end of a horror story, the reader is left with a new perception of the nature of reality. In the moral allegory strain, the point seems to be that this is what reality was and has been all along (i.. e., literally a world in which supernatural forces are at work) only you couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize it. Psychological metaphor stories basically use the intrusion of abnormality to release repressed or unarticulated psychological states. In her book, Powers of Horror, critic Julia Kristeva says that horror deals with material just on the edge of repression but not entirely repressed and inaccessible. Stories from our second stream use the heightening effect of the monstrously abnormal to achieve this release. Third stream stories maintain the pretense of everyday reality only to annihilate it, leaving us with another world entirely, one in which we are disturbingly imprisoned. It is in perceiving the changed reality and its nature that the pleasure and the illumination of third stream stories lies. . . . The mass horror audience is not much taken with third stream stories. . .
Because they modify the emotional jolt (10-11).

Hartwell includes a quotation of George Stade, which originally appeared in The New York Times (October 27, 1985):

Although the manifest images of horror fiction are legion, their latent meanings are few.

He also offers a quotation of Stephen King:

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out (Danse Macabre).