There’s a moment of scale in Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman that took me totally by surprise and immediately became one of my favourite things I’ve read. Jackson was an incredible writer who consistently managed to draw both unexpected humour and horror from the most mundane-seeming situations, with this little twist a great example of that – it’s a short kaiju-style scene randomly inserted in the middle of a novel about a college student searching for her place in the world as she leaves home and overcomes past trauma.
For some background, Hangsaman follows Natalie Wait as she moves from a fairly isolated, comfortable home life to college where she drifts between cliquey friends and smug professors, all the while trying to get a sense of belonging. It has a dreamy, drifting kind of feel overall, with Wait’s bookish imagination frequently creeping into the narrative (often in the form of a detective story). This is taken to an extreme towards the end of the novel where, frustrated and losing her grip, Wait imagines herself a giant walking amongst campus.
What follows is a short but beautifully crafted rampage, in which Wait goes from first observing the tiny world before tearing it apart – she destroys a house and eats a room full of terrified people, then begins stripping tiny people and shoving them together for her own amusement. It is written with a great sense for both the fear her abuses instill and the callous pleasure she herself takes in this.
It’s an all-too brief bit of size-play in a novel that otherwise has nothing to do with it – just a girl’s imagination running truly wild – but to my mind it captures the possibility of giants and tiny people better than size-focused novels where entire stories fails to elicit such scenes. I can imagine not everyone interested will want to read through the whole book themselves, given the rest is very different, so below is my favourite section from the scene:
A Hungry Giantess in Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
Perhaps tomorrow I shall pick up one of the houses, any one, and, holding it gently in one hand, pull it carefully apart with my other hand, with great delicacy taking the pieces of it off one after another: first the door and then, dislodging the slight nails with care, the right front corner of the house, board by board, and then, sweeping out the furniture inside, down the right wall of the house, removing it with care and not touching the second floor, which should remain intact even after the first floor is entirely gone. Then the stairs, step by step, and all this while the mannikins inside run screaming from each section of the house to a higher and a more concealed room, crushing one another and stumbling and pulling frantically, slamming doors behind them while my strong fingers pull each door softly off its hinges and pull the walls apart and lift out the windows intact and take out carefully the tiny beds and chairs; and finally they will be all together like seeds in a pomegranate, in one tiny room, hardly breathing, some of them fainting, some crying, and all wedged in together looking in the direction from which I am coming, and then, when I take the door off with sure careful fingers, there they all will be, packed inside and crushed back against the wall, and I shall eat the room in one mouthful, chewing ruthlessly on the boards and the small sweet bones.
― Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman
