A southern confluence

by liberal japonicus

Perhaps it is just me, but there is a strange synchronicity in the air with the debates about the Confederate battle flag and the publication of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman (link goes to the first chapter at the Guardian, read by Reese Witherspoon). The reviews have not been kind, and several links are here.

I've not gotten the book, but I'm a bit baffled by the reviews. Kakutani writes:

Somewhere along the way, the overarching impulse behind the writing also seems to have changed. “Watchman” reads as if it were fueled by the alienation a native daughter — who, like Ms. Lee, moved away from small-town Alabama to New York City — might feel upon returning home. It seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people’s enmity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness. At times, it also alarmingly suggests that the civil rights movement roiled things up, making people who “used to trust each other” now “watch each other like hawks.”

'alarmingly suggests' hints at a sort of historical ignorance that is pretty stunning. Of course, the civil rights movement 'roiled things up'. It led to white flight and a de facto segregation that exists today. Gladwell points out the space that allowed an Alabama governor like Bill Folsom to exist disappeared with the rise of the civil rights movement. That is the reality that Harper Lee was addressing. Now, Kakutani may be upset that the sentence sounds like the civil rights movement had some agency, and agency is always one of those things that are difficult to talk about. But when one notes that:

The racial terrorism ranged from cross-burnings and church-bombings to beatings and murder. In the summer of 1964 alone, Mississippi journalist Jerry Mitchell reports, “Klansmen had killed six [people], shot 35 others and beaten another 80. The homes, businesses and churches of 68 Mississippians associated with the civil rights movement were firebombed.”

'roiled up' seems like a bit of an obvious point.

But Kakutani is obviously quoting the book, but who is saying those lines? Atticus, who is already revealed to be a racist? Jean-Louise, who is travelling back to Maycomb to try and make sense of her relationship with her home? Or someone else? Was Kakutani expecting a rousing speech about the equality of man? Does she not understand what that time was like?

And certainly, Kakutani must be aware of the provenance of the novel, which this Jezebel link discusses. There are complicated questions about whether Lee would have wanted this novel to be published and how it can be attributed to her, and Ullin comes closest to understanding when he writes:

Despite its potential for drama, Lee develops her story through long dialogue sequences that read less like conversation than competing arguments. There is little sense of urgency and key aspects of the narrative — Jean Louise’s naïvete, for one thing, her inability to see Maycomb for what it is — are left largely unresolved.

If I’m hesitant to level such a criticism, it’s because, although “Go Set a Watchman” comes marketed as an autonomous novel, it is most interesting as a literary artifact.

How did Lee take the frame of this fiction and collapse it to create "To Kill a Mockingbird," finding a narrative fluency only hinted at within this draft? How did she refine her language, her scene construction, discover a way to enlarge what are here little more than political and social commonplaces, to expose a universal human core?

As the way with synchronicity, other things appear. The discussions of the confederate flag, along with last minute manuverings by the House. How can one be shocked that Atticus might have ended up racist in his 70's? How can one be surprised, knowing what is happening in the country now, that the idealization of Maycomb, Alabama falls short of the mark.

I'm certainly not a book critic and I don't know the metric on which literature should be judged. Orwell famously trashed Dickens, noting that:

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown.

Yet Orwell did love Dickens, calling him "a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls." It seems that the problems with Harper Lee's reimagining of Atticus is more a reflection of our own troubles rather than anything in the story.

Comments

[Poptartacus]

Reading this would just harsh the buzz that TKAM has given me.
Not to mention if the author was in her right mind, it would never be published. Vultures gotta vultch, disgusting behavior

[Davebo]

Actually Lee's reimagining of Atticus came, as I understand it, with To Kill a Mockingbird.

Guardian was, as I understand, the original.

[wj]

How did Lee take the frame of this fiction and collapse it to create "To Kill a Mockingbird," finding a narrative fluency only hinted at within this draft?

The most obvious answer (albeit not necessarily the correct one) is that lat time she had a very good editor, and this time she did not. As someone noted in one of the Hugo discussions, that can make an enormous difference.

[Bruce Baugh]

That was me, and it seems like editing is the difference here, too. As I've said of the experience seeing my work edited: Good editing makes a work more itself. It cuts away things that the author may have found fascinating (enjoyable, intriguing, whatever) that don't actually help this particular work, and it builds up the work's real strengths.

And it's also important to overstate how much Mockingbird likely benefitted simply from being a second take on some of the material.

It'd be interesting to compare the personal evolution of Finch in Mockingbird and Watchman with one of Flannery O'Connor's stories. This is the relevant paragraph, with an aging Southern white woman commenting on the apparent chaos of the same era as Watchman:

“They were better off when they were,” she said. He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roil majestically into the station: “It's ridiculous. It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”

The story is called "Everything That Rises Must Converge". And lots of us turn out not to be ready for the consequence of one ascension or another.

[Girl from the North Country]

On the purely limited question of whether this book is as Harper Lee intended it when in full possession of her faculties, I just read a fascinating article in the Sunday Times about whether she has been taken advantage of in her declining years, and whether therefore this book has been improperly published. It presents a viewpoint I hadn't read before, with what appear to be excellent sources. I don't know if you can read this if you don't have a subscription to get past the firewall, but the link is http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/article1574881.ece

[Barry]

Bruce: "That was me, and it seems like editing is the difference here, too. As I've said of the experience seeing my work edited: Good editing makes a work more itself. It cuts away things that the author may have found fascinating (enjoyable, intriguing, whatever) that don't actually help this particular work, and it builds up the work's real strengths."

Just watch any successful author's later works, and see if they both bloat up and become caricatures of previous works. The term I've heard used is that that author has become 'too big to edit'.

[Girl from the North Country]

"whether she has been taken advantage of in her declining years, and whether therefore this book has been improperly published"

In case you can't get past the firewall, I should have made clear that the writer gives pretty good evidence, on both counts, that she has NOT been taken advantage of, and that she is fully aware of and approves the book's publication. This makes a difference to me, and, I would guess, to many others.

[liberal japonicus]

Thanks for that link! Can't get past the firewall, but can get it at my uni library.

[bobbyp]

oops...wrong link posted above...try this one:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-06/high-frequency-trading-all-you-need-know

[Doctor Science]

Believe it or not, I never read To Kill a Mockingbird, nor have I seen the movie. My knowledge is strictly cultural.

Nonetheless, I'm inclined to suspect Balloon Juice blogger Betty Cracker (of the Florida Crackers) is right, when she says:

Atticus Finch is good and pure in “Mockingbird.” Mr. Ewell is an ugly racist with no redeeming characteristics. A child would see the world that way, and “Mockingbird” is narrated by a child. Having read the already released first chapter of “Watchman,” I doubt it is a better novel than “Mockingbird.” But it might be a truer one.

[liberal japonicus]

You ought to take a read/watch. I had it as one of the movies to review for my 2nd year college writing class last year, and it was clear that it touched a chord in them.

I should have probably taken more of a look at the people who didn't think much of Gladwell's article. Here's a representative:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1537688

To understand Atticus, one must first understand Jesus and his teaching. Finch is a New Testament-style prophet whose worldview propels him to this truth: Love and understanding open doors; judgment and condemnation close them. Consequently, his quiet and gentlemanly interactions with the racists in his midst suggest neither passivity nor appeasement, as Gladwell contends. Instead, they are a form of character and strength – derived from Finch's faith in Jesus – that imbue Atticus with moral authority in the eyes of the community. Moreover, while Gladwell rightly stresses the need of legal change in bringing equality to the South, the kind of moral change led by Finch was likewise necessary. Law is only half of the equation.

I wonder what McMillian (author of the above link) thinks now that apparently, Lee had imagined Atticus evolving to someone who had some underlying racist views.

[Girl from the North Country]

I agree with the Betty Cracker quote above. LJ, the point about "Atticus evolving to someone who had some underlying racist views" is that almost everyone has some small smidgen of racism in them, and it emerges more openly in old age. I knew a South African lawyer who behaved (in Apartheid South Africa) in every respect as any white liberal would have wanted him to. Unlike Atticus, he sometimes also broke the law in order to protect black employees'/acquaintances' safety. He left SA before Sharpeville, because "you either had to stay and fight, and endanger your family, or leave". Yet in old age, in Israel, he was capable of saying amazingly racist things about arabs. When challenged, he would sheepishly recant, but that old devil racism was in there, it had just found a different target.

[Matt McIrvin]

I've seen "Mockingbird" harshly criticized lately for taking an overly simplistic view of racism, the idea that racism is something that horrible people (particularly low-class Southern whites) do because of the evil in their hearts, and you and I know better.

I haven't read it since junior high school, and I remember loving the book then, but mostly for its evocation of the childhood of a bright, peculiar kid. So I don't know how I'd find it today.

[liberal japonicus]

the point about "Atticus evolving to someone who had some underlying racist views" is that almost everyone has some small smidgen of racism in them, and it emerges more openly in old age

Not disagreeing with your point, but that was phrased poorly on my part. 'evolving' always gives an image of time progression, but it seems wrong to have said 'Atticus started out', though that may be more accurate.

Given the provenance of the novel, many of the people who got upset at Gladwell for his take on Mockingbird and Atticus ought to think about what it means. A lot of the criticism of Gladwell (who I think can be a pretty frivolous writer at times) was how dare he take issue with Atticus and his underlying goodness. It is precisely that failure to recognize that racism isn't simply a matter of how one feels in one's heart, but the structure of society that supports it that makes racism in the US such a pernicious problem.

[Nigel]

Given the various critiques of Mockingbird - most pertinently the one which condemns its denial of black agency - Watchman sounds rather more interesting than I was expecting it to be.

I remember it made quite a strong impression on me when I read it in my teens.
Having read the story of Scipio Africanus Jones, a black lawyer who fought a similar case IRL, something scarcely imaginable in the universe of Mockingbird -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Africanus_Jones
- the figure of Atticus Finch in Mockingbird lost much of his substance for me.

[Girl from the North Country]

It seems to me that what has inspired millions of people about Atticus Finch is not that he is an exemplary non-racist, it is that he has a stubborn determination to do "the right thing" even at some personal cost. The right thing is probably to some extent dependent on cultural and historical context, but I guess enough people know it when they see it: TKAM has fired up the careers of more than one human rights lawyer (e.g. Shami Chakrabarti in the UK).

But LJ your last point is exactly right, the racism in hearts is not the only, or even the main problem. It's the structure of the society that supports it that has to be tackled. Another South African example: Helen Suzman, a classic white liberal, with all that that entails. This piece describes her career well, and despite the alarming developments in modern SA it is impossible not to be impressed by and admiring of what she did. As Simon Jenkins says, "Suzman's resistance must be among the most courageous parliamentary careers ever."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/06/helen-suzman-mandela-forgotten-saint-anti-apartheid

Yet there were whispers that, according to modern standards, she had some racist attitudes. But what mattered,and to the people that mattered, was what she did. This was her first meeting with Nelson Mandela after his release. I confess, I still find it extraordinarily moving.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45339000/jpg/_45339587_suzman_ap226.jpg

[SC_Birdflyte]

Reading TKAM when I was 13 helped me to start changing my attitudes on race away from the values of my small-town Southern home. Now I'm 65 and I probably need to read GSAW (flawed though it may be) to come to a more honest appraisal of how my life and values have evolved.

[CharlesWT]

New Harper Lee Book Has Parents Reconsidering the Wisdom of Naming a Kid 'Atticus': The Times has scooped The Onion.