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.
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