Posted on 07/17/2015 7:36:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
The controversy over Harper Lee's new "old" novel, "Go Set a Watchman," might be the most bizarre controversy yet in a summer of bizarre and unlikely explosions of national piety.
Atticus Finch, the patriarchal figure of "To Kill a Mockingbird," has been regarded as an unexpected hero in a region that many readers thought was unworthy of heroes -- mothers named their children after him -- and now many feel betrayed because he emerges in the new novel as a man with unexpected blemishes, an authentic representative of his time (the 1950s) and place (a small town in the South). How could he?
The Internet boils with indignation. Talk radio has checked in. The New York Times put a story about it at the top of Page 1. Since both books offer polemics inside the fiction, neither fits into a Procrustean bed of personal pride and prejudice, but offers insights, for the thoughtful reader, into the differences in racial and sexual attitudes and how they have radically changed in the 55 years since "Mockingbird" was published.
Since he's a fictional character in two novels it's important to judge Atticus Finch within the context of both the early book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," and the new one. Some readers are finding that hard to do. One benefit of the controversy is that the books can be read with fresh eyes, and "Mockingbird," especially, doesn't have to be stuck with the hand-me-down adoration. The adoration is as much for the movie with Gregory Peck as Atticus as the writing style of Harper Lee, which has limitations in spite of its innocent charm.
The young daughter Scout, the narrator of "Mockingbird," was a tomboy who resisted learning the genteel manners expected of a young woman of the South. The girl in a coming-of-age story in "Mockingbird" becomes an arrived-at-woman in "Watchman." She has learned to assert opinions independent of her Southern upbringing, and she spurns a conventional marriage because the prospective husband doesn't live up to the idealism she acquired living in New York.
Racial issues in both books become considerably more complicated in the hindsight of history. When "Mockingbird" was originally published in 1960, liberal readers loved Atticus; he confronted racists who dominated the law and the courts and regarded Negroes as inferior. If Atticus was a hero inside the novel, his kind of heroism was rapidly vanishing in the world outside the novel in the wake of the Brown decision mandating the end of segregation in public schools. He shames the racists into silence but is unwilling to see the racism outside his comfortable island of Maycomb, Alabama. He makes gestures that require courage, but it was courage that could not dent the fundamental structure of racism built into the culture.
Like politics, racism was local in "Mockingbird," but the patronizing platitudes of Atticus sound today like simplistic feel-good banality lacking the complexity of authentic moral courage. His thematic voice, even after the guilty verdict for the innocent black man he defended against rape, expresses passive perception as much as outrage.
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view," he tells his daughter Scout, "until you climb into his skin and walk in it." This is the bromide often quoted by examiners of the first Atticus, whose tolerance is open-ended for the racist as well as for his victim. He tells daughter Scout she shouldn't hate Hitler because it's not right to hate anyone. He even defends the leader of a lynch mob because he's "basically a good man," who "just has his blind spots along with the rest of us."
When Scout asks her father if he's a "n*****-lover," as she heard him described in her little town, he answers without irony, "I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody."
Readers of "Watchman" are shocked that this Atticus questions the inclusion of Negroes in the formerly white schools, an issue that tore the South apart after the Brown decision, dividing families, permanently rupturing friendships and sometimes splitting church congregations. Hardly any white folks wanted integration; the arguments were over who would bear the disruption of desegregation. The North got its first taste of such racial anger with the arrival of busing in liberal Massachusetts. "Watchman" is the tougher, more realistic but less artful book. The third-person narration lacks the charm of the child's voice in "Mockingbird," but raises more complicated questions of character when the fist hits the nose that thought it was immune from fists.
It's not so important how these two books came to be written, or the order in which the stories are told, but how they speak to us today. The questions of character and culture challenge all of us.
Did you know that the name “Wendy” didn’t exist before it was used in Peter Pan?
I wished Fox News would get rid of him period, not just take him of The Five.
Someone who killed WHALES for a living! LOL!
Well, he managed to allow a lot of whales to get older, because of his demented search for a particular whale...
BTW, the symbolic undercarriage of Moby Dick is breathtaking...and all of it without a hint of a female character; verboten by today’s standards...
Amen
No I didn’t know that about Wendy. Interesting to learn.
I think Finch is most likely a Christian. I’m going to have to read “Set a Watchman” now.
My husband took me to the movie at the base in Germany to watch “To kill a Mockingbird” many years ago. I didn’t like the movie, perhaps because my English wasn’t good at that time. Maybe I will either order the book or the movie from Amazon so I can either read it or watch it again
It is one of my favorite books.
I have read it at least five or six times since the Fourth Grade, when I found it in my Dad’s bookcase.
Reading it is like taking a sea voyage, rolling, rambling, and stalling, and struggling, and side trips with very strange ports of call.
It is an experience rather than a book.
If I were stuck on Alpha Ceti 5, I would be mighty glad to have it on the book rack! :-)
Of course, Mr. Racist Supremacist KHANNNNN!!!!! liked it too, so maybe the book should be banned altogether!
Ooops..I meant, Of Course, “Moby Dick”.
Not TKAM.
I wouldn’t go that far, but you are close.
The books, if taken together (thats a different debate) and in order of publication, first tell the story through the eyes of a child who idolizes her father, then through the eyes of an adult who is “mature” enough to set that idolization aside and see their parents for “who they really are.”
So it’s about children transcending their parents.
In a way, Atticus was built up in Mockingbird SO he could be torn down in Watchman.
Whether that was Lee’s intent or not given the order in which the books were written and publushed is yet another debate ...
Well, Gregory Peck also played Captain Ahab.
and while we’re on the subject, his performance in that movie was, well, awful...his confrontational scenes with Leo Genn as Starbuck were quite comical, when all the element for great drama were there for the taking...
So, at a ultra-lib party in NYC, where he is well documented to have seduced and had extramarital affairs with Marian Javits, wife of former New York senator Jacob Javits in a room while Javits was at the same party.; Margaret Trudeau; and Bette Midler, among many others Atticus would have done that— right Gerald (his actual name Freepers)?
I loved Starbuck.
Too bad they named a liberal-overpriced-burnt-coffee-self-righteous-hypocritical-snobby-snot-nosed-cafe after him!
I once attended a conference for attorneys where one of the panelists, who was a federal judge, was asked if he had any heroes in the law. Without a moment’s hesitation the judge said, “Atticus Finch.” At the time “WWJD” was a common phrase in evangelical circles. The judge couldn’t resist adding that he often asked himself, “What would Atticus do?”
If this book forces liberals to confront the idea that “racism” covers a huge range of beliefs and values, and is no more worthy of contempt and abuse than any other philosophy, so much the better.
Notes: Made popular by J M Barrie in the novel Peter Pan, from a small girl who referred to him as her 'friendy' - fwendy or fwendy wendy. Also found earlier in the US and the UK, possibly as a diminutive for Gwendolen or other names beginning with gwen.
“....Maybe you should not name your child after fictional characters ...”
Or “Mohammend” either....
the new book was garbage, she was in denial, the publisher just printed it for the money.
If this was done by changing the names and under a pseudonym it would have tanked. This was cashing in on her name and her having written a book which was a famous movie. (the original book was a dull slog too)
This book was for the approval of the brie crowd and the low information white wine crowd.
From Harper Lee's own words, "She tells Caufield that Esquire has turned down an article she submitted (Go Set a Watchman) because, she says, the editor did not believe that there were segregationists who also despised the Ku Klux Klan. “This is an axiomatic impossibility, according to Esquire!” she writes. “I wanted to say that according to those lights, nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/yours-truly
Then, she wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird", and it was accepted for publication by HarperCollins.
Personally I would recommend the book over the movie, although it is one of the few films that I can honestly say was an accurate portrayal of the book it’s based on. But Harper Lee is an excellent writer and the book gives you insights into the characters that couldn’t be brought out in the movie. I first read the book back in the 90’s when I was in high school and fell in love with it. I’ve read it many times since and each reading is still as wonderful as the first time.
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