Spoiler alert<\/em><\/strong>: you may learn things here you\u2019d rather not know if you plan to read the novel. As with her previous novel, there\u2019s plenty of n-words at work in the narrative. True to its day, illustrating over and over the systemic evil.<\/p>\nI\u2019m no expert on Harper Lee, and even less an expert on fiction. But I give today some reflections on this penetrating novel. It deeply disturbed me. I found the ending far more realistic and ambivalent than I wanted. The book tells the story of racism and the desire by Southern whites to protect their segregationism to which they were blind.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more than a scuffle about the publication of this novel. I\u2019ve been enough of a fan of Harper Lee that I would read anything she\u2019s written, even if it doesn\u2019t live up to her classic novel. What could? I lean toward those who think it should have been published, but there\u2019s a debate here that will be decided by whether you read it or not. I chose the group that reads it. I\u2019m glad I did. I\u2019m glad in part because it opens a window on the development of Lee\u2019s craft and mind.<\/p>\n
Let us propose that Harper Lee\u2019s two novels,\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> and\u00a0Go Set a Watchman<\/em>, were meant to be read in succession \u2014 the former first. What then? Before we answer that question, let us counter-propose that the story we\u2019ve been told is accurate: that Harper Lee originally wrote a novel, her editor (Tay Hohoff) asked for lots of revisions, Lee went to work to edit and edit \u2026 but finally Hohoff had her way with Lee and Lee started all over with a novel that took on the same basic subject \u2013 racism in the South \u2014 and that became\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird.<\/em>\u00a0Go Set a Watchman<\/em> was the best she could do with the threads she originally created but she junked that novel once Mockingbird<\/em> took its shape. Let us propose, also, either account of the two novels when it comes to\u00a0character portrayal<\/em> in the two novels.<\/p>\nEither way, and the second scenario is most likely the case, Atticus Finch moves from a man of moral and legal principled behavior to a compromised Southern racist who thought Brown v. Board of Education<\/em> might launch radical equality at the poll booth. Atticus, as he tells his own story in\u00a0Go Set a Watchman<\/em>, was a \u201cJeffersonian Democrat,\u201d which gave voting rights to those who were deemed (indeed) most likely to know what they were doing. Or in a particularly intense scene late in the book, Atticus presses this question on his justice-loving daughter, Jean Louise:<\/p>\n\u201c\u2018What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights?\u2026 Would you want your state governments run by people who don\u2019t know how to run them?\u201d<\/p>\n
Scout, or Jean Louise Finch, was a child observer and early activist for justice for all, including Southern blacks, in\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, becomes the protagonist for racial equality and justice in\u00a0Go Set a Watchman<\/em> and a fierce, if at times slightly overcooked, critic of her father and all things Maycomb. She in some ways replaces Atticus for racial equality and justice. But when her father pressed his question on her, Jean Louise came back with ferocity and bitter satire \u2014 in the kinds of racist terms so typical of the South at the time of Lee\u2019s writing:<\/p>\nYou neglected [she tells Atticus] to tell me that we were naturally better than the Negroes, bless their kinky heads, that they were able to go so far but only so far only \u2026 When you talked of justice you forgot to say that justice is something that has nothing to do with people \u2014 \u2026 You sowed the seeds in me, Atticus, and now it\u2019s coming home to you \u2014<\/p>\n
And speaking of God, why didn\u2019t you make it very plain to me that God made the races and put the black folks in Africa with the intention of keeping them there so the missionaries could go tell them that Jesus loved \u2019em but for \u2019em to stay in Africa?<\/p>\n
You deny that they\u2019re human. [He asks how so?] You deny them hope\u2026. You are telling them that Jesus loves them, but not much.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Her boyfriend from Maycomb County, Hank, was alongside Atticus Finch in the citizens\u2019 council that was doing its best to preserve segregation, and after Jean Louise watched the meeting \u2014 reminding us of her watching the entire opposite narrative in\u00a0Mockingbird<\/em> \u2014 she morally punched out his lights in these words, after he asks her \u201cWhat was he to do?\u201d<\/p>\nDo? I expect you to keep your gold-plated ass out of citizens\u2019 councils! I don\u2019t give a damn if Atticus is sitting across from you, if the King of England\u2019s on your right and the Lord Jehovah\u2019s on your left \u2014 I expect you t be a man, that\u2019s all!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She asks him how he can live with himself.<\/p>\n
[He:] It\u2019s comparatively easy. Sometimes I just don\u2019t vote my convictions, that\u2019s all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Suddenly she heard someone behind her.<\/p>\n
A dry, pleasant voice behind her said, \u201cI don\u2019t know why you can\u2019t. Hypocrites have just as much right live in this world as anybody.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
These are the best scenes in the whole book \u2014 forcing racism to the front, forcing Jean Louise into the front of defending justice, but by the end of the novel the fierceness of Jean Louise seems to be softening into a kind of empathic accommodationism to the ways of the South. One is left hoping she might take up residence as an advocate against Jeffersonian Democracy in Maycomb. We just don\u2019t know where she might land.<\/p>\n
Whether the two stories are to be read consecutively or simply in the developmental narrative of Harper Lee\u2019s own mind, the story of Atticus moving from an advocate of justice against racism to a compromiser in order to preserve Southern ordered living\u00a0is as human a story as one can find<\/em>. Virtuous characters do not always live up to their virtues. Some fade into compromise, and Atticus does in this novel due to his desire to preserve Southern conclaves \u2014 call it apartheid \u2014 and because he didn\u2019t think Southern blacks were morally or culturally or civilly prepared to assume civic duties as were the whites. One thinks of Israel\u2019s first king, Saul, or its second king, David, or any number of biblical characters along with countless others in American history who have lost their virtue. One also thinks Atticus belongs in the Roman system of elitism while his daughter, known to us all as Scout, was Athenian and desirous of equality.<\/p>\nWere it not that Atticus Finch has in the meantime become a paradigm of advocacy for racial justice by means of legal justice the story would be gripping. Or unnerving and frustrating and incomplete.<\/p>\n
Go Set a Watchman<\/em>\u00a0has its moments \u2014 from its Mark Twain-like stories of Jem and Scout in the early portions to it\u2019s powerful scene when Jean Louise observes at the council meeting the racist hypocrisy of her father, her boyfriend Hank, and many other white leaders in Maycomb plotting how to preserve racist systemic structures, and on to the powerful indictment of Jean Louise of her father in a late chapter vendetta \u2014 but the plot doesn\u2019t run the emotions. What runs the emotions best are the scenes she sketches, the dialogues and episodes. The plot is little more than now a highbrow New Yorker Jean Louise returning to lowbrow, bumpkin Maycomb twenty years after the famous trial of\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> to discover ripening racisms, her shock at the discovery, and her impassioned decision to abandon family and town to simmering, evil racism. As mentioned already, the novel ends with the ambiguous account of a physical double-swat on the chops of Jean Louise by, and a conversation of Scout with, her uncle, Dr Finch,\u00a0Maycomb\u2019s \u201cmost learned licensed eccentric,\u201d\u00a0and his attempt to persuade her to stay in Maycomb to make a difference. There is not that much ambiguity, perhaps, as it appears to me she will stay and perhaps even accommodate herself to Southern racism. That ending collapsed under the weight of the hope it created \u2014 but perhaps that, too, was her point. Maybe the narrative needed more editing and sharpening \u2026<\/p>\nThere is a story that after writing Watchman\u00a0<\/i>and then converting it in a thorough rewriting into the classic\u00a0Mockingbird<\/em> that Harper Lee wrote a second novel \u2014 one to fill the gap between\u00a0Watchman<\/em> and\u00a0Mockingbird \u2014\u00a0<\/em>that the novel was stolen from her apartment, and that as is well known she never wrote another novel. This story has been told in Charles Shields, Mockingbird<\/em>. I have no reason to doubt the story just as I have no reason to think it was meant to bridge the gap between Mockingbird<\/i> and\u00a0Watchman<\/em>. We don\u2019t know. I suspect rather that the classic novel was a full blown supersessionism of the earlier attempt and she left it behind her. But whether or not the two are to be read in succession or not, the development in Harper Lee\u2019s mind of the race postures of Atticus is more than a little credible as an account of a sad human story. One worth telling \u2014 not uplifting but perhaps ultimately even more a kick in the shins about racism\u2019s evil systemics.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My response to Harper Lee\u2019s novel,\u00a0Go Set a Watchman. Spoiler alert: you may learn things here you\u2019d rather not know if you plan to read the novel. As with her previous novel, there\u2019s plenty of n-words at work in the narrative. True to its day, illustrating over and over the systemic evil. I\u2019m no expert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[476],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n