To Kill a Mockingbird's 50th Anniversary
Jul. 18th, 2010 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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petzipellepingo : To Kill A Mockingbird Rings True Today
I can understand the recent criticisms of the character of Atticus and the direction of the novel even if I find it to be a tad unfair in that it's too modern of a reaction the more recent critics seem to want. On the other hand I also suspect that I always read the story on a very literal level because my tiny hometown in the deep South is Harper Lee's tiny hometown in the deep South-- literally. I was born and up until I went to college had lived my entire life in Monroeville (a town of 5000 - 7000 citizens at its height but which has been in decline for some time now). I was born slightly more than a decade after the book was written and after integration had taken place. Still, I attended the same elementary school as the one Nell (Harper is her middle name) Lee attended, albeit by that time the 1930s building that had been the entire school in her time was just the kindergarten. We had 'new' 1960s era modernist buildings flanking it. The playground was dominated by a towering 150+ year old oak tree (long gone now) that I always imagined was 'the' tree in the novel because it stood between the old part of the elementary school and where the old Lee house used to stand. Truman Capote's childhood home was still there (though alas it too is now gone) and I was always somewhat creeped out/fascinated by the fence that had stood between the two houses because it had both stone and... chicken bones in it. No, I never understood the chicken bones. Also, down the street there was this huge old house with peeling paint and dark windows (that my fifth grade teacher eventually bought and renovated) that everyone said was 'haunted.' I doubt that it was 'boo's house' or even its inspiration, but it certainly served the same function in my elemantary school years.
When I read To Kill A Mockingbird it isn't as a symbol of Jim Crow laws in the old South. It's literally my home (even if I haven't lived there since graduating high school). When Scout speaks about the Baptists playing the Methodists in football, that exact place pops into my mind because the Baptist and the Methodist churches do face one another across the street. I attended that Methodist church as a child (even as the Lees continued to attend it when I was a kid), and we still played touch football (and 4 square) in the rear of the church or went across the street to roller-skate in the Baptist's gymnasium. The courthouse in the book (and the movie) is the courthouse in the center of the square (the movie copied it identically. My mom even remembers meeting Gregory Peck when he came to town during the preparation for the movie. The movie wasn't filmed there but they did visit in pre-poduction to copy things). The physical locations in the book are very clear in my head because though she would rename places and families, it was never changed very much. It was always clear where each and every thing and area she mentioned was. And even some of the families in question were clearly certain families. So even though Nell Lee always said that the case in the book was never a real, specific case but an amalgam, it was also never really all that difficult to guess some of the people or families they were modeled upon even a couple of decades after the book was published (probably much more difficult now as many of those locations have now gone and the town is now virtually a ghost town. The town was relatively prosperous when I was a kid but with NAFTA, all of the local industries have gone and now it's really beginning to verge on a ghost town).
So if, perhaps, I have a different view of 'the neighbors' and 'the town' than the critics it's because that while racism is evil and racist laws are more evil and racist injustice is a huge evil, we're still talking about the town where I grew up, encompasing virtually everyone that I knew as a kid. True, I was born a decade after the book was published and some 50 odd years after the story within the novel was to have taken place, so I grew up in a very different time. But somewhere at the time of the book, my great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents were around (albeit slightly out of town) because my family has lived in that area since the 1790s. My family attended the same Methodist church (even if we are as my mother always said 'heathens' who don't believe in much of anything). Nell Lee is a close friend of one of my friend's parents and an acquaintance of my own parents. She used to come in to sign copies my mom would stock of To Kill a Mockingbird, even though she wouldn't do book signing tours. As a kid, I had no idea that she was famous. She was just an ordinary little old lady (she seemed old to me even when I was a child). It didn't connect with me just who she was, and she never made an issue of it. She didn't want to be recognized to the point that it was always considered impolite to mention the subject to her.
Unlike myself or my parents, Nell Lee still lives in Monroeville, though she is now in poor health and has refused to make any appearances in relation to the book's 50th Anniversary. Her sister has spoken about it some, but since the stroke Nell Lee doesn't appear in public.
And I'm not sure where I'm even going with all of this except to say that I don't think of the book as a statement or rallying cry. To me it has always been rooted in the past. More than that, it has always been rooted in a very specific place. One that is not a fiction to me, for all that Monroe County is redubbed Maycomb County in the book. And this has always influenced the way that I experience the novel, inescapably so..
petzipellepingo : To Kill A Mockingbird Rings True TodayFifty years ago, a novel hit America's bookshelves that changed the way millions thought about race and the inexplicable South.
Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," by some estimates the most-read book in American schools, has grown old enough to have become slightly dotty in the minds of fresher readers, many of whom have only a textbook understanding of the way things were.
Indeed, it is fashionable to dis, as we now say, the great and humble Lee, a writer so without vanity that she has declined all attention to herself since the publication of her novel in 1960 and continues to live quietly in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala.
As a heroine herself, she deserves to live out her days without having to hear the din of critics wielding hindsight as virtue. Yet lately, Lee's famous and only novel has earned special scorn as critics opine about the way things should have been, not only in real life but also in the artistic treatment of the era.
Writing a story in the Jim Crow South about a white lawyer who defended a black man against a charge of raping a white woman was an act of courage, make no mistake. And though Atticus Finch, the protagonist-lawyer, might seem bland by today's standards, it is unfair to label him a paternalistic defender of the status quo, as Malcolm Gladwell did last year in The New Yorker.
Gladwell, who marvelously describes culture in ways that cause us to blink in recognition of tipping points and wish to be outliers all -- not to mention forcing us to embrace a newly coined vocabulary without which we are helpless to address the zeitgeist -- is perhaps less attuned to the ways of fiction. With all due respect.
For "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a story -- a parable designed to move hearts and minds -- and not a manifesto for radical action. Yet this is what Gladwell and others would have preferred. Gladwell, who finds common cause with George Orwell's criticism of Charles Dickens, wishes that the author had made Finch a man sufficiently outraged by racial injustice to seek systemic change, rather than merely be a decent sort willing to defend a black man wrongly accused.
Orwell similarly criticized Dickens, who, he complained, never offered solutions to the problems he illuminated. (This has a familiar ring.) But isn't it a lot to ask that the artist, in addition to exposing societal disease, also cure it?
Walker Percy, another Southern novelist and my muse in such matters, said that the artist's job is to be a diagnostician -- "to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable." That "art is making; morality is doing."
"This is not to say that art, fiction, is not moral in the most radical sense -- if it is made right. But if you write a novel with the goal of trying to make somebody do right, you're writing a tract, which may be an admirable enterprise, but it is not literature."
In July 2010, we might be more comfortable with an Atticus Finch who was less compassionate toward his racist neighbors. In explaining people and events to his young daughter, Scout, Finch noted that these were not bad people (even though some did want to commit violence against blacks), just misguided.
From where we sit today, this attitude is both ludicrous and offensive. One can't distill "not bad" from what is clearly bad. But, then, who is to say that Lee thought otherwise? Sometimes truth is better received through a reflex of recognition than by a blow to the head. Remember, too, Finch was trying to explain a hateful world to a child in terms familiar in the church-going South: Hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner.
My own recollection of the book, which I first read as a child, was that it was full of hard and ugly truths. The story, because it was revealed through the eyes of another child, caused me to understand injustice as no textbook or lecture ever could. Such is the power and mystery of literature.
To kill a mockingbird is a sin, Finch told his children, because it brings no harm to others. "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us," a neighbor further explained.
Likewise, trying to kill a great book because a 50-year-old literary character doesn't measure up to modern critics' idea of heroism is a sin. All Harper Lee ever did, after all, was sing out her heart for us.
I can understand the recent criticisms of the character of Atticus and the direction of the novel even if I find it to be a tad unfair in that it's too modern of a reaction the more recent critics seem to want. On the other hand I also suspect that I always read the story on a very literal level because my tiny hometown in the deep South is Harper Lee's tiny hometown in the deep South-- literally. I was born and up until I went to college had lived my entire life in Monroeville (a town of 5000 - 7000 citizens at its height but which has been in decline for some time now). I was born slightly more than a decade after the book was written and after integration had taken place. Still, I attended the same elementary school as the one Nell (Harper is her middle name) Lee attended, albeit by that time the 1930s building that had been the entire school in her time was just the kindergarten. We had 'new' 1960s era modernist buildings flanking it. The playground was dominated by a towering 150+ year old oak tree (long gone now) that I always imagined was 'the' tree in the novel because it stood between the old part of the elementary school and where the old Lee house used to stand. Truman Capote's childhood home was still there (though alas it too is now gone) and I was always somewhat creeped out/fascinated by the fence that had stood between the two houses because it had both stone and... chicken bones in it. No, I never understood the chicken bones. Also, down the street there was this huge old house with peeling paint and dark windows (that my fifth grade teacher eventually bought and renovated) that everyone said was 'haunted.' I doubt that it was 'boo's house' or even its inspiration, but it certainly served the same function in my elemantary school years.
When I read To Kill A Mockingbird it isn't as a symbol of Jim Crow laws in the old South. It's literally my home (even if I haven't lived there since graduating high school). When Scout speaks about the Baptists playing the Methodists in football, that exact place pops into my mind because the Baptist and the Methodist churches do face one another across the street. I attended that Methodist church as a child (even as the Lees continued to attend it when I was a kid), and we still played touch football (and 4 square) in the rear of the church or went across the street to roller-skate in the Baptist's gymnasium. The courthouse in the book (and the movie) is the courthouse in the center of the square (the movie copied it identically. My mom even remembers meeting Gregory Peck when he came to town during the preparation for the movie. The movie wasn't filmed there but they did visit in pre-poduction to copy things). The physical locations in the book are very clear in my head because though she would rename places and families, it was never changed very much. It was always clear where each and every thing and area she mentioned was. And even some of the families in question were clearly certain families. So even though Nell Lee always said that the case in the book was never a real, specific case but an amalgam, it was also never really all that difficult to guess some of the people or families they were modeled upon even a couple of decades after the book was published (probably much more difficult now as many of those locations have now gone and the town is now virtually a ghost town. The town was relatively prosperous when I was a kid but with NAFTA, all of the local industries have gone and now it's really beginning to verge on a ghost town).
So if, perhaps, I have a different view of 'the neighbors' and 'the town' than the critics it's because that while racism is evil and racist laws are more evil and racist injustice is a huge evil, we're still talking about the town where I grew up, encompasing virtually everyone that I knew as a kid. True, I was born a decade after the book was published and some 50 odd years after the story within the novel was to have taken place, so I grew up in a very different time. But somewhere at the time of the book, my great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents were around (albeit slightly out of town) because my family has lived in that area since the 1790s. My family attended the same Methodist church (even if we are as my mother always said 'heathens' who don't believe in much of anything). Nell Lee is a close friend of one of my friend's parents and an acquaintance of my own parents. She used to come in to sign copies my mom would stock of To Kill a Mockingbird, even though she wouldn't do book signing tours. As a kid, I had no idea that she was famous. She was just an ordinary little old lady (she seemed old to me even when I was a child). It didn't connect with me just who she was, and she never made an issue of it. She didn't want to be recognized to the point that it was always considered impolite to mention the subject to her.
Unlike myself or my parents, Nell Lee still lives in Monroeville, though she is now in poor health and has refused to make any appearances in relation to the book's 50th Anniversary. Her sister has spoken about it some, but since the stroke Nell Lee doesn't appear in public.
And I'm not sure where I'm even going with all of this except to say that I don't think of the book as a statement or rallying cry. To me it has always been rooted in the past. More than that, it has always been rooted in a very specific place. One that is not a fiction to me, for all that Monroe County is redubbed Maycomb County in the book. And this has always influenced the way that I experience the novel, inescapably so..
