It’s the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, and everyone seems out for blood. In the Wall Street Journal, Allen Barra compares Harper Lee to other Southern writers, and finds her wanting: “And as for Harper Lee—Alabama born, raised and still resident—she doesn’t really measure up to the others in literary talent, but we like to pretend she does.” Only a few weeks earlier, Malcolm Gladwell complained that Lee’s novel reveals the limits of Southern liberalism: “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama.” Does any novel really instruct us about “the world”? Don’t we learn about a specific time and place, and how a heroic character may be ahead of his time but not necessarily ahead of ours? Much of what makes Atticus great is that he is a flawed hero, growing up in a world that does not share our own understanding of social justice. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Digs like these are not new. Back in 1960, Flannery O’Connor wrote, after a friend “insisted” on sending her the book: “I think I see what it really is–a child’s book. When I was fifteen I would have loved it. Take out the rape and you’ve got something like Miss Minerva and William Green Hill [a children’s book set in a small town in the South]. I think for a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.”
I’m reminded once again of Philip Pullman’s high-wattage Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech, in which he said:
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.
The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship.
But stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, “events never grow stale.” There’s more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. And by a story I mean not only Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk but also the great novels of the nineteenth century, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Bleak House and many others: novels where the story is at the center of the writer’s attention, where the plot actually matters. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.
In the novel itself, Miss Maudie explains to Scout why Atticus declared that it was a sin to kill a mockingbird: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out of us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
One popular edition of To Kill a Mockingbird includes that extract on the back cover and describes it as “a lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel–a black man charged with the rape of a white girl.” That seems a real stretch to me, and Atticus’s wisdom seems flattened by that statement. In the context of the recent assaults on Harper Lee’s novel, I can’t help but think that one way of understanding Atticus’s words is to imagine the mockingbird, master of mimicry, as the writer herself. Unfortunately, that makes the rest of us bluejays.
“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em,” as Atticus puts it.
