Today's New Yorker brings a sort of unclosed-circle of a Malcolm Gladwell piece, about a book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which is based loosely on events including the trial of a black man who was alleged to have raped a white woman in 1936, a book that was published in 1960, and also a politician, Jim Folsom, when he was running for election in 1954, and also a 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Ed, issued in May, which according to Gladwell ended Folsom's career, while even if that is true it also did not apparently prevent Folsom from being reelected for a second stint as governor of Alabama, six months after that decision, serving from 1955 to 1959, having received 73% of the vote.
Some people, they have criticism about the book. Also Folsom sometimes was worried about his "nigger problem." Some lawyers have suggested that Atticus Finch, in the book, did not do such a good job, as his rape defense of the black man was that the woman allegedly raped was just white trash. This is a hard Malcolm Gladwell piece to explain, which is not to say that it's not nice to read something that isn't so damn didactic, and prescriptive! Also Charles Dickens, George Orwell said, lacked any interest in prescription. Sometimes books are just complainey! Like this Mockingbird book:
In the middle of the novel, after Tom Robinson's arrest, Finch spends the night in front of the Maycomb jail, concerned that a mob might come down and try to take matters into its own hands. Sure enough, one does, led by a poor white farmer, Walter Cunningham. The mob eventually scatters, and the next morning Finch tries to explain the night's events to Scout. Here again is a test for Finch's high-minded equanimity. He likes Walter Cunningham. Cunningham is, to his mind, the right sort of poor white farmer: a man who refuses a W.P.A. handout and who scrupulously repays Finch for legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, and a crate of smilax and holly. Against this, Finch must weigh the fact that Cunningham also leads lynch mobs against black people. So what does he do? Once again, he puts personal ties first. Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is "basically a good man," who "just has his blind spots along with the rest of us." Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, "It just happens that Cunningham's blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people."
I think he blinked and tipped over the hickory nuts.
Don't you just hate when random fictional characters have flaws. Unlike real people.
73% is also the frequency of Gladwell contributions to NYer lately!
But yes, this was good. "“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. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature.’" Living in a place where much could use a change this could not be more true and a real frustration.
Also: "Folsom would end his speeches by brandishing a corn-shuck mop and promising a spring cleaning of the state capitol." Missing the midget.
"Living in a place where much could use a change this could not be more true and a real frustration."
- A place, called Evening Shade.
CLOSE!
I suppose Atticus' point (and by extension, Harper Lee's point) was that people who commit evil acts are not necessarily evil people - the world isn't that simple.
They believe what they are raised and conditioned to believe, and behave the way they are raised and conditioned to behave. That is a reality that is hard for many people to accept, because it makes it hard for us to believe that we are inherently morally superior human beings. We want to think that we believe better - and behave better - than those other people because we are inherently morally superior to those other people.
Lee probably believed that changing a socially-dominant evil behavior took education and enlightenment - not demonization of the character of most of the human beings in the society that practiced it. And if she did, I tend to agree with her.
I'm not sure whom I'm arguing with here ... Gladwell? I guess I should probably go read his piece and find out.
When you think about when that book was written and what time period and setting it represents, wouldn't having Atticus Finch eviscerate Cunningham a little, uh, unrealistic? Fiction is about the way the world is, not (generally speaking) about the way it should be. And verisimilitude goes a long way in convincing readers that what they're reading is representative of those realities.
What Gladwell seems to be prescribing is a sort of fiction where characters are sympathetic and/or likable because they some moral obligation to be. Which reminds me of Martin Amis's nasty critique of that notion, wherein he suggests that following that prescription leads to a "literature of ingratiation."
Then again, it's Malcolm Gladwell. Maybe he's just considering the obvious fact that it's fiction as a data point not relevant to his argument, and one that can therefore be excluded, per most of his books. Let's just make sure he never gets his hands on any Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor. Boy, would he be pissed.
As a character, Atticus Finch was never designed to be a civil rights leader. Much of the beauty in that book is that it was realistic, in that Atticus didn't become a preachy patriot bent on changing the world. As you mention, changing that would have made it an entirely different book, and probably not a very good one. The fact that Atticus represented this "everyman" type who wanted to right a wrong in his small town is what made him a relatable and well-regarded character in literature.
Of course he put personal ties first. Right or wrong, most people do.
Maybe Malcolm could rewrite all of Tennessee Williams plays and make everyone well adjusted and happy and all the female characters look forward to aging gracefully and all the male characters accept their sexuality.
It occurred to me while reading this piece that the “adopt a more humanitarian attitude†could easily be used to describe any modern politician who favors civil unions over gay marriage. "Don't rock the boat and we will throw you a bone", the policy seems to promise the minority population. Or maybe I'm just projecting here!
Hey, no knocking "To Kill A Mocking Bird!"
This guy is a backseat driver on every Trojan Horse in Western Civilization.
Hey! I kept thinking about Dickens/Orwell example too! "It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure." -- That Guy Orwell is my favorite literary critic the best literary critic. Related! Orwell on Henry Miller:
"Miller is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more
purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive. Within a narrow
circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he
feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as
helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence
the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him."
Gladwell's facile piece attacks the novel for not being something Lee did not intend it to be. Lee was not writing a diatribe against racism. The book is faulted for dealing with individuals rather than structures. People may have put a lot of baggage on to the book (e.g., becoming a lawyer to fight for justice because of reading it), none of though which diminishes the book. When Sheriff Tate talks Atticus into acquiescing to the version of events at the end that 'Bob Ewell fell on his knife' (after his children had been attacked by the white trash villain Ewell and saved only by the shy Boo Radley), Atticus does compromise his ethics. The town does take care of its own business. The book shows hows the matter would have been handled in such a place at such a time (early 1930's). WWII integration had not yet happened. Flannery O'Connor made a good point, whether taken archly or not, that the book is a children's book. When I was thirteen and read it, not for school-thank god-but of my own volition, and read the inscription, "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.", I was hooked. The child's perception of the world and those times at that place is paramount. The individual shaming the mob is the political lesson - changing the structures will not change hearts and minds - it will only generate new codes and new code words. The individual is where the change must take place. No one measures up to perfection and all are flawed even Atticus in this tale. Questions are raised, such as, What is Justice? Would it be more just to drag Boo Radley out into the limelight, not because he is middle class and not trash, but because he is haunted or ill (see, the young Robert Duvall shy away from the light in the film). The system was not being changed from within and matters were resolved personally, not institutionally. The rabid dog, Zeke the trashman, Calpurnia learning English from Blackstone's Commentaries . . . the book has amazing images and characters and a most compelling story. It is a story. Not a polemic. Harper Lee did not write the book to end the wrongs in the world but to share some of herself with the world, for which I am grateful. As for Gladstone, for his next project, perhaps he should take the Founding Fathers to task for not being Feminist enough or not being vegetarian.
** from Bluey Cleveland's Commentaries