In Search of Atticus

There isn’t much to see in Monroeville, Alabama.  There is the courthouse where Atticus Finch defended a black man against white accusors, to a white jury.  Except, well, Atticus is a fictional character.  Not even Gregory Peck, during the filming of To Kill a Mockingbird, argued a case there.  That happened on a set in Hollywood.  There is a museum in the courthouse, with the little trinkets Boo Radley left for Scout – the watch and the dolls and the gum.  Only, again, that didn’t really happen.  There is a gift shop.

Harper Lee grew up in Monroeville and still lives in the area, but for people looking for any sort of real connection to the world of Mockingbird, the town is a bit of a bust.  Besides a handful of touristy concessions (the Mockingbird Café, for instance), it’s just like a hundred other small Southern towns I’ve driven through or lived in.  The air by my hotel smelled like wet dogs and old french fries.  Lee’s childhood home is torn down, replaced by a grimy-looking restaurant called Mel's Dairy Dream.  At the time of my visit, it didn’t seem to be open.

But tourists go there, to the town, to the museum, to the Mockingbird Café, hell even to the Dairy Dream.  There are millions of people in this country who were deeply moved by To Kill a Mockingbird, who learned how to be decent, gentle, strong adults from Atticus Finch.  And I’m one of them.

So of course, I was excited about Go Set a Watchman.  The day news of its publication broke, I went online to say it was “a great day for fans of American letters.”  Then, gradually, my excitement began to flag.  This wasn’t some sort of lost masterpiece, I learned; it was a rejected draft of a project that later became Mockingbird.  Serious questions were raised about the degree to which the 89-year-old Lee consented to publishing this work, something she had always staunchly opposed.  And then reviews came out, saying the work was full of longwinded political conversations with an aging, racist Atticus Finch.  By that point, I no longer had any desire to read Watchman.  I still haven’t decided if I will.

But while I dithered, pundits, reviewers, and critics all across the nation succumbed to some kind of mass hysteria.  The review in the New York Times said Watchman gave Atticus “a dark side.” The AV Club said that Lee deliberately “overturns the mythos of Atticus Finch.”  And then, the floodgates opened.

Watchman arrived on the scene at a crucial time in American life.  A cynical man might even say an “opportune” time.  After five years of mainstream white America proclaiming that a black president meant racism was over, the illusion of a postracial society came violently tumbling down.  Riots and protests are on the news.  Young black men are getting shot by police.  I know there were many of us who would have loved nothing more than a kind and thoughtful word from Atticus Finch, to tell us that we need to have empathy and respect for all people.  But instead, we get a new book where – twist! – Atticus was a racist the whole time.

It’s the sort of thing that you almost can’t help writing a thinkpiece about.  And there were lots of them, touching on everything from Jim Crow politics to the death of the white savior myth.  Watchman was the perfect entryway into any sort of article about how racism doesn’t go away.  It can be found everywhere: even in Atticus Finch.

I don’t want to detract from the idea behind some of those pieces.  Many of them make thoughtful and important points - prejudice can indeed be found even in the supposedly sacrosanct.  But, as a literary critic, calling Atticus a racist doesn’t make any sense.

Intertextuality is a tricky thing.  Many works of fiction relate to one another, many can be placed in dialogue with one another, and some reveal different aspects of a character through different events.  Sometimes, it’s clear how two texts fit together.  On the other hand, people have spent years trying to figure out if Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury and Quentin Compson in Absolom, Absolom! are really the same character.  Other, equally devoted people, concoct elaborate theories on how James Bond can appear as half a dozen people in the span of 50 years.

Those problems can get thorny, and require lots of research.  Luckily, that’s not the problem we face when looking at Atticus Finch.

In reading Mockingbird alongside Watchman, critics are attempting to read a novel and an early draft of that same novel as coequal texts.  This demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of how characters function within a fictional work, seeing character as a reality outside of the page rather than an aspect of how a story is told.

Characters serve a work.  They are one of the elements an author can employ to create meaning.  Lee wrote a novel called Go Set a Watchman, and with the help of a talented editor, that novel became To Kill a Mockingbird.  The setting and tone changed during that process, and the focus of the plot shifted from arguments about race relations to demonstrations of race relations.  And as that happened, the characters were reimagined.  That’s an easy thing to understand.  It happens to projects all the time.  Watch the Black Friday reel – Pixar’s original animatic of Toy Story in which Woody is a vindictive sociopath.  Or even earlier work, where Woody is a terrifying ventriloquist dummy.  As those works evolved, so did their characters.

Yet there is something about Atticus Finch which resists this idea.  It is difficult to think of that man as a mere narrative device, a tool used by Lee to tell a story.  Atticus has become so real to many of us that an “initial draft” of his character doesn’t make any sense.  We want to think of him as Harper Lee’s actual father, concrete, someone we could have met.  If that is true, then anything Lee wrote about him would reveal a new aspect of his personality.  But he is a fiction.  He was made up.  When we accept that fact, Watchman becomes nothing more than a literary curiosity.

It’s hard to do, though, to keep your mind wrapped around it.  Mel’s Dairy Dream all over again.  We are, I am, desperate to see some sign of Maycomb, Alabama.  Where a grown adult can stand up for human dignity, even as everyone around him loses their minds. It should be real. So we go, we read, we try to find the beauty at the heart of Mockingbird in a broken, nonfiction world.  But all we have here is Monroeville, where the lady in the gift shop will sell you Go Set a Watchman as if it were a new revelation. 

No, if we want to find Atticus Finch in this world, the only thing we can do is start acting like him.