It’s a Book, People!

Reading the initial comments about Harper Lee’s  Go Set A Watchman, I'm wondering if our obsession with the virtual world has caused even professional journalists to confuse reality and fiction.  Commentators are shocked that Atticus Finch at age 72 is (was?) prejudiced against African Americans. They're talking as if he's a real person who changed views as he got older.  Please remember this: he's a name in a book, given certain qualities by a writer who used the same name for someone in another book.  Apparently he's not the lawyer who lost the case of a black man accused of rape, since that's supposedly peripheral to this book, and that trial ends in an acquittal.  (I admit I haven't read the book, but I'm talking about the reactions. You don't have to have seen a play to know that the member of the audience who leapt onto the stage to slug the villain was also confused.)

A few simple facts: Watchman was written before Mockingbird. So Atticus was 72 before he was 52 to 55, as he was in Mockingbird.  In, say, 1955 he was an elderly racist, but by 1960 he was a middle-aged idealist.  So he is evidently another Benjamin Button.  Or, he's just a name, so is Scout, and, by the way, Jem is not really dead, because he never lived.  Harper Lee wrote two books about the same characters, or rather about characters whose names she didn't change.  The books are about two alternate realities, and Lee made no attempt to connect them, nor should we. Now if Watchman were a sequel, we could ask why Lee never cleared up how Atticus had changed.  But it's a prequel in the real world, as Lee tested out what her characters were like, then went, as they say, in another direction.

Let's put it this way: authors create alternate realities.  Sometimes they create an alternate reality and carry it through several books.  Then we can look at changes: How does Bilbo change as he ages in Tolkien’s writing?  Does Snape change or does he hide his true character until the last Harry Potter?  But when an author sits down to write a book, he or she can start fresh every time and build a new world. Shakespeare's Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 is not the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and it would be foolish to debate how he changed from one to the other.  (For one thing, he's dead in the histories before he's wooing in the comedy, at least as Shakespeare’s authorship went.) 

The confusion seems to be caused by the simple fact that Harper Lee wrote about a man named Atticus twice.  Take another character written about by several people: is Shakespeare's Brutus, whom even Marc Antony extols for his principles, the same Brutus condemned to the lowest circle of hell in Dante?  Is Dante saying Roman morality was inadequate?  No, because again, Dante puts Brutus in hell centuries before Antony praises him.  Again, Odysseus is either a tired soldier trying to get home (Homer), an arrogant defier of the limits God has put on humans (Dante), a sneaky, cynical pragmatist (Shakespeare), or a courageous explorer showing the indomitability of the human spirit (Tennyson). But Harper Lee writing in the 1950s and Harper Lee writing a few years later, are two different people, at least as creative minds.  As T.S. Eliot put it, “every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.”

Trying, as some are already doing, to use Atticus’s “change” to analyze American racism is as inappropriate as asking gerontologists to decide whether Alzheimer’s or some other brain condition is behind his alleged alteration.  Let’s spend our time trying to figure out how living racists can be led to change, whether by reading Mockingbird, studying history, or hearing the stories of actual victims of racism.