Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part 1A

There’s so much wrong with Malcolm Gladwell’s hatchet job on To Kill a Mockingbird that I’ve had to actually write a second blog post just to cover all the nonsense.  Here goes.

In yesterday’s post, I deconstructed the basic ideas that underpin Gladwell’s contentions concerning the book.  Today, I’m just going to quickly go over a couple of smaller points.

One of Gladwell’s later tactics is to draw a comparison between To Kill a Mockingbird and criticisms that George Orwell made of Charles Dickens.  First, he fails by assuming that simply because George Orwell said something that it is automatically true, that Orwell–who I think would have been disgusted by being used in this manner–was Christ returned.  The real problem that Gladwell encounters, though, is that when Orwell criticized Dickens for attacking “the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places” and for showing “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,” he is not attacking Dickens the novelist, he is attacking Dickens the social satirist.  Again, To Kill a Mockingbird was not, is not, and was never intended to be a satire, social or otherwise.  The comparison is not valid.  Orwell, had he lived may have loved, hated, or ignored To Kill a Mockingbird, but he certainly would never have confused it for satire.

Next, as raised in a comment in my previous post, Gladwell’s interpretation of the sequence at the end of the book concerning Boo Radley is just plain wrong.  To Kill a Mockingbird is, at its heart, a meditation on some basic teachings of Jesus, such as “do unto others” and “turn the other cheek.”  Boo Radley, who is not merely “shy,” as Malcolm Gladwell would have it, but is either mentally retarded or just plain crazy, defends Scout and Jem not as a matter of civic duty, but in response to a series of small kindnesses.  He would derive no benefit from notoriety–a concept which leaves the well-known Mr Gladwell aghast–and would only, in the long term, suffer harm from it, probably ending up being institutionalized.  Since Mr Gladwell appears to be incapable of absorbing anything other than the most surface elements from a story, he takes the Sheriff’s reference to “angel food cakes” quite literally, and does not interpret it as a metaphor for the invasion of Boo’s privacy and the harm that can be done by the well meaning.  It means that Boo Radley sought no glory and deserves the right to have no glory thrust upon him.  In other words, good works are their own reward.

Finally, Mr Gladwell excoriates the book for presenting what his own research shows was a fairly realistic depiction of conditions in the South in 1936.  Harper Lee’s mistake, in his view, is in telling us the truth simply because that truth is uncomfortable and ugly.  He wants Atticus Finch to be something he was unlikely to be, a person who stood outside the society he lived in, immune from the values he was raised with and surrounded by, some sort of Nietzschian Superman, who is exactly the sort of person I’ve never come across in real life.  Mr Gladwell’s problem is that he doesn’t want a novel, he wants a fable, a fairy tale, in which things work out the way we want them to rather than in the way they actually happen.

It is true that Atticus Finch tends to get placed on too high of a pedestal, however, that is the fault of neither Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird.  That is the fault of readers who tend to romanticize their heroes and wrongly so.  Atticus Finch was a good man, but not a great one, a person who sought justice where none was likely, but not a revolutionary.  And yet, when all is said and done, is there not something to be said for a book that preaches understanding and compassion as virtues?  Are these not, in fact, the same sort of virtues that Dr. King so often preached?  Why should Malcolm Gladwell and The New Yorker be so against compassion?  It’s because it is hard to find room for compassion when you are planning a hatchet job.