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.

Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part One

This is the first in at least a two-part series concerning The New Yorker and the various hatchet jobs that it does on established literary figures and works.  For a place that’s continually published crappy fiction throughout my adult life, they like to get awfully uppity.

Today’s installment concerns Malcolm Gladwell’s knifing this week of the classic book To Kill a Mockingbird in honor of its 50th anniversary.  Gladwell’s approach to the novel is social rather than artistic.  In fact, even though it is a work of art and not a treatise on race relations, he makes no assessment of either the merits or demerits of the text.  His problem with it is that it does not make any attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and end racism as it was known in one fell swoop.  He attacks it for fostering what he calls “[o]ld style Southern liberalism,” an approach to Jim Crow and politics in the South that was destroyed in the battle between the Civil Rights movement and diehard segregationists in the late ’50s and early ’60s.  He calls old style Southern liberalism “gradual and paternalistic,” which seems accurate.  Further, he claims that Atticus Finch’s approach to race relations and dealing with justice in the South at the time of the novel was too namby-pamby, too paternalistic, too forgiving of people, and not committed enough to true equality between blacks and whites, and this is probably true too.

The problem is that the novel is not, in its essence, about race relations and was never meant to be a kind of manifesto.  Harper Lee set out to tell a story about certain people in a particular time-and-place.  She was trying not to change the world, but to describe it, as it was, as best she could.  Oh, she could have portrayed Atticus in the hero mode of the average boy’s adventure novel, righting wrongs and always following the true moral path.  Instead, though, she attempted to draw a portrait of a man. As someone who could have actually existed in space and time.

The primary mistake that Gladwell makes is a classic one.  He assumes that the point of art is to change the world, which it most assuredly is not.  In fact, he attacks both the novel and the character of Atticus for using the “hearts and minds” method, which is seen as being too slow, too incremental, too otherworldly.  The truth is that this is how all art works.  Art is about evolution rather than revolution, and anybody who thinks that the shackles of oppression will be broken and abandoned because of a book is out of his or her tree.  People have tried to do that and never has a one accomplished, at the end of the day, a damn thing.  In fact, most ended up being worth nothing more than recycling.  Pedantic and self-important books tend to end up in the dust bin, with the possible exception of Ayn Rand’s.  And, fortunately, most people, mainly boys, who grow enamored of Ms Rand eventually outgrow her.  Her work is juvenalia for juvenile minds.

No, the best that a novel can do is to get the reader to understand another person’s suffering and thereby increase the reach of that person’s compassion just a jot further.  And that is what To Kill a Mockingbird is on about:  compassion.

When Gladwell complains that Atticus is too forgiving of Walter Cunningham, the “poor, white farmer” who leads a mob in an attempted lynching, he misses (and so does the scholar he quotes) the entire point of the episode.  Here.  Let me let Malcolm explain his point of view for himself:

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.”

First, is it true that “Cunningham’s blind spot . . . is a homicidal hatred of black people”?  Is Walter Cunningham, in fact, going about killing blacks as he comes across them or is his leadership of this mob more specific than that?  Does he in fact lead “lynch mobs against black people” or lead one mob against one particular black person?  Are members of any mob a collection of psychopaths or are they groups of people who are under the sway of mass hysteria?  Do people quite often do things in groups that they wouldn’t dare do alone?  And shouldn’t the renowned writer on sociology be aware of that?

Cunningham’s blind spot is not “a homicidal hatred of black people,” but rather an unquestioned belief in an evil social system.  Again, Harper Lee could have painted him as merely a monster, a villain, but that would have taken her story in the fantasyland of melodrama.  In the real and complex world, good men can do evil things, quite often because they have invested their identities in a rotten system or because they get swept away in the hysterical moment.  Is it better to understand that person and their frailties or to condense them into a caricature of their real selves, all the better to hate them with?   For both Malcolm Gladwell and Professor Monroe Freedman are guilty of stereotyping.  They have to if they want to construct that straw man where the character of Walter Cunningham used to be.

As Jean Renoir said in The Rules of the Game, “The terrible thing about life is this:  Everyone has his reasons.”  This is not to imply a kind of leveling of reasons and actions, but to open the possibility in one’s mind that we are all human and fallible.  It is to imply that compassion is a virtue and that blind judgment is not.

As part of Gladwell’s attack, he says that To Kill a Mockingbird is “a novel set in mid-century Alabama,” and while I cannot carp about it being set in Alabama, I must complain about the “mid-century” part.  The purpose, of course, is to make sure that your straw man is set in the proper straw setting.  The meaning that Gladwell wants the reader to take away from “mid-century” is that the novel is set in the 1950s, the decade that saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, just so that he can show how out-of-step the book was with the times that it sought to portray.  Which is nonsense.  The novel is set in 1936, a very different time in Southern history.  This “mid-century” business is misleading, just the kind of trick used when the author has few legitimate arguments to make.  And so much for The New Yorker’s fabled fact-checking department.

Attack To Kill a Mockingbird if you must, but at least attack it for what it is, not what it isn’t.  To do so should be beneath a writer of Malcolm Gladwell’s stature, and to print it should beneath a publication such as The New Yorker.  Unfortunately, as further entries in this series will show, the hatchet job is an accepted part of The New Yorker’s ethic.

UPDATE:  I have added a part two to this argument.