The latest buzz about Harper Lee’s newly published novel, the predecessor to To Kill a Mockingbird, is that Atticus Finch is portrayed not as the moral champion of racial equality, but rather as a racist. Before this piece of news takes over all of our Facebook newsfeeds, however, let’s just remember one thing.
It really doesn’t matter.
I have not yet read Go Set a Watchman, although I intend to. But I know that whatever is contained in that novel has little to do with the work that ultimately became To Kill a Mockingbird. In other words, the Atticus who appears in the former work is only tangentially related to the Atticus who appears in the latter work. No matter what the news articles tell us, Go Set a Watchman is not a full-fledged literary work: because it was not published, because it was in fact rejected by editors, we must regard it as a rough draft of sorts, a work in progress, and not as a work on its own.
In fact, I find the popular interest surrounding the publication of Go Set a Watchman puzzling, because this embryonic version of Harper Lee’s masterpiece should really be of interest only to literary scholars and critics. The fact that it has grabbed media attention is frustrating but predictable. To Kill a Mockingbird is an iconic novel, after all, emblematic of the United States at a certain point in time. Moreover, having published her one great novel, Lee never published another; and so she herself is a tantalizing mystery, much like that other one-hit wonder, Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights.
But the truth is that because Go Set a Watchman is simply a kind of rough draft for To Kill a Mockingbird–nothing more and nothing less–the only people who should be interested in this work are literary scholars, those people who crawl around musty libraries studying literary minutiae, debating whether the first ending of Great Expectations is superior to the revised one that Dickens ended up with–in other words, people like me. And the only reason that the media is showering attention on this book is that an anti-intellectual culture cannot understand scholarly interest, and so Go Set a Watchman must be presented not as a type of juvenilia, not as an early (rejected) version of a masterpiece, but rather as a work in its own right. And what is surprising about this? After all, there is nothing to wonder at in this kind of attitude arising out of a society that places greater value on sports facilities than on libraries. The $27 price tag tells the entire story,
So don’t worry about whether Atticus Finch is racist. He isn’t. The only Atticus Finch that really matters is the one that appears in To Kill a Mockingbird. On the other hand, if you just have to worry about something, consider worrying about the fact that fifty years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, we still haven’t solved the problem of race in this country. Unlike Dickens’s books, which sometimes provoked real social change , Lee’s work still reflects a reality in our world that we are unwilling to contemplate. And that’s something to worry about for sure.
The Tabard Inn 