Summary: Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is a book controversial for its publication and for its content, but I think it is an interesting glimpse into the back-end of Southern Literature. Some thoughts.
BLOT: (19 Jul 2015 - 03:58:30 PM)
My thoughts on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman
There are three broad ways to read Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, all of which center on its relationship to Lee's much more beloved To Kill a Mockingbird. The first, most correct way—and also the way I suspect history will remember the book—is as a draft of the story that became Mockingbird. Watchman is rough, mechanically. Though capable of beautiful moments, and full of the style of storytelling I personally heard growing up in the same rough region of the world, it is also prone to having sentences or paragraphs repeat themselves, of interjecting constitutional law into sections that should be emotional climaxes, of cliches, and of meandering off into the specific past while the non-specific present lingers like wool gathering. In this way, it is a literary marvel, a rare glimpse into the writing process as the internalization of place's spirit with no easy answers for the person crafting it, much less the reader, and can be invaluable to other writers.
The only problem with this reading is that it is not how the publisher sold it to the public, meaning Watchman was forced to stand up in a way different than how it was crafted. It is a phenomenal rough draft, but it is undeniably unpolished.
The second way to read it, and the way I would whole-heartedly recommend against even if there is merit for it, is as an alternate universe to Mockingbird: a world with similarly named characters and places but not meant to be the same world. It will be satisfying for many to read it in this way at the moment, for it allows people to set aside Mockingbird entirely from discussions involving it, but in the end it removes the book from its process and from its potential, leaving it exposed as a lesser written tale that is more honest in many ways but much less lovable.
The third way, which is the way I read it, is to take it as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, or perhaps a stepping-back to see a broad picture of events. This way is flawed, for sure, and requires the literary equivalent of blurring the eyes at a few inconsistencies in world building between the two, but it allows the reader to take Watchman as a monumental exegesis on the paradox of the Southern Soul (one of many examples, and perhaps unintended, is how the anti-racism book still manages to dive into broad racist tropes). It is a time when the South was so passionate about striking back at what it saw as another wave of Northern aggression that many Southerners turned on themselves and held up a falsely idealized version of the past as proof of inherent greatness, as if by convincing themselves that the War Between States was actually just about State Rights and nothing else might be proof that the South is equal to the North by way of being better. Racism is not the creation of the South, but the South has to wear it like an albatross, and this novel is partially a tale of that.
It is also partially a tale of what happens when you grow up past your own stories, a victim to their splendor, like Jean Louise "Scout" Finch had to do. Towards the beginning, she writes that the historical version of events is at odds with the truth: to her, the way a story is most fondly remembered is the way it is best told. And, towards the end, she is told that much of her displeasure at facing Atticus at odds with her image of him is because he is finally letting her see him as a human, and—ironically, since this was written before—it is like a message to those who felt betrayed by the Goodman Godlike Atticus, who once strode unscathed on a sea of Jim Crow Laws looking toward a future it would take the South decades to reach, turning out to be just a man of his time. Mockingbird is a book about worshipping fathers, while Watchman is a book about loving them.
To Kill a Mockingbird is undoubtedly the better book, and Mockingbird's Atticus is the better character, but Go Set a Watchman is a better love letter to a place. Like all passionate relationships it endures its hate and makes itself because of it. The way I understand it, there was once a plan to release Watchman as an actual sequel to Mockingbird, which would have resulted in better editing and likely a stronger focus. It is perhaps one of literature's great missed chances, like the way we will never see Herbert's own vision for the seventh book of Dune, but such is life.
On Words
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: July 2015
