A great loss (Page 7 of 7)

It's those little things...   Atticus always addresses the white folk by either prefixed by their title, i.e. Mrs., Miss, Mr. or their complete name, i.e. Bob Ewell etc. but the Negros are only ever referenced by their first name. It is like there is no respect for them and they are addressed like a pet dog.

This may just be me noticing this, as johnny foreigner. I can't find one Mr. Robinson from Atticus's (or any other) mouth.

No. A black person may just feel he doesn't like white people generally; and vice-versa.

However, a fictional white lawyer may feel superior to black folk because he is as far he knows better educated and cultured, and as for any  other people who are neither white nor male, they could be equal but also the exceptions which prove the rule.

That is the philosophy of scepticism in your thinking that definitions are subjective and the very foundation for  the political-philosophy behind racism. You are a racist because you think like a racist who by no reasonable definition must think one race is superior to another race..

Brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers endorses Trump

Well then, The Incoherence Theory it is.

YUP. This is one of my mother's favorite novels. I was telling her about your remarks here -- specifically the two passages I've quoted here. Before I could finish, she was nodding her head. That's racism, however polite he is. If he saw Tom Robinson as an equal, he'd address him with similar deference.

Agreed.

I'm seeing the point here. People rally around this book (myself included) as if Atticus is the hero of all heroes, & the issue (if I'm understanding right) isn't that Atticus lacks some heroic qualities, or that the book is necessarily bad. I think Atticus does have some heroic qualities, especially for a man of that time. And I think Harper Lee wrote one story which grew a life of its own. The issue is that if people cannot see Atticus as he sincerely was, what else aren't we seeing deeply? For example. Literature is our opportunity to test our critical thinking, and if we choose not to, we may make the same choice in life.

This is why it's a problem that this book is so often assigned in schools? I wasn't quite following several days ago, but good stuff. I think it could be interesting if teachers interrogate this novel as you have been, Dill. But I sense that the issue is that they are not. I was never taught this book in school, so I have no way to guess whether it's used to feed nostalgia or to feed critical thinking. It (could) offer an opportunity to teach students to read against the grain rather than with it.

Not to say I still don't love the book. I do. I'm loving it more for the deep analysis. I sense purpose in Lee's pen -- nuances I'd missed which, I believe, actually enrich the work.

(Pardon me for being uncritical, but sometimes after hours of school, I can't take a book that requires anything but passive imagination and pleasant feelings. Which is why I do love a cozy story. Sometimes it's just the ticket. To Kill a Mockingbird deserves more!) x

So if I grew up inland, where the lakes and rivers are freshwater, and one day learned the hard way that a tidal estuary is salty, I would be an anti-salinist?  If I were a child who wandered off his cul-de-sac into heavy traffic, I would be an anti-motorist?

It takes time to unlearn, and it should.  One outlier should not invalidate all data, but supplement it, and re-open the conclusions to question, not close them again.  Nor should one throw away all new data.  Just because Party W has always seemed to represent your interest, you should be ready to recognize when it doesn't.

And there is the greatness of an Atticus, surrounded all his life by blacks who have been forced to act inferior and subservient.  Without changing his beliefs about people's capacities, he recognizes injustices that transcend his learned error and acts on them.  He does not confabulate the one 'fact' (as he regards his error) with the question of Robinson's guilt or innocence.

You might say the same of the news-publisher ... but he knows that the free press relies on the courts to remain free, and he may also have it in for the Establishment of the town, so his motives might not be so clear.

Yes and no.

You made me think, why am I here debating this book; dissecting the characters?

Atticus is a good man doing the best that he can in bad times. A cosy story that is dear to so many. Mockingbird is a fiction. It is exactly what its editors wanted it to be, a cosy story; as simple as that. It has its heroes and villains, good versus evil, and an ending that is sad yet satisfying at the same time.  It's like a Mary Poppins or a Lassie and here I am demanding validity from the fiction as if it were fact. So what if there are a few mixed morality issues if you dig deep? I may as well be criticizing the validity of Mary Poppins’ ability to fly by umbrella.

I must learn to let it be.

Why am I spending so much time and energy discussing a book that I don’t particularly like when I could be in the company of the literature that I love; or heaven forbid, writing something myself?

The argument here looks set to descend into a contentious argument upon one person’s definition of racism over another. I guess that for anyone to make or concede a point about Mockingbird, that it would always come down to that.

But hey, this conversation bought to mind that I did read and really enjoy another novel set in the USA in the 1930’s. I was in hospital a few years ago following an operation and from the Red Cross book-share trolley that was wheeled about the ward, I took a lucky-dip and happened upon ‘The Persian Pickle Club’ by Sandra Dallas. I think it is deemed to be within the genre called ‘Women’s Fiction’ and I read it under the influence of medication; but it was good, very good. It made me feel good whilst I was feeling bad. It probably sold about fifty copies to Harper Lee’s six hundred and fifty million but I’d readily give it a score of 8 to Mockingbird's 5.

Onwards, corrabird, I think that my participation within the discussion upon Harper Lee’s Mockingbird is done. I shall be active in respect of chat upon other books, over on the other channel.

In the meantime; yes… kill as many blue jays as you like; slaughter them, but never, ever harm a metaphorical hair upon the head of the mythical Mockingbird.
x

I will indulge in a parting shot, then, and suggest that rejecting my analogies also rejects the idea that people learn about people by mechanisms alike to those by which they learn about things.

To those who might still be listening, I ask whether there is so great a sacred-profane divide between our human environment and our physical environment that our learning processes of them must have nothing in common.

Newton showed that the laws of physics in the sky are the same as those on earth; I'm arguing (on much less rigorous grounds, to be sure) that our learning of people-society-culture is of the same kind as our learning of hard-soft-hot-cold-safe-dangerous.

We judge people not only by their results but by their motives.  Great injustice and great harm arise from forgetting, ignoring, or rejecting consideration of either motives OR results.  People who wish to praise often concentrate on whichever is praiseworthy; people who wish to condemn, on whichever is contemnible.

To the claim that I argue at the level of Charles Bell, I deny the claim:  He argues (and thinks) at a very high level of abstraction and categorization.  When I have parsed his arguments, I often disagree at least in part, and sometimes agree in part.  He and I have to work hard to reach the point (stasis) where we understand and agree on our disagreement.  But it is a challenge for me to work at his level and (pardon me, Charles!) the effort is often hard for me to budget.  It would not surprise me if he has to work as hard to reach down to my level, and I thank him for the times he has obliged me.

The foregoing has been edited.

We thank you for listening and now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion ...

As a generality, I disagree, but my reasoning is from a complicated understanding that there is in reality no such thing as determinism -- except within a narrow context of classical physics -- which is why you'd have to reach out to Newton to support your assertion. Every horror of Man against man is brought by thinking that all we have to do is teach the individual that X is wrong, even if we have to kill him in the process. After all, we teach a lunar module to land with sufficient efficacious precision, don't we?

Whether X (where X is nothing like landing a lunar module)  is a right or wrong thing to do can be ascertained by looking through the prism of morality and not utility, and 'morality' is to an individual's actions as kinetics is to an individual molecules's actions.

Putting into words what we dislike about a book is good exercise, I think. I hope it's been a rich discussion for you. It certainly has been for me, up to this point. I think a good novel can hold up to reasoned debate among friends, and that deconstructing it is a fine way to strengthen our own writing and sense of what we want to say within a work of our own literature. When this conversation started, I could offer really no reason why I loved To Kill a Mockingbird beyond the banal "it's cozy." This conversation has changed that, and I thank you for it!

I respect every reason you've offered for disliking the novel. I think we differ in our sense of the author's intent. I want to reread the book for myself, and see if I can unearth a method behind the uncomfortable inconsistencies you've cited within the book (such as the Underwood/Atticus parallel, and the Mayella story as laid aside Scout's story, and Tom Robinson's story.)

My feeling is that these places are part of the truth Lee was hoping would be sensed in the undercurrent. I'd like to see what effect they offer for me personally. But that may take me a few reads! And a bit more experience in literature to unlock what instinct is sensing and cannot, at this point, put into words. If these inconsistencies are not a part of her original purpose, it would certainly effect my sense of the novel.

Anyway, right you are, to dig deep into it, and right you are to leave now that the tone of the conversation has changed.

I've just added The Persian Pickle Club to my to-read list.

Thank you for the quotes you found in TKAM, and the points you've made. I've loved it & feel I walk away from it with some thoughts knocked about and tested in the best way. A proper shred, Dill.

I hope you read something that thrills you to the soul, next. Cheers! x

The last I heard it was The Bible, Atlas Shrugged, the Koran.  "To Kill a Mockingbird" though is one of the best sellers of all time.  And to the critic here, yes, it's mandatory reading in the US too, but there's a reason for it.  Actually, I suppose two--just like the Germans pursue policies to prevent Nazism from ever happening again, the US pursues policies to prevent the racism portrayed in the book from happening.  But it's also just a really good story.

I found this really interesting discussion against the novel online (contains spoilers immediately upon clicking). I think the speaker of the video makes a lot of really interesting points. I really like the way he compares America's reception of To Kill a Mockingbird versus Go Set a Watchman. Really solid remarks, I think. (From what I watched. I skimmed a bit.) He seems to echo some of what Dill said above. He mentions the way Lee emphasizes Boo's whiteness at the end of the novel: I'd missed that. (SPOILER FOLLOWS) Robinson is black and he dies; Boo is white and he is spared. I think the speaker fails, though, to consider Lee may have done this on purpose, not to condone it, but to bring it to light. He (may) also fail to consider that Lee wrote for a middlebrow audience, not to romanticize the issue, but to attempt to reach the middling sorts. :-)

"Boo had drifted to a corner of the room, where he stood with his chin up, peering from a distance at Jem. I took him by the hand, a hand surprisingly warm for its whiteness. I tugged him a little, and he allowed me to lead him to Jem’s bed."

I still love the book. I love it because I love it. I still haven't bothered to reread it and have anything intelligent to say in this thread -- evidence perhaps that I don't quite love it enough. I like to see it challenged and beaten about. I'm not sure I'll ever consider it beneath the effort.