Charles McNair, in Paste Magazine, recently asked whether To Kill a Mockingbird is too good. Is the success of To Kill a Mockingbird keeping other southern writers from writing about race relations in America?
I sometimes wonder if To Kill A Mockingbird states our racial situation so successfully…well that’s it—what more can be said? What writer wants to sit down and write a book about race that will never, ever be so celebrated?
I have no idea, not being a writer, much less a Southern Writer. My first thought was that surely others have successfully written novels about race in America since Harper Lee. And McNair addresses this:
Don’t get me wrong—we’ve had some great fiction about race. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for instance. William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner. But it seems to me that race relations were, are and will be the great theme of Southern life. And with a triumph like To Kill A Mockingbird as the ultimate declarative statement on race, how easy is it for readers to simply shrug off newer, sharper and more provocative novels?
In other words, why should a modern writer write a newer, sharper, more provocative novel about race relations if it will simply be ignored? I don’t know – maybe because the novel is in them and they have to write it even if no one wants to read it? Again, the criticism seemed off base. If anything it might be better leveled at publishers who aren’t out there seeking (i.e. paying for) these types of novels and/or marketing them.
In fact, McNair’s ultimate question seems a question that should be put directly to publishers: “I’m not disrespecting Harper Lee’s great book. All I’m asking is this: Isn’t there room for other points of view—less comfortable, more challenging—in Southern fiction?”
I agree with him. I fully endorse the idea that novels with other points of view – uncomfortable, challenging points of view – need to be out there. Any writer who has it in him/her should let it out and write it. And publishers should be looking for these novels.
But let’s get back to To Kill a Mockingbird.
Is it too comfortable? Is it not challenging enough? By the standards of the year it was published? By today’s standards? McNair “suggests” that the novel has a “comfort level” that “allows certain readers” to resist “testing their attitudes about race”. He says:
I think too many Southerners wishfully identify with the goodness of Atticus Finch…and actually come to believe, somehow, that they were really like Atticus all along. The truth is that we weren’t—too many white Southern men and women simply sat rocking on the porch as changes came.
This is interesting and bears some thinking about.
Let me make a confession. I’ve always been a bit bored by discussions of Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch and the trial. It isn’t that I want to ignore the trial – it is the plot- turning, heart of the novel, after all, it cannot be ignored. But discussion of the injustice done to Tom Robinson seems too easy in 2009. There is no challenge to understand what Lee was saying about it. And she never made it difficult to understand the facts of what happened if a reader was willing to admit to them. This isn’t the problem in 2009 that it probably was in 1960. I can understand how discussion of this issue would have been novel and difficult back in 1960 but the issues and conclusions seem so self-evident in 2009 that the conversation mostly seems repetitive to me.
