Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Visits To Kill a Mockingbird's Nest

When I delivered my eulogy for my father, it was a mixed review of him.  I noted that he was a free thinker and a contrarian, and while these traits made him a valued friend, it could be confusing from the perspective of being his son.  My sister's was much less ambivalent; she sung his praises, especially around the moral code that he lived by and held us to.  I agreed with what she said, and she with me, but they were very different views.  When a parishioner who knew Dad but not me came up to me afterwards and commented on what I had said by noting that I was raised by a regular Atticus Finch, I wondered who she had been listening to.  Atticus Finch is one of my heroes.  His was to have been the name of the first cat I could have (my Dad was allergic to cats and we didn't have them growing up), but he was a she, and therefore we called her Scout.  When a male cat finally sauntered along, he has became affectionately known as Atty - the whole proud name is just too much for one small critter to bear.

Atticus Finch has stood for all that is good in parenting and all that is good about southern gentlemen.  He stood up to defend Tom Robinson, a black man in the thirties who was accused of raping a woman who had actually been trying to seduce him.  It didn't matter that the all-white jury convicted Tom, Atticus was revered by the African American Community in his small Alabama town, and by a nation struggling with the Civil Rights movement when the book was published in 1960.  In the story, when the white trash father who accused Tom Robinson of rape is humiliated by Atticus in court, he seeks his revenge by trying to hurt Atticus' children - Jem and Scout (Jean Louise).  Boo Radley, the oddball next door neighbor comes to the rescue and kills the man, and the law (and Atticus) agree that it is best to leave him out of the story, to say the man died falling onto his own knife, because Boo could not handle the glare of publicity that would accompany a trial.

Go Set a Watchman is, as best I can surmise, the first rough draft of what would later become To Kill a Mockingbird.  It has been released this year as a book, though it was written better than 50 years ago, and it has, apparently been left untouched.  It could have used a good edit.  But something vital might have been lost.  This first approach to the story, instead of being told through the eyes of the six year old Scout (as was the case in the final - To Kill a Mockingbird - version) is told in the third person and is primarily about the grown up Scout, now going by the more proper name of Jean Louise.  She is coming home from New York at the age of 26 to find that her hero, Atticus, has feet of clay.  He holds beliefs that she finds deplorable, he consorts with despicable men, and she doesn't know how to reconcile all of this with the man that she thought him to be.

Well this is, even more clearly than To Kill a Mockingbird, a memoir thinly disguised as fiction.  And the dialogue, especially at the end, which is supposed to be poison tongued, comes out a bit preachy - and therefore misses some of the bite that I think it was intended to have.  I don't know that Harper Lee (which is a pen name, Harper is Nelle Lee's middle name - her given name is her grandmother's name spelled backwards) or Jean Louise is able to really lay into Atticus.  I know that I couldn't.  But she does her best.

Most of the reviews that I have read, including one from the New York Times, bemoans the fall of Atticus as a moral beacon.  I get people's attachment to Atticus.  Not only were cats named after him, but I modeled my own parenting on his - one tangible piece of that is that Atticus read to Scout, running his finger under what he was reading.  This led her to become a precoscious reader. I was disappointed when this did not lead to the same result with the reluctant sone.  But hat I think is Atticus' critical test in Go Set a Watchman - and one which he passes with flying colors - is not his position vis a vis race relations in the south, which he is savaged for, but the test with Jean Louise.  Jean Louise takes the position that Atticus is acting immorally because she learned her ethics from him and he is not acting in accordance to them.  Atticus' brilliant response, supported by his eccentric, but equally beacon like brother, is that Jean Louise's disagreement is proof that she has become her own person - that she has built her own moral code, and that this is worth celebrating.  Indeed, she should move home, not to care for her old man in his arthritic demise, but to be a good and worthy engager in the battle to solve the problem of civil rights in the south.

First, from a psychoanalytic perspective, Harper Lee has a much more advanced view of morality than Freud did.  Freud's model (which I have discussed in more detail here in response to the current dilemmas psychologists are facing as we confront whether we sold our ethical principles to the Department of Defense) mirrors Jean Louise's model and is based on an infantile internalization of the other's (usually a parental figure's) moral system through a process known as identification.  While I believe (as does Jean Louise and millions of readers who have incorporated their version of Atticus into their own moral code) that internalization is a powerful mechanism, that is not the end of the story.  We are not simply at the mercy of an internalized system, we also organize it, shape it, and build it.  The superego, if we want to call it that, is not a static entity - it is a fluid and dynamic one - otherwise why would we write and read books like To Kill a Mockingbird.  These books are intended, in part, to provide materials to help flesh out the structure that is erected over the internalized foundation.

When Harper Lee published To Kill A Mockingbird, our cultural foundation was in disarray.  It sat in much different soil on its southern exposure, and the cracks there may have been wider, but the issues of what to do with our ex-slaves, who counted in our constitution as only 3/5s of a person and who were allowed, when that document was written, to be owned by other human beings, had tendrils that reached far to the north.  For an interesting look at Racism in the north during the thirties, read Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge - or follow the links to my post about the former.  The white majority's conceptions of what an African American was were radically different then than they are - or might be today.  And books like To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as manifold experiences, have helped us develop different cultural and personal palettes from which to think about race.  We, like Jean Louise, can have radically different views about race than our parents did.

Is Atticus' behavior deplorable?  Atticus' brother tries to help Jean Louise wrestle with this question in part by having her look up the definition of bigot, which he accuses her of being while asserting that Atticus is not one.  She reports a bigot is "Noun.  One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion."  He accuses Jean Louise of running from the racism around her that she finds deplorable instead of, like her father, engaging with it and trying to understand it.  I think this is a deeply, and powerfully psychodynamic observation.  It is much more difficult to look at the ugliness in the world than it is to run from it - to take the moral high ground and say that I know that this is wrong.  The early version of Atticus, the one as an upright man who only did the right thing, was the version that a young girl needed to "set a watchman"; to form the basis, the foundation, for the conscience she would develop.  This appeared to be what Atticus' brother calls a collective conscience - Jean Louise believes she has internalized it whole - but it is not and it cannot be.  We each have our own conscience.  One that is tawdry and filled with imperfections as well as grand beacons.  And it is up to each of us to figure out how to let that conscience guide us, direct us, and to use it to engage with others - as Atticus and his brother do.

Our collective conscience - the one that doesn't exist and that is affected by things like books, was not ready for the book "Go Set a Watchman".  We needed the simple clarity of right and wrong that Atticus Finch, seen through the eyes of a six year old, could provide.  We needed to learn that we could act on principle and that we could change the world.  What Atticus and his brother had to tell us as adults is that the change that we would impose is a violent one.  It gets at the very identity of the person that we want to change.  And we don't give up our identity without a fight.  So if we are to truly change - to do the really tough work of transforming ourselves from becoming bigots, we need to see each other, and hear each other, and engage with those ugly and dark sides of ourselves and others that we would prefer to keep hidden.

This is a much more complicated and darker message than the bright one from To Kill a Mockingbird.  It is offered, I think, to an audience that Harper assumed was more mature.  One who could see the complexities of being a southern man in the middle of the twentieth century - and, by the way, of being a contemporary American.  She may have misjudged us.  We may, like the woman who heard my eulogy and substituted my sister's for it, have wanted our heroes to be simple - something that we need in at a certain stage of development - we may not be ready for the complex heroes that we also need to not just right a wrong but wrestle with the devil and in so doing to see The Lord. To recognize that God and the Devil may not be separate entities, but co-inhabitants of our soul.

OK, before I finish preaching, three notes:

One - Harper Lee followed the advice of her imaginary uncle, left New York and moved back to Alabama.  She chose to live among her people, flawed thought they may be, and, I presume, to engage with them - unlike her cousin Dill (Who was, in real life Truman Capote), who fled to other climes.

Two: Torture is a part of the human experience.  It is morally reprehensible and wrong.  It is also something that Psychology, which has chosen human experience as its scientific province - should know as much as can be known about it.  And, when we know it to be evil, we should work to prevent it being used - and look to other means to achieve the ends that torture would, theoretically, achieve.  But we should also continue to know and study the human impulse to torture and to study the impact of torture - not by inflicting it, but studying its effects because they will emerge organically.

Three: Look no further than police killings of Black Americans to see that the complications of these issues still live within us - in the north, in the south, as whites and as blacks.  What does race mean to us?  Answering that question requires giving up our bigotry - which is threatening because it is part and parcel of our identity.  Fortunately our identity can evolve and can actually thrive in the wake of an upheaval that we feared would be lethal.

OK, sermon over, as is Harper Lee's.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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