NP: 50 Years On, 'Mockingbird' Still Sings America's Song

[alice wellintown]

The novel opens with a brief history of the Finch family. Of course,
since this is a Southern Gothic tale and incest is a major theme and
structuring element of the story, we are told that the Finches are
related to everyone in the county. The history of the Finch family is
the history of America, and specifically the history of European
destruction of the landscape and its people and the enslavement of the
Africans--in other words, the two deadly sins that permeate and
perculate, from a haunted lands that are no longer the "fresh green
breast" (that breast has been ripped and swings like a flap from the
muirdered Myrtle of Virgin or Venus)  that Nick (Gatsby)  imagines was
comensurate with Man's capicity to dream--America to Dutch Sailor's
Eyes to Britania (M&D). see the famous and beautiful passage at the
close of Fitzgerald's Gatsby. The deadly sins (slavery and
extermination of the Indians and the lands--trees that Prairie is so
encahnted by that are cut down to make way for Gatsby's house) are
visted upon posterity. The key text here is, of course, The Book of
Kings. It's where Hawthorne gets his Pyncheon and where Melville gets
his Ahab. So, from the HSG to Faulkner to Morrison (Morrison has gone
to school on Faulkner and this is one of the reasons why she is a far
more important author than McCarthy), and Lee's TKMB is part of this
traditional American Romance (gothic to the core), to Pynchon, the
tale is the same. Booooooooo, Radley is more than meets ot doesn't
meet the scouting eye of Dutch Sailors. And then, there is the
Catskill Eagle.

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I may have. You make a straightforward good argument. (unlike your good complex
> arguemnts). Smile.
>
> I am certainly a minority reader.
>
> If she is an adult and 'she is a child" then my critique applies in reverse.
>
> The Southern Gothic race and gender elements seem pretty unoriginal to me. Maybe
> gender
> is more original.
>
> So I go. The anxiety of self-influence.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wed, July 7, 2010 7:13:24 PM
> Subject: Re: NP: 50 Years On, 'Mockingbird' Still Sings America's Song
>
> You've misread the narrator; she is an adult, and, of course, she is a
> child.  This narrative type is a standard narrrative technique and Lee
> makes excellent use of the ironies the distance her narrator affords,
> that is, the distance between the scout, Scout, and the implied
> author, Harper Lee. Yes, Dill is a fine character. The moral of the
> tale is not what you suspect. Scout, not her father (as the film with
> Peck seems to have convined the world) is the heroine of this feminist
> tale. It's astounding that the book has been misread for so long.
> Finch, and his son is, at novel's end, ready to follow the old man, is
> a racist. Not an in your face white supremicist, but his latent racism
> is obvious enough to a perceptive reader. The tale has more to do with
> sex and gender than race, infact, the Southern Gothic elements of the
> tale, one such is incest, are developed around sex, interacial sex,
> and issues of gender. The novel is far from the ham-fisted and heavy
> handed screed about racism that its classic cover and its film have
> made it out to be.
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I recently tried to reread To Kill a Mockingbird.  Am I about the only one you
>> sorta know
>> who couldn't like it?.....
>>
>> To me, Scout the narrator is seeing as an adult; she is not believeable even
> as
>> a precocious
>> young 'un to me.........big FAIL......book 'works' in certain scenes, in the
>> Capote character and
>> as an unfortunately heavy-handed moral tale.....good as that tale is,
>> morally...........
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Wed, July 7, 2010 10:30:05 AM
>> Subject: 50 Years On, 'Mockingbird' Still Sings America's Song
>>
>> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128340180
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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