Go set a watchman
Author: Harper lee
Publisher: Random House, Rs799
Marred with controversies, Harper lee’s Go Set a Watchman is said to have undone the essence of her earlier classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. But what continues to be alive in this work is the unvanquished fervour of the good, old Maycomb county, writes ANANYA BORGOHAIN
Today in 2015, it is unbelievable that Abraham lincoln was a Republican, although in the 1860s, America’s revolutionary, anti-slavery notions of a Republican party were much more democratic and a far cry from their contemporary social conservatism. With time then, come disillusionment and developments that destabilise settled notions, sometimes to the extent of irreparable damages. Unfortunately, in recent times, the literary world has been hit with a similar monumental debate. Harper lee’s American classic, the Pulitzer-winning first novel To Kill a Mockingbird, had established a fan-base across the world and 55 years later, it is still considered to be one of the most significant products of literary fiction.
Her second book that released this year and is being referred to as the sequel to Mockingbird is however laden with unending controversies and criticism. Mockingbird upheld humanity, an egalitarian world where racism and the Ku Klux Klan crumbled in the face of the novel’s empowering plot. Atticus Finch, father of the narrator Scout and the heroic lawyer of the fictional Maycomb county, attained the love of readers globally and became the gallant representative of American anti-slavery, anti-racism consciousness. He was partly modeled on lincoln and partly on lee’s father Frances Cunningham Finch.
In Watchman, to the shock of readers worldwide, Atticus’s ideologies and practices are mercilessly shredded to unfathomable disorientation. Narrated from Scout’s (now a grownup Jean louise Finch) perspective, Atticus is firmly racist in Watchman. Set in the good, old Maycomb (in Alabama), Watchman is about Jean louise’s dilemma to choose between her own perceptions of Maycomb as an equal, free spirited, peaceful space and its bigotry as perpetuated by none other than her own father.
For anyone who has read Mockingbird, Watchman can be read as its sequel, with primarily the same characters such as Scout’s uncle Jack and aunt Alexandra with her regressive and moral imperatives. Scout’s brother Jem is dead in this novel but like the vibrant Dill in Mockingbird, both Jem and Dill recur through Scout’s reminiscing of the old landscape, as she comes back to Maycomb from New York in the beginning of the novel.
There is also a quick and brief mention of the rape case against a “nigger” that Atticus represented in Mockingbird, the same case that established him as an egalitarian hero who did not subscribe to racism.
At the surface level, nothing much happens in the plotline, and although narrated in a third person voice, it solely focuses on Jean louise. She might not be the narrator but she is still all-encompassing, and the readers are familiarised with new characters such as her suitor Henry, only through her evaluating lens. Without her judgement, nobody else can be understood in the novel by the readers on their own, a fact that limits the story and the growth of its characters.
However, in spite of the disillusionment, there is still something very romantic and nostalgic about Maycomb. The unique Southerness that was rejoiced so grandly inMockingbird is still alive in Watchman. Maycomb in so many ways is a character in itself in both books, with its childlike innocence and pastoral romanticism.
Atticus’s bigotry in Watchman seeks to reinforce that inMockingbird, he was seen from his daughter, a child’s perspective, a doting daughter whose father was her first role model. He need not be a hero and was probably always an ordinary man with human flaws. That everybody is equal is a utopian notion, and that utopia is not actuality. And this is where the problem begins. Human sympathy and rights are an essential reality. The Southern liberalism of Mockingbird needs to be upheld and not surrendered in the name of ‘human fallacy’. We need rising heroes, not anti-heroes.
What detersWatchman’s growth is also that its credentials as a sequel are highly debatable, particularly because lee had called it Mockingbird’s parent. It is being considered as a rough draft of lee’s amateur work that she would not have wanted the world to see. It is also being suspected that lee at 89, confined to the bed while being both deaf and blind today, has no authority over her work and Watchman has been published by her lawyer Tonja Carter, who had found it affixed to an original transcript of Mockingbird. Its global publishers, HarperCollins have also clarified that they did not have any direct contact with lee while producing the book. Carter in fact recently mentioned that there could be a third probable novel by lee as well. Ostensibly, lee never wanted her readers to discover that their hero Atticus was first conceived as a racist bigot.
Watchman as a manuscript or rough draft very obviously is also a poor piece of work and it is likely that only after lee reworked it, that it turned into a classic like Mockingbird. This raises pressing questions such as how ethical it is to release a first draft of a book publicising it as a sequel, how much authorship does a writer really have in today’s world or to borrow from Roland Barthes, is the author really dead after the work is publishedIJ
Michigan bookstore Brilliant Books is refunding readers who boughtWatchman because they consider publishing this book a scam.
At the same time, many others argue that fiction cannot proceed according to the readers’ expectations and fancies. While that is a strongly valid point, one can never be sure if that applies to this context where a novel is publicised as a sequel to a classic whose values are still taught in schools to shape children’s nascent worldview. What turn this debate now takes remains to be seen. After all, the title has been inspired from The Bible, more specifically, the Isaiah 21:6: “For thus the lord said to me: ‘Go, set a watchman; let him announce what he sees’”.
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