Monday News: Harper Lee, Umberto Eco, and Antonin Scalia
Publishing NewsAmerican literature / Antonin Scalia / Harper Lee / law / Legacies / Literary Criticism / obituaries / Race / semiotics / The Name of the Rose / To Kill a Mockingbird / Umberto Eco9 Comments
Go Set a Legacy: The Fate of Harper Lee – Harper Lee’s death on Friday has generated a number of excellent chronicles of her life (like this one from AL.com). It has also spurred several inevitable discussions about her literary legacy, especially because of the cloudy circumstances around last year’s publication of Go Set A Watchman. In the article linked to above, from The Atlantic, Megan Garber argues that the cultural popularity and power of To Kill A Mockingbird will be the focus of Lee’s literary legacy, glossing over the more complex, and less overtly admirable, character of Atticus Finch in Watchman (unless you are a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s nuanced reading of Finch in this article from The New Yorker).
Ron Charles, in The Washington Post, argues that the circumstances of Lee’s last book (I had no idea that TKAM was still generating $3 million a year in sales), along with the less-idealized version of Finch, are a “shame” and a “tawdry Southern gothic playing out in the news.” While I am still suspicious of the circumstances behind Watchman’s publication, I am also uncomfortable with the way I think Charles sentimentalizes both Lee and Finch in the way Garber cynically suspects the collective cultural memory ultimately will. Unlike Garber, I imagine that the circumstances of Watchman‘s publication will cast a larger shadow over Lee’s literary legacy in ways that invite important questions about how publishers continue to shape their authors’ reputations, and how that, in turn, can affect popular reception and interpretive engagement with the books.
Atticus may be an even more interesting character in Watchman than he was in Mockingbird; he is, however, a distinctly less admirable one. And Lee, for her part, may still be the author who gave us the man who has been called one of the “all-time coolest heroes in pop culture” and the “Best. Dad. Ever” and “the greatest hero of American film”; she is also, however, the person who revealed that this great champion of racial justice was also a racist.
The question, now, is whether that complication will be reflected in the legacy of Harper Lee. Will she be remembered for Jurist Atticus, or Racist Atticus? Will she be remembered as the author of a book so beloved, and so revered, and so culturally dilute, that it seems wrong to call it simply a “book”? Or as the author of the work that complicates Mockingbird’s tidy vision of right and wrong?
Both, of course. But if literary history is any indication, cultural memory will be both selective and, perhaps like history itself, biased toward justice. Instead of Watchman, as some have argued, “troubling the legacy of a literary hero,” Lee’s first and second book could well serve as simply a coda to her great, if otherwise single-work, career. “Harper,” along with “Atticus” and “Scout,” could thus remain symbolically pure. – The Atlantic
Umberto Eco is dead: Long live Umberto Eco – Columbia University’s Hamid Dabashi’s piece is really a eulogy of novelist and literary philosopher (specializing in semiotics) Umberto Eco, who also died in Friday. But it’s a powerful and passionate tribute to Eco, and if you are unfamiliar with Eco’s life and work, you might want to start with the more conventional obituary in the New York Times or even this 2008 interview with Eco in The Paris Review. Best known outside academic circles for The Name of the Rose, Eco was also a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna who, in the 1980s, created a program there called Anthropology of the West.
Eco was trained as a medievalist, but he also happened to be a pre-eminent semiotician (massively simplified to: the study of signs in language and the way they are created and, in turn, create meaning) who turned his interest in culture, language, and signification, to the writing of fiction. His fiction was famously criticized by Salman Rushdie (who Dabashi refers to as a “jealous novelist”), but he enjoyed great popularity from his first novel, which was turned into a successful film starring Sean Connery. I think Dabashi’s admiring description of Eco’s writing inadvertently illustrates the quality of Eco’s prose that generated criticism from writers like Rushdie:
The Name of the Rose is a study in semiotics, hermeneutics, biblical exegesis, and medieval philosophy cast ingeniously as a murder mystery.
He would write a few other novels, and his sublime wit and exquisite sense of humour were for many years on display when he wrote regular columns in Italian newspapers. His prose was replete with the vertiginous wit of a polyglot thriving at intertextuality and virtuoso performance of his astounding erudition. – Al Jazeera
Stanford Law Faculty on Justice Scalia’s Legacy – I didn’t initially report on the death of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, wanting to avoid some of the initial reactions, which were pretty, uhm, passionately ad hominem (both pro and con). As much as I disagree with Scalia on almost everything (and “disagree” here is a vast understatement) and even find some of his views appalling and ignorant, I also know he was a close friend of Justice Ginsberg (probably the Court’s most liberal justice), and was often enlisted to write the Court’s most difficult holdings, such was his writing skill and intellectual command.
The Washington Post ran a pretty good obituary on Scalia, and if you are not familiar with some of his most notably controversial opinions, this ABC News piece is a decent primer, but the piece linked above does a good job, I think, of articulating Scalia’s complex legal legacy, which is more overtly political than he would ever admit, and more intellectually and legally rigorous than his critics like to admit. As Barton Thompson points out, “the Court today has more dynamic and enlightening arguments than before” Scalia was appointed, in part because his active and even aggressive questioning generated more discussion; indeed, many legal scholars credit (or blame) Scalia for changing the nature of oral arguments before the Court. But as Pamela Karlan argues,
If Justice Scalia had had his way, we would live in a nation where all affirmative action by the government was forbidden; where same-sex couples could be denied the right to marry and where the federal government could ignore their marriages even in states that do provide marriage equality; and where people with mild to moderate mental retardation could be executed (since in 1791, only those “commonly known as ‘idiots,’ enjoyed any special status under the law,” and those referred to as mere “imbeciles” could be put to death). Justice Scalia’s constitutional vision forced those of us who disagreed with him to sharpen our arguments; it did not, however, change the minds of a majority of his colleagues on many of the most important issues of his time. – Stanford Law
I, for one, will continue to deny the existence of the Mockingbird sequel, just like I deny the existence of the Catch-22 sequel. THERE IS NO SUCH THING!
@Jo Savage. – Hear, Hear. 100% spot on.
When it comes to the fight over Atticus Finch’s character, I’m with Malcolm Gladwell — I think that Atticus Finch’s blind spots about race (and class and gender for that matter) are pretty clearly delineated in TKAM. He’s definitely a product of his culture and times (the white racist southern middle class of the early 20th century). He does not subscribe to the worst racist notions of his time, but he is not free of all the racist assumptions any more than he is free of all sexist/class prejudices. He’s a good man in TKAM, but he’s not a perfect man and part of his imperfections include a certain type of racism (that he and others in the book do not even recognize as racism — although I suspect that Lee, the author, does recognize this).
And I’m not sure why this was such a surprise and why people were so upset that with GSAW showing Finch’s racism becoming more overt in response to the growing civil rights movement (the upset about how the publication of GSAW came about, I totally understand and sympathize with). Becoming more racist/sexist/homophobic, etc. is sadly not an unbelievable response from someone who held paternalistic liberal views about those “other” people and who believed in (at best) in a super-slow change in the status quo and who is now disconcerted that those “others” (whether African Americans, women, or gays) are no longer interested in waiting for that gradual change to happen and want to upset the status quo.
TKAM was beloved because it allowed those of us with white privilege to imagine that if a black person was in need, we’d be a hero and rescue him. We would rise up if an extraordinary situation rose, as it did for Atticus, who was the small-town lawyer whose turn it was to defend the black man accused of raping a white woman. But, by accepting the racism of the day, in being able to say that Walter Cunningham, a lynch-mob member was a good person, if you got to know him, Atticus was saying to be a hero, we don’t have to confront the day-to-day racism that is/was pervasive in society. We can live happily, insulated by white privilege, sure that we are good people while ignoring the issues our darker-skinned fellow citizens are fighting.
It was a narrative of white rescue, of white heroism that didn’t require anyone to confront society’s or their own prejudices. I think in 20 to 50 years, TKAM will be as dated as Gone with the Wind.
@Jo Savage: Totally agree.
I read The Name of the Rose in high school and loved it. I attempted Foucault’s Pendulum sometime in my early 20s and could not get through it. I rediscovered Eco in grad school, when I learned (a little) about semiotics while studying design – I probably still have a marked up, photo-copied version of one of his essays somewhere in my school papers. Thanks for the obituaries.
Foucault’s Pendulum is my favorite Eco. The incredibly dense opening section is off-putting, but intentionally so; it is also hilarious if you’re familiar with the academic debates in the field. Indeed, the whole book is [SPOILER, sorta] one very long, very complicated, very literary shaggy-dog joke.
I am both amused and horrified by this spin off of the Scalia death reporting
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/law-students-traumatized-by-anti-scalia-email.html
“At Georgetown University, Scalia’s undergrad alma mater, a really interesting version of that debate is unfolding — and it’s flipping a lefty campus-activist trope on its head. Conservative students, two law professors at Georgetown Law are arguing, have become “traumatized, hurt, shaken and angry” by one professor’s anti-Scalia opinions.”
Poor lambs.
Scalia worked very hard to be loathed by progressives. He was damn proud of it, and he came by it honestly. I’m bemused we should deny him the legacy he wanted, by suddenly ignoring his left-baiting, racist, ignorant opinions.
“such was his writing skill and intellectual command.”
::cough:: You mean like what he displayed in his dissent in Obergefell v Hodges?
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf
“But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003.20 They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amend- ment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds— minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly— could not. They are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called for by their “reasoned judgment.” These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago,21 cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.
The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate con- curring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so.22 Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent. “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spiritu- ality.”23 (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.) Rights, we are told, can “rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.”24 (Huh? How can a better informed under- standing of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?) And we are told that, “[i]n any particular case,” either the Equal Protection or Due Process Clause “may be thought to capture the es- sence of [a] right in a more accurate and comprehensive way,” than the other, “even as the two Clauses may con- verge in the identification and definition of the right.”25 (What say? What possible “essence” does substantive due process “capture” in an “accurate and comprehensive way”? It stands for nothing whatever, except those free- doms and entitlements that this Court really likes. And the Equal Protection Clause, as employed today, identifies nothing except a difference in treatment that this Court really dislikes. Hardly a distillation of essence. If the opinion is correct that the two clauses “converge in the identification and definition of [a] right,” that is only because the majority’s likes and dislikes are predictably compatible.) I could go on. The world does not expect logic and precision in poetry or inspirational pop- philosophy; it demands them in the law. The stuff con- tained in today’s opinion has to diminish this Court’s reputation for clear thinking and sober analysis.”
@Ann Somerville: You can say a lot of ugly things about Scalia (and he said a lot of ugly things about those with whom he disagreed), but he is widely perceived to be one of the Court’s best writers, if not THE best. And he also wrote a number of the opinions that upheld important First and Fourth Amendment protections, including the holdings against California’s attempt to restrict the sale of “violent” video games and law enforcement’s beliefs that placing a GPS tracker in a suspect’s car without a probable cause warrant was A-OK. He was the deciding vote in favor of the principle that flag burning was protectable as free speech. Those of us on the left often perceive ourselves to be the unimpeachable guardians of civil rights, except when we’re not, especially — in the US, at least — when it comes to issues like free speech, search and seizure, and warrantless surveillance (it pains me that Obama has vastly expanded, not dismantled, Bush’s mass surveillance infrastructure). I don’t know anyone on the left who doesn’t find Scalia horrifying on issues of social progressivism, and his close friendships with both Ginsberg and Kagan are, no doubt, head-scratching to many. Then there is his refusal to perceive the ideological nature of his “originalism,” which was likely a function of his own egotism, because he really was too smart for that ridiculous (a)historical posturing.
But when Bush II was unremittingly trying to condition Pavlovian international submission in response to the word “terror,” there was a frightening amount of cooperation from the US courts, including SCOTUS, on issues like indefinite imprisonment of US citizens without charge (we USians are fond of our habeas corpus rights). During which Scalia made one of his most important and powerful dissents, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, where, joined by Stevens (!) he argued for the most limited executive authority (either Congress had to suspend habeas corpus or Hamdi had to be charged under US criminal law):