The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Harper Lee · a novel in two parts, thirty-one chapters · J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1960 · scored as the novel as published in 1960, on Lee’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of childhood as retrospective first-person memoir; comic chronicle of a small town and courtroom drama in one narration
Mythos
The innocent who does only good and is killed for it, named in the title and doubled in Tom Robinson and Boo Radley; the monster in the house who proves the hidden guardian; the just father alone before the town; the shadow who comes at night
Phase
From about Scout’s sixth summer to the Halloween night of the year she is eight or nine, in the Depression, told in retrospect by the grown woman
Presentation
Fiction; two parts, of eleven chapters and twenty, narrated in the first person by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, recalling her childhood; an epigraph from Charles Lamb
Register
Comic and domestic, quick and plain, much of it dialogue; rising in a few places, the jail at night, the gallery, the dark walk home and the porch; the father’s speeches in the register of the sermon
Scale
One family, one street and one town, its order of class and caste, and one trial, seen through a child
Governing Proposition
In Maycomb, a tired old town in Alabama in the Depression, Scout Finch and her brother Jem spend their summers daring one another toward the house of a neighbour no one sees, Boo Radley, whom the town has made its ghost; their father, Atticus, a lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, and loses, as the whole town knew he would. The grown Scout tells it as the child saw it, from about her sixth summer to the night her brother’s arm was broken. The wager of the novel is that seeing a person is learned slowly, from inside a child’s ignorance, and that the town which makes a monster of its hidden neighbour is the town which convicts the innocent man: the game of Part One and the trial of Part Two are one lesson.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” The book begins at its end. The voice is that of Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, grown and looking back, and the arm is broken on the last night the book tells: the whole novel is the road to it. Before it stands an epigraph from Charles Lamb, “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”, which names the two things the book will hold together, a lawyer and a child.
“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it”. The place is a fictional town in Alabama in the Depression, where payment is made in kind and every family has its station. Scout lives there with Jem, their father Atticus, a lawyer, and Calpurnia, who keeps the house; there is no mother. The summers belong to Dill, to stories and dares, and to the house on the street where Boo Radley lives and is never seen.
The children make Boo a monster out of rumour, and play at him. But things come to them that they cannot account for: gifts left in the knothole of an oak, a snowman, the night of Miss Maudie’s fire, when a blanket is put round Scout’s shoulders and she does not know whose hands put it there. The book lets the gap stand. The child does not understand; the woman telling it does, and does not say. Boo is known before he is seen.
Movement II
A mad dog, Tim Johnson, comes down the street, and the street goes still. The scene has a stillness near the eerie, and in it Atticus, whom his children think feeble, shoots the dog. It is courage with a gun.
Then Mrs Dubose and her camellias, set beside the dog, and Atticus on courage in words the book keeps: “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” This is courage without a gun. It is also the trial before the trial: in Part Two Atticus will fight a case he cannot win, and begin anyway.
The rule the book lives by is given early and plainly: “it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”. So is its moral law, that a person is not understood “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. The book does not hide its meanings; its characters speak them. That is its legibility, the reason a child can read it, and also its limit, for myth that announces itself sits below myth discovered.
Movement III
Atticus defends Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, whose family stands at the bottom of white Maycomb. The town knows the verdict before the trial begins. One night a mob gathers at the jail where Tom is held, and the children are there.
The mob breaks because a child talks. Scout sees Mr Cunningham among the hats and faces in the dark, a man she knows, and asks after his son and his entailment. She does not know what she is doing; she is being polite. The men become individuals again, and go home. It is the book’s most real disclosure: the mob is not a monster but neighbours, decent men who are the instruments of the order, and a child’s ignorance can return them to themselves.
Around the trial the book lays out the town’s whole order, caste over class. The Finches; the Cunninghams, poor but proud; the Ewells beneath them; Dolphus Raymond, who feigns drunkenness so that the town can account for him; the black church of First Purchase; Calpurnia and her double speech. Aunt Alexandra comes, with her missionary circle and her sense of family. Not all of this is compelled. But every part of it is a story the town tells about people it has not looked at.
Movement IV
The trial fills five chapters, the seventeenth to the twenty-first, and they are paced with command. The Ewells testify, and Mayella is cross-examined. The children watch from the gallery, where black Maycomb sits. To Scout the charge is words she does not grasp, and the book lets them stay so: the reader understands what the child does not.
The verdict is the one that everyone, the jury included, knew before it was given: guilty. As Atticus leaves the court, the gallery rises, and a voice says to the child, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” It is done in two sentences and is perhaps the book’s highest moment: honour paid to a man who has lost, by the people for whom the loss is real.
Tom Robinson is shot running from the prison yard. The book reports it in a few lines, deliberately, and evasively too, so that the man the trial was about is gone before the book has looked at him. That is the charge the frame carries throughout: Tom is drawn thinly, black Maycomb is seen from the gallery, and the injustice is disclosed to and about white conscience. The disclosure is real; the verdict read as a tragedy for the town’s conscience is also a safety.
Movement V
On Halloween night the children walk home in the dark from the pageant, Scout in a ham costume. The terror of the walk is told through what the costume lets her hear and feel: the sound of it, a hand. Bob Ewell, the book’s shadow, comes at them in the dark. The farce turns into attempted murder without a change of physics, and the ham costume both saves Scout and is the joke.
It is the night the book began with: Jem’s arm is broken. The man who saves them is Boo Radley, the monster of Part One and the hidden guardian of the knothole and the blanket, come out at last, a man behind a door. Scout knows him: “Hey, Boo.” The law is then bent to keep him from the town’s gaze, and Scout sees why, for to drag him into it would be like shooting a mockingbird. The second innocent of the title is kept where the first was not.
Scout stands on the Radley porch and sees her own street as he saw it, through the seasons of the book: the summers, the gifts, the fire, the night. The last chapter is required by the first. Between father and child the lesson is said in its plainest form, “Atticus, he was real nice.” “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.” It is the book’s law, stated, as its laws are; the novel has spent thirty-one chapters teaching a child to see.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it is passed more often than the book’s reputation for looseness suggests. The idle summers of Part One return as load in Part Two. The gifts in the knothole of the oak and the blanket put round Scout on the night of Miss Maudie’s fire are how Boo is known before he is seen; the mad dog is Atticus’s courage with a gun, Mrs Dubose his courage without one. The last chapter, Scout on the Radley porch, is required by the first. Against this: Aunt Alexandra’s missionary circle, Dill’s runaway, much of the Finch’s Landing material and some of the school comedy are permitted rather than compelled. The book could lose a fifth of Part One with little loss.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the book brings into the open, and states so that it holds, is the anatomy of a small Southern town’s order: caste and class laid one over the other, the Finches, the poor and proud Cunninghams, the Ewells beneath them, Dolphus Raymond feigning drunkenness so that the town can account for him, the black church of First Purchase. The verdict is known to everyone, the jury included, before it is given. The mob at the jail is made of neighbours, and a child’s talk dissolves it: not a monster, but men who can be made individuals again. Held below the bar by the frame: Tom Robinson is drawn thinly, black Maycomb is seen mostly from the gallery, and the disclosure is made to and about white conscience.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The register is comic and domestic, and the book rises in a handful of places only, but those are true heights. The jail at night, where children break a mob by talking. The gallery rising as Atticus leaves the court, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”: two sentences, and perhaps the book’s highest moment. The dark walk home from the pageant, its terror given through the sound of a costume and the feel of a hand. “Hey, Boo.” And Scout on the porch, seeing her own street as he saw it through the seasons. The mad dog has a stillness near the eerie. Between these the book does not rise and does not try to: high at three or four points, modest in frequency.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The archetype is built, not only evoked. The innocent who does only good and is killed for it is named in the title and given its rule early, “it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”, and is then made to bear load twice: in Tom Robinson, shot running from the prison yard, and in Boo Radley, whom the town has made its ghost and whom Scout, at the end, saves from its gaze. Boo is the old figure of the monster in the house who proves the hidden guardian; Atticus the just father who must stand alone before the town; Bob Ewell the shadow who comes at night. The patterns stay particular to Maycomb. The axis stops below the bar because the symbol is spoken aloud by the characters: legible, and so shallower than myth discovered.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is plain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gave the child narrator and the moral education beside a black man’s danger; Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948) a white boy, a black man accused and a lawyer; McCullers and Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) the Southern novel of childhood. Lee’s turn is to set the courtroom novel inside the comic memoir of childhood and let the double voice carry the trial: a real fusion, and credited. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is turn and stake together. Form, syntax and structure are conventional, and the real risk of the subject for an Alabama author in 1960 is lessened by the safety of the frame, the righteous white lawyer and the verdict read as a tragedy for the town’s conscience. A wager placed largely on a proven path.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The form is the double perspective: a child who sees without understanding, and the grown woman who tells it and lets the gap stand. Much of what the book knows depends on it. The rape charge reaches Scout as words she does not grasp; the mob is seen as hats and faces in the dark; Boo is assembled from rumour, gifts and a blanket until he is a man behind a door. Told in the third person, or by Atticus, the book would become a legal melodrama and lose its argument that seeing a person is learned slowly. The two parts know something too: Part One’s game of making Boo a monster is Part Two’s trial in miniature. Held below the top because the voice is not strictly governed: the adult’s diction and knowledge leak into the child’s scenes, and the form carries the speeches as much as it shapes them.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The evidence of return is long and real: more than sixty years of teaching, legal scholarship on Atticus as the model of the lawyer, the critique of the white saviour frame, and rereadings after Go Set a Watchman was published in 2015. But the yield is chiefly a yield of argument about the book’s politics and its hero, not of a text that changes under the reader. Returned to, the novel gives what it gave: its structure is clear on first reading, its symbols are explained by its characters, its moral is stated. What does reward return is the Boo plot, and the quiet pairing of the town’s two hidden men, Boo and Dolphus Raymond, each hiding to be let alone. A demonstrated well, not a deep one.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is the American novel after Faulkner, and the intrinsic force is small: the book reorganises nothing in technique and little in what the Southern novel could do. Its reach is very wide, and mostly outside literary practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1989), a Southern lawyer defending a black client, is written in its line; Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) keeps its moral frame, a young white woman’s eye on black Southern life; Atticus became the exemplar of the American lawyer in legal education and in the profession’s image of itself; and through school reading the book shaped how generations of American readers first met race in fiction, setting a pattern, the decent white witness at the centre, that later writers have written against. Reach that large among readers and that small among makers sits in the high sevens.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-six years, and presence is as wide as that of any American novel of its century: continuously in print, taught in schools across the English-speaking world for six decades, widely translated, its title and its lawyer proverbial. The film of 1962 extends that presence and is credited no further. The text is whole and unchanged. Two charges keep the axis from the top of its span. Part of the presence is institutional, the book assigned rather than chosen. And it is now contested, and withdrawn from some curricula, for its language and its frame: not a loss of the text, but a sign that its surface is fixed in part to the conscience of 1960.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on Lee’s English, with no translation between. The prose is clean, quick and often very funny. The first sentence, “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”, plants the end in the beginning in a plain voice; “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it” sets the place in a clause. Dialogue is the strength: the Ewell testimony, Mayella’s cross-examination, Calpurnia’s double speech, Miss Maudie’s dry wit. The trial chapters are paced with command, and the pageant night is a set piece of suspense told through a constrained point of view. Against it: Atticus speaks in sermons and the book stops for them; sentiment enters at the edges; Tom Robinson’s death is reported in a few lines, deliberately and evasively.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of childhood, Dill’s stories, the ham costume, Miss Caroline’s schoolroom; and the trial and death of Tom Robinson. One law governs both. In each the town makes a story about a person it has not looked at: Boo the monster, Tom the rapist, the Cunninghams as trash, Atticus as feeble, Dolphus Raymond as a drunk. In each the child learns to look. The Halloween farce turns into attempted murder without a change of physics, and the ham costume both saves Scout and is the joke. Where the law weakens: Aunt Alexandra’s arc and some of the school belong to a gentler book, and the black characters are governed by a flatter law of representation than the white.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Many orders, held in one structure: a child’s consciousness and its growth; a family without a mother, with its servant, its aunt and its neighbours; the town’s class and caste; law as procedure and as ritual; two churches; the memory of the Civil War and of the Finches’ slave-holding forebear; the Depression’s economy of payment in kind; the natural order of seasons, snow, fire and mockingbirds. They are integrated through Maycomb and the trial, not listed. The bounds are the town’s and the child’s: the state is present only as the courthouse; labour, the sacred and history are glimpsed rather than held; and black Maycomb’s own world lies outside the structure. A small compass, well filled.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, and The Unconcealment, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.0. A text whole and continuously in print for sixty-six years, its presence as wide as that of any American novel of its century; the innocent of the title built into the plot and doubled, in Tom Robinson killed and Boo Radley kept; the order of a Southern town laid open, its mob made of neighbours and its verdict known in advance; clean, quick and funny prose, with command of dialogue and of the trial; and one law over farce and tragedy alike, the town’s story about a person it has not looked at, and a child learning to look.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 7.1: a real fusion of the courtroom novel and the comic memoir of childhood, made in a conventional form on an inheritance that was in Twain and Faulkner before it, and on a stake of 1960 eased by the safety of its frame. Next above it, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 7.6: a long record of argument over the book’s politics and its hero, from a text that gives on return largely what it gave at first; and a small compass well filled, bounded by the town and the child, with black Maycomb’s own world outside it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.0, The Living Form at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, The Unconcealment at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 and The Swerve at 7.1 each fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.1, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, published by J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, on 11 July 1960, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It is scored as the novel as published in 1960: two parts, of eleven chapters and twenty, thirty-one in all, under an epigraph from Charles Lamb. Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, is context only, neither credited nor charged; the film of 1962 is credited to the book’s presence and no further. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Lee’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the epigraph, the first sentence, the sentence on Maycomb, the rule of the mockingbird, the law of the skin, Atticus on courage, the words in the gallery, Scout’s greeting on the last night, and an exchange between father and child. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s length, the year of the trial, the relation of the earlier manuscript to the published novel and its editing, the number of shots that killed Tom Robinson, the time the jury took, the light at the jail, the name of the Finches’ forebear, the model for Dill, and the course of the debate over Atticus in legal journals, are not given. Citations are by part and chapter.