The next few posts are dedicated to To Kill a Mockingbird, with my attempt at some girardian commentary.
“When he gave us
our air-rifles Atticus wouldn't teach us how to shoot. Uncle Jack
instructed us on the rudiments thereof; he said Atticus wasn't
interested in guns. Atticus said to Jem one day, “I'd rather you
shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds.
Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember
it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
That was the only
time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something...”
In Atticus' pronuciation, Harper Lee
condenses all the petty sins of conservative southern society into
one: the hypocritical lynching of an innocent victim. Various other
voices in the town are scandalized by sins against fashion, against
class, against American sensibilities, against polite decorum,
against Jim Crow racial rules, and each one of these scandalized
reactions is exposed, through the innocent observations of Jem and
Scout, and the patient integrity of Atticus and Calpurnia, as hollow
and hypocritical.
Jesus boiled down the multitude of the
old commandments into a two-in-one: Love the Lord your God with all
your heart, soul, mind and strength, and the
second one like it: Love
your neighbour as yourself. The second is like the first because in
Jesus God becomes the Neighbour, and this
Neighbour God becomes our Victim. “Whatever you do to the least of
these, you have done unto me.” The mockingbirds who it is a sin for
us to kill are each and every one the Christ.
One
look around the postmodern world reveals that the harming of innocent
victims really is the only sin we believe in anymore. What scandal
on the news is not a story of
the cross: either the story of a victim, told from the victim's point
of view, or an
expose of corrupt authorities, often judged from the perspective of their victims?
The
only ones we still feel justified to righteously condemn anymore are
the mockingbird-killers. It's
the only scandal we have left. But like the titilated missionary
society ladies of Maycomb, we are finding our little gatherings
breaking down, because a voice is breaking in that gives the lie to
our shared gasps of dismay.
The
gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as the
gospel according to Harper Lee, reveal the
mockingbird-killers to be
none other than
ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment