(gentle music) - [Man] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and as citizens of Minnesota.

This program brought to you in part by Selco.

(upbeat music) - Good evening and welcome to our first Reading For Life lecture.

Reading For Life as a movement of imagination for the purpose of growing community around a shared love of literature.

The idea is that real community begins and ends with our imaginations, and a few resources.

If any as a vital to the imagination's development as works of literature.

But I just wanna give a little introduction to our presenter tonight, Michael Verde, Michael graduated with the honors from the University of Texas, plan two honors program, and earned an MA in literary studies from the University of Iowa.

He holds an MA in the theology from the university of Durham, England, where he graduated at the top of his international class.

He taught for 15 years at the university, college prep school levels, mostly at Indiana University, and is currently completing his PhD with a focus on literary and religion studies.

Michael founded Reading For Life in 2005.

Tonight, our topic will be "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

- It's very appropriate that we should start this adventure with "To Kill a Mockingbird".

Because arguably, and in this case, plausibly arguably this is the most popular novel ever written in English.

To date something like 55 million copies of this novel has been sold.

It's been translated in over 40 languages.

It is a common staple in high school curriculum, 1991 Library of Congress in a survey, the prompt of which, which books have made the greatest difference in your life.

The number one choice, actually the number two choice was "To Kill a Mockingbird", the number one choice was the Bible.

In 1999 the librarians of the United States through the Library Journal determined that this, or decided rather that this was the greatest novel of the century.

And as recently as 2006 librarians in England, when asked what is the one book a person should read before he or she does, "To Kill a Mockingbird", actually this time finished first and the Bible second.

It's impact cuts across genres, 1963 Academy Award winning, in fact three Academy Award winning films.

2018, the Broadway production of "To Kill a Mockingbird", which has now had the highest grossing sales of any play in American history.

When the second Harper Lee novel, or perhaps more accurately, the first draft "To Kill a Mockingbird" was released in 2014, "Go Set A Watchman."

It broke Barnes and Nobles records for the greatest amount of book sales on the opening day.

And the first week, I think it's sold something like one point million copies.

And Amazon pre-order sales for "Go Set A Watchman" toppled all its previous records.

When you have a work of art that attracts this much devotion, really, 'cause this is a book that people not only like, and not only love, this is the kind of book as one of the surveys indicated that people are inclined to say this book changed my life.

And when you have a work that is having that kind of impact over that amount of time through diversity of settings, you're dealing with something that people are identifying with and at least two levels.

Certainly there is many personal reasons why people are attracted to the book, is there are people.

You might for instance, identify with the book because you were a tomboy, or perhaps you grew up in a small town, and maybe even a Southern small town that only outside looked sleepy, or as Jem described it like a caterpillar in a cocoon that was warm, but not yet entirely born.

This is Jem's metaphor.

Perhaps you grew up in a town like that, and that attracts you to the book.

Or perhaps it's, Atticus's sort of steadfast commitment to a certain morality or ethical code to which one doesn't relinquish even in the face of objection, even in the face scraps of duration.

Perhaps those are reasons why different people with different kind of life paths would identify with the book.

But certainly when you're talking about over 55 million people, you can't only explain its appeal through those idiosyncratic connections.

And it is the source, the universal, you might say, that the universal magic of this book, why is it that this many people over this amount of time are drawn to this book with this degree of zeal?

That is the question I'd kind of want to ask myself, and explore with you what might be that universal dimension of this book.

So that's our angle of engagement.

And I think a good place to start would be with Jem's experiences.

And the sixth grade Jem as you know, is the brother of Scout Scout is the principal protagonist.

When the book opens she's six years old, in Maycomb, Alabama.

Jem says to Scout, because Scout is expressing some real dissatisfaction with even the whole idea of school, which has not proven to be particularly generative for her.

He says to Scout, not to worry because you don't really learn anything important in school until you get to the sixth grade.

I'm not sure that that was the case for me.

I had some important things happen earlier that, but I can't remember anything particularly in the sixth grade.

But in any case that's what's Jem's vision was for Scout in her pedagogical trajectory.

And the reason it turns out that sixth grade was a threshold year and Jem's intellectual life is because in the sixth grade in Miss Bond's class, Jem learned about the pyramids of Egypt and in particular, the caste system of Egypt.

And this historical introduction to a social structure in a place far away in time in geography, served Jem, as a condo, let's say filter our lens through which he had a new perspective on Maycomb and in particular Maycomb social structure.

Social structure, and we use this structure as a metaphor thinking of architecture and things that are physical, but a social structure of course, is not visible in the same way a structure of an edifice might be.

And so to get a sense of it, requires a different kind of vision than what the eyes alone will empirically reveal.

So with the construct of the Egyptian caste system, which placed the Pharaoh at the top, the slaves at the bottom and the courtiers, let's say one strata below the Pharaoh, and on down the line.

With this construct, Jem was able to see that, you know what?

It looks like Maycomb, our town also has a caste system.

And it becomes a source of intellectual inquiry on Jem's part to try to flesh out what the different social classes are, how archaically arranged in Maycomb, that would be in some way parallel to those historical arrangements of Egypt.

And he engages Scout in this conversation, and they propose different kinds of theories of what particular person is here or there on this social pyramid.

At the end of the day, Jem proposes this, he says, "I figured it out, Scout, and our cast system and our pyramid at the top are the white people like us, the Finches, one wrong beneath us are the white people like the Cunningham who live in the woods.

Beneath the Cunningham's," Jem hypothesizes, "are the Ewells who lived down by the dump.

And beneath the Ewells in our social structure of Maycomb are the Negroes."

This is the terminology in the novel itself.

And this is Jem's way of making a kind of analogous assessment of the way people in Maycomb organize themselves in ways that are not visible to the naked eye, but that manifest themselves in all kinds of events.

And the novel brings the Tameron to close focus on how the pyramid operates in the minds of Maycombians in two principle settings.

The first setting is that of the jurors in the trial of Tom Robinson.

Tom Robinson is accused by Bob Ewell of raping his daughter.

And there is a trial and the judge of the Maycomb appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson.

And in this trial, the jurors are, they are presented with two narratives.

They of course weren't at the scene of the incident.

So they have no way of knowing through a firsthand conviction what in fact has happened, in relying on two narratives that they're proposed to them to decide what in fact transpired between Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson.

And one narrative, the narrative proposed by the prosecution, it is in keeping with what Bob Ewell has claimed that his daughter was accosted and subsequently raped by this black man.

But Atticus presents an alternative narrative that the jurors are asked to consider.

And in Atticus's presentation, it is in fact Mayella Ewell who sexually accost Tom Robbins.

And there is some reasons, some in fact, irrefutable reasons why it was physically impossible for Tom Robinson to have beaten and raped Mayella Ewell.

And that particular anatomical reason was because Tom Robinson's left arm, which was shorter than his right, the arm was not functional.

And it turned out that it is the right side of Mayella Ewell's face that is bruised and shows that it has been struck multiple times.

It also turns out that Mayella Ewell's father, Bob Ewell is left-handed.

So the arm that Tom Robinson can't use, and the side of the face that that arm would have struck turns out to be the side of the face that Bob Ewell's lead hand was actually a functional.

So there is some reasons that are irrefutable reasons you would think that Tom Robinson could not have done what he's accused to do.

Nevertheless, the jurors are presented with those two, with that two different narratives.

Now I'm trying to flesh out how this pyramid works, how this caste system manifest itself in the way people make sense in this case, interpret two proposals of an actual event.

The fact that the jurors, despite physically irrefutable evidence, the fact that the jurors come back and render a verdict of guilty to Tom Robinson illustrates how the pyramid functions in real time.

Because what essentially this case turned on was this question, could a white woman be sexually attracted to a black man?

And according to the pyramid, if Mayella Ewell occupies the third strata on this social hierarchy, and African-American people are beneath her, then it is not imaginable, and the key word here is imaginable, it's not imaginable given the pyramid or caste system that the jurors of Maycomb have internalized.

In other words, they're not really rendering a verdict on what happened in real time between these actual people.

The verdict is actually saying that in Maycomb, this pyramid is not malleable.

This pyramid and its structure is not up for negotiation.

And whatever may or may not be happening in the "real world."

What is most real to us is this social structure.

And we are going to keep this social structure.

Now, these are not things that people say consciously.

And nevertheless, it is as Atticus, to Jem after the children are despondent, because they know that that gross injustice has been carried out.

And they're not only despondent about the case itself, their entire sense of the world as a place that makes sense, where there are things called justice and right and wrong.

All of those kinds of things that they took for granted in their state of innocence.

Because of this event that has been shattered.

In many ways, now they're walking around in a world that they had previously never imagined existed, and they have seen its ugly face and are distraught understandably about it.

And Atticus explains to Jem that in a situation as that of a black man accused of raping a white woman, that those jurors simply were not rendering a verdict based on reason.

As he says to Jem, something came between their mind and reasoning.

And what I'm proposing came between their mind and reason is this particular caste system that then manifested itself in the verdict that they render.

That is one context where you see the caste system in play and how it manifests itself.

The second setting in which this caste is on a full display would be the Missionary Circle.

This is the group of ladies.

And you can see the binary structure here, it is the men who are in the setting of the jury box.

It is the women who are in the setting of the Missionary Circles.

And in this Missionary Circle, and we want to keep an eye on that word circle, in the setting of the circle, the ladies, and led by Ms. Grace Merriweather the most moral person.

And at this point, Scout is being openly ironic.

The most moral woman of Maycomb is expressing really her fatigue at the fact that the African-American people are being surly about the verdict.

And she suggests to the other ladies that they need to keep in mind that they should forgive the African-American people, or she calls them the darkies.

They should forgive the darkies for their attitude at the moment, because that's the Christian thing to do.

So this again is exemplifying the way that people are assigned different strata, and the way reality is interpreted through the lens of that social structure.

One of the things that we learn about Aunt Alexandra is that she is, in addition to being the amanuensis of the Missionary Circle, which is to say two things, she is the secretary and the memory as to what amanuensis suggests that Aunt Alexandra is the memory of the Missionary Circle.

Aunt Alexandra has also has this peculiar gift of knowing everyone in Maycomb according to the tribe, to which he or she belongs.

And not only does she know what everyone's tribe or affiliation is, she knows what the particular distinguishing characteristic about that tribe.

And it is always a disreputable characteristic that she refers to as a streak.

So this particular tribe or people or family, they have a flighty streak.

Or this group, and in the case of Gertrude Pharaoh and the Pharaoh, they have a drinking streak for instance.

Well, Aunt Alexandra knows every group by their tribal name, and she knows what it is about that group that has determined its place on a social hierarchy.

This conversation that takes place in the context of a Missionary Circle are just so many ways that through gossip, that pyramid is assigning through the imagination of the participants everyone's rightful place in the social hierarchy, and more fundamentally, and perhaps perversely, because it is the Missionary Circle, this social strata that has been shown to be exploited, demeaning indeed, in the case of Tom Robinson, deadly, this social structure is positioned as something sanctioned by God himself.

In this way, then the people who are themselves identifying with the pyramid are not responsible because God has, so the Missionary Circle in other words, is using a religion to sanctify and to legitimate the particular structure that keeps everyone in Maycomb in his or her place, principally through gossip.

To demonstrate just how upside down this is, Grace Merriweather, in addition to talking about the darkies in Maycomb being surly, tells the story about a great missionary, Methodist missionary, J Everett Grimes.

And she met J Everett Grimes at a church revival, I think that's a church camp before he went back to Africa to save the Maroona people.

This is apparently a tribe of people in Africa, Harper Lee, it's not based on an actual people in Africa, she made up the name Maroonas, but Grace Merriweather explains that J. Everett Grimes he's such a good man that he has dedicated his life to saving the Maroona people.

And these people she described are remarkably primitive.

And as she gives the details of their lives, the ladies are listening agazed at a people that could be so uncivilized.

And the way the Maroonas live, according to Grace Merriweather they all, to eat and drink, they all chew the bark of a common tree.

They then go and spit into a pot, and they drink together out of this pot.

She describes this as a ritual and a practice that is distinctive of the Maroona people, as an example of just how uncivilized, un-Christianly in fact are.

The point I want to underscore though, in this context is how this pyramid, not only has it been the lens through which the jurors have rendered their verdict about something they didn't see in person, is that same pyramid now is being projected across the entire world, as these ladies in the Missionary Circle imagine it exist according to this pyramid structure that they just happened to be close to the apex of.

And not only do they have this privileged place in the social pyramid, it is a pyramid that God himself has a decree or created.

This is an example of, and I bring all this up because our big inquiry here are kind of essay of sorts is what could be the universal appeal of this novel.

And my guess is that most people understand that pyramid and how it works rather intuitively, because if you're like me, you've encountered this social pyramid through many instances and perhaps maybe the majority of your social life.

When I look back on junior high, and high school and even elementary school, I can very well see a kind of social pyramid in which different people were said to be along to this group, they were the athletes, they were the geeks, they were the nerds.

And then there were the people who smoked or get other kinds of things that were scandalous.

And they all have carried these reputations throughout their life.

But what were we doing?

We were putting people in their place in a social hierarchy.

In fact, this is like a kind of a structure that is not only we could say endemic to people and not universal because there's no reason to conclude that people have always in all times organized themselves in social pyramids.

In fact, there was evidence of people not organizing themselves in that way.

Nevertheless, it does seem to be pervasive.

And not only within the human species, but also among animals and mammals, and particularly primates.

I took a class at the University of Texas on primate behaviors.

We studied Sykes and verbiage monkeys, and they organized themselves in social pyramid.

And I remember as I learned this, and we did actual observation, it's sort of maybe like Jem hit me right between the eyes.

Oh my goodness, this monkey business is very much people business.

So that's a way and reason I believe that this is novel beneath perhaps the conscious surface, we can identify with the idea that people identify themselves in kinds of caste.

But this novel is not an ironic novel, it's not a sequitur, it's not a tragedy.

It doesn't end, in other words with the pyramid, getting the last word.

There's another social structure that manifests itself, but not as obviously in the novel.

And I wanna propose what the images are in the novel that give us a glimpse of what it would mean to live off of the pyramid.

And I think there's two principle images.

The first, perhaps you remember that on a day at a nowhere snow to Maycomb and the whole town, school is led out, because it never snows in Maycomb.

And on this day out of school, Jem decides that this snow could be put to good use by making a snowman.

However, the snow is so minimal that Jem is not able to gather enough to make a snowman.

So he supplements his snow with the soil, the dirt there in his yard.

And he begins to put together this snowman, part snow and part dirt.

And initially he's using as his model, one of his neighbors named Mr. Avery.

But as he completes this snowman, it looks so much like Mr. Avery, that the kids decide, or perhaps Atticus's admonishes them, that they would be mocking Mr. Avery.

And so they decided that they would incorporate Ms. Maudie, their across the street neighbor and this a snowman's manifestation.

And so they go across to Ms. Maudie's house and they gather her, I think her clippers, and her winter hats, she's a big gardener and they incorporate this into the snowman.

Anyway, when they finished this snowman from across the street, Ms. Maudie hollers to the kids, to Jem and Scout, you've created an absolute morphodite.

Now, to my knowledge morphodite is a neologism.

In other words of a Harper Lee, as far as I can tell, made up this word, it's a very interesting word.

It sounds a little bit like hermaphrodite.

It's certainly through the morph, emphasizes the body and the morphine, or the transformation, the morphing of a body.

This absolute morphodite, if we were to imagine how it is constituted.

Well, first of all, it is part white, it is part black because of the snow and because of the dirt.

It is part male, part female, part natural, part artificial.

In other words, the absolute morphodite is a combination of things that are seemingly opposite.

That seemingly should be in discrete place, have been brought together in a common place.

And out of those ingredients, a human body has been created.

I'm suggesting that this is an image that can be contrasted with a social pyramid.

That in the social pyramid, everyone has his or her place, and those things don't intermingle, they don't cross borders, but in the absolute morphodite all things come together to be one thing.

And no one thing is superior to another thing.

That's one image of what the pyramid could be contrasted with.

Another image, going back to those Maroonas.

Very, very interesting these Maroonas and their relationship to a tree, and of a common source of sustenance.

And here's why I think it's interesting.

If you think a little bit about what these Maroonas are doing, perhaps you remember the movie "Avatar" and the Navi people and their relationship to a tree in the way they were all in some sense finding the source of their life in this common tree.

The Maroona people you might say are doing something in their rituals that if you think about it looks, and here's the irony of the Missionary Circle looks a whole lot like communion.

I mean, if someone were to come from another planet to visit a church where communion was being offered, and someone wants to explain what was happening, it would be something like where you see that bread there is as the body of these peoples God.

And that wine, well, that's the blood of these people's God.

And what they're doing is they're eating that body, and then they're drinking that blood.

That I guess would be well, if you think about that, it's starting to sound not unlike what the Maroonas are doing of finding a way both in actual practice and perhaps imaginatively and symbolically to re-member as in R-E-member, re-member through this common source of sustenance, remember I mentioned that there's a primary concerns of food, but then those primary concerns could modulate into, you could say existential or spiritual concerns so that the food for the body can also be a food, soul food you might say.

And what these Maroonas are doing is they're organizing themselves not in a nuclear family as is the case in Maycomb.

And this is what has the ladies of the Missionary Circle so convinced it's not civilized because only the nuclear family according to this pyramid structure could be considered God's sanctioned these people, and what are they doing?

They are becoming one body that is not characterized by tribal distinctions and a social hierarchy.

In other words, the absolute morphodite, which Jem and Scout make and the Maroona people are other structures that contrast or can be contrasted with the caste system.

How you might ask, what does one move from living within a caste system to living otherwise, particularly if you were in the middle of a town like that.

This you might say is the deep plot of the novel.

The principle plot of course, is bringing out this character named Boo Radley to coax Boo Radley from coming out of his house.

A deeper plot might be will Scout in Jem assimilate the pyramid, the pyramid that has played itself out in the juror box and the Missionary Circle, will they internalize that?

Will it become their mind structure to speak, their frame of reference?

Or will they be delivered from the social structure of Maycomb?

Will they get outside of it and imagine a different way of being human?

This you might say is the subtextual plot of the novel.

And I wanna propose with a little bit of time that we have left.

Here's a wonderful scene.

As you know, when Scout and Jem returned from the high school, from their celebration of the Halloween party and pageant, which combined on the same night, Scout is wearing a ham, Scout is dressed as a ham for Halloween.

And she and Jem, when they're coming home are attack by Bob Ewell who's going to get his revenge on Atticus for humiliating him in the trial, because Atticus expose the fact that in fact, he sexually molested his daughter.

Everyone that knew that whether or not, whether would agree to it in public or not.

And then retribution to Atticus, Bob Ewell is going to kill his children.

I have, multiple times, if you have your protagonists in what can be considered the climax, the action climax of the novel dressed as a ham, if ever there was a moment in which something was blinking in red neon lights, this is a symbol.

Well, this would be the moment when your main character who life or death situation is dressed as a ham, you you're gonna have to come to terms of what the world is.

That ham symbolize, because if it's clearly, even if we were gonna say that Halloween had to be, Wabi dressed as a ham.

I don't recall any my friends or myself ever dressing, I do, I can see Casper the friendly ghost, Spiderman, Frankenstein, witches, angels, fairies.

I don't remember any hams.

Well, that perplexed me for a long time.

Until I learned through some kind of reading, that all of a sudden I learned that the land of Egypt was known by the Hebrew people as the land of ham.

And when that came to my awareness, then all of the imagery related to Egypt in the novel, including the fact that the sixth grade Jem entered his Egyptian period.

Scout says he began to walk stiffly like a stork imitating and making fun of him.

And then all of a sudden, Aunt Alexandra, why Aunt Alexandra?

Well that's associated with Egypt.

And then it started to occur to me that there was something going on that looked very much like the Exodus story taking place in this novel.

Northrup Frye, the great literary mind of the 20th century proposed that all works of literature evolved out of myth.

Certainly in this novel, if you scratch the surface, you can see that the myth of Exodus is playing itself out in a novel context.

To come out of the ham, in other words is to come out of the mentality, to come out of the mindset of a caste system.

This is the moment in which Scout is delivered from the mentality, symbolically the moment when she comes out of this cast system, that has really and body snatched the people, she's coming out of that social structure into a new kind of consciousness.

And it's not long after she's saved by Boo Radley, that Boo Radley escorts Scout back to the Radley house.

He in fact leads her.

She insists that he is the lead as he walks her down the street, their arms are locked together, hooked together almost as if it was a, a marriage ceremony.

When she enters the Radley gate, she says it was the second time in her life she had entered the Radley yard.

The first time is when she came rolling in a tire, it was a game that she and Jem in deal were playing.

They put her in a tar and they rolled her, in this instance, rolled her too hard.

And she rolled right into the Radley yard and hit up against the porch.

Well, this was the second time that she had entered the Radley yard.

She goes to the front door and Boo Radley walks into the house and she remarks, "And I never saw him again."

Now at this point, a Scout is nine years old, maybe 10 years old.

And it's not plausible that the person that just saved her life, because it doesn't say that Boo Radley died, it just says that she was to never see him again.

And so I knew that there was something to be thought through there.

After eight Boo Radley steps into the house, she walks over to the window.

The window at which Boo Radley has been standing throughout the novel, watching the children and watching Maycomb.

That's perhaps the basis of "Go Set A Watchman" because Boo Radley is the watchmen of Maycomb.

Well, she stands at the window and she has Boo Radley's perspective now on the town.

Here's the moment, remember that Atticus told her, if you learn one simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with people.

That simple trick was to see the world from their eyes, and he described it metaphorically is to climb into their skin.

And perhaps for them to climb into your skin.

Well, this I'm gonna suggest is precisely what has happened here.

When Scout comes out of a ham, Boo Radley enters into Scout.

She never sees, excuse me, Scout never sees Boo again, because from here on out, she will see with Boo, she won't see Boo, Boo will in fact be her eyes, she's at an autotransplant, so to speak.

And then she standing at that window, she describes Maycomb, and very interesting about the description, and we can wrap up with this, she sees Maycomb in four seasons simultaneously.

She sees Maycomb in other words, not in ordinary time, she's no longer in clock time.

She's in some other kind of dimension of time in which all things are present.

And she sees, however, facet of Maycomb is drawn together.

And what brings them together?

If you will read this moment when Scout is describing what she sees from the Radley window, and I'm hypothesizing with the Boo's eyes, she begins by seeing moments from the past.

They're now made present.

And as she begins to describe these moments, it initially starts out that she is seeing Atticus as her father and as Jem's father, and says his children and the his is referring to pronouns to Atticus in the first several vignettes that she describes.

But by the last vignette, read this scene carefully, the pronoun his, as is his and her father, the his, of the his of his children, modulates or migrates from Atticus to Boo Radley.

So by the final vista, the father and his children are Scout in Jem.

The implication would be that the Boo Radley, who after all is named after a ghost, who's described as so translucidly wide, she could almost see through him whose hair is described as that of a bird.

Who's initially when Jem challenges, when Dill challenges Jem, the first time to go touch the house, he says, "I'll trade you one "Gray Ghost" for two Tom Swifts."

He say, "And if you'll go touch the Radley house, I'll give you this book, "The Gray Ghost," there's another ghost.

And then two Tom Swifts, there's another bird.

If you see, in other words, if you read the novel, Boo Radley is through images, identified with both a ghost and a bird.

And in fact in then this spirit, this, you could say, speaking of Scout, this holy ghost as Scout has experienced it, is something that is potentially within everyone in Maycomb.

In other words, just as the Maroonas are having a common source assessments from that tree, it's quite possible, and this brings us now to Boo's tree, and remember the first gift from the tree, what was it?

It was chewing gum with the Wrigley double mint rapper taken off, chewing gum.

Remember now the Maroonas chewing that bark?

Well, here a Scout, the first gift that she gets from the tree is something to chew.

She in effect that tree, that Scout receives, and Jem receives these gifts from Boo is analogous, you could say, or identify with his tree of the Maroona, and it is a source of life.

It is the gifts that come down, are all gifts to images, to lead Scout and Jem out of the caste system of Maycomb.

And I'm suggesting that the way you've make an absolute morphodite amongst real people is that they share a common spirit.

Not that they become uniform, that they have rather unity with maximum diversity.

Remember that morphodite is difference, differences coming together.

Not everyone being the same.

So in other words, if we're sharing something you could say, spiritually or imaginatively, that brings us together, we get the best of both worlds of being uniquely who we are, singularly who we are, including all the ways that are not common.

And yet at the same time, we don't have to fragment out into Balkanize little identity spaces because we do share a kind of common body metaphorically speaking.

In any case, I wanna conclude by saying the reason I believe we're drawn to this novel, and the reason it has such universal, or universal like appeal is because we can feel the reality of both that caste system or social pyramid, and the reality of being a part of other bodies so that my skin encapsulated ego is not really the limits of who I am, because part of who I am is in you, and part of who you are is in me.

And when I come to identify with you, or as Attica says, see the world through your eyes, then we have walked away, walked out of in fact, the pyramid or the caste system that we are typically identified with.

I wish that we had more time to discuss this because we barely scratched the surface, but we do have a little time for questions that may have been proffered to one of our facilitators, and I'll take what time's left to share with you what thoughts and perhaps not a question, it's a comment, but whatever, this is a space now that we can begin to unpack.

And what I've shared, you just, it's what Whitman said, "If I said something that insult your soul, just dismiss it."

That's the great thing about literature, there's no right or wrong answer.

But we can come together as if we're chewing from a commentary this time a book, and we can see what we can internalize from each other's perspective.

So I'm, I'm open for questions, whatever folks wanna do now.

- Michael, one of the things that came up in some of our discussions was how "To Kill a Mockingbird" is different from "Go Set A Watchman."

So having read both of those, what do you think the difference is?

- I would say the difference is so distinctive that it almost constitutes one of the great living examples of the power of the imagination when it transcends the ego.

And this is what I mean by that, undoubtedly "Go Set A watchman" is a early draft of what became "To Kill a Mockingbird".

If you read that novel, as I have it, I experienced it as a extended sort of a commentary on racism in the south.

But it read more like a monologue of a person, almost like a diary entry of going home except told in the third person.

And I've encountered a bunch of people that now, since the person has moved away to New York and come back home, now she sees through all of the kind of racist attitudes.

But my point is it doesn't move my imagination.

It seems to make a succession of points.

It's like, it's got like morals to it.

Like it was a kind of extended sermon.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" and I dhou've mentioned that I found it, it really sort of boring to read.

And I can't imagine why I'd wanna read it again, except for analytical or academic purposes, but I wouldn't read it for fun.

If you take that and then compare it to what is the most popular novel ever written in English?

I mean, if a relatively pedestrian almost borderline failure, if it's not the failure that the publisher sent it back and said, I don't think this is gonna work, can you take another?

I mean, that's how big of a failure.

From that to the most popular novel ever written in English, something strange happened.

So I won't say there's a qualitative difference.

I think it is an early draft, but something happened between those two novels that explains the power of "To Kill a Mockingbird" as compared with the earlier draft.

In other words, you might say, what's the difference here?

What happened that turned this sort of pedestrian draft into this incredible work of art?

What's the difference?

I think that's a remarkably interesting questions.

- And do you think, I know we talked about this a little bit, you kind of talked about how one is telling what the author wanted to say and the other is showing what the author wanted to say.

- Absolutely, that's a good way to put it.

You know, the imagination, the very word imagination has in an image.

And the imagination communicates in images.

The analytic communicates in concepts like propositions, you know, like a, I don't know, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

That's a concept or proposition.

Well, that's not how works of fiction as fiction communicate.

They're closer to a moving picture.

And so yes, one difference between the two is that "To Kill A Mockingbird" reveals something to the imagination that is unlike in its presentation, and I would say in an end its consequence, than the succession of sort of moral admonishments and of norms that are kind of made in an almost essay fashion.

So yeah, something is starting to come alive and it's coming alive through images and not through commentary.

- And it's interesting because I think, you know, you talked about ego and it seems like that's come up in a lot of the things that I've read lately.

And the idea that the author's ego almost has to get out of the way for them to be able to write these somewhat inspired works of literature, right?

Well, the very idea of amuse speaks to that.

And how many artists across different forms of art will say I was more like a vehicle or I was like a midwife?

I mean, something happened through me, we're gonna be talking about a Toni Morrison "Song of Solomon" in the preface to that she indicates just straight out, you know, straight prose from her.

I used to think all this stuff about amuse was a little bit, whatever, but now having read this novel, I'm a believer in it and then gives an example why?

So I would definitely say that there is something about fictional verbal structures that invites aspects of consciousness that were typically not in direct communion with, invites those aspect of our consciousness to get a word in edgewise.

And with those aspects of consciousness, what you're having is a very different set of eyes that are perceiving, you could say they're perceiving the same world from a very different set of eyes.

And if you think of the climax of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the what it is that Scouts sees when she stands in front of Boo's window, I mean, after all Boo has been the watchman, if you wanna say, where does that draft name come from?

Well, BOoo is the Watchman and that plays off two things, one he's watching the kids, but also it relates to time.

Time as a watch indicates.

So Scout is standing in front of the window of Boo Radley and she sees Maycomb and she says, the first time from this angle.

And from that angle, she experiences all four seasons simultaneously.

In other words, Scouts no longer in time as we know it.

And what I would proffer is that what Scout sees from that perspective, you can even say with Boo's eyes identified with her own, or even replacing her.

What she sees now is enough, is the same Maycomb from a different, you could say hight or depth of consciousness.

The Maycomb hasn't changed if you mean empirically, is there, is it all of a sudden, it all, you know, like what was it Stephen Wright has a joke about someone broke in my house and replace everything with an exact replica.

I mean, so we've got a funny line, like it's not like everything in Maycomb has been replaced with the exact.

It is Maycomb, what is different now is the dimension of consciousness that is perceiving it.

And I would say when I mentioned, the eight books, I mean, excuse me, eight months, four books, and you, well, it's that transforming the consciousness so that you see what was previously the real world through a whole new set of eyes.

That's what fiction is up to.

Yes, it's playful, yes, it's an art, but there is a profound sort of potential with respect to the world that we share that's at play in fiction.

In other words, there's a Mozart, you could say we're just playing around with sounds.

Yes, these are people playing around with words.

But what playing around with words at this level can do, and I'm suggesting is to affect consciousness that gets us however transiently outside of our egos perspective.

- Well, so that kind of leads, you talked a little bit about the end of the book.

And I know after the lecture, I went back to the text to reread that end, where Boo is standing or Scout is standing on Boo's porch looking out the window and seeing Maycomb for the first time, kind of through his eyes.

And then I did, what I often do is I went right back to the beginning of the book and started it over again, just out of curiosity, to see how far we'd come.

And what I noticed there in rereading, it was just in the first couple pages is that you, we get introduced to Dill in just those first few pages.

And the first thing he says to Jem and Scout is he introduces himself and he says, "I can read."

And that really struck me because we, the book talks about, and then he ends up arguing with Jem about, Jem's like, well, so what?

Scout can read and she's younger than you are.

And so there's, I kind of wanted to ask you, what do you think is the role that reading plays?

How, how does it play, because it obviously is essential to the novel it comes up time and time again.

- It is a a great line because Dill says that completely out of the blue.

it was a complete non-sequitur and I can read, and then he adds, "If you got anything that needs reading, you can give it to me."

Let's think about this for just a second, do you know if we read this novel and Scout has this transformation in consciousness, that's pretty cool, but that's just something that happens to this fictional person named Scout.

However, if we read the novel and something like that happens to us, well now we're not just talking about make believe place called Maycomb once upon a time in a work of fiction we're talking about here and now.

So it goes back to early comments.

Ultimately, the impact of this novel depends upon the reader's reception of it.

And for that reason, reading, not just in this novel, we have three more novels to go, and I'm confident we're gonna discern that reading and even writing in the case of say, for instance, Jane Eyre was trying to tell her story, this is a common persistent subtext.

In other words, great works of art are often self-reflective about the process of writing.

Think about "The Things They Carried" with Tim O'Brien how much it explicitly talks about.

He's writing this novel to create a body for Timmy, create a place for Timmy to live.

So really all that to say that the novels consequence multiply times a hundred thousand, if it involves the reader and what's at stake.

And that's why, and also critical here is how one reads is gonna determine how this novel ends.

Ms. Maudie explains to Scout that Boo Radley's father is a foot-washing Baptist.

And she explicitly distinguishes them from the kind of Baptist she is because foot-washing Baptist take the Bible literally.

So there's a real direct connection between Boo the son being sentenced to stay inside his house.

That is to say isolated and cut off from us.

There's a implicit comparison, not in comparison identification being made between the way Boo Radley's father reads the Bible and what he's done to his son.

And there is a way that we could think about reading that would be the opposite of what Mr. Radley did to Boo, and that would be a kind of reading that invites Boo to come out.

And there you have it.

That's the plot of the novel can Scout, Jem and Dill get Boo Radley to come out of his house.

So based on what we're saying, is there a way of reading that the spirit or character that was previously trapped in this abode, or we could say analogously trapped inside this novel, is there a way of reading it that enables that spirit to come out into my imagination.

And this, the novel suggesting that that is not reading literally, that's reading metaphorically, or you could even say spiritually.

- Well, and it's interesting, 'cause even if you go back to when, when Scout finally gets to school and her teacher says, "Well, you've been taught how to read wrong."

Like don't learn anymore at home.

You know, it's getting back, it's pointing out again, is there a right way in a wrong way?

And if Scouts being told the wrong way at home, you know what kind of, yeah, it's trying to keep her in that structure, right?

And that Maycomb structure of a hierarchy.

- That's a profoundly insightful that the whole second chapter is about this.

In fact, one of the things that Scout says is Jem says "I was born reading!"

Okay, we can think of that as a throwaway line just means I read a lot.

But if you read the words, as precisely what they're saying and not through the words to what we expect or what our sort of projection is and what she's saying literally, that she was born reading, that there was a part of her that came to birth in the act of reading.

And even it gets even really, really specific about the two different ways of reading, because Jem explains to Scout that she's learning the Dewey decimal system.

And then in a kind of farcical way, he goes to explain that in this new way of reading you just don't read about a cow, you go out and look at a cow.

And then that's how, well look at what that is saying.

That's about as literal, that is an absolute spoof on what it means to read literally.

So a cow out there in the real world in some sense is not what works of fiction are all about, works of fiction, or about taking that cow that you see out in the real world and putting it in an imaginative structure that reveals its true identity, which is very different than just a cow as an empirical cow.

In other words, she learned to read from letters.

In fact, is very specific, she learned how to read and write one, by reading and copying pages out of the Bible.

So Calpurnia would have her spell out the alphabet, and then copy a chapter from the Bible.

So it's not only that the book is saying there's different ways of reading, it's even explicitly connecting this potential of being born reading with something that's coming through scripture, but notice how that is not how Mr. Radley reads.

You know, if you come in from the south, you do know, and this is true with Jane Eyre who grew up in a context where the Bible was justice authoritative.

If you grow up in a Bible belt, you know that all reality goes back to a Bible verse.

I mean, if you're arguing about, so when even intellectual argument, you can just say, yeah, but Ezekiel tells us in chapter three, and then you just lay down the law.

And so you will start to understand in the south that all rally, it goes back to the Bible.

Well, if you think about that, then how you read the Bible is going to be absolutely crucial to the rest of your life.

And this novel brings that out in the starkest possible terms because the con of reading that Boo Radley's father does, and the same kind of mentality is the way those jurors read the narrative.

The jurors are presented with two narratives of what Tom Robinson did or didn't do.

And there's the same mentality that put Boo Radley in his house, put Tom Robinson in prison.

It's a deadly way of reading.

And this, even the apostle Paul says that, that the letter killeth, you read the scriptures with the letter, which is say, literally it killeth, but if you read the letters in the spirit of the letters, which you can say metaphorically, which is not mean a eludes early, it just means with a different dimension of consciousness, if you read the scripture in that way it quikineth or give it life.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - [Man] This program brought to you in part by Selco.

Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and citizens of Minnesota,