Storytellersunplugged

by David Niall Wilson

(This is posted a day early - we had no new essay on the 30th, and I didn’t want us to go another full day without a post…)

Every day, it seems, I read an article, or see a news item on television about something that stirs or outrages me. I can’t imagine the number of times I must have said, “God, if that was ME I’d have…” Our ancestors had the leisure to read much more occasional and distant news, discussing it over coffee, or whiskey, or gathering around radios to soak in the details that were carefully chosen and presented to them before launching into lengthy diatribes of their own. Our world is much more immediate, and so much smaller, that most of our opinions are glossed over, hurried past, or ignored, but for me they still simmer beneath the surface, and for that reason, among many, I am thankful to be a writer.I recently finished re-reading John Grisham’s first novel, “A Time to Kill,” and I believe he feels – or once felt – the same. The protagonist is that elusive, mythical beast, the ethical, honest lawyer. He is a man confronted with questions who knows his answers and lives them. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in “The Great Gatsby,” – “I believe all men suspect themselves of at least one of the Cardinal Virtues…” In writing, we have options that life doesn’t always afford us.

How many times, I wonder, have lawyers, judges, district attorneys and police officers heard the question, “What would you have done?” How many times, when asked, is that question answered honestly? Very seldom, I suspect. We live in a society that believes a set, mutually agreed upon set of rules is more important than any individual’s beliefs, ethics, or personal honor. That’s a harsh way of putting it, and it sounds a bit communist, when expressed in this manner, but it’s true. What we believe to be right, and what society expects and enforces as right are very seldom similar.

In “A Time to Kill,” Carl Lee Hailey, a black man from Clanton, Mississippi, is faced with the question of how to react when two drunken, red-necked white men torture and rape his ten year old daughter. This is a brutal, no gray area situation, and Carl Lee reacts honestly. He shoots the two men before the “justice system” can lock them away for a few years and set them free. Most of the men of Clanton (in the novel) – when confronted with that eternal question, “What would you have done?” admit they hoped they’d have the courage to react as Carl Lee did. They also admit that, had it been a white girl, and black assailants, the case would never even make it to court.

Of course, in our society, and even in the society of Clanton Mississippi back in the time period of this novel, shooting a man because he richly deserves it is not the correct answer to this situation, or to any situation. There are rules, and there are laws, and we are taught that “right minded” folk will abide by, understand, and even agree with these laws. But do we ever agree? Really? I don’t think so. I will never, for instance, believe that in the situation described in the book that the two rapists should get anything but the death penalty — or if they are in a more liberal state, life in prison. If confronted with the same situation, I have to side with the men of Clanton Mississippi and hope I’d have the courage to act on my convictions, because in the end, that is the only reaction that can make you feel right inside. If you see something you truly believe to be wrong, you must react, or live with the result of your inaction, and that is where this windy, opinionated essay veers in the direction of writing.

In stories and novels, we create characters and situations that — while they may seem complex — are actually simple, clearly defined slices of the world. We people these slices with characters who act exactly as we picture them acting – or who teach us how they would act as we interact with them. Our protagonist may not do the right thing in a given situation, but if we write him honestly, we will convey his awareness of what he has done, or left undone. We will lay bare the emotion behind a right decision, and a wrong one. In prose we have the liberty of slipping around, under, over or through the rules of society and reacting to the situations we create with honesty, ethics, dishonesty, cruelty, or any other emotion we hope to convey, and we have the opportunity at the same time to open doors into the minds of the characters and divulge the thought processes, the pain, the joy, the ecstasy and the humiliation those reactions cause.

Our drunk drivers may still kill people on the road, but they won’t do it in a vacuum. They will do it, take the consequences, and open their thoughts to readers, and if this is an issue the author believes in fiercely, the answer to the question “What would you do?” is clearly answered through the character. What would you do if you had too much to drink, ran a red light, and killed a young couple on their way to the prom, or their wedding — or ended the life of someone who’d managed to avoid such accidents for seventy years? Going into writing about such a thing, you may believe you know exactly how you would react, but if you write honestly, and well, by the time you are done, both you and your readers will know more about that answer, and the question that spawned it, than you might have believed possible. You will look at it from the perspective of the victim, the victim’s family, the driver and his family — the situation behind it all and the situation that follows.

As writers we create cowards and anoint heroes. We create fictional problems a notch more intense than whatever news story invoked them, and we pit ourselves, through our characters, against the temptations, dangers, rewards and possible repercussions of those situations without society’s threat of reprisal dangling over our heads.

In the real world — in the real small-town Mississippi where such a trial may or may not have taken place many times — I doubt that young Jake Brigance would have stood against all he faced. The judge in the town is not bright, and refuses to change venue. The District Attorney has political ambitions and wants nothing more than a death verdict for Carl Lee so he can further his own dreams. The Ku Klux Klan re-forms in the town, burns Brigance’s home, threatens his family, beats and shaves his young law clerk and ties her to a pole in a field, causes the husband of his secretary to have a stroke that kills him, and finally kills the informant who has helped keep Jake (and others) alive. Jake faces crooked preachers, several slick, big-city lawyers who want to the case for themselves, a lack of any real pay for the job he is performing, and the NAACP. His wife is on the verge of leaving him because of the danger he has put their family in, and Lucien Wilbanks, who owns the building that houses Jake’s offices, and who is a disbarred attorney himself, continually attempts to “fix” the trial.

This is what I mean about fiction. These odds are stacked incredibly. When you think things can’t, or won’t, get worse, they do. In the face of this, we get a clear view of Jake’s thought process. We see that his ethics are sound, that his beliefs are stronger than his fears, and that he is a lawyer who will do what he believes to be the right thing regardless of the odds. Jake almost loses heart when a young National Guardsman is shot and killed by a bullet meant for him, but he shakes it off, and he doesn’t quit.

And he wins. That is another gift we have as writers, and one that is too often ignored, I believe, in modern novels. We can create the people we wish we were, and the people we wish we could kill. Through our words, we (and vicariously, our readers) can become those good people, and those villains. We can live, love, sacrifice, and experience the myriad emotions associated with each situation. We can answer over and over the question, “What would you do,” and we can answer that question from every possible angle through characterization and caricature, putting truth to the lie that we call society over and over again and reminding people of the depths extending far beneath that social veneer.

As a reader I’ve grown disillusioned by authors who can’t seem to leave a character happy, or on top in the end of a novel. Love affairs always go south, lives are ruined — and when things seem to be looking up, they fall apart. This attitude seems to me a cop out, imposing more the veneer of the author’s own bleak reality onto a landscape of events and characters meant to take the reader away. Perhaps I’m a bit too romantic in this respect, but I think heroes should be allowed a moment of celebration when they save the world, and that villains should be dropped into deep, dark pits and sealed safely away until the next crisis — or novel –occurs.

In short – it’s what I’d do.

DNW