Styron and His Black Critics

...It was therefore possible for a slave preacher to plot rebellion among the slaves without being the religious fanatic Styron makes him out to be...

...In short, Turner in the novel is a man driven by the bloody and vengeful apocalypse of the Old Testament yet also held by the appeal to love and charity contained in the New...

...He has been quoted in Newsweek as saying: I think Jimmy [Baldwin...

...It is a language produced by oppression, but whose central impulse is survival and resistance...

...While such a portrayal may not necessarily be better than one attempted by a writer outside their own group, it will certainly make less strenuous demands on their imagination, particularly since a sense of their reality and their past is immediately accessible through experience and group memory...

...But we feel there is something in what the country can still be that we love...

...In academic journals and in such black publications as Freedomways, Negro Digest, Ebony, and Liberator, the black critics subjected the book and its author to one of the most violent attacks in the recent history of American writing...

...Yet it is also true that serious literature cannot earn the attention it continues to demand if it disowns an interest in the passions and problems of the times for and in which it is written...

...The mere fact of Styron's having exercised his rights of invention does not automatically exonerate him from judgments having to do with the way he treats history—least of all a history such as slavery with which black and white Americans have anything but a harmonious connection and in which they tend to find quite different memories of themselves...

...If Lukacs is right, then the thematic essence of a particular historical figure should be reproduced in any work of art that attempts to deal with such a figure...

...JERVIS ANDERSON Turner has since gradually assumed the dimensions of a hero in the imagination of Negro Americans, his gesture—the outstanding one of its kind in American history—reminding them pridefully that as slaves they were not all docile accomplices in their own bondage...

...and, third, the debate concerning historical accuracy has already been amply aired, notably by Herbert Aptheker, arguing the negative in The Nation, and by Eugene Genovese, arguing the affirmative in The New York Review of Books...

...The majority of white critics liked it, finding it superb both as fiction and as a re-creation of history...

...What is to be judged is the degree of Styron's faithfulness to the essential historical spirit of Turner and the event with which he is associated...

...To digress here for a moment, let us relate the foregoing to one of the prevailing contradictions in American life...

...Now 136 years have gone by between 1831, the year of Turner's death, and 1967, JERVIS ANDERSON the year Styron published his novel...

...They looked at each other in silence, evidently as surprised by the question as by its timing...

...So that by now he has succeeded in raising the most serious doubts in his readers' minds as to how they should read and understand his book: They have already found him somewhat less than faithful to his claims to historical accuracy, and now they feel pretty much on their own in what to accept as fact and what as invention...

...And looked at in those terms, it becomes clear that a part of the critical animus against Styron resides in his critics' demand that literature should serve the immediate ideological interests of the black community—in the same way almost that the Communist critics of the thirties in America demanded that literature should consciously serve the aims and objec tives of the class struggle...

...But this never means being tied to particular historical facts...

...John The collective judgments of the essayists were that the book was a perversion of history, a libel on the life of Turner, an apology for slavery, and a reflection of Styron's "vile" racist attitudes...

...A few seconds before the program ran out, the moderator said he wanted to ask them one final question: did they love America...

...These may represent interesting speculations on the problems of religious faith and commitment, but they can have little to do with the historical reality of a man who revolted against one of the most inhuman institutions in Christendom, no doubt in full awareness of the odds against his success...

...While social cant declares the society and its history to be pluralist in content and in spirit, the general style of the society and much of its written history suggest differently...

...I will not attempt any extensive appraisal of the historical data of The Confessions, and for good reasons...

...Serious artists have always associated this demand with the success or failure of their purpose...

...Thus Scott humanizes his historical heroes while avoiding what Hegel calls the psychology of the valet, namely the detailed analysis of small human peculiarities which have nothing to do with the historical mission of the person concerned...

...Well, what really is it...

...And to note this is to take note of one of the crucial restraints upon the imagination of the historical novelist: It is not really free, since its freedom to re-create is confined within the terms of a given historical circumstance...

...There are many among them who insist that they are as American as anybody else, but even those do so less out of love than out of a refusal to surrender the moral and historical legitimacy of their citizenship...

...That is, if Thelwell's statement is meant as an argument against Styron's intruding upon "our prerogative to define this heritage in terms of our own choice," it is ridiculous, for Styron could no more interfere with this "choice" than he could question or revoke the prerogative...

...It is so perceptive and instructive a point that to question the validity of its application to The Confessions appears almost like quibbling...

...The more notable of these castigations were later to be collected by John Henrik Clarke, an editor at Freedomways, and published, in 1968, in a volume titled William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.* * Boston: Beacon Press, 120 pp., $4.95...

...Which is to imply that the prerogative entails more than the black writers' desire to present their own people with monumental or inspiring images of their own character...

...There is certainly nothing wrong or unprecedented in writers serving such ends if they so choose, but it is certainly wrong, if no longer unprecedented, for them to insist that no distinction remains between writing which supports the causes of agitation and writing which reflects an independent and individual moral outlook...

...But, if only by implication, he raises a point which the black writers do not take sufficiently into account when they accuse Styron of distortion...

...Actually, while that is what the claim of the black writers implies, it is much too absurd to stand for what they really mean...

...Styron might well have chosen the latter course, for the essence of Turner that emerg es from The Confessions is not that of a reb el against slavery, but a man caught in the torments of a religious dilemma, and in whom rebellion is nourished not as a conse quence of his sociopolitical experience but as a consequence rather of his religious fanat icism and his reprersed sexual lust for the slaveholder's women...

...Charles Hamilton, chairman of the Department of Political Science at Roosevelt University...

...Particularly worth reading is his analysis of the problems of language and consciousness a writer is likely to encounter in undertaking to reproduce the speech, thought patterns, and attitudes of a slave, especially a slave rebel...

...and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination...

...broke down JERVIS ANDERSON the last shred of whatever final hangup of Southern prejudice I might have had which was trying to tell me that a Negro was never really intelligent...

...The rebellion seems to have interested Styron therefore not for the possibilities it contained for the writing of a reflective historical political novel, which is what the nature and events of Turner's life would seem to require, but merely as an occasion for making Turner the center of a religious passion play...

...While it agrees in substance with the major points raised by his colleagues, it is more skillful and cogent in analysis, more reflective in temper, more literary in approach, and more attractively written...

...the misleading tensions, misleading because they are never pertinent to the principal narrative and never embodied in relevant actions—all this exhibits the fatal internal contradictions that bring Nat Turner to its knees as fiction...

...and that only an excess of arrogance could have led him to suppose that, as a white man, he could authentically re-create the thought processes of a black slave and conceive the novel from a center of black consciousness...

...it is a conflict between Old and New Testament commands that leads him to falter over his only act of killing...

...And if Turner, a slave preacher, was as religiously fanatic as Styron makes him, then one way of dramatizing this fanaticism would certainly be to portray Turner in some close ministerial relationship with his fellow slaves and the effect his ministry had upon them...

...It will be necessary to touch upon some of these questions, but only as they have a bearing upon the problems of value, belief, consciousness, method, and moral concern, which the novel poses as historical fiction...

...The colored folks had their code of religion, not nearly so complicated as the white man's religion, but more closely observed...

...Vincent Harding, an assistant professor of history at Spellman College...

...It is this religious mania that seems responsible for his sexual continence and frustration...

...A point concerning the alleged factual distortions: Perhaps Styron's critics ought not to be judged too harshly for tending to read the book more as history than as fiction, for in certain respects they were encouraged, if not advised, to do so by the author himself...

...What they must really mean is that the imagination should be suborned into relating not what it sees but what is politically or sociologically expedient to be seen...

...All were speaking out of a deep pride in their blackness, as it is almost mandatory to do today, and also out of a feeling of being seriously at odds with the way life is in America...

...These are not illegitimate observations to raise around the concerns of art, for not the least of its qualities that have won it such prestige in our culture is its capacity to witness the need for moral change...

...the misleading psychology, misleading because again, Styron hasn't made a reading of Negro or slave mentality but only of a religious fanatic who happens to be a Negro...

...Some of the specific charges: that Styron deliberately distorted the known facts about Turner and slavery in order to pander to the stereotyped view of blacks held by whites...

...Lacking complicated syntactical structure and vast vocabulary, it depends on what linguists call para-language, that is, gesture, physical expression, and modulation of cadences and intonation which serve to change the meaning— in incredibly subtle ways—of the same collection of words...

...And on the basis of what is to be observed in life and art, self-definition proceeds against the most arduous of tests: what is edifying in the character of an individual or a people inspires attention only as it shapes itself out of the complex of stresses and contradictions to which experience or the imagination subjects it...

...And what that relationship says about privilege and power it also says about cultural and historical legitimacy...

...One of the most serious judgments on The Confessions is that dealing as it does within the premises of a harmful legacy, it has contributed little to a positive revaluation of that legacy, let alone to a conquest of it...

...The still forming and emerging reality of black Americans consists in more than suffering, grievance, spontaneity, and soul...

...I see neither value nor wisdom in branding him a racist simply because his vision of Turner does not correspond to what one perceives oneself in history: It is hard enough for the artist to live with the uncertain truths of his own vision, to live in dread of the acid day when his readers tell him he has failed, let alone to be told when it is all over that he has been discovered in the deliberate service of racism and oppression...

...But it is quite possible that the reductions and rationalizations started even then, for Turner had little control over how his words were put down by Gray—a Southern gentleman who felt no admiration for Turner's deeds--or how his thoughts would be colored, interpreted, and extended by Gray's own judgments...

...It may turn out, of course, that the vision a writer has of a particular figure cannot be realized within the limits of the meaning history gives to such a figure...

...A people must define itself, and minorities have the responsibility of having their ideals and image recognized as part of the composite image which is that of the still forming American people...

...Well, Jimmy is scarcely the model of an 1831 black slave rebel on a Virginia plantation: he neither speaks nor, one should imagine, is any longer obliged to think like one...

...B B UT SINCE ONE of the impressions gained from the black critics is that Styron, as a white man, labored under a fatal difficulty in his attempt to portray a black Turner, it might be useful to pause here and consider some of the implications of this controversy for black writers defining their own historical situation...

...We may all hope that out of this reawakening will emerge a literary portrayal of Nat Turner that is infused with the blacks' sense of their own past and which, as a result, offers some necessary corrections and modifications to Styron's effort...

...And so too is the sense of violation which most black readers feel over Styron's portrayal—and the white majority acclamation—of Nat Turner's reality...

...Lerone Bennett, historian and editor at Ebony...

...The latter point is of special importance, for we cannot pretend that Turner does not stand on the side of the blacks in their historic confrontation with whites, and that therefore he is not a more immediate part of the black reality...

...So that while it is entirely understandable and even justifiable for black writers to be less than enthusiastic about Styron's portrait of Turner, they are, it would appear, also indebted to him for having reawakened them to the possibilities for powerful fiction which Turner's life contains, as well as to a militant sense of their prerogative to define their own historical reality...

...that though Turner was also a slave preacher, Styron minimized his religious and social contact with the slaves...

...that he portrayed Turner as a man who despised his fellow slaves and expressed toward them the kind of disgust felt only by white Southerners...

...than a meditation on history...

...Reading The Confessions against such a background of feeling, and discerning in it a violation of their historical belief, their first reflex is to question the credentials and condemn the motives of a Virginia-born writer in whose regional history Turner stands more as villain than as hero...

...Only after most of the white judgments were in did the voice of the black critics begin to be heard...

...On the contrary, the novelist must be at liberty to treat these as he likes, if he is to reproduce the much more complex and ramifying totality with historical faithfulness...

...C. Vann Woodward tells us that the known facts were so skimpy that the author had as free a hand to create and invent as any novelist could have wished for...

...that Styron emasculated him by focusing his sexual and romantic desires upon a white girl rather than upon a black woman, as well as by investing him with homosexual and onanistic tendencies...

...If The Confessions fail to witness such a need it has nothing to do with Styron's "racism," as some of the angrier black critics charge, but with the fact that his personal vision seems to have been insufficient to the enormous demands of his subject...

...He [the world-historical individual] must not be placed on a pedestal in order to appear as a great figure, for the events themselves will raise him in imposing upon him their task...

...In spite of the book's elaborate conception and inspired religious ratiocinations, one can scarcely imagine a more comforting and even entertaining reinforcement of the conventional white American outlook upon blacks...

...This is said with full awareness of the dangers in trying to relate literature to social needs, for it can quite easily be taken as a request that literature subordinate itself to sociopolitical demands...

...STYRON AND HIS BLACK CRITICS as a work of historical scholarship than as a novel...

...F F OR REASONS such as these we cannot be too surprised at the almost opposite reactions of blacks and whites to William Styron's novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which is based on the life of a slave who led a bloody but short-lived uprising in Southhampton, Virginia, in 1831...

...To see the book as historical fiction is to be obliged to concede it the privileges of vision and invention to which it is entitled, while insisting that these freedoms be exercised within the essential historical terms of the subject with which it deals...

...Since a faithful portrayal of Turner, Thelwell argues, "requires some literary approximation of this language," one of Styron's major failures lies in the fact that "Nat speaks, or rather meditates, in no language at all...

...166...

...Turner's reality as a slave preacher and rebel must, in any case, be judged against what history tells us of the Negro church...

...It could be argued, of course, that the tone of Turner's original "Confessions" as dictated to Thomas Gray would naturally lead a modem observer to find in him a strong disposition to religious fanaticism...

...I do not share in the acrimony of the attack made against Styron...

...ONE AFTERNOON last summer I hap pened to be watching a TV discus sion among five or six black teen agers...

...To make such a claim, then, is almost to suggest that the imagination as the crucial instrument of artistic creation enjoys a free and vigorous life among black writers but is moribund and impotent among those who are white...

...We must," Thelwell writes, "insist on our prerogative to define this heritage in terms of our own choice...

...and that, psychologically, each serves in its own way as the source of a mythic vision through which the children of the ante-bellum time in America tend to look out upon each other...

...Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry...

...And Lukacs himself points out that "the principal front of struggle in the artistic sphere . . . is the conquest of harmful legacies...

...Michael Tbelwell, writer and teacher at the University of Massachusetts...

...Lukacs then goes on to speak of Walter Scott's approach to the historical novel: Scott discovers the only possible means whereby the historical novel can reflect historical reality adequately, without either monumentally romanticizing the important figures of history or dragging them down to the level of private psychological trivia...

...John A. Williams, novelist and essayist...

...that Styron questioned Turner's courage as a slave leader by making him falter in the act of shedding white blood in behalf of freedom...

...When we had our meetings of this kind we held them in our own way and were not interfered with by white folks...

...His creator places in his mouth a sterile and leaden prose...

...It may well be the black critical intelligentsia who hold no respect for such a distinction to whom Genovese (in NYRB) is referring when he points out that their attack upon Styron reflects a requirement for "conformity, myth-making, and historical fabrication...

...The latter, he says, is a language of conspiracy and disguised meaning, of pointed irony and sharp metaphor...

...in which case, the best way of liberating himself from such constraints is not for the writer to violate the reality of a figure who already exists, but to invent his own hero in history...

...As he says in the novel, "maybe he [Thomas Gray] is right...

...What seems chiefly in question then is whether the details of Turner's life and character, as Styron fashions them, contribute to Turner's aliveness as an individual, without sacrificing his historical reality as a slave rebel, without reducing or suppressing the nature of his historical mission, or without dragging him down to the "level of private psychological trivia...

...Franklin Frazier, in his excellent study of that institution, reminds us that the Negro church served as the first seat of political agitation among the slaves, a function it continues to serve in our own time...

...Nor do I insist upon a portrayal of Turner serviceable to the immediate ideological needs of the black community...

...Maybe...

...If one regards the continued denial of their historical "truths" which minority groups suffer in American life and literature as a national "sketch gone bad," as "unfinished" historical business, or as a "harmful legacy," then one cannot be satisfied with the efforts of artists which have the effect of leaving the sketch "bad," the business "unfinished," or the legacy "harmful...

...Nor is there much, if anything, in it which answers to the Negroes' sense of whatever dignity they were able to eke out of a terrible history—a history across which blacks and whites will have to reach with a handclasp before blacks can begin to confess to any love for this country...

...And this violation, one should add, does not lie in the invention or "distortion" of details so much as in the effect which the emphasis of such inventions has on shaping Turner's character and suppressing his sociopolitical reality in history...

...They had been critical of the experience America imposed upon them, but they certainly had not voiced any hopelessness over the kind of future they were demanding...

...There is nothing in it that invites white Americans to revise some of their historic prejudices and correct some of their surviving stereotypes concerning the character and outlook of black Americans or the nature of their response to slavery...

...Negroes, after all, have been publishing fiction in America for more than 100 years...

...Further, as historians of culture have pointed out, a group's collective vision of itself or of its past is not necessarily incorrect simply because it may not correspond to the estimate others make of it...

...God is dead and gone, which is why I can no longer reach Him...

...In a prefatory note, Styron claims to have "rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was leader...

...And Styron himself admits in the same prefatory note that "in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat...

...Nor, that being true, can we deny that the meaning of his mission is now an inextricable part of the meaning of their life in America, and that they have a greater stake in preserving what history bequeaths of that meaning than does any other group...

...and in The Confessions es sions it is the essence of Turner's consciousness that counts most seriously, not those homespun styles and flavors of it imparted through idiom or dialect...

...This is necessary not only to black needs of the moment, but to fill a vacuum in the total history, consciousness and sensibility of the nation...

...B B UT TO RETURN to The Confessions...

...The promise of accuracy was neither a wise nor a necessary one to make, not only because it was clearly hard to keep, but also because there was precious little historical fact to remain faithful to except the event of the rebellion itself...

...Perhaps it was his [Jimmy's] diamond-bright intelligence which allowed me to say "When I plunge into Nat Turner . . . he will respond with as much intelligence as I can give him...

...In fact, The Confessions might well have been a far more persuasive fictional statement if Turner had been Styron's own man rather than an authentic man of history, if the chief character had been Styron's own invention—one of God's millions of anonymous children in Southern history...

...A A LL OF THIS leads, and not improperly, to certain judgments on the quality of Styron's artistic vision and its relevance to, or effect on, the psychohistorical state of American society, particularly in regard to racial disharmony...

...Some man who had a little education and had been taught something about the Bible would be our preacher...

...But one must, for though it tells us a good deal about language it also ignores a good deal about fiction...

...Some of the current struggles in our schools, particularly those around history textbooks, are the fruits of that contradiction...

...It would surely be reasonable for them to wonder, which a good many of them probably did, whether Styron was not attempting to lay claims to a troika of genres, perhaps hoping to write off his critical losses in one direction against his successes in another...

...and it is also this conflict that seems responsible for the sense of ambivalence and even regret with which he assesses his role in the rebellion...

...So his argument is useful merely as a reminder to black writers that it is about time they undertook more fully the exercise of the prerogative of which he speaks...

...This is not to say the elaborately stylized language Styron employs comes anywhere close to reflecting the consciousness of a black slave rebel of 1831...

...It is such a creative, and at the same time corrective, activity that Ellison has in mind when he states that Negro writers and those of the other minorities have their own task of contributing to the total image of the American by depicting the experience of their own groups...

...And, considering the hostile tone of the voice, one felt it was influenced as much by what the black critics themselves thought about the book as by their resentment that it had been so loudly applauded in the media of "the white literary establishment...

...Nonwhite minorities may be recognized as socioeconomic realities, but they have no relationship to American privilege and power except as it is a relationship which defines who it is in fact that enjoys privilege and wields power...

...a strange fusion of Latinate classicism, a kind of New England Episcopalian prissiness...

...It is undoubtedly the language in which Turner's rebellion and the countless other plots for insurrection were formulated...

...Contributors in addition to Clarke are: Loyle Hairston, a freelance writer...

...I had them say: "It is hard to love America as it is...

...Clearly, then the lack of accuracy in Styron's reproduction of historical detail is hard STYRON AND HIS BLACK CRITICS ly a legitimate ground on which to criticize the portrayal of Nat Turner...

...In this, Styron may well have been misled by some of the examples available to him in his acquaintanceship with black Americans...

...And it becomes even more absurd when one considers that no black American writer has ever been heard to speak of the impossibility or the impertinence of blacks portraying white character...

...This something they are waiting to see resolved, what can it be...

...And there doesn't seem to be much reason to love it for the way it has been...

...that he attempted to "steal the meaning" of Turner's life...

...The slaves, he points out, were forced to develop two languages in America, one for their masters and the other, a language of oppression, for themselves...

...Nor was it necessary for him to have been so singularly articulate and intelligent, for here, as Frazier quotes, is an ex-slave's version of what the slave preacher was: Our preachers were usually plantation folks just like the rest of us...

...What Ellison demands in the effort of many white novelists who have attempted to portray Negro reality he would no doubt also demand in the work of the blacks...

...Which is also to suggest, finally, that Turner was not all that necessary to what we can observe of Styron's purpose...

...It is this legacy which has been responsible for the duality of national psychology and life-styles as well as for the growth of sharp socioeconomic contradictions between black and white Americans...

...second, factual accuracy is not, in my view, crucial to a judgment of the book...

...These criticisms, particularly those concerning the biographical and other physical details of Turner's fictional life, rest on the claim that they are in contradiction to clear historical evidence, a claim which seems to account for the book being approached more Oliver Killens, novelist and essayist...

...In fact when—in a heated exchange with Aptheker in The Nation—Styron comes to invoke aesthetic authority, he leans on none other than Georg Lukacs, the eminent Marxist critic and one of the best living students of the historical novel...

...But the problem of tendentiousness aside, there exists a clear need for black writers to portray their own reality...

...While idiom is an accurate reflector of a particular cast of consciousness, it is by no means the only one, and, to the novelist, cer - tainly not an indispensable device...

...T T HE MOST STRIKING of the essays in Ten Black Writers Respond is the one by Michael Thelwell...

...that the benign aspects of slavery were emphasized in order to reduce the justification of Turner's rebellion...

...Yet not very far into the book it is discovered that there has in fact been a departure, notably from the facts of Turner's parentage and childhood (which Turner had dictated to Thomas Gray in his original "Confessions," a 4000-word document that serves as the basis for Styron's novel...

...I got the feeling they weren't committed to so total a renunciation, but that under the circumstances, "No" was the closest and briefest approximation to what they felt...

...Van Gogh, for instance, speaks of the world as one of God's sketches gone bad and interprets the artist's duty as that of "recon JERVIS ANDERSON structing this sketch and giving it the style it lacks...

...He cites Lukacs thus: What matters in the novel is fidelity in reproduction of the material foundations of the life of a given period, its manners and feelings and thoughts deriving from these...

...For, as Styron himself has since observed, Turner's "Confessions" were "taken down in a backwoods jail by a white man whose own reliability as an amanuensis must be questioned...

...These basic attitudes underlay critical responses to the book...

...Nor, if I thought of the majority of black Americans, could I have said anything different...

...that Turner's thought and speech reflected white consciousness and white language...

...By and large, he is right...

...And I do not question his right to invent detail except his invention of the white Miss Whitehead as the chief—in fact, only—object of Turner's libido, since such a thing is not at all necessary to the por JERVIS ANDERSON trayal of Turner's historical mission as a slave rebel...

...As such it is also the source of the crisis that has now developed in America not only around socioeconomic contradictions, but also around such related ones as black dignity, black identity, and black power...

...But having thus given the impression that his book is both history and fiction, he then goes on to define it as "less a historical novel...

...First, this article aims merely to be a general review of the controversy...

...it is a combination of the mania and the frustration that seem to account for his impulse to rebellion...

...With time on my hands, and remaining within the context of their negation, I tried to put into their mouths what I thought they might have said if the circumstances were more suitable to elaboration...

...The misleading dilemmas, misleading because they aren't the dilemmas that being a Negro or a slave might conceivably pose, but dilemmas proper to a certain kind of religious fanaticism...

...The prerogative of defining their reality entails, therefore, an obligation to perceive and acknowledge the complexities of their experience, the courage to see the negative as well as the positive aspects of their historical reality, and a willingness to endure the self-denying rigors of portraying so demanding a composite...

...On the basis of precedent alone— the excellent portrayal of Negro character by Faulkner and Gertrude Stein, to name only two—it seems rather absurd to suggest that white American novelists are incapable of perceiving and portraying black character...

...that salient facts concerning Turner's marriage to a slave woman and his early attachment to his parents and grandmother were suppressed...

...I think the book bears a closer resemblance to the historical novel than to any other genre with which we are familiar...

...But to speak of Ellison—a man as committed to the experience of his own people as he is to his vocation as an artist—is to be reminded that the prerogative of black writers to define the humanity and reality of their own group is not all...

...One might even go so far as to agree with Richard Gilman who, in an essay in The New Republic, questions whether Styron needed to use a black figure at all: for this purpose the protagonist did not have to be a Negro, and his being one introduces all sorts of distractions and irrelevancies into the book...

...Lukacs, in The Historical Novel, reaffirms these principles: The portrayal of "world-historical individuals" from the standpoint of their success or failure in their historical mission frees them STYRON AND HIS BLACK CRITICS of all the trivial anecdotic characteristics of biographical portrayal without making them forfeit any of their human aliveness...

...Camus speaks of the artist's role in aiding the completion of the unfinished business of the world...

...To the majority of white readers, who are not involved in the sentiments which the blacks hold of Turner, such a reflex has no place in the evaluation of literature which stands, in any case, as an end in itself...

...Anyone who has been privileged to catch the performance of a good black preacher in the rural South (or Martin Luther King talking to a black audience) understands something of the range and flexibility of this language...

...A people, in the long run, do not care to be made a gift of their "beauty" so much as they care to see it defined and accounted for...

...Their struggle can scarcely have a larger meaning than that they are waiting for something in the spirit of the country to be resolved before they can give themselves fully to it or confess to any great love for it...

...It would seem that Styron's determination to make Turner as intelligent as possible—evidently according to the way intelligence is perceived and admired in Negroes by white Americans—led him to portray Turner's consciousness through a rhetoric that bears a closer resemblance to the mannered periods of Henry James, than, say, to the blunt shafts of Malcolm X. All of which is to say that the fault of Styron's language lies less in its failure to capture accurately the externals of slave idiom than in its failure to reflect credibly the inner life of Turner's consciousness...

...If anything, it strains away from credibility rather than toward it...

...Unless he was the only American writer inspired by the possibility of re-creating or resurrecting Nat Turner, we are all entitled to ask what were the black artists—especially those to whom, it now appears, Turner is a figure of such surpassing importance—doing all those years...

...To think of this cleavage and of its seedtime on the old plantation is to see that there have always been two Americas, one black and one white...

...Seldom," he says, remarking upon the image of the Negro in American literature, "is [the Negro] drawn as that sea sitively focused process of opposites, of good and evil, of instinct and intellect, of passion and spirituality, which great literary art has projected as the image of man...

...But the clock was running and the moderator waiting, so each of them, with different degrees of certainty, simply said, "No...

...It consists also of moral strength fashioned out of one of the darkest histories any group has known, of weaknesses and errors of outlook that mark the history of any people, and personal follies that connect them with the history of man...

...This was not done, and there can be no more excuse for failing to do this than for STYRON AND HIS BLACK CRITICS making a fanatic out of him...

...So a history they are asked to accept as their own, and out of which they are told to develop an image of their reality, is a history written and interpreted and validated by others, a history viewed through the perspective of a group which traditionally considers the country, its values and its past to be essentially white...

...he can still evoke reality without being tied to the actual flavors and colors of idiom...

...I didn't think that was too unfair or optimistic an interpretation...

...maybe all was for nothing, maybe worse than nothing, and all I've done was evil in the sight of God...

...Any kind of language, imaginatively conceived and flexibly applied, is able to capture essential states of consciousness...

...It is for some of these reasons that it is hard to imagine Turner after his capture virtually collapsing in remorse and, in anticipation of one of the sophisticated theological notions of the mid-2Qth century, finding that God is dead...

...But I am sympathetic with the feeling most black readers have that their sense of their own past has been violated and that so too has the sociopolitical meaning history ascribes not only to Turner's rebellion but also to all the other slave rebellions here in America, as well as in places like Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and other islands in the West Indies...

...My own view is that it is the tension between the black and white sense of American reality which is distilled in the spirit of the country and which, as the evidence so clearly suggests, is one of the legacies of slavery...

...Ernest Kaiser, staff member of the Schomburg Collection...

...All of this not only underplays the social condition of enslavement but also tends to make the politics of rebellion somewhat irrelevant...