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     Emanuel Veteran Poster Username: Emanuel Post Number: 652 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: |
I never knew of the existence of the two main novels regarding Nat Turner in the article below. I'll have to check them both out. Styron’s Choice By Jess Row Published: September 5, 2008 Nineteen sixty-eight began as a promising year for William Styron. After six years of intense work, he had published, the previous fall, the novel he thought would cement his reputation: “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” an account of an 1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, Va., narrated in Turner’s voice. It was a risky, even provocative book — he’d always known it would be — but the gamble appeared to have paid off. “The Confessions” got excellent reviews, appeared on the best-seller list, was sold to 20th Century Fox and won a Pulitzer Prize. Best of all, Styron said, was the response from many African-Americans. Later in life (Styron died in 2006) he recalled traveling to a historically black college to receive an honorary degree shortly after “The Confessions” was published: “I felt gratitude at their acceptance of me,” he wrote, “and, somehow more important, at my acceptance of them, as if my literary labors and my plunge into history had helped dissolve many of my preconceptions about race that had been my birthright as a Southerner.” Amid the upheavals of the spring and summer of 1968 — Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April, Robert Kennedy’s in June, rioting in American cities, the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago — Beacon Press published a slim volume of essays called “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.” Almost overnight, “The Confessions” became the center of a debate that has helped shape American literature ever since. “The Confessions of Nat Turner” is based, very loosely, on a “confession” Turner gave to his court-appointed lawyer, Thomas Gray, shortly before his execution. Gray later published the confession. Styron wrote that the Turner he found in Gray’s text was a “dangerous religious lunatic, . . . a psychopathic monster”; rather than expand on the historical record, he chose to write a meditation on history, giving him “dimensions of humanity that were almost totally absent in the documentary evidence.” In the novel, Turner is a young slave brought up as a domestic servant in the household of a wealthy, altruistic plantation owner who decides to teach Turner to read as proof that slaves are capable of “cultivation.” In Styron’s depiction, Turner is pious, even saintly, with no romantic entanglements other than a chaste attachment to a young white woman who secretly holds abolitionist views. Styron was a close friend of James Baldwin and drew inspiration from Baldwin’s novel “Another Country” (1962), which depicted interracial romance in late 1950s New York from the perspective of both black and white characters. Baldwin, in turn, praised “The Confessions,” observing that Styron had “begun to write the common history — ours.” But in the broader African-American intellectual world, the novel was widely condemned. “Ten Black Writers Respond” has to be read in light of this history: as a polemic and corrective that introduced a spectrum of opinion mostly ignored in the mainstream press. “For all its prose power and somber earnestness,” Loyle Hairston wrote, “Styron’s novel utterly fails the simple test of honesty.” “This is meditation mired in misinterpretation,” Charles V. Hamilton wrote, “and this is history many . . . black people reject.” John Oliver Killens: “In terms of getting into the slave’s psyche and his idiom, it is a monumental failure.” The 10 writers — magazine editors, psychiatrists, librarians, academics — argue with Styron’s rejection of the historical record, his interpretation of Turner’s scriptural and religious inspirations, his use of African-American dialect and his invocation of inflammatory stereotypes in both black and white characters. The book’s tone at times echoes avant-garde manifestoes and agitprop pamphlets, but just as often it is pained, searching and evenhanded. Mike Thelwell wrote that “The Confessions” “demonstrates the persistence of . . . myths, racial stereotypes and literary clichés even in the best intentioned and most enlightened minds. . . . The real ‘history’ of Nat Turner, and indeed of black people, remains to be written.” “Ten Black Writers Respond” was met with a counterblast of scorn from the establishment, most famously a long essay in The New York Review of Books by Eugene Genovese, who dismissed Styron’s critics as censorious radicals opposed to racial dialogue. At public forums, young activists shouted Styron down when he tried to defend himself. After protests from Ossie Davis and other African-American actors, the planned movie was shelved. Styron retreated into private life and for many years remained embittered and unrepentant; in a 1992 afterword to the novel, he wrote that he had “unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time” and dismissed “Ten Black Writers” as “intellectual squalor.” Late in life, however, he was gratified to hear younger African-American scholars, including Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., address the novel in more favorable terms. Gates even encouraged Spike Lee to consider making a film of “The Confessions”; Lee did consider it but later abandoned the project for financial reasons. Over the decades, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and “Ten Black Writers Respond” together helped create an explosion of interest in slave narratives and in 19th-century African-American literature, and made the study of slavery a vibrant field in American history. Not coincidentally, these same decades saw the emergence of what scholars call the “postmodern slave narrative”: a genre that includes Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Charles Johnson’s “Middle Passage,” Edward P. Jones’s “Known World” and Sherley Anne Williams’s “Dessa Rose.” Williams, speaking for many writers of her generation, identified “The Confessions” as a source — albeit a negative one — for her novel, writing that she no longer wanted the African-American experience to be, as she put it, “at the mercy of literature” written by others. But it would be a mistake to describe the “Confessions” controversy only as a struggle over who has the right to tell the story of slavery. (“I do not believe that the right to describe . . . black people in American society is the private domain of Negro writers,” the novelist John A. Williams wrote in “Ten Black Writers Respond.” “I cannot fault Styron’s intent.”) Styron himself admitted that his novel was an effort to adapt Turner’s sensibility and language to the 20th century, and it was the artificiality of this adaptation that most infuriated his critics. The prevailing mode of much historical fiction since then has been precisely the opposite: to take a term from the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, novelists have wished to “defamiliarize” history by making it unrecognizable, unknowable, fantastic, brutal. “Beloved,” with its harsh, fragmented narration of infanticide, is the most obvious example, but consider also Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” which portrays the Mexican frontier in the 19th century as an apocalyptic wasteland populated by psychopaths and mystics. Whether these novels are more honest than “The Confessions of Nat Turner” is perhaps an unfair question — honesty in fiction is a moving target — but they do embody a radically different sensibility, one that refuses to collapse the past into the present and that makes history almost fetishistically “different,” difficult to accept or assimilate. It may be unfair to celebrate a writer for being so publicly rejected and railed against, but 40 years’ perspective should allow us to credit Styron for taking the risk of writing “The Confessions” and to appreciate the courage of the 10 writers who dissected it in searing detail. Their confrontation helped shatter the idea that there can or should be one version of “how slavery was”; now we have a hundred different versions — some omnipresent, some long silenced, some real, some fictional — telling a messier, trickier, less comforting story. This may not be the “common history” James Baldwin spoke of, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Jess Row is the author of “The Train to Lo Wu,” a collection of stories. He teaches at the College of New Jersey. | ||
| Thumper Veteran Poster Username: Thumper Post Number: 645 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
Hello All, Emanuel: Thanks for the post. I read "Confessions" years ago, a year or two before Stryon died. I thought the book was fantastic! What is fascinating to me is that the novel still holds up beautifully, yet the arguments lodge against it does not. The book is wonderful. If you haven't read it, please do, decide for yourself the true merit of the novel. | ||
| Emanuel Veteran Poster Username: Emanuel Post Number: 653 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
I figured it was Troy. Thanks for recommendation. I just reserved it at the library. Hope I can find the time to read it. | ||
| Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 7416 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
Thanks for the post. I read "Confessions" years ago, a year or two before Stryon died. I thought the book was fantastic! What is fascinating to me is that the novel still holds up beautifully, yet the arguments lodge against it does not. The book is wonderful. If you haven't read it, please do, decide for yourself the true merit of the novel. (I respectfully disagree) | ||
| Carey AALBC .com Platinum Poster Username: Carey Post Number: 1158 Registered: 05-2004 Rating: N/A |
Chris, why don't you tell us ...respectfully what you disagree with. You know you are one of my guys ...I generally know when you are being facetious and laugh along. You are bold and couragous in your replies ...I like that ...We've been doing this a long time ...but lately ...and I don't know if it's your thang ...but lately you seem to be working on this image of ...well ...being a pesky fly *LOL*. What's up with that  ? ...you even buzzed around the head of my girl Kitty ...she doesn't usually get in mess with anyone but you sort of pushed her off her spot ...Am just saying ...because you know ...I can get on the last nerve of some individuals ...but that is not my goal(usually) ...but just tell me ...what ya workin' with? | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 458 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
you even buzzed around the head of my girl Kitty ...she doesn't usually get in mess with anyone but you sort of pushed her off her spot LOL, Carey...actually you can't blame Chris for my stress- and hormone-induced "fall". Today just was not a day for any of my pet peeves to cross my path. Willful idiocy and ungrateful children among them. donning red wig and clearing throat "The sun will come out...tomorrow...bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow...there'll be sun..." | ||
| Steve_s Veteran Poster Username: Steve_s Post Number: 388 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Jess Row writes: "The prevailing mode of much historical fiction since then has been precisely the opposite: to take a term from the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, novelists have wished to 'defamiliarize' history by making it unrecognizable, unknowable, fantastic, brutal. 'Beloved,' with its harsh, fragmented narration of infanticide...." Jess Row may not know that infanticide is depicted twice, and harshly, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, first when a woman holding a baby jumps to her death from the boat after she's been sold down the river; the second time when Cassy, Simon Legree's concubine on a Northern Louisiana plantation, kills her baby so it will not have to grow up under slavery. The late Bebe Moore Campbell said in an interview in Black Issues that UTC contains the original "tragic mulatto" in American ficttion, however, she identifies "Eliza" when I think she means Cassy. Anyway, only the first sentence applies to Cassy, I haven't read "Imitation of Life" by Fannie Hurst. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HST/is_5_5/ai_108312738/pg_4?tag=artBody;col1 Cassy is the pampered favorite daughter of a white New Orleans Creole by his mistress. When the man dies unexpectedly without a will, she's put up for auction. In my opinion she's only tragic because she loses her freedom, otherwise she doesn't conform to any of the usual stereotypes: she's not rendered asexual, she doesn't have an identity crisis, she doesn't show any disloyalty to the group, and she's not straddling any metaphorical fence that would make her unable to live in either world. In fact, when Legree discards her in favor of the younger Emmeline and she's forced to work at hard labor, she more than pulls her own weight, she takes up the slack for the older people. Eliza is Cassy's long lost daughter who escapes with her young son across the frozen Ohio River from Kentucky into Ohio, just as the real life Margaret Garner would do in 1856, four years after the publication of UTC. "Perhaps one reason why Toni Morrison omits any description of the historical flight of Margaret across the frozen ice (from Kentucky to Ohio) may have been to obviate comparison with Eliza and the 'floundering masses of ice' in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Surely, amongst much else, Beloved is a 'black-wise' rewriting of Beecher Stowe's novel. For instance, Uncle Tom's Cabin begins in February, while February is Sethe's 'free month'. Beecher Stowe's Hale -- the slave-driver -- and Harry -- the slave child -- might even have yielded up Toni Morrison's use of the name Halle. Henry/Harry/Hal are variants of the same name, as seen in Shakespeare, for example. While source speculation is often absurd, offering potential intertextual depth is not. After all, going back to founding texts is one way in which poor culture manages to struggle on." http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/muckley.htm There's something interesting I learned about the subject of infanticide from Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us, the triple biography of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon. A nineteenth-century English folklorist named Francis James Child collected a body of antique Scottish and English story-songs that had been handed down on the Scottish moors since the sixteenth century. They became known as the Child Ballads and they included songs such as "Greensleeves" (Coltrane recorded it), "Barbara Allen," "Maid of Constant Sorrow," "Geordie," and "Mary Hamilton." Although these songs were anonymous, a Drake University historian named Deborah A. Symonds recently found evidence that their nameless writers were overwhelmingly -- ten to one -- female. The subjects of the Child Ballads evolved over the centuries, but Weller says that... "As feudal life in Scotland and northern England gave way to the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, the ballads became obsessed with a single subject: these hard-pressed women's abandonment of their infants and, in the frequent extreme, their desperation-bred acts of infanticide (as in "Mary Hamilton"). The intense refocusing of the ballads' subject matter reflected events in the changing society. In feudal days, a woman's pregnancy would trigger a betrothal, and the newly married couple would live on the family's land. But with the buying up of small farms in the eighteenth century by the emerging bourgeoisie, the poor were left landless -- you couldn't marry without land to live on -- so the young poor stopped marrying. While the shamed, land-poor menfolk ran away to join the army, the shamed pregnant women were left to bear out-of-wedlock children in vast number." So the terror at giving birth unmarried led some women to smother their infant children rather than have them face inevitable slow death by cold and starvation. These Child Ballads (and faux-Child Ballads about infanticide like "Crow on the Cradle") became mainstays of the female folksingers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when sexual mores were changing and getting an abortion was dangerous and harrowing. I realize that there's much more to Toni Morrison's Beloved than infanticide and a similarity to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, however, Ms. Stowe lived at the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati during the era of the Fugitive Slave Law and she no doubt heard these stories firsthand. I'm just suggesting that infanticide in Ms. Morrison's novel, besides being an indictment of slavery, might, like the revival of the Child Ballads in the 1950s and 1960s, have an additional meaning for our age, like the incest you find in The Bluest Eye, The Color Purple, and Just Above My Head. | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 459 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
Steve, thanks for the history lesson re: the influence of Child Ballads via "Girls Like Us". One of Mitchell's songs, "Little Green" always gets me...it's about the daughter she placed for adoption, but eventually reunited with decades later. There's also a mention of that child in "Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody": Now your kids are coming up straight And my child's a stranger I bore her But, I could not raise her I've always imagined too that the "Carole" Mitchell references in the preceding verse is Carole King: Caught in the middle Carole, we're middle class We're middle aged We were wild in the old days Birth of rock 'n roll days ...especially when she sings: Down at the Chinese Cafe We'd be dreaming on our dimes We'd be playing-- "You give your love, so sweetly" One more time ...from King's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow." I'm a fan of all three of these singers, so I just might check out "Girls Like Us." | ||
| Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 7419 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
(To wit: The novel is based on an extant document, the "confession" of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Gray. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mission from God to lead a slave uprising and destroy the white race. Indeed, most historians consider Gray's "confessions" to be largely fictitious. Styron takes further liberties with the historical Nat Turner, such as removing his wife from the story. , the novel was strongly criticised by some black Americans for its treatment of Turner as a brooding and sexually disturbed figure.[citation needed] Turner and one of his supporters are shown fantasizing about sexually assaulting white women. The "myth of the black rapist", painting black men as prone to sexual violence (particularly against white women), represented a longstanding racist stereotype that was sometimes used as an excuse for lynching black men.[ There is something sick and twisted in the so called "liberal" psyche wherein it insists it is not racist even as it involuntarily expresses or holds beliefs it would condemn as racist-- Witness Bill and Hillary Clinton's race baiting campaign in the Pennsylvania primary and their shock at being called racists for it. More later. I am going to re read John Henrik Clark's anthology, "William Styron's Nat Turner, 10 Black Writers Reply" so that I might come up with accurate quotes. Don't nobody try to defend it because it got a Pulitzer--some of the slime that has won that prize is not worth wrapping fish in. It's just like the Wizard of Oz giving the Scarecrow a "brain" etc. |
