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ROBERT COLES
asked to read more B. F. Skinner, more Lukacs, and become more "quan–
titative," less "qualitative" and more "historical"; and Freud is called a
poor sociologist who never knew what Durkheim or Weber did. Again and
again we choose to ignore exactly what a given man is doing, and when
and where, and in the face of what professional resistance or prejudice.
As critics we also refuse to invoke the most obvious and pertinent stan–
dards; and for Styron's
Confessions of Nat Turner
those standards have
to do with the novel's success or failure as a work of the writer's
imagination.
I think Styron has written an enduring book. He captures a whole
region, the speech, the beautiful land, the moody weather and every–
where the open black fear and the white fear that masquerades as edgy
pride. Whatever its historical merits, I think the book will
make
history,
be a part of our history. Like Faulkner, Styron will not let up on the
reader. He has some of Faulkner's passionate, withering power, and like
him he is a Southerner, brought up on talk, on stories and on the
region's calculated and desperate ambiguity. I do not see how anyone –
regardless of race - can ever be the same again after reading his novel,
after reading what the facts known about Nat Turner did to and brought
out from the mind of William Styron. For me the book made the share–
cropper quoted above become more "rcal," more of a "person." That is
the point - and the irony - of what a writer can do. The sharecropper
is
real,
is
a person to me. God knows I have seen him often enough. Yet,
when I recently went to see him again, with Styron's Nat in mind, some–
thing seemed different. The sharecropper's "life," his words and eyes
and gestures became Nat's, and in a flash I felt myself "seeing" and
"feeling" more than I could before. I suppose I could say that Styron's
writing made me newly and gratefully impressionable, and as a result
more broadly observant.
The obvious simplicity of the novel's plot binds together all sorts
of complicated and tortuous "inner" events. Nat Turner has been caught
after an abortive but striking, persistent and fearful rebellion. In Styron's
book Nat sits in jail awaiting execution and speaks and speaks and speaks ;
and dreams and remembers and meditates and wonders and listens. In
a few days he will be dead and the novel about his life and spirit over.
Nat's listening is particularly important. Styron wants to bring Nat alive,
make him seethe and cower, but as a writer Styron knows that the most
private and withdrawn person lives with others, even if they populate an
imaginary world of dreams and fantasies. And as a Southerner Styron
knows that slavery or no slavery the region's twin distinctions have been
its willingness to exploit the Negro ruthlessly and live beside him in fitful
and peculiar closeness.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
conveys more than
