ARGUMENTS
413
inflated, self-congratulatory, sentimental white myths about their own
genteel and chivalric past." Mr. Thelwell implies that the Negro has
never accepted those myths. But what has happened to the sense of
irony and ambiguity that Mr. Thelwell has already demonstrated in his
earlier writing? Does he really believe that outrage - based on actual
self-respect or a yearning for it - cannot smolder in people who are
also beaten, intimidated and driven to self-hate? Or that people cannot
accept what they have to (even believe it right they should)
and also
dream every night about power and vengeance?
Mr. Thelwell has written at even greater length on
The Confes–
sions of Nat Turner
("Styron and Turner,"
The Massachusetts Review,
Winter, 1968). There as well as here he keeps on going back to the
novel's failure to encompass and indeed highlight the "tradition of ...
black leadership" and the development of an independent "black con–
sciousness" in the Negro community. In fact, sadly, it is Styron (and
not, for example, many of our historians) who has brought Nat's leader–
ship to our attention and made us all think about his anguished strug–
gle for independence, of mind as well as body. For doing so he is told
that his novel "reinforces the foolish and dangerous notion that the
black community inhabits the myths of its oppressors and shares the
same historical experience."
If
only victims didn't "participate emo–
tionally" in what happens to them at the hands of their oppressors.
If
only the weak didn't learn to believe (but sometimes struggle against
believing) the myths that powerful plantation owners, corporation presi–
dents and commissars all forcefully propagate.
If
only blacks could
thoroughly, decisively separate their historical experience from their
"perceptions" of that experience.
If
only Jews hadn't learned self-loath–
ing and suspicion and a desperate clannishness based on the living,
breathing fearful historical intimacy of the diaspora, the ghettos only
so
walled-off from the far-flung
goyim.
If
only we all didn't envy the
rich and the wellborn, and wish to be like them, and dream about
their kind of living, and hate ourselves for doing so and then find our–
selves doing it again, damn it.
Well, we can go on and on with this terrible, vexing question. I
see what bothers Mr. ThelwelI - the fake, pietistic condescension that
is everywhere in America, and afflicts (by the way) more than
20,000,000 blacks; but I think he and others are utterly wrong in using
William Styron as their scapegoat. As I said again and again in the
review, Styron wrote a novel,
his
novel. (And novels make their
own
history, which is the kind of history I was talking about.) Thelwell's
Nat Turner would of course be different, and not be "valid" auto–
matically because Thelwell is black and knows "the black mind," or
because Thelwell had been coached by a collection of historians and
