ROBERT COLES
psychiatrists. Hopefully, Thelwell's Nat would be a powerfully drawn
character in a strong, convincing novel.
I think Styron's big mistake was to write that preface, and bring
up all the business about history and meditation on history. Did Tolstoy
have to apologize or explain himself for using (and speculating on the
thoughts and purposes and fate of) Napoleon and the Tsar and his
court and all sorts of real-life Russian generals in
War and Peace?
But of course, Tolstoy lived in a more "backward" age, when nervous
self-consciousness and the need for scientific justification hadn't made
poets worry about "relevance" and novelists or essayists about
"methodology."
Styron is a novelist, and incidentally, one who can be powerfully
satiric. (For some reason Thelwell is bothered rather than vastly amused
by the way white ladies are made to possess "the disembodied, trans–
parent beauty of an imagined angel" or made to float "in an immacu–
late effulgence of purity and perfection.") As a novelist Styron is not
writing revisionist history or one of those (by now, I hope, boring)
psychoanalytic "interpretations" of Nat Turner's "acting-out," his "char–
acterological" rebelliousness.
Of
course Styron is white. Of course he is
Southern, and linked, as such, to a "tradition" and a specific "cultural
heritage." Of course he puts a certain, stylized speech into Nat's mouth,
and
presumes
(what writers do, after all) to make a particular person
out of him, with a certain coherence and consistency to his mind and a
'~rtain
story to his life.
That
in
Nat's very mind there were many
Nats, waiting for perhaps other novelists, goes without saying. I thought
it was only political ideologues and perhaps people like me who claim
the
truth - and rush to call everyone else sick, or devious, or yes,
"reactionary." But at least Mike Thelwell uses quotes around that last
word of his argument. There is still hope.
