Word: nat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nat and the Trap...
...even if historically true, border on irrelevancy. The essayists, led by John Henrik Clarke, an editor of the militant Negro magazine Freedomways, repeat the same points endlessly and separately, but this does not necessarily validate them. Nor does a reprinting of the full text of the original confessions of Nat Turner seem in any way to enhance their position...
Indeed, the most telling and effective blows unleashed against Styron's Nat Turner are those leveled in terms of literature, not history. Novelist John Williams (The Man Who Cried I Am) criticizes Styron for offering too many characterizations based on traditional Southern regional cardboard stock. Mike Thelwell, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, reasonably suggests that black slaves developed two languages, "one for themselves and another for white masters," and that Styron has captured neither. Thelwell argues that the more public form is the familiar dialect found in the works of Southern-dialect humorists. The other, "the real language...
Perhaps the most absurd criticism comes from a Boston psychiatry professor, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, who with utter seriousness takes Styron to task for referring to Nat Turner by his first name. "Is this familiarity by the author part of intuitive white condescension and adherence to Southern racial etiquette? Is this reference and the entire book an unconscious attempt to keep Nat Turner 'in his place'? Would the novelist expect Nat Turner to address him as 'Mr. Styron'? Perhaps no one can ever know the answers to these questions...
...important question to ask is: What is Styron's own attitude on ra- cial questions? The Confessions of Nat Turner is a clear enough reply. Styron obviously believes in a darkly militant way that any brutish black uprising is the inevitable result of white persecution. The effect of both, the persecution and the uprising, adds up to tragedy...