Word: styron
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Above all, Styron has written a novel, not a history. "My prerogative as a novelist is such that I so not have to apologize for anything unless it can be shown to have been otherwise," he says. He only has to say it once, because he answers the historical objections anyway...
Very few other topics have held the floor against University events that night. Styron's Nat Turner is one of those rare books which delighted most of the reading public and hit one part of the public--black militants--in a spot so sore that they responded in print. Possibly only individual memoirs have provoked similar reactions, and those from a much smaller group of people. "No novel," Styron says with that heavy calm that makes irony sound imperial instead of petty, "has ever been accorded the extraordinary accolade of having a whole book written about it as soon...
That accolade is William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, which attacks Styron for portraying Turner as a sensitive, hesitant, psychologically troubled leader instead of as a ruthless revolutionary. The responding writers make a number of objections on historical grounds and try to discredit the sociology of Stanley Elkins, whose work Styron called "enormously important" and which influenced Styron called "enormously important" and which influenced Styron's portrait of plantation slaves. In part, Elkins compared black's reaction to the authoritarian system of slavery to Jews' reaction to German concentration camps...
...Styron handles objection with unnerving adroitness. No, Turner probably did not have a black wife, he makes no mention of one, the only evidence is a sentence in not-so-reliable memoirs published thirty years after Turner's death. Why did Styron push Nat's African ancestry back a generation? He had to account for white women are possible--look at the sociological evidence; Styron points to other slave revolts. Styron's voice adds an edge, he had heard all these questions before, he has answered them before...
...STYRON'S Problem, at least it was his problem that night in Winthrop House, is that he replies to those objections so unanswerably. After the discussion, Styron asked why the students--and the students weren't black militants, they were white, or moderate, or both--had insisted in asking questions which verged, well, on insult. The reason is that Styron didn't look like an author, a man deeply troubled by hard-to-grasp, will-o'-the-wisp problems; he looked like an administrator...