Word: styron
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...Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron's novel about the 1831 slave uprising in Virginia, won the Pulitzer Prize, has sold over 175,000 copies so far, and is still comfortably at home on the bestseller lists. On this evidence alone, the book would seem to deserve at least respectful attention; indeed, it seems to have been the right novel at the right time. But, peculiarly, Nat Turner has provoked an astonishing amount of wrath from black militants, as well as a nasty exchange in The Nation between Styron and Communist Theoretician and Historian Herbert Aptheker, who claims that...
That dispute has now led to this angry polemic from ten Negroes. They accuse Styron of distorting history when he describes the rebellion as "the only effective sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery"; they maintain that there were numerous others. They dispute Styron's judgment that the rebellion was put down with the help of loyal slaves. They bitterly question the mise en scene that depicts most slaves as complaisant plantation Sambos; on the contrary, say the critics, the slaves were constantly plotting insurrections. Finally, they complain that Styron in effect emasculated Turner by portraying...
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...
...Familiar. Too often, however, the contributors to this book are simply blinded by their own racism. The fact that Styron is a Virginia-born white seems to discredit him instantly in the eyes of more than one essayist. Rather typically, Political Scientist Charles Hamilton (Black Power) peevishly sees Styron involved in a white man's plot to divest black people of their "historical revolutionary leaders." Novelist John O. Killens ('Sippi) writes: Styron "is like a man who tries to sing the blues when he has not paid his dues." And several essayists, without even the leavening grace of black humor...
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...