The Confessions of Nat Turner

The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1968
Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100
            During the spring of 2008 I was at a restaurant with my mom, aunt, and grandfather. This was during my last semester of graduate school, and everyone was being very polite as I talked endlessly about all of the books I had been reading. Towards the end of the evening my grandfather mentioned that, "No one really talks about Bill Styron anymore." I told him that I had read Sophie's Choice, his 1979 novel, over the summer, and that I had very much enjoyed it (the restaurant we were eating in was actually just a block off of a street that was mentioned in that novel). Then he said that he had known Styron during the war, and they had been in college together. And while he didn't come right out and say it, he let on that he had thought Styron was kind of a conceited jerk. I have no problem believing this. The narrator of Sophie's Choice is (or at least seems to be) a thinly disguised version of a postwar William Styron (his name is Stingo, which is, well, pretty close to Styron). As much as I loved the book, the narrator is pretty full of himself. But there does seem to be some self-discovery going on in this novel, as if a much older Styron looks back on his youth and chastises himself for being immature.
            Sophie's Choice came over a decade after The Confessions of Nat Turner, and it is curious to think of Styron's progression. His SC narrator, Stingo, has actually begun working on the novel that will become Nat Turner, and his initial critics call it alternately a work of genius, and the scratchings of a hick. Considering the subject matter of Nat Turner, as well as the time it was written in,  it is easy to see that Styron was sensitive to this criticism. The novel deals with a semi-successful slave uprising in south central Virginia in 1831. Nat, the leader of the uprising, has been caught, and as he awaits his execution by hanging, he communicates his reasons for the revolt which led to the murder of 56 white people. After an initial back and forth between Turner and his attorney, a man more concerned with an answer as to why this happened than he is with saving Turner from death, Styron takes Turner back to his childhood and tells his life story as a slave.
          Turner's attorney, Thomas Gray, is an important figure who is only quickly touched on. Gray was a real person, who wrote a short book about Turner, and Styron uses this book as his starting point. Since Gray's account of Turner's story is brief (and I have not read it), it is unclear how much of the background is Styron's invention. What I noticed is that Styron employs the tactic of separating Turner from the bulk of the slave population. Turner grows up in the main house, is taught to read, and spends most of the first two thirds of the book with white people. It is not until Turner is in his early twenties and is sold to a cruel new master that he is forced to work the way he has seen other slaves do. I think that this wading into the realities of slavery was cleverly done, and it helps the reader identify with Turner's sense of injustice. But other aspects of Turner's personality and behavior are much harder to understand. He is deeply religious, and often quotes Old Testament passages that deal tangentially with what he is experiencing. He fasts, and these fasts put him in a quasi-dream state where he has visions. In one of these visions he is instructed by God to destroy the white race.
           Throughout the novel Turner provides a sense of Central Virginia as a land that is decaying and falling to ruin. That ruin can be interpreted as spiritual, or moral, and as an avenging figure doing God's work, Turner would be eliminating that decay, and returning the land to the fertile and life-affirming state that is natural. The perversion of slavery, Turner believes, is the cause for the droughts, blights, and famine. Turner compares himself to Joshua, who led the Israelites in battle to defeat their enemies and preserve God's promised land. That is one way to look at this incident. Another, probably more accurate, way of viewing this incident is that the perversion of slavery has destroyed the mental faculties of a mind to the point that he became a dangerous weapon. This tragic reality is compounded since the reader must recognize that Nat is a genius, wasted by a system that is only concerned with getting as much labor out of him as possible.
           Styron was heavily criticized for this book in the black community. Whether this is fair or not, he was brought to task for portraying a black historical figure in not always the most positive light. Indeed, Turner at times is a deeply conflicted individual, and that internalized conflict as portrayed by Styron can be disturbing. I think that Styron took this personally, and it is this criticism that I think SC's Stingo responds to. He defends his good intentions as trumping over issues of authenticity that are complicated by race, and this is something that I buy. When Nat acts in a way that is not completely heroic, is is easy to interpret this as an acknowledgement that anyone who would lead a revolt would have to be a complex and conflicted individual. Styron was defended, however, by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, two celebrated African American authors who were also his contemporaries.
            I liked this book. A lot. If you only read one novel by William Styron, it should be Sophie's Choice. But if you read two, well, I'm sure you could do worse.
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