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STYRON'S DILEMMA   HAIRSTON

Turner's biographical "confessions" to emasculate him as a man, as an anguished slave whose despair drives him to fatal desperation. We find him looking at himself, and the world around him, through the white man's distorted lenses, observing his own life with devout detachment-a kind of existentialist scorn for the absurdity ranging round him. His concerns are clearly not his own, but those of William Styron's rather medieval conceptions of what the inner life of a "Negro," a black slave, was like.

As the novel progresses, Nat Turner's character assumes those grotesque dimensions which are so familiar and tiresome. Apparently bedeviled by the white-supremacy inspired fears of the black man's alleged super-human sexual powers, William Styron's noble slave is triumphantly reduced to a religious celibate-a form of self-imposed castration. His only sexual relation is-alas!-a homosexual one! And guess whose image fills his sex-fantasies? When masturbating (in his youth) he always envisioned himself between the legs of "a nameless white girl...with golden curls." There are other instances when his religious armor gives way momentarily to passions of the flesh, driving him to uncontrollable desire to "violate" a white woman. Shades of Senator Bilbo!

Such ideas about black men are dredged up from the barbarous system which William Styron is supposed to be describing. There is not a shred of evidence in existence to support his amazing "creative" insights; moreover, his nasty little "revelations" have no relevancy in the story, except to slander Nat Turner as a heroic figure and rob him of his humanity and manhood. 

This kind of writing must be challenged both on aesthetic and moral grounds. Literature does not exist outside society and the life of man, devoid of responsibility and meaningful purpose. Its serious function is to illuminate the nature of social relations by portraying man in the context of his reality and the values which support his moral conventions. There is of course an easier alternative: to bastardize one's creative work by yielding to the corrupting demands of a society that lives in dread of truth.

With all its prose power and somber earnestness, William Styron's novel comes closer to the latter view. His version of Nat Turner's "confession" is-to put it bluntly-a blatant forgery; and its purpose exposes the author's own moral senility. 

For it will take more than a literary flogging to diminish the illustrious image of Nat Turner.

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-12 08:38:54