Books: Will the Real Nat Turner Please Stand Up?

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Will the Real Nat Turner Please Stand Up?

WILLIAM STYRON'S NAT TURNER: TEN BLACK WRITERS RESPOND. Edited by John Henrik Clarke. 120 pages. Beacon Press. $4.95.

The 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 the novel is inaccurate.

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 him as a celibate harboring onanistic fantasies, whereas the truth, according to Styron's critics, is that Turner was the husband of a black woman on a nearby plantation.

Telling Blows. It is always possible to attack a historical novel on grounds of inaccuracy and faulty detail. It is particularly difficult in this case, since there is actually very little known about Turner himself or the rebellion. But since the ultimate sources of characterizations and events in fiction lie deep in the creative unconscious, such arguments, 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.