Interlocutors, Interpellants, Interpreters, Interpretants

Abstract

William Styron. The Confessions of Nat Turner. Vintage International Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Albert E. Stone. The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Even though Vintage has recently brought out a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner, and even though Samuel Coale's 1991 William Styron Revisited argues that, even if Styron failed to overcome certain problems posed by his choice of a first-person narrative, "the Con- fessions of Nat Turner remains a powerful novel in its own right" (102), it seems that the angry attacks launched by those Ten Black Writers who pub- lished, in 1968, under the editorship of John Henrick Clarke, William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond were opening salvos in a campaign that has by now pretty much driven the Virginia-born novelist from the field where the prize was the right, the 'privilege,' to define and characterize the leader of the violent 1831 slave rebellion. What is more, it now seems that the controversy over Styron's fourth novel, The Confessions, presaged a dimming of his once-glimmering literary reputation, fostered a critical climate in which many readers, if they could be bothered to consider the matter, would be likely to smile condescendingly at the assertion with which Coale concludes his book: "Sophie's Choice is a masterful, passionate vision, one filled with all the ambiguities and uncertainties that such dark visions can conjure up. The promises of Lie Down in Darkness are here realized, and the confessions of William Styron have reached their present fulfillment" (134).