William Styron's Sophie's Choice: The Structure of Oppression

Abstract

In the face of repeated objections to the assertion in What Is Literature (1948) that a anti-Semitic or racist novel would be a contradiction in terms, Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that whatever the theoretical value of his analysis, no one had yet taken up the practical challenge: show me a single good novel whose deliberate intention was to serve oppression, a single one written against Jews, Blacks, workers, colonialized peoples.1 If we judge by his most recent novel, William Styron seems to believe that his own work may represent for some readers an attempt to satisfy Sartre. Sophie's Choice incorporates frequent and barely disguised references to the negative critical reception of Styron's earlier novels, which frequently included charges of racism. Such reminders have served strong evidence for the many reviewers of Sophie's Choice who are insistent on identifying its fictional narrator Stingo with William Styron himself. Thus Nathan Landau notes signs of ingrained and unregenerate racism in Stingo's first novel,2 highly reminiscent of Styron's own Lie Down in Darkness; and the mature Stingo comments on similar reactions to what is clearly a version of The Confessions of Nat Turner: as accusations from black people became more cranky and insistent that a writer-a lying writer at that-I had turned to my own profit and advantage the miseries of slavery, I succumbed to a kind of masochistic resignation.. . (p. 37). Moreover, Stingo's and Styron's current Sophie's Choice, for Stingo is writing the novel we are reading, has aroused general critical acknowledgment that its treatment of Jewish experience invites charges of anti-Semitism, even if none has materialized to date.