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6. The Confessions of Nat Turner Carved of Air and Light
- Louisiana State University Press
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chapter 6 the Confessions of nat turner Carved of air and Light Not afraid of ghosts, are you? —styron, in conversation, 1990 Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment. —joyce carol oates, The Faith of a Writer, 2003 The Confessions of Nat Turner is a ruminative novel, full of references to the passing of time, the rotting away of material objects, and the disappearance of once vital, living beings. “Carved” (as Arthur Miller put it of Styron’s novels in general) with precision, the style and quality of its writing invites us to contemplate not just an episode in American history but the relationship of the past to the present. Typical of this is Nat’s description of a slaves’ graveyard in “an abandoned corner of a meadow,” set off from it by “a plain pole fence” that has “long since fallen into splintery ruin.” Among the markers, many of which “have toppled over to rot and mingle with the loamy earth,” is a cedar headboard with “letters which read: ‘Tig’ AET. 13.” Nat’s recollection of the oddity of pondering, “age thirteen,” the grave “of your own grandmother, dead at thirteen herself,” epitomizes the poignancy of one of the mysteries he tries to comprehend; it’s not just that people can be cruel, can be vicious, can enslave others, but that we exist and then are gone, that the vibrant present, joyful or terrible in its immediacy, dissolves as if it had been an illusion (131). This mystery of time itself, at least as much as the story of race re- 122 r er ea ding wiLLia m st yron lations in America, is the novel’s subject. Once upon a time, in “history ,” a slave named Nat Turner existed. Any truths about him must be glimpsed, only and inadequately, in historical records and in hearsay. Once upon a time, too, a man named William Styron existed. He wrote a novel that lit a controversy, now documented in books, essays, letters, and archives but beyond resolution. Some of its participants are now dust, and those still alive are old, or perhaps, when you read this, dead as well, just as the writer of these words will be, and you yourself, in time. Ars longa, vita brevis. The novel anticipates the demise of its own era, and the demise of all times in which one might, as “now,” reread it, as surely as it meditates upon the lost era of Nat Turner. In a novel full of disturbing episodes, none is more so than Nat’s murder of Margaret Whitehead. Her attempt to flee perhaps the only man—young as she is—with whom she’s felt sexual frisson combines the joy and terror of immediacy with a pondering of context. Their union has been tragically blocked by the social strictures of the antebellum South, and she flees him in the knowledge that, out of necessity rather than hatred, he intends to kill her. The incident traumatizes Nat and takes the momentum out of the insurrection. For Nat—the Nat conceived of by Styron—is a man of moral nobility, compassion, and empathy. Margaret’s ghost appears to him soon after, vanishing “like an image carved of air and light” (415), but her presence haunts the final pages and goes with Nat himself, we must suppose, to his own, horrific death at the hands of a community that has imprisoned him from birth. But, irony on irony, the Nat whose mind we witness is himself a mere image carved of air and light by Styron through more than fifteen years of meditating upon the historical facts and imagining into being one of the most evocative, controversial, and influential novels in American literature. The image of Margaret as “carved of air and light,” moreover, is the ghost of a ghost, for none of this happened as Styron makes us see it happen, and he keeps the alert reader constantly aware that this is a creative reconstruction, an imagining of events about which we know only a few facts. But there is a further irony, not of Styron’s making: the bulk of criticism accumulating on the novel treats it as something very different from the invitation to join in an imagined journey into a past we cannot in reality possibly revisit. It tends to view the novel not from within...