“A Mighty Clamor to Know”: Rhetorical Power and Memoir Fiction in Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner

BETHANY OBER MANNON Old Dominion University “A Mighty Clamor to Know.”: Rhetorical Power and Memoir Fiction in Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner NAT TURNER’S FIRST CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS GRAY ESTABLISHES HIS confession as a site of struggle. While imprisoned and chained, awaiting trial, Nat uses silence and speech to manipulate the verbose lawyer who comes to persuade him to give a confession: I felt I had gained a small, private initial victory. Had I opened up at the outset it would have been I who had to ask for indulgences, and I might not have gotten them. But by remaining quiet I had allowed him to feel that only by small favors could he get me to talk; now already he had expressed the nature of those favors, and we had each taken the first step toward getting me unwound from my cocoon of iron and brass. (14) With this early scene, The Confessions of Nat Turner introduces the revelation, concealment, and shaping of personal narratives as central themes in the novel.1 When Nat gives his “confession” to Gray he exchanges information for material comforts. He shapes that narrative, and then hears it shaped again for the prosecution’s purposes in the official document. He tells readers that he intends to be truthful in recounting the story of his childhood and uprising to them, though he must conceal some information from Gray. The Confessions of Nat Turner. foregrounds Nat’s acts of telling multiple versions of his life story. In this way, the novel gives readers a complicated and substantive understanding of the role of human subjectivity and rhetorical positioning in the formation of historical truth. My analysis of this rhetorical use of personal narrative builds upon and responds to scholars and critics who identify The Confessions of Nat 1 Styron’s 1967 novel and Gray’s 1831 pamphlet share the title The Confessions of Nat Turner. My primary interest in this article is Styron’s novel, so I use the full title to refer to this work. I refer to the date or Gray’s authorship to indicate when I discuss the older text. 48 Bethany Ober Mannon Turner as an early work of biographical fiction, or biofiction. Michael Lackey in particular locates Confessions.atthe beginning of a progression of scholarship on biofiction. When the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, one committee member admired Styron’s ability to “use rich, imaginative language in order to engage the reader and to represent the historical figure accurately,” but considered the novel a work of history rather than biography (Lackey, “Introduction” 6). Other committee members asserted that Styron had “the right to invent scenes that illuminate the established facts about history, but he [did] not have a right to alter history itself.” (7). Contributors to the volume William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968) extend this critique, and decry the novel for ignoring recorded facts of the historical Nat Turner’s life and distorting his character. My reading continues to examine tensions between historical fact and novelistic invention in Confessions. However, I depart from this previous interest in the categories of biography, fiction, and history. Instead, I ask what autobiography studies, a field that grew in prominence during the same period as biofiction, contributes to interpretations of Styron’s Confessions.2 I propose “memoir fiction” as a distinct form of biofiction and a productive lens for examining Styron’s representations of the historical Nat Turner. I define memoir fiction as texts employing writtenorspoken personal narratives as explicit, conspicuous narrative frames. The Confessions of Nat Turner. begins with Nat Turner telling his confession to Gray, and then addressing the novel’s readers as he recounts a separate confession. This ostensibly more authentic and complete narrative comprises the body of the novel, punctuated by self-reflexive phrases reminding readers that Nat is a rhetorician actively constructing and 2 Leigh Gilmore dates the “memoir boom” (2) to “the skittish period around the turn of the millennium” (1). Julie Rak dates the beginning of the popularity and critical recognition of life writing much earlier: . . . sales of “biography,” a term that covers all personal non-fiction such as...