The confessions of nat turner by william styron pdf

Skip to main content. By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. Formes de l'aveu dans le monde anglophone, Download PDF. A short summary of this paper. Formes de l'aveu dans le monde anglophone, Presses- Universitaires de Provence, : Having initially received an overwhelmingly positive reception from white American reviewers, the novel has since been caught for decades in the heavy polemical crossfire exchanged between two bitterly opposed critical camps.

Whatever its flaws or merits as a work of literature, then, The Confessions of Nat Turner certainly raises a slew of interesting issues of all kinds.

Even the artistic question of how, as a white author, to create an authentic-sounding representation of the idiom in which a slave from 19th century Virginia would have spoken, is not seen by him as posing any particular problem. From this breathtakingly ethnocentric perspective, to deny Nat the speech of an educated, literate white man would indeed signify side-lining him from the universality that Styron clearly believes white cultural values to possess.

By conferring on Nat the rhetorical style of an author like himself, on the other hand, the author gives notice of his subscription to the idea of racial equality — or rather the idea that blacks who have adopted white characteristics are almost the same as whites. A point of view that, he suggests disapprovingly, his questioner does not share.

Indeed this bizarre act of racial ventriloquism was hailed by them as a literary tour de force. But for Styron to have endowed Turner with a voice that neither articulated the suffering, nor reflected the mode of expression of slaves touched a raw nerve.

A miracle, which he then went on to demonstrate, William Styron had singularly failed to achieve. Since European colonialism has always concealed its crimes against humanity by silencing the people against whom such crimes are perpetrated, voicelessness, but also finding a voice and using it to speak out against western hegemony, are major tropes to which the literatures of formerly colonized countries repeatedly have recourse in order to signify, respectively, colonial oppression and resistance to that oppression.

Clearly Caliban had his own "would gabble like a thing most brutish" , but not only is this not accorded the same status as that of Prospero, it is not acknowledged as language at all In a recent article in The Guardian David Fickling points out that, according to linguists, out of the fully fledged indigenous languages and dialects as distinct from one another as Spanish is from Portuguese that existed in Australia at the time of the British invasion in , only 20 now remain in a healthy state.

Which explains why autobiographical writing from all corners of the formerly colonised world abounds in stories of native children being beaten or humiliated for communicating in their mother tongue. Speaking of the psychic damage that the aftershocks of such practices continue to inflict today, Jamaica Kincaid argues with icy fury, that the culturally orphaned black communities of former slave- owning societies are still in mourning for the fact that they have:.

When, in the eighteenth century, Blacks made their entry into the world of literature, they found, like all oppressed peoples, that the genre best suited to the story they wished to tell was autobiography or the confessional narrative.

His refusal even to countenance the possibility that his black critics might have legitimate grounds for grievance, signals, at the very least, a surprising lack of sensitivity in an author who, through his use of the first person singular, claims, to some extent, to be acting as spokesman for the victims of American slavery.

But Styron is not simply content to allege that his critics have misread his work, or even that they are misinformed about the history on which his novel is based. His reflexive dismissal of black criticism is redolent of the kind of racist stereotyping that - ever since European economic interests recognised the profits to be made from exploiting African labour - has consistently constructed blacks as childish, intellectually inferior, irrational and deeply primitive.

Other people have been victimized and put upon and they have survived to pull themselves out of their predicament without resorting to this infantile behavior To the extent that the silence of subjugated peoples is frequently perceived by the dominant culture as being of an opaque, impenetrable nature, such silence becomes emblematic in that culture of a lack of knowledge of, and thus control over, the Other in its midst. Another is the barrage of words with which the preternaturally loquacious white protagonists of several of J.

Moreover, the radicalisation in African-American opinion that had led, in the late sixties, to the belligerent discourse of Black Power activists, had made him realise what a very serious handicap the lack of inter-racial communication had become. What is problematical in his reasoning, however, is the assumption, which subtends his novel, that a human predicament with such deep-rooted socio- political causes can somehow be remediated by a feat of literary imagination.

There are, it would seem, two main reasons. It is on the second of those two reasons that I shall now focus. There is clearly, then, a fundamental difference distinguishing the first two types of confessant from the third. Both religious and criminal confessions are first and foremost oral acts, addressed to the physical person of the confessor and performed within a specific place — notably the confessional or the interrogation room — that has been ritually designated for the purpose.

Such confessions are also made, primarily, in response to external pressures — the demands of the Church on the one hand and of the Law on the other. In the latter case, as J. A fact which betokens, in other words, a clear authorial intention to position the novel in the tradition of the literary confession, that is to say, the confessional mode which, in the Western imagination, is associated above all else with the quest for eternal verities.

Since The Confessions of Nat Turner is a novel, the discourse of the self on self is a fictional discourse. He thereby pulls off the extraordinary literary conjuring trick of convincing white readers that what is being revealed to them is a historically accurate portrait of the black rebel leader, while at the same time disfiguring that portrait with the lies and distortions that it is the function of the literary confession to dispel.

As Earle V. As one black critic bitterly remarks We know how these confessions are brought about and with what methods of persuasion. And we can just imagine what the methods for getting confessions must have been like way back there in the good old days of slavery. Killens Margery Fee has observed that, "A complicated process, simultaneously a confession and a denial of guilt - an identification and a usurpation - ensues when white writers choose Native people as literary material.

The Confessions of Nat Turner demonstrates, I think, that this process becomes even more tortuous and ethically problematical when the white author claims, as Styron does, to speak in the voice of a historical black person.

For if, as history professor, Richard N. Works cited Achebe, Chinua. New York: Doubleday, Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, James L. West III. Jackson Miss. Bender, Eileen and Seymour L. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, The Confessions of Nat Turner pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Sophies Choice by William Styron.

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