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MICHAEL LACKEY University of Minnesota, Morris Introduction to The Confessions of Nat Turner WILLIAM STYRON’S THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER IS ONE OF THOSE rare texts that becomes increasingly more relevant with the passage of time. Such is the primary theme of the essays in this special issue, which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Styron’s groundbreaking and enormously controversial novel. That Styron’s Nat Turner narrates his story in prison while awaiting execution assumes new meaning in relation to the disproportionate number of minorities incarcerated today. In his contribution, Gavin Cologne-Brookesnotesthisfactinordertochallengeconventionalviews of criminal behavior. From one perspective, Turner receives the death penalty for his ruthless rebellion, which resulted in the murders of many whites, including women and children. The crime in this instance is the murder of innocent whites. But from another perspective, society is set up in such a way that it favors some but strategically subjugates and debases many others, thus leading the marginalized to develop feelings of hopelessness. In this instance, the crime is the way society is established so that it sanctions the violation of culturally designated “inferiors” with impunity and therefore generates within them an overpowering form of hatred and even the yearning to kill. By locating Turner within a tradition of oppressed figures on death row, CologneBrookes illustrates that what Styron pictures in and through his protagonist has considerable power, force, and relevance today, since, as Michelle Alexander demonstrates in her book The New Jim Crow, the same structures are at work in America’s mass incarceration complex. WhenTheConfessions. wasfirstpublished,manycriticizedStyronfor using the first-person narrative, but Cologne-Brookes’s work indicates the value of this approach. Like Bruce Springsteen, who tries to honor and respect without judgment the worldview of the characters about whom he sings, Styron gives readers the inner life of his character, who has been strategically violated by his society. This has a major impact on Springsteen’s listeners and Styron’s readers. Punishing a cold-blooded murderer is very different from killing a smart, sensitive person who lashes out at a society that has been designed to oppress him/her. What 4 Michael Lackey Styron, Springsteen, and others in this tradition have done is to give us access to the rage-filled interiority of those who have been victimized by society. Like Cologne-Brookes, James L. W. West III illustrates the value of Styron’s decision to center the narrative in the protagonist’s consciousness. While working on the William Styron papers, housed in the Library of Congress, West found a handwritten draft of The Confessions, and in a margin, Styron says that he must quote the first part of the Author’s Note from Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 biographical novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, in his Author’s Note to The Confessions of Nat Turner. In the end, Styron did not quote Yourcenar, but West surmises what would have caught Styron’s attention. Yourcenar and Styron were primarily interested in creating a “portrait of a voice” in their novels about historical figures. The truth of an individual voice is significantly different from the truth of historical fact. For instance, that Turner knew his grandmother and was very much attached to her is a historical fact recorded in the 1831 confession of the actual Nat Turner, but Styron eliminated this detail from his narrative. Why? The answer is that Styron is more concerned with the truth of voice, which is a character’s psychological and/or emotional orientation toward people and the world. Within this aesthetic framework, if altering an established fact about Turner’s grandmother would enable Styron to more vividly portray the protagonist’s tortured and enraged voice, then that is what he will and must do. This is typical of biographical novelists, who generally hold that the “truth” of an individual voice is moresubstantiveandilluminatingthantheliteraltruthofhistoricalfact. West’s focus on the truth of voice challenges two separate interpretations of TheConfessionsofNatTurner. First, it enables. Styron scholars to expose the problems with the approach of biographical absolutists, who believe that novelists are required to give readers literal truths about history and their subjects. Some wonder why Styron altered facts and invented characters and scenes. West...

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