An American Tragedy: The Confessions of Nat Turner

*As always, there are spoilers ahead*

The Heartland Film Festival plays for two weeks every fall here in Indianapolis.  In spite of the fact that we have lived here for ten years, this is the first year that Ann and I have been able to attend any of the screenings.  Our son was in California for his fall break, so we took a Friday off and saw three films in a row.  The last film for the night was We Are the Giant, a documentary by Greg Barker about three pairs of individuals involved in separate Arab Spring rebellions.  It was a fantastic film, and I highly recommend that you see it when it is released in theaters.  One of the striking features of the film is that all the people at the center of the narratives are still in the midst of the revolutions.  Nothing is settled, and these people are fighting against an institutional power with no assurances that they will be victorious or that their cause will not be undermined even if victory is attained.  This uncertainty of rebellion has been bouncing around in my head since the viewing.  The other aspect of the stories that resonated with me was the violence of any political uprising.  Some revolutions begin with bullets, but others are begun with a determination to employ only peaceful means.  At some point, however, those peaceful protestors are set upon by tanks and machine guns run by the national powers that are equally determined not to be overthrown.  Do the protestors avoid violence and offer themselves as sacrificial lambs and martyrs, or do they pick up arms and fight not only for freedom but for self preservation? 

It was not until I was half way into the novel that I realized the issues fresh in my head from We Are the Giant are also at play in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.  From the start, I knew that I was reading a fictionalized account of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, the largest slave uprising in history.  I knew that there is a real 20-page document of Turner’s confessions and that Styron, as he says in his Author’s Note that opens the novel, “rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was the leader,” but that “in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events.”  Yet knowing those things, I had no idea how Turner would be created or how his rebellion would be imagined.  The details of those imaginings are the very things that make this novel incredible.

How many reasons could a slave possibly need for rising up and killing his oppressors?  I never expected anything impressive because no labor would need to be done to even imagine the motives.  But Styron does a beautiful job of making his world as messy and as complicated and as real as life itself.  His characters are complex jumbles of competing motivations and desires and the book stinks of their sweat and worry, their aspirations and longings.  The slave owners and white lawyers are as human as Nat and his inner circle of friends who help him execute his plan.  Styron, in short, takes no short cuts.  He does not let any of his or your assumptions about slaves, slave owners, whites, blacks, early 19^th-century Virginians dictate his story.  As a result, the reader is always on a voyage of discovery in this tragic world brought magically to life.

The novel begins in a jail cell where Nat and his friend Hark are imprisoned waiting for their trials and eventual executions.  In the first part of the novel, Nat meets with Thomas Gray, an attorney who takes down his confession and writes it up for Nat to sign.  In this section we learn the general facts of the matter, as Styron uses actual passages from the original text published as The Confessions of Nat Turner.  We learn that Nat is well versed in the Bible, that he is something of a reverend, that he is well educated and feeling separated from his God.  I assumed that his rebellion started as an impulsive act against a cruel overseer that gained unintentional speed, so it was with some shock that I read this offhand statement that Nat makes in the middle of a reverie:  

I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had before to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.

The calm with which Turner referred to the mass slaughter of “all the white people” took me by surprise and made me uncomfortable.  Moreover his religious fervor and sense that the Bible was “exhort[ing]” him on a “mission” made me think to myself that Turner must be a little nuts and a dangerous religious zealot.  And as I said earlier, it was not until the middle of the novel that I began to understand how Nat could so casually insist of killing every white person, men, women, and children without being the least bit crazy. 

Nat may feel his religion strongly, but his thinking is always ordered and rational—there is no trace of insanity in his plans.  Nat’s goal is to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom in the depths of a nearby swamp from where they can defend themselves from whites seeking to re-enslave them.  It is a three day march through the countryside and along the way, he and his crew will need to amass an army, supplies, weapons, and horses to ensure their reaching the swamp and surviving once there.  As Nat tells his four disciples when first revealing his plan to them, “One or two niggers run off an’ they send out the dogs.  Three niggers run off an’ they sent out the army.”  In short, the white men react strongly to the smallest rebellion, so the reaction to something large will be astronomical.  If Nat and his followers are to survive three days, they will need to go undiscovered for at least two.  To go undiscovered, no one can be left alive to run and warn the other.  No one.  The reality of this necessity is brought to the reader slowly and subtly, and it becomes clear that Nat is correct—any betrayal can undo them, and to spare one white life is to create the argument that another should be spared, and mercy will result in their ultimate defeat.  In fact, it is one tiny act of mercy by Nat himself that does undo the rebellion leading to an alarm going up among the whites, which puts an eventual end to the rebellion.  As a reader you are in a no win situation, wanted Nat to succeed and wanting no one to have to die.

This necessity of death is the tragedy at the heart of the book.  The very institution of slavery and the violence (and continual threat of violence) by the whites needed to keep slavery alive is the very thing that necessitates the murder of so many innocents.  Just like those involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, in Virginia, 1831, there can be no peaceful rebellion if the rebellion has any hopes of ending in freedom.  Styron weaves this fact together through the slow building of the novel and the revealing of the characters and the character of the world they live in.  Styron does what I admire most of any writer, creating characters who are understandable, admirable in their own way, though flawed in equally understandable ways.  I don’t need to like a character, but I need to love something about them, to love that complicated knot at their heart that makes them incontrovertibly human.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is a heartbreaking and powerful novel, beautifully constructed and beautifully written.

A Lot to Love: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

There are many enemies lying in wait to ambush a great novel and rob it of everything that makes it powerful and meaningful and moving.  If the author is trying to “say something” in addition to telling a compelling narrative, then those enemies only multiply.  The dark figures of destruction lined up against Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 are as numerous and nefarious as the mythical marauders of Tristero, yet Pynchon deftly sidesteps each attack, moving carelessly down his path as the failed assassins fall into a dust-covered pile behind him.  The Crying of Lot 49 is a truly amazing book and one of my all-time favorites.

The first and worst enemy to saying something meaningful is pretentiousness.  Pretentiousness has taken the knees out from under an untold number of potentially great stories.  Of course, pretentiousness is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, but in spite of all the academic and inter-disciplinary topics touched upon by Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49, the novel remains unpretentious.  It does so through its surreal humor and its wry ability to present one possibility and in the next sentence undermine it.  Pynchon simultaneously proposes profound possibilities while winking at us and making us laugh at those very notions.   As a quick example, during the play within the novel, The Courier’s Tragedy, which humorously describes the violent nature of Jacobean revenge plays, the narrator takes a moment to make things serious, noting, “It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words.”  Then, after the mystery of Tristero is relayed to us, Pynchon once again laughs with us in the “bloodbath” that is the fifth act: “Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including the lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom’d talons, is employed.  It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.”  Following the play, the director, Driblette, warns Oedipa not to think too much about the play: “It was written to entertain people.  Like horror movies.  It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything.”  And that’s the line that the novel itself delights in, between entertainment and meaning, for without one the other is without value.

The second and third enemy work together as a dual threat, like Scylla and Charybdis.   Scylla in this case is the danger of not saying anything of meaning, and Charybdis is the danger of saying too much, being too on the nose and becoming more of a lecture than a novel.  The Crying of Lot 49 is uniquely satisfying in this respect as it nimbly gathers up historical, literary, technological, and cultural artifacts like so many daisies to chain together, creating a woven and intricate article to admire and ponder over.  Freudian psychology, paranoia, the mafia, generic narrative conventions, World War II battles, Civil War sea battles, the Pony Express, oscilloscopes, corporate greed, mythical figures, the homeless and disenfranchised, the workings of mystery novels, Jacobean tragedies, acronyms, an underground postal system, stamp collecting—they are all brought together and presented to us as part of the same cloth.  The earth is dug up from this garden of life and we are shown that all the roots of what seem to us like individual plants are tangled and inseparable.  Or rather, like a magician, Pynchon shows us each colorful scarf before dropping them into his hat and pulling out a single scarf of colors impossibly long.  We laugh and wonder and simultaneously enjoy the parlor trick and know that something great is hinted at even as we know what we see is not what it seems. 

Through all this fun and play with the world and its history, Pynchon presents us with the modern condition.  In the last handful of pages, in which Oedipa is wandering the streets and train tracks around San Narciso, she contemplates what it all means, concluding that either she’s paranoid, crazy, the victim of an elaborate hoax, or the witness of an unbelievable plot.   The road in her mind leads her in circles but always back to something grand: 

She walked down a stretch of railroad tracks next to the highway.  Spurs ran off here and there into factory property.  Pierce may have owned these factories too.  But did it matter now if he’d owned all of San Narciso?  San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squall-line or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence.  There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries.  No one knew yet how to draw them.  She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.

And again, a few pages later, bouncing between paranoia and a real plot, Oedipa thinks:

Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.  Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero.  For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into paranoia.

The truth of Tristero would mean that America was irreparably divided into the affluent and the disenfranchised to the point that there was a secret existence for those “storm-systems of group suffering and need.”  Knowing this, Oedipa couldn’t continue in her old life and would have to exist in some space between the two worlds, which is where the paranoids tread.  Oedipa, once trapped in her Remedios Varo tower of a woven world of her own creation has been freed by her pursuit of Tristero, but that freedom is uncomfortable, lonely, and looks a lot like madness.

Everything about The Crying of Lot 49 is, to me, perfect.  It is a book that I can open to any page and read something hilarious and profound and insightful and gripping.  We follow Oedipa’s travels with her at a safe distance from our own towers, pushing ourselves to understand, to grasp, to make sense of the world so lovingly and playfully laid out by Pynchon.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do in the Wide Sargasso Sea

I first read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in an upper level college course about colonialism in 1993.  I was aware, of course, that the novel told the story of Rochester’s madwoman-in-the-attic wife.  I had read Jane Eyre only three years earlier, and my Norton edition was filled with hastily written marginalia declaring Rochester to be a smug, self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, so I was excited to see him revealed as some kind of monster and victimizer.    I was in fact so caught up with the novel’s connections to the Bronte classic that I did a grave injustice to the book and did not read it for what it really was, its own story.  There is certainly enjoyment in seeing the points where the narratives cross over, but if you come to Wide Sargasso Sea looking for Jane Eyre tie-ins, you will not only be disappointed, but you will lose the opportunity to find a heartbreaking and compelling narrative all its own.

The novel is divided into three parts.  In the first section, Antoinette narrates her time from the 1833 British emancipation act, when she is a small child, to when she is a young adult, being removed from the convent by her stepfather to meet the man he plans for her to wed.  At the time that the slaves in the British colonies were freed by the emancipation act, the British government promised financial compensation to the slaveowners, but that compensation was a long time in coming.  Families like Antoinette’s that relied entirely on slaves found their funds rapidly depleted and their estates increasingly rundown.  Antoinette and her mother lived near poverty, rejected by the wealthier white British families and scorned by the black islanders who struggled with their own poverty.

This state of being between two worlds and belonging to neither defined Antoinette’s existence.  Many times does Antoinette state that she does not know who she is or where she belongs, and Rhys makes use of the recurring theme of looking glasses as a way of showing Antoinette’s crisis of identity.  She occupies a no man’s land at the intersections of white and black, European and Caribbean, colonizer and colonized, wealth and poverty, privilege and disenfranchisement.  Traditional critical discussions of Wide Sargasso Sea have centered on the cultural, racial, and national complexities that make up Antoinette’s identity crisis and their inevitable contributions to her madness.  But the reason the novel has endured over the last 50 years is not because of any of the political quandaries it casts light upon, but because it allows the problems and confusions of poor Antoinette to live and breathe with reality and subtlety.  Antoinette is not some puppet for Rhys.  She is a sympathetic, heartbreakingly tragic figure with a real life dimensionality.  As I found myself marveling at the depth of the characters, I was drawn to Rhys’s treatment of “madness” itself.

In my memory of my first reading, I would have told you that Rochester (who interestingly remains unnamed in the novel) drove Antoinette to madness with his cold cruelty.  But of course Antoinette is already in a fragile state before Rochester takes her away for their honeymoon.  Having watched her mother’s passionate outbursts at her own powerlessness, having been rejected by her mother when she needed her comforting touch, having been taunted and physically assaulted by other children, Antoinette sought nothing more in this world than safety.  When she lay in bed as a child, she would say to herself, “I am safe.”  When her father died and she and her mother slid into poverty, Antoinette notes that “feeling safe in bed . . . belonged to the past.”  When her mother begins to fall apart, Antoinette observes this in terms of safety: “Once I would have gone back quietly to watch her asleep on the blue sofa—once I made excuses to be near her when she brushed her hair, a soft black cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe.”  The world is hostile and a threat to Antoinette’s personhood and sanity.  (As a side note, I find it not coincidental that Wide Sargasso Sea and The Painted Bird were written and published around the same time since they are both haunted by horrible cruelty.)

In her relationship with Rochester, she dares to reach for more than mere safety.  The shy and self-protecting girl of the first section is replaced by a charming, happy young bride in the second section, narrated by Rochester.  She is talkative.  She is earnest.  She seems genuinely delighted with her new husband as she loves him and believes he loves her.  But all that improvement comes to a crashing halt when Rochester’s dislike of Antoinette and the Dominican island lead him to greater acts of cruelty, culminating in his sleeping with the servant Amelie within earshot of Antoinette.  In the aftermath of this betrayal, Rochester has a long conversation with Christophine, Antoinette’s childhood nanny, and the only person who seems to care about Antoinette’s well being.  This conversation, or rather, confrontation, is for me the heart of the novel.

In this confrontation, Christophine accuses Rochester of wanting to “break [Antoinette] up”: 

you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without it. It’s she can’t see the sun any more.  Only you she see.  But all you want is to break her up.

Christophine repeats the phrase “break her up” to describe Antoinette’s emotional and mental meltdown.  She never uses the words “crazy” or “mad.”  It is Rochester who first uses the word “mad” when he asks Christophine, “And that her mother was mad.  Another lie?”  Christophine responds:

They drive her to it.  When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away.  They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad.  Question, question.  But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her.  They won’t let me see her.  I try, but no.  They won’t let Antoinette see her.  In the end—mad I don’t know—she give up, she care for nothing.  That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk.  That man, and others.  They they have her.  Ah there is no God.

For Christophine, all that happened to Annette was that “she los[t] herself for a while.”  But instead surrounding her with kind words, friends, a loving husband, they diagnose her as “mad” and treat her as such.  That declaration of “madness” is Annette’s doom, for with it, she is discarded by her husband and family and left in the “care” of strangers who have no interest in helping, only in taking advantage of a powerless and hurt woman.  And when Rochester won’t be swayed by Christophine’s words to love Antoinette and nurture her, Christophine declares: “You think me a fool?  You want her money but you don’t want her.  It is in your mind to pretend she is mad.  I know it.  The doctors say what you tell them to say.  That man Richard he say what you want him to say—glad and willing too, I know.  She will be like her mother.”

When someone is broken up, she is a sympathetic creature to be healed and made well again.  When someone is “mad,” she is something to be feared and locked away.  “Madness” is a tool for blameless dismissal of another human being.  As if to drive the Christophine’s point home, once Rochester forces Christophine to leave, he thinks:  “She’s as mad as the others.”  Boom.  With the one word, Rochester rids himself of needing the consider anything said to him.

This distinction between madness and broken up ties in neatly with the novel’s larger concerns about race, culture, and colonization, since it is the European men who give the diagnosis of madness like an obeah curse, bringing a dramatic end to fates of Antoinette and her mother.  In the section that follow’s Rochester’s talk with Christophine, Rochester seems as broken up as Antoinette ever was, employing broken syntax and passionate outbursts.  But this momentary outburst, not even three pages in my edition, does not result in “madness” as Rochester regains his composure and determination in the next section.  Both Antoinette and Rochester suffer the same ailments, but one is bundled off to an attic in England while the other gets to establish himself as a Byronic hero.

Moving Beyond Mere Plot in The Painted Bird

I occasionally chart my progress though this reading list on Facebook and invite others to join me in reading the next book.  Once I finished Herzog, I made a blanket invitation to read The Painted Bird with me.  I noted that I had no idea what the book was about but that it was less than 250 pages in the version I had, so come play!  There were no takers, but then there never are, so that’s not especially noteworthy.  The thing that interested me was one of my friends’ responses: “Hooboy,” he wrote.  I asked  if he had read the book and what his comment meant.  He responded, “ Yea. I have not read the Painted Bird, but it's often at the top of ‘I want to be really really depressed, what should I read?’ threads.”  His comment made me both laugh and think.

The last time I had heard someone tell me that he didn’t want to read a book because he didn’t want to be depressed was in reference to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  If someone summarized just the plot of Grapes of Wrath, I don’t think I’d want to read it either.  Similarly, if before reading The Painted Bird, I knew that the story followed a child as he aged from 6 to 12 in the backwoods villages of a non-specific Eastern European country betting beaten, abused and molested while watching other get beaten, abused, and molested until the war ends and he is reunited with his parents only to discover that everyone is broken from the brutality of the war and no connection with anyone else can be made—if I knew that, I would not have dived energetically into the book.

But of course a novel is so much more than the outline of its plot.  In fact, with the exception of plot-twist-filled mystery stories, the plot is usually the least interesting part of any novel.  If you were to give a two page plot summary to 100 writers and asked them to tell that story, you would get 100 entirely different novels.  A novel is created by language, by characters and characterizations, by descriptions and the lack of descriptions.  It’s tone and perspective, sentence structure and attitude.  A book is never “about” its plot, and to dismiss a book because of its plot is to deprive yourself of some incredible reading, especially if you are talking about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird.

The story is riveting from the outset.  Kosinski creates such a complete and absorbing world, that I wanted more and more, no matter how horrifying the events were to become.  And even when they were at their worst, the neutral tone and simple structure of the sentences and observations, presented through the eyes of a child who is no longer innocent but still far from experienced, all work together to create a visceral and intellectual punch that provides an impact without dragging me emotionally down.  There is, in short, nothing sentimental to gum up the works and bring the story down to an emotional morass.

The Painted Bird is a brilliant way to approach the horrors of World War II.  The war roils all around the action and is a constant presence even though we never witness a single battle.  The genocidal policies of the Nazis are given a grand context of hatred and meanness that is at the heart of the human condition, as Kosinski sees it.  The peasants of the villages that the narrator wanders between are no romanticized or idyllic figures.  The hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and other dark-haired peoples pre-existed Hitler’s rise, and the “science” of the Nazis that discussed brain sizes and attempted to prove the sub-human status of a large portion of the human race are predated by the superstitions of the villagers that can believe the narrator to be a vampire, that the very color of his eyes are proof that he can cast curses.

In a lot of ways, The Painted Bird is a re-telling of The Odyssey.  Odysseus has become a child wandering through the world looking for his home, suffering greater trials than the Greek hero could imagine.  The mist of mythology is replaced by figures of earth and clay.  When the boy finally reaches home, he’s not sure that he belongs even there, as if Odysseus, upon reaching Penelope, decides he is too changed to live the life he once did.  Like all the children in the orphanage, the narrator is scarred and broken.  The children are identified by their unique brand of destruction and brutality, carrying names like Tank, Flamethrower, Torpedo, and Sniper.  It’s an interesting indictment of war.  The war is certainly responsible for tearing all these families apart, for crushing these children and ruining their spirits, but the narrator’s adventures show that the brutality of the world exists even before war comes to the land, and it exists completely separate from the war.  War does not break humans; broken humans make war.

The question at the heart of the novel is this:  why do some people have the power to make others suffer and why are others made to suffer?  The narrator’s main quest is survival, and to survive he wants to discover the secret of how he can move from a sufferer to the other side of the equation.  He turns to Christian prayers, and when he feels that fails, he embraces the powers of the Evil Ones.  They too fail him, and he is left with Mitka’s philosophy of revenge: if you are made to suffer, make he who hurt you hurt equally.  It is this philosophy that leads The Silent One to kill hundreds in an engineered train catastrophe in order to kill one man who hurt and embarrassed the narrator.  The Silent One created his own holocaust and still failed to exact revenge on the one person he wanted to die.  Clearly, this is no way to conduct our human affairs. 

In recalling The Odyssey or one of the Brothers Grimm twisted tales, the narrative sometimes feels like a piece of folklore, and like folklore, it holds the seeds of truth about human motivations and nastiness.  No matter how much you might love your fellow man, you cannot deny the accuracy of the ugliness in this portrayal.  There is a ton to think about here.  There are beautiful and disturbing passages to roll over in your mind.  There is a lot to be upset about, a lot to want to change.  But there is nothing to keep you from reading it.