Styron’s Nat: or, The Metaphysics of Presence

In 1967, the American novelist William Styron published his third major work of fiction, a book entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron’s Confessions represented itself as the autobiographical narrative of an African American slave, who in August 1831 had led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, not far from the Virginia Tidewater region where Styron himself had grown up. Both Turner and the revolt that bore his name were real enough. But for Styron the Turner of record was “a person of conspicuous ghastliness” with whom he wished to have no connection. So Styron invented his own Nat, inspired by “subtler motives” than those manifested by the historical Turner. In this essay I ask what called Styron’s fictive realities into being, and how they were crafted. I ask why he insisted his work was not a “historical novel” but a “meditation on history”—and why, despite his insistence, he could not explain what that meant. Finally, I ask whether it is possible to redeem Nat Turner from the effects of our attempts to “understand” him; whether, that is, he might achieve a historical presence of his own that is ever other than ghostly, or ever other than past