a matter of the heart that splits you in two
I've returned to William Styron, and it feels, simultaneously, like a homecoming and regression. To read a white Southern author after having swum in a multi-hued, somewhat postcolonial pool carries the air of transgression. I'd rather not tell my friends how beautiful I find this man's sentences, and it frustrates me how much his patrician tone soothes me. I don't resent him for the grace in his sentences. But I do cheer for myself when I am able, now, to see occasions of his short-sightedness, or moments where his defensiveness about being a Southerner crashes through any reasoned analysis of the racial issue. This Quiet Dust begins with a series of essays on the South, what it means for Styron to be a Southerner, the fact that his grandmother owned a little girl, and his own search for Nat Turner in the build up to his writing maybe the most problematic but beautifully-worded novel I've ever held in my hands. I still duel with how I feel about his slave revolt narrative. It's easier, less complicated, to simply look at him as Faulkner Redux. Now that Southern writers who look more like me have begun to burst past the gatekeepers and claim patches of the region for themselves, I'm more at ease feeling as though, reading Stryon, I'm merely better acquainting myself with the enemy.
It would not take a PhD in psychology to figure that my chancing on this book was prefigured by earlier conversation between Mom and I of a better, more prosperous Connecticut, which was in turn prompted by the upcoming election and Governor Malloy's gross negligence in attending to the state wherein I was raised. Indeed, it seemed Connecticut in 2016 was the logical result of his myopia, of his catastrophic lack of vision and his inability to square the fact that he was Governor of both Fairfield and Bridgeport. This state is more than Stamford, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and shout into his face. Before long, Mom and I had come up with a number of initiatives to turn around the state's fortunes: state-subsidized loan assistance programs for young graduates with an entrepreneurial streak, enticements for those inclined towards tech and trying to dodge the stratospheric price of living in a place like San Francisco (welcomed as they would be to occupy any number of the abandoned warehouses and residences that pockmark Central Connecticut and points north). Governor Rowland was lionized in that van for having the character and the force of will to command that CIGNA, if it wanted to set up shop here, would hire exclusively from Connecticut stock. But now we've seen the flight of nearly every insurance giant greener pastures. And as more people flee, the tax base shrinks, which prompts a raise in rates. An unfortunate side effect of having only a few decades prior come up, and rather haphazardly, with a homunculus of a state tax code. Job flight, higher taxes, no professional prospects for the young who graduate from our state universities. It was no mystery as to why many Trump voters went the way they went.
That, and failure on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic Right to even pretend towards proper self-reflection on and atonement for decades (predicated on centuries) of racial injury.
Which brings me back to Styron and his defensiveness. I almost wish he'd just taken his whippings after the publication of The Confession of Nat Turner. For all his claims to "know the Negro", a bizarre utterance from a man born in a part of the country that sought with terrifying and apocalyptic comprehensiveness to grind any sense of human-ness out of a greater portion of its population, he probably had no idea why we were so angry at him. Maybe he did. Still, a public castigation (so readily available in the age of Twitter) would have provided a catharsis of unimaginable strength, unimaginable at least to him. Maybe it's impossible for me to comprehend any idea of "knowing the Negro" that isn't attended by crippling guilt coupled with a madness-inducing compulsion to atonement, all of which of course remains unrealized because a white Southerner is a white Southerner. I don't imagine "knowing the Negro" can ever be devoid of any impulse towards penance, or at least understanding of why it's being demanded.
I find retroactive consolation in this added, surreptitious desire to continue reading his work. Of course the sentences caress and impress me. But I'm getting to "know" him, the way one studies game film of the team you'll be playing against next week, or previous work of a terrorist organization an operative of which you plan to capture.
It would not take a PhD in psychology to figure that my chancing on this book was prefigured by earlier conversation between Mom and I of a better, more prosperous Connecticut, which was in turn prompted by the upcoming election and Governor Malloy's gross negligence in attending to the state wherein I was raised. Indeed, it seemed Connecticut in 2016 was the logical result of his myopia, of his catastrophic lack of vision and his inability to square the fact that he was Governor of both Fairfield and Bridgeport. This state is more than Stamford, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and shout into his face. Before long, Mom and I had come up with a number of initiatives to turn around the state's fortunes: state-subsidized loan assistance programs for young graduates with an entrepreneurial streak, enticements for those inclined towards tech and trying to dodge the stratospheric price of living in a place like San Francisco (welcomed as they would be to occupy any number of the abandoned warehouses and residences that pockmark Central Connecticut and points north). Governor Rowland was lionized in that van for having the character and the force of will to command that CIGNA, if it wanted to set up shop here, would hire exclusively from Connecticut stock. But now we've seen the flight of nearly every insurance giant greener pastures. And as more people flee, the tax base shrinks, which prompts a raise in rates. An unfortunate side effect of having only a few decades prior come up, and rather haphazardly, with a homunculus of a state tax code. Job flight, higher taxes, no professional prospects for the young who graduate from our state universities. It was no mystery as to why many Trump voters went the way they went.
That, and failure on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic Right to even pretend towards proper self-reflection on and atonement for decades (predicated on centuries) of racial injury.
Which brings me back to Styron and his defensiveness. I almost wish he'd just taken his whippings after the publication of The Confession of Nat Turner. For all his claims to "know the Negro", a bizarre utterance from a man born in a part of the country that sought with terrifying and apocalyptic comprehensiveness to grind any sense of human-ness out of a greater portion of its population, he probably had no idea why we were so angry at him. Maybe he did. Still, a public castigation (so readily available in the age of Twitter) would have provided a catharsis of unimaginable strength, unimaginable at least to him. Maybe it's impossible for me to comprehend any idea of "knowing the Negro" that isn't attended by crippling guilt coupled with a madness-inducing compulsion to atonement, all of which of course remains unrealized because a white Southerner is a white Southerner. I don't imagine "knowing the Negro" can ever be devoid of any impulse towards penance, or at least understanding of why it's being demanded.
I find retroactive consolation in this added, surreptitious desire to continue reading his work. Of course the sentences caress and impress me. But I'm getting to "know" him, the way one studies game film of the team you'll be playing against next week, or previous work of a terrorist organization an operative of which you plan to capture.