The Big Picture

Greenberg’s “Nat Turner: The Man and the Rebellion” greatly complicates and challenges  the story set forth in Kyle Baker’s graphic novel – as well it should. It would be hard to defend the use of a graphic novel with such minimal use of text as an authoritative history of any person, place or set of circumstances. Baker is telling a story with an emphasis on the visual. We as readers/interpreters get a sense of the story through that which art tells best: vivid representations of scenes that make good viewing, the visceral emotions and actions of the people involved in the 1831 events. What words there are are selectively chosen to accompany the graphics but as such, tell only part of the story.

Likewise the actual text of Nat Turner’s “confession” tells us only part of the story, because, as Greenberg points out, it was taken down by someone whose motives were particularly suspect and who certainly wasn’t sympathetic to Nat. Furthermore, we don’t know how much he or Nat left out in the telling. Greenberg’s piece offers a lot of fascinating background and historical context to enhance our understanding, but it is no more the whole picture than the other two texts. Finally, the series of wonderful old photos from the University of Virginia archives offer us more visual fodder and perhaps engage us in a way that Baker’s novel does not in that these are the real locations. I can’t help but look at those photos and marvel: how small most of the houses and outbuildings really were, what the dust on the roads must have felt like when you walked them. I wonder if such and such a tree is still standing, especially the one from which Nat Turner was hanged.

So, what we really need are all these bits and pieces. When we approach a given story (I like that word so much better than “literature”), we do best when we broaden our understanding to include a number of different sources – being exceedingly careful with that word “authoritative.” This aspect of variety is not only a grand thing for the different kinds of information it affords, but for the opportunities it gives us to engage students. Graphic novels may be incomplete, even superficial in some cases, but they give certain students important entry points into literature, science, history, etc. And for the rest of the students, they can enrich understanding, and yes, even inspire argument. I also like the cross-discipline idea of art plus literature (or science, or history, etc.): discussing choices the artist made in rendering and presenting his art, why an item placed in such a way on the page has a certain meaning for the reader, etc.