I know I should probably spend this week writing on the required reading materials, especially in regard to how Nat Turner stacks up to reality—to the best of our own understanding. To tell you the truth, though, I’m still hung up on last week’s conversation about “storytelling” and “literature.” In hindsight our discussion was incredibly nebulous. I’m not sure if that was more of the fact that we were grappling with very esoteric terms or just that I didn’t get a full night sleep the day before. I must admit I probably wasn’t the clearest in my thoughts that night in some respect, but that is the beauty of these blog posts and their existence as a sort of big red reset button on our thoughts for the week or the previous one.

I think the most interesting question that was never asked last week was in regard to the series of woodcut illustrations composed into novel format. What if Gods’ Man wasn’t “A Novel in Woodcuts” but simply “A Novel?” How much would that change our judgment of the book’s cover before even opening it? Does such a statement (and it most certainly is a statement in and of itself) change the way we read it? I’d like to think so, because when I see “A Novel in Woodcuts” I see a transfixion of what makes a novel a “novel”—that is, sequential prose of a given length—and adapting that to carved illustrations. To outright call itself a novel would be much more deliberate call to overturn genre conventions, but that may have not been the author’s intention.

Perhaps, ultimately, there is no harm in calling Nat Turner a novel or calling it literature. So let’s call it that. And what of it? The sky doesn’t fall. The sea does not run red. Season three of Game of Thrones still airs without a hitch.

I believe I was a bit harsh in my first response regarding Nat Turner in suggesting that there’s not much in the way of the written word being worked with in it to be considered literature. It was rightfully brought up by someone else last week before class had started that the confession and the way it unfolded as described in the back of the book was different from how Baker integrated the confession into the progression of the “graphic novel.”

In a certain sense, then, Baker is working with the source material—literature by definition—in ways that can be arguably seen as literary. Visual rhetoric and expression may overpower the piece, but there is certainly an engagement with the written “discourse” of Nat Turner and his multiple representations across various source materials that Baker is directly reacting to—if not responding to. If it’s unfair to call it literature, it is at least inviting the reader to participate in ways that are “literary” interpretations.

Background: I always read the responses that are posted on the blog, but this week I found myself more eager to do so than usual. Our inability to discuss the content of Nat Turner in any depth last week made me especially curious to see which areas of the book we were each individually wrapped up in.

Reading through the posts of those of you who posted before me, I found that a lot of the mental threads I had been playing with had already been picked up. I wanted to add my thoughts in a way that would connect and respond to these other posts but I had to admit that I didn’t have any solutions, either. And, man, the post in which I tried to unite all of these ideas started getting long. Obscenely long. So I’m going to take a cue from one of Jacque’s earlier posts and throw out some of my unconnected ideas in bulletpoints. Let’s pretend this is a literary homage to the pulsing instability of the Nat Turner graphic novel.

• Mimi has referred to the “gap” that the graphic novel leaves between “a gifted child’s ethereal piety and its transmutation into unsparing violence.” I was similarly struck by the ‘choppiness’ of the text. I feel that this issue is not limited to the content of the book, however, and that, in large part, Baker’s artistic decisions are responsible for the effect. The style of the illustration used seems to further fictionalize the tale and I wonder about the (literally) black-and-white presentation of a conflict that exists almost entirely in the grey area that lies between stock notions of right and wrong.

• Robb mentions the rage that characterizes the violence on pages 174-178. Because these pages were brought to my attention in light of my own consideration of the graphic novel as a medium, I began to think about the fact that each episode of the story – every frame, every stroke of charcoal – resulted from a deliberate choice on the part of the author. If there is rage in these pages, it cannot be reduced to the rage of the characters; it is Kyle Baker’s rage every bit as much as it is Nat Turner’s.

• Several students have touched on the uncertainty that familiarity with this week’s historical documents caused them. This issue brings me back to the idea that I attempted to articulate last week about the appropriateness of a medium for a story and the way that the choice of medium influences the reader’s understanding of the text. Is Nat Turner a historical record? Is it an example of historical fiction? Do the answers to these questions change the way in which teachers and other readers approach the work? Should they?

• Finally, one issue kept bothering me when going through Gray’s base text: Why do we have this tendency to think of historical writings as factual simply because they were written during or soon after the event they describe? Why do we, informed readers who routinely question the media reports we encounter in this day and age, suddenly lose our ability to consider the myriad of biases, estimations, and outright lies that can (and do!) make their way into historical documents?

In creating a dramatic account of Nat Turner, Kyle Baker could have started from any point in the story.  That he chose to begin with a portrayal of communal life in Africa, with the rape of a civilization by marauders, then the shaving, branding, neck irons and claustrophobia of a chained voyage across the Atlantic provides the depth and indelible dimension of a saga.  His graphics move us along with dramatic power and credibility.  At the same time, some vital information is missing from this vivid interpretation of a historic incident.  What really motivated Nat Turner?  This week’s reading stimulates the question: what dam burst in his active mind? 

Kenneth Greenberg notes how the psyche of a slave could be demolished, particularly (and ironically) in the case of a more ambiguously close and paternalistic relationship between a slave and master.  I wish we knew what really happened to Nat.  What traumas did he suffer?  What conflicts seared his piercing intelligence?  The record leaves critical gaps.  Either Turner withheld a full accounting from Thomas Gray, hewing to his own beatific vision just prior to death, or Gray excised any particulars that might have shone a contemptible light on the white masters and an inhumane system in our nation.

I began to wonder.  How old Nat was when his father ran away?  Why did Nat himself run away and then decide to return?  What kind of work did he perform, and what did he witness?  Was he or a family member abused?  Beyond his religiosity, what motives prompted him to lead other slaves to put their own lives on the line in an act that was doomed to futility?

It seems that Nat himself did not do a lot of the killing.  The sword he carried was a blunt and ineffective instrument.  Nat seemed to have strong survival skills.  At what point did something snap?    

Baker’s account raises breathtaking awareness.  However, the historical record with which he had to work leaves many questions unanswered.  I will never forget the expressions on the eye-popping faces of the black and white characters, and the scope of human cruelty and suffering that Baker depicts with fluidity.  I concluded that his book is a work of art, even though it is incomplete and flawed as a story and history.  

The introduction to “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context” is a wonderful read not only in and of itself (how it serves to inform and, for us, contextualize Baker’s Nat Turner) but as a formulae for any historical treatment of a text.  I found the historicity of Kenneth Greenberg’s article to be this perfect balance between a well-grounded and yet truly expansive effort.  By ‘historicity’ I mean a discussion about how authentic a historical document can be and in what ways that historical text can be authenticated and/or contextualized with other historical documents.  I studied history at university, and I wish I had read this sooner.  The line, “The act of recounting, whether personal or historical, often involves transforming the people or events of the past into objects we can use in the present” (26), is a great summation of the study of history (as opposed to “the learning of history”).

With this text in mind—and some of those great, sepia-tinted photographs wandering around in my mind—I approached Nat Turner for a third time without very many expectations.  I tried to stop forcing myself to pay closer attention to some pages than I was inclined to give them (which was part of my project for the second reading), but on the other hand I wanted to donate extra attention to those pages which I felt were the most powerful.  Most of these were the ones that stood out to me in the beginning or the ones that our classmates traced and discussed last class (I trust the intuition of a first read and the collective wisdom of the class).  One of the things I discovered early on was that graphic novels function more like poems than tradition novels, at least in regards to how we traditionally read poems and novels.  This isn’t a necessarily esoteric insight—graphic novels have a select number of images as poems do words, as opposed to the horde of words, images, characters and changes that typify novels—but I enjoyed making the realization.  The picture of the noose around the woman’s foot in the beginning was especially moving to me this time around.  Unlike most, I didn’t find the violence of the rebellion especially distasteful, and each time I’ve read this book I’ve found myself rooting for Nat Turner pretty freely.  But the depiction of rage on pages 174-178 altered that view; I was reminded that this was a historical retelling of some kind, that this was a product of rage—violence begetting violence, suffering over suffering.  In the end, redemption is found (or consummated) by Turner’s death.  Maybe that is the only kind of redemption possible for this kind of story—a movement away from the Old Testament to the New.  On the other hand, I wonder if it was not so much the result itself—which, as Greenberg points out, was relatively minimal on the scale of world history—as it is the story which has endured (if not prominently) for such a long time.  It doesn’t seem strange to me that Nat Turner, who must have had a great love and reverence for the written word, would have passed on his story even into the hands of a miserly white lawyer.  Greenberg’s text also made me think about what historical context I tried, both the first, second, and third times I read it, to put Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner in.  This, in turn, made me think about how that immediate contextualization speaks to my education and my history.

Finally, the big insight I took away from this third, contextualized reading was that I finally felt comfortable enough with the text to criticize it.  I began to think: I needed words here.  And: This is unnecessary and messes up the linguistic flow of the visual text.  And I began to want more of the story and different elements in it here and there.  A few times I felt that the whole story should have just been visually represented.  I believe what Greenberg says, about how retelling a story transforms it, in some way, into the now (just like traditions renew the history out of which they were born), and a lot of times I felt that Baker’s retelling was not fictionalized enough; he did not fill in the Nat Turner’s narrative gaps in the creative ways that I wanted them filled in.  Why didn’t he tell the dynamic story of Nat Turner and his wife?  Did Nat Turner have friends?  What about his suffering?  Why was the intimacy of the slave-master connection not touched on at all?  (In fact, the text presented a very defined and distant establishment.)  Now, I don’t think I’d be able to defend many of my critiques because I know nothing about art or graphic novels.  When it came to thinking that a certain representation was misleading or too underdeveloped, I became a little frustrated by not having the vocabulary to voice what I felt.

The best moment in the book, I think, has to be the mural on pages 102-103.  There’s this descent of the wrathful holy spirit through a lightning bolt—the spirit of Jehovah, God of the Old Testament, the one of fire and brimstone who took away the first born sons of Egypt so that the Jews could be freed from their bondage—and Turner’s arms raised like they would be in prayer but with balled fists, and the tempest behind him, and his scream.  The page got me thinking about that sermon, “I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God,” and some of the stories in Genesis that I don’t but should know by heart.  Then, because Greenburg mentioned that he promised invulnerability to rebels that “held crab claws in their mouths” (p.17), I spent over an hour researching the failed slave rebellion leader Gullah Jack.  Afterward, I wondered if all or any of this is really admissible.  I mentioned this in my first post on Nat Turner, but I still don’t know what sort of textual history this story wants to be placed in or read with.  Perhaps, though, the neat thing about graphic novels is that you are free to bring your own textual history into them in a way that is usually not possible in traditional text-mediums.  At least I was free to do this because I didn’t have any other comic references.  And I’d be willing to defend this point on the grounds that it made the work that much more enjoyable.

Nat Turner’s is a complex story, which I knew little to nothing about prior to my experience with Nat Turner in graphic narrative form.  The background reading for this week though left me, like Joy, wondering about whether background would’ve been a help or a hindrance in this situation.

It probably says more about me as a reader than Baker as a writer/illustrator/designer, but I didn’t realize until the articles this week that Nat Turner’s Confession was not only not written by Nat Turner himself, but by a man who had suspect motive and not altogether trustworthy credibility.  That was one of the most eye opening things that the readings for this week, and it makes me wonder if it’s possible to tell Nat’s story in anything but an extremely biased way since the main source we have on the event may be a biased account masquerading as something objectively truthful.

Despite not being sure about the interpretation of events, the readings and photographs for this week lent a sense of reality to what was otherwise a slightly unreal, otherworldly tale.  Actually seeing the photographs of the areas where the rebellion took place, especially done in a similar coloring to the illustrations in Baker’s book, made it seem even more real for me.  Too, there were parts where Baker’s illustrations combined with the “Confession” left me feeling more confused than anything else.  The account of Nat knowing things that had happened before his birth was one place that left me feeling that there must be more to the story, and Kenneth Greenberg’s piece helped me fill in that gap.  It doesn’t seem that we know a great deal about what exactly that event was that Nat recalled, but it became more clear to me that everyone who knew Nat saw that time, and other events, as markers that Nat was destined for greatness.

I’m not sure where all that leaves me about knowing what to do with background information.  I enjoyed my first read of the story in more of a purely for the story sort of way—I was trying to understand what was going on, rather than trying to do any sort of in-depth interpretation.  And I liked that.  But, I also like reading it again after developing more of an understanding of what was happening, looking for places that Gray’s influence may have slipped into the account, and looking for places where Baker had to make an interpretive decision.  This worked well for this sort of situation where the readers can probably be trusted to actually go back and read the main text a second time.  I don’t know that it would be possible to approach a story this way every time, but I do think “withholding” background information at the beginning can be a positive way of reading a story.

Joy Wagener

While I was reading the primary sources and looking at photos from the Turner rebellion, I was wondering whether this material brought positive light to my first reading of Nat Turner, or if my first reading was better because I had zero context. It’s hard to say, actually.  When I first read it, I was literally in shock, jaw agape, when I saw images of severed hands and heads with blood smeared across the frames. With each turn of the page, I felt as shocked as Nat’s victims must have felt when awakened by the shouts of the murderous mob.  I felt sympathy for the white men, but I also could feel Nat’s pent-up rage and discontent.  However, now that I have so much background and context for this story, I feel more enlightened about the bias of Kyle Baker, but also surprisingly skeptical of Thomas Gray’s motives and reliability.

In the article by Greenberg (“The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context”), the author mentioned that Gray was poor and in need of money. He was not Nat’s lawyer. There is no evidence that this testimony was ever read in court. Gray’s motive seems to be completely monetary which calls into question the reliability of the “confession.”  Another interesting point Greenberg brought up was the strange use of language Nat presumably used in his confession—ie, his eloquent way of stating things which would have been outside of his vocabulary. If these are Gray’s words and not Nat’s, then the story is significantly impacted.  Also, why would Nat feel comfortable enough to open up on Gray?

While my first read of the novel was simplistic and filled with my gasping, my second read created many more questions for me about the truthfulness of the story—in the language, the interpretation, and in Nat’s “confession” of facts.  Did Gray alter events in his recording? Did his motives to make money overreach the truth and facts? I find my reading of Nat Turner forever altered by these questions and my considerations of their impact.

Just realized I missed last week’s blog.  Please depict me with Scott McCloud’s severe zigzag lines.  Puddles of ink around darkly shaded cheekbones and eye bags highlight a face in tension, which dominates the frame.  The background is busy.  What would signal my inner state of mind?  Perhaps piles of notebooks around a computer, a basket of dirty laundry and dishes that cry out for washing.  At this point, I would rather read a graphic novel. 

Nat Turner surprised me.  I did not think I would like this pictorial form of literature; I was a skeptic.  Caricatures are bound to be superficial conveyances, I thought. 

In fact, the “information density” to which Erik Rabkin refers applies to this work of art, which moved me deeply.  Images of outrage are superimposed upon the reader’s imagination.  I cannot forget the neck irons, a busted drum, curling whips, a bawling baby tossed to sharks, and human cargo crammed into the bowels of a creaking ship.  The images reflect the “jarring combinations” that McCloud writes about.  If Kyle Baker’s narrative is not linear, historically minute or fully realized, it nevertheless arouses awareness and shocking emotional power.  A historical saga is humanized.

I refer to an NPR American Masters TV program on Philip Roth last night.  Did anyone else catch it?  At age eighty, this prolific novelist remains reflective, articulate and active.  Quoting Chekhov, Roth said that the mission of literature is the proper presentation of a problem, and not its solution.  “You invite understanding,” he said.  “And often you get it wrong.  That’s how you know you’re alive.” 

Kyle Baker’s depiction of the forces that generated a bestial insurrection may not be fully coherent.  For example, I found a disjunction between a gifted child’s ethereal piety and its transmutation into unsparing violence.  As a reader, I puzzled over this gap.  But my eyes returned again and again to the images.  Baker takes us on a journey, his variegated frames invite us into the abusive world and minds of slaves, and he makes us participate in a narrative of degradation, guilt and shame that occurred here in Virginia in our own nation.  His graphic work invites our engagement and it stimulates more questions, if not pat explanations or solutions.

 Much more compelling than laundry and dishes.     

I’m not sure I know any more about Nat Turner after reading this book.  Like the author, I knew very little about the man, and the frustrating part of the book was that I still feel like I don’t know much.  While the graphics were gripping at times, I believe there are still too many gaps to satisfy a reader willing to learn more about a famous slave.  If I had more time, I would spend it googling Nat Turner and try to fill in some of the gaps I feel were missing (but already I am very late getting this weeks readings done).

And that brings me to my next point – time.  Sure I was able to finish a 200 pg book in a very short amount of time, but the time I spent trying to figure out what was happening was frustrating.  There were plenty of sequences when I just couldn’t figure out what was going on (the killing of the old man drummer, for one).  Finally, when I finished the book there was a page of notes that explained that episode.  But it was frustrating going back and forth for a few minutes trying to figure out where I missed the panel “explaining” the situation.  I have lots of questions like this which weren’t answered on the page of Notes.

I imagine a college student, who is pressed for time, will absorb very little of this.  I don’t want to minimize the horror of some of the scenes, and depictions of the violence of slavery in general.  These are the images that will stay with me.  But if an instructor was expecting a student to learn all about Nat Turner, that wouldn’t happen with this book.  The busy college student who doesn’t want to linger and spend the time trying to piece the narrative together, and perhaps even spend a little time in google, won’t get much from this.    At the very beginning of his article, Rabkin says  “…we need extended time to apprehend art – to read it.” (36),  and I think this could actually be a problem with the graphic novel format.

I was really hopeful to see what I would take from this week’s reading.  While I think graphic novels are a nice break from the typical texts, this novel in particular might expect too much from students; many of the students I teach would be willing to put in the time to make the leap to fuller understanding.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, about how students today read, and some experts are saying that because of the format of most of our reading, on a computer screen, we’ve become a nation of skimmers – we do a lot of surface reading, but very little deep reading – and therefore there is very little deep understanding.  And I think that might be a problem with this graphic novel.  The material is difficult and the gaps are sometimes too large, and therefore, the student will just skim the surface rather than take the time to figure it out.  It certainly is tempting just to skim when you have so many other things to do.

Even conservative English classes have begun to incorporate more and more of the types of materials once reserved for cultural studies, an understandable combination since the latter in many ways grew out of the study of literature and the line between these two fields has always been somewhat indistinct. I find much to celebrate in the inclusion of many of these new forms and genres and, more broadly, with the mindset that acknowledges “reading” as a not-exclusively-textual act of understanding and interpreting. This week’s reading of Nat Turner and the other articles on graphic novels, however, has been instrumental in helping me to articulate what I feel to be one of the major weaknesses with using alternative texts into classrooms (and with students) that are not aware of the different approaches which must be employed here.

My issue is not with the texts themselves but with the way in which teachers and students deal with them. Although I believe that critical reading skills can be applied to all sorts of texts, I have found that literature classes rarely give proper consideration to the merits and limitations of different forms. They also tend to ignore critical discussion of the success of a given work in a particular medium. An example: Compare the graphic novel Nat Turner with the recent film Django Unchained. While there are obvious differences in the two stories, their similarities are immediately apparent to anyone who has been exposed to both works. Both offer vivid, violent depictions of slave uprisings but I found the effect of the two texts to be completely different: while I found Nat Turner to be somewhat superficial in terms of character development and explanation (a great ‘jumping off place’ for classroom discussions), Django Unchained offers viewers a more fully-realized situation that is also more limited in scope (a personal revenge story rather than a rebellion against the entire institution of slavery).

But literature teachers who incorporate these “alternative” texts into their classrooms must make a conscious effort to discuss interpretive strategies that are unique to each medium. The pacing/time issues that Rabkin mentioned in his article are just one aspect of the challenges that readers have when they encounter these materials. Failing to think critically about the type of texts that they have often consumed in non-academic settings may ultimately lead to more frustration than enlightenment.

In the same vein as previous commentaries, I revere those talented enough to take an indescribable, in this case habitual, processes and turn them inside out; thereby unraveling, even evaluating invisible sequence of events.  Piggy-backing off of what Molly wrote—I found Rabkin and McCloud’s work on temporal awareness, sincerely enlightening.

Positioning myself in Rabkin’s camp, he won me over from the get-go, beginning with the glaringly obvious concept, “…we need extended time to apprehend art, to read it” (36).  Of course that what it is!  You couldn’t stay we need more time to stare—too much emptiness implied.  I guess gaze would fit, but the term doesn’t really indicate a deeper level of critical thinking, not to mention the action seems pretty one-way.  Reading fits, because reading, as writing, is cyclical.  The piece presents information, one takes it all in–comprehending, evaluating, disseminating, etc.–then, said individual contributes these new ideas to the piece, do they fit?, not fit,? oh hey look, the piece brought up something new, and by extension, I have a new idea—and around and around we go.  As Rabkin noted, developing ‘analytical principles’ (43).

If that didn’t win you over, this next one might—although it’s a bit of a stretch. Pivoting off of the image, ‘reading in between the lines,’ that is reading blank space—if you just turned that space, vertical, you’d get a gutter…to read!

Still, Rabkin takes the idea of time happening in between the panels a step further, which I agree with; “But McCloud’s view of the reader’s role also needs refinement…we find single frames that can hold our eye for minutes as we note and decode a wealth of half-understood detail. Time, in graphic novels, then, is controlled, among other ways, by the degree of information density and representational immediacy in each frame” (37).

Take for instance, the many fight scenes in Nat Turner.  While one frame illustrates Nat attacking, the next frame doesn’t necessarily portray the other person’s reaction, let alone them fighting back.  More often then not, the next sketch was of a disfigured, dead body.  Here, the reader’s imagination is processing much more than what’s represented—and the gutters merely helped, not instigated said process.  Even if you could say, the author rendered the ‘quick and dirty’ nature of the killings, the contents of the frames themselves still represent time more than the space between.

And this all was routine.  Readers just knew—it’s not as if words were put in the past tense and you could point, to something tangible, and say here, I knew this sequence of events took longer, no.  The busyness of the frame subliminally measured time.