Moving back and forth between the photographs in the UVa archive and the Baker’s illustrations in Nat Turner, I was struck by the similarity between them. Barker’s drawings evoke the same tone of old photos: his choice of shading and use of shadows mimic, at times, the feeling one gets looking at tintypes. His selection of “color” – varying shades of off-brown for backgrounds and darker shades of black – in many ways replicate the lithographs, daguerreotypes and engravings of the period. His use of photographs as page “headers” (129, 130, 133, etc.) and the insertion of a sketch/photo of an axe (152), complete with manufacturing details and trademarks, also give the novel a sense of the straight-forward history and a chronology of events.
It is highly likely that Barker came across pictures of slaves during his research for the book and was influenced visually by what he discovered. As he states in the introduction, the genesis of the novel comes from his engagement with history texts and his curiosity about Turner’s rebellion and he is true to “history” in his drawings.
What little written text Barker does use works against the graphic text. The excerpts from The Confessions of Nat Turner move back and forth between a matter-of-fact recitation of events and the wonderfully structured sentences describing his spiritual development and final epiphany. The bland and gentle matter-of-factness of the written text clashes head-on with the brutality of the images. Turner mentions the kindness of some of his victims in his confession and then Baker renders an image of absolute brutality and terror as they are destroyed.
In terms of the mating of text and images, Barker’s Nat Turner is far removed from Spiegelman’s attempt to accurately the story of Maus. The “confession” of Nat Turn could be a distortion of what really passed between Turner and Thomas Gray, and Gray’s editorializing certainly calls into question the reliability of the narrator. Barker’s drawings, however, take much of what is said as a departure point from which he feels free to write a “novel” that captures what is not said, but what is implied by Turner. The retrospective vantage point of history bears out Turner’s words.
The first panel of the book is nothing more than a pair of eyes and the image of a book surrounded by black. It captures one of the themes highlighted by Turner in his confession; how the power of the written word can set us free. Barker mentions the power of written text extensively in his preface and then proceeds to create a text with only a minimum of words.
For all my griping about Baker’s depiction of Turner himself (see comments on Jay’s post), I absolutely think you’re on to something here. Baker certainly seems to be be trying to making his narrative as believable as possible in terms of the setting, props, color choices, etc.
As you point out, the juxtaposition of the “confessed” text and the images of bloodthirsty execution can be completely unsettling. There is no doubt about it–it’s a powerful text.
I guess that’s why I have so many questions about it.