ABSTRACT
William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice was published in 1979, just after the broadcast of the television series Holocaust in the United States at a time when the ethics of representing the subject were making headlines. Sophie’s Choice was greeted by a mixture of acclaim and outrage. Styron repeatedly notes in interviews that at least the critical controversy was never as fierce as that which greeted the publication of his earlier novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966), typified by the appearance of a volume called William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.1 On the publication of Sophie’s Choice Styron breezily observed that had he got the facts wrong about Auschwitz, ‘Rabbis, Poles, exNazisthey’ll all be after my hide’, and added that at least he never had to ‘dodge the assault’ of a book called ‘Ten Rabbis Respond’ to Sophie’s Choice. The novel stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for over forty weeks and won the American Book Award for fiction in 1980.2 However, Styron did have to ‘dodge the assault’ by critics incensed that he had written a novel purportedly about the Holocaust, an event with which he was not only unconnected but which focuses on a Polish Catholic and not a Jewish victim. It was pointed out that his narrator (and therefore, in several minds, Styron) inaccurately likens plantation to Nazi slavery; that all the Jewish and female characters in the novel are either sexually dysfunctional or mad; and that the novel was allegedly motivated by a literary rivalry between Southern and Jewish-American writers in which Styron was trying to prove he could engage with the subjects usually considered the province of the latter.3
