Perversion the Social Relation

i82Michael P. Biblernew world of sameness and equality. Although the flawed logic hereobviously rests in the way that Nat personally forms his opinion aboutBrantley, Styron's inclusion of this second baptism seems to suggest thatNat's new vision of violent Christianity and bloody insurrection marksa final attempt to destroy the institutions and definitions of difference, aswell as the people who support them, so that the realities of interpersonaldifferences between those who remain will no longer need to besuppressed.But the flaw in Nat's thinking—and here, I think, in Styron's as well—cannot be ignored because Nat also allows the term "sodomy"—whichwe now more generally associate with homosexual acts performed byconsenting adults—to absorb and obscure Brantley's much more problematicidentity as a pedophile. He de-emphasizes the predatory form ofBrantley's apparent sexual preference and recasts it as something muchmore amenable to his own political goals. This slippage convenientlyallows Nat once more to redraw the axis of sameness and welcomeonly those who also live at odds with the hierarchies and ideologieshe is struggling to overthrow. 12 He now redefines sameness on politicalgrounds instead of racial ones by also misconstruing Brantley's habitsof sexual domination as something more akin to his own experience ofhomo-ness. Nat seems to privilege a false notion of Brantley's sexualidentity in order to reclassify himself and the white man as the same kindsof outlaws—men who are at odds with society not just because they'vedone something taboo sexually, but because their sexual histories haveprompted them in one degree or another to modify and challenge thesocial limitations placed upon them. With this subtle error, Styron apparentlywants us to read the scene as the full-circle return of homo-nessin a way that allows Nat to tolerate differences within a community builton a communal sameness. Superficially, Nat's embrace of Brantley seemsalmost like a realization of the Utopian form of homo-relationality thathomo-ness inspires—the place where social equality is grounded in thenotion of a fundamental sameness and where differences can exist withoutmattering. But to reach this new system of homo-relational community,Nat must constantly redraw the lines of sameness to satisfy hispersonal criteria of who should be admitted and who should not. Again,the error here seems to stem in large part from Nat's personal idiosyncrasies.But the inconsistency of Nat's criteria for sameness may also