The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (8 page)

How was it that in America I had been demonstrating in front of the White House, running away from tear gas and shouting political slogans, and now in Tehran, in the midst of a real revolution, under the threat of real bullets, I found myself in my bedroom, poring over Mark Twain into the early hours of morning and wondering how to teach the idea of beauty? Perhaps it was the very intensity of life during revolutionary times, its extreme and violent intrusions into each and every aspect of our being, that made us more sensitive to questions that just a year or two earlier might have seemed purely academic. My dilemma that evening was how to share with my students what I had so often experienced myself when reading a poem, a play, a novel: that immense sense of gratitude and joy, that spark of recognition that Vladimir Nabokov called the “tingle in the spine.”

Research. From the beginning of their freshman year, my students would have been taught how to use the library, how to find articles and background information, to cite quotations and structure footnotes. I did not want to ask for more of the same. I thought it would be more exciting, and perhaps more fruitful, to treat literary research the way one would a treasure hunt, following a web of clues until one could piece together the genesis of the story, or the motive, or the crime. Parallel to all the mechanical aspects of writing a paper, and before using outside sources, I wanted the class to do another kind of research, to trace the book through its process of formation.

“Just remember,” I told them, “the word ‘civilization’ is transformed on the very first page by Huck into ‘sivilization.’ That is a clue to the whole book—that slight change in spelling subverts the word’s meaning and implications. The key words in this novel—like ‘respectable,’ ‘conscience,’ ‘heart,’ ‘white’ and ‘nigger’—none of them have their conventional meanings. Remember the word ‘topsy-turvy,’ which we discussed last week? It applies to
Alice in Wonderland
and, in a different context, to
Huck Finn
.” I wanted them to feel the subversiveness of the text, to experience it as Twain’s first readers might have.

Nima, one of my students who now lives in the United States, reminded me recently of the hue and cry I made, in one of the last classes I taught in Iran, over the mistranslation of the word “sivilization.” One day a student brought in the Persian translation of
Huck Finn
and showed me how the well-meaning translator had simplified matters for his readers by rendering “sivilization” in its correct Farsi spelling. This had led to a long discussion in class about the issue of integrity and the fact that in every novel, including this one—indeed, perhaps especially this one—words were flesh, blood and bones, as well as soul and spirit. You have a right to interpret them however you wish, but no right—
no
right—to mutilate them or to perform plastic surgery on the text for your own comfort and pleasure.

I would be reminded of this exchange
two decades later in Washington, D.C., when another well-meaning publisher
took it upon himself to expunge another word, more inflammatory by far, from the text, arguing that he saw no reason to offend sensitive modern readers. So he decided to excise the word “nigger”
—
a word used 219 times over the course of the book—from his edition. He was not the first to express concern. In 1957 the NAACP called
Huck Finn
racially offensive, and since 1976 the charge has resurfaced in one form or another every decade or so. Toni Morrison beautifully weighed in on the subject, arguing that “the narrow notion of how to handle the offense Mark Twain’s use of the term ‘nigger’ would occasion for black students and the corrosive effect it would have on white ones” was “a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution.” So the publisher was in good company, but no one up until now had actually dared to tamper with the text.

I watched the latest iteration of the controversy play out in horror, glued to the
60 Minutes
piece on the subject and furiously mumbling to myself and jotting down notes. I was reminded of how professors and publishers in Iran, like the walrus and the carpenter tearfully eating the oysters in
Through the Looking-Glass,
would provide elaborate and self-serving justifications for their decision to delete words like “wine” and “lovemaking” from works of fiction. Of course, there was a difference—as the publisher of NewSouth Books dutifully explained, his change had not been mandated by the government, and people had the right to voice their objections, as well as to read the uncensored version, which was still available. In Iran, most publishers and teachers agreed to censor texts because severe repercussions could be expected for failing to do so. In this instance, censorship was rooted in a sense of righteous indignation, as the publisher explained how he, a native of Alabama, had witnessed Dr. King’s and other civil rights leaders’ struggles and been transformed by them, and how in altering the book now, he only wanted to do the right thing.

In a democratic society, we do not practice the savage methods of an autocratic regime, but we find new and pernicious ways of expressing our prejudices. Education’s goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical but unpredictable and often uncomfortable. One has to pause and imagine what it would mean to censor all that is uncomfortable from our textbooks. How, if you cannot face the past as it was, can you ever hope to teach history?

“Delicacy—a sad, sad false delicacy,” Twain wrote to his friend William Dean Howells, “robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.” He wanted to shock us, to make us uncomfortable, to arouse us from our indolent acquiescence. And he wanted us to feel. “Don’t say the old lady screamed,” he advised. “Bring her on and let her scream.”
What disturbs us about
Huck Finn
is that we hear the scream only too well, and that, perhaps, is not what we bargained for when we set out to read the adventures of a small boy drifting down the Mississippi.

Twain’s use of the word “nigger” demonstrates more than anything else how deeply and perniciously justifications for slavery were ingrained in the minds of Americans. Each time the word is used, it is simultaneously questioned, subverted, destabilized and discredited—in the same manner that terms like “respectable” or “white” are transformed and undermined. When Huck tells Aunt Sally that no one but a “nigger” was killed and she expresses her joy at no one’s being killed, this, as the saying goes, speaks volumes—not about the inhumanity of slaves but about the utter blindness of a good-hearted, God-fearing woman.

My students in Iran offered up a few innovative papers; they had not yet succumbed to the revolutionary mind-set that would soon grip campus. I remember two quite excellent ones from unlikely admirers of Huck, one of whom was the president of the newly formed Islamic students’ association. Some addressed the myth of American innocence à la Leslie Fiedler, and one girl had gone to the trouble of tracing the roots of the name Huckleberry. I don’t remember now what definition she came up with, but recently I checked a dictionary out of curiosity and came up with:

1. Fruit: the edible dark-blue fruit of a bush related to the blueberry.

2. Plant like blueberry: a bush that bears huckleberries. Native to: North America. Genus: Gaylussacia.

Her reasoning went something like this: the huckleberry, a wild and rare berry belonging to North America, symbolized Huckleberry, the wild and rare boy, so typically American. Of course, the plant’s name was as deceptive as the boy himself, because a huckleberry resembles a blueberry but is not one. Was Huck the wild fruit to Tom Sawyer’s tamer blueberry? I confess, the tame blueberry is my own contribution; now that I had been transformed from student to teacher, I could afford to abuse literary theory’s potentials for endless cat-and-mouse games with the text.

I remember one essay in particular, by a girl who objected to my choice of
Huck
on the grounds that it was too sad. Perhaps I remember this girl so well because she did not even pretend to write a research paper. Life was too overwhelming for her to make any attempt at objectivity. Her paper included few, if any, references or footnotes, and its language, following the curves and contours of her feelings, was for the most part barren and formal, but every few lines it veered into a poetic sentence or two. Her central point was more of a complaint than an argument: Why should students be made to read about this homeless and “unhappy” little boy and the fugitive slave who accompanied him at a time when they themselves felt so insecure? During one of her many digressions, she had questioned how representative this book was of America, wondering whether Americans really were this restless and lonely, because the America she had read and heard about was a happy and carefree place, so full of color: just look at the movies!

A year or so later, I too would dream of taking refuge in that other America, a Hollywood confection, only from the start I knew it was as true—or as false, for that matter—as the idea of Iran I had nurtured during my student years. Soon universities, always at the forefront of protest and dissent, would be shut down in a long and bloody confrontation as students and faculty united in protest against the government’s so-called Cultural Revolution, another name for the Islamization of the universities, which three decades later the Islamic regime has not yet succeeded in accomplishing, or at least not completely. Friends and relatives were on the run, sometimes making a quick stop at our place, their final destination unknown. Within the next few years, many among them were jailed or executed or fled the country. That girl and her classmates, the free way we had talked and debated, would soon belong to a past as distant and unreachable as America itself. Who would have time now to worry about the nomads of American fiction?

As the reality of the Islamic Republic insinuated itself into our lives and Tehran lost its colors and sounds, America was transformed in my imagination into a lush, green, teasingly colorful and desirable land. The more alien and menacing Tehran became, the more we had to withdraw from its public spaces, the more vibrant America’s fictional landscape appeared in my imagination. Yet it was obvious to me even then that the America I yearned for was more an invention of life in the Islamic Republic than the country I had known as a student. So I clung to that fictional other country, whose vagrant and at times unhappy citizens were the ones who helped me keep things in perspective when daily life began to feel more and more like a very bad dream.

Until I started teaching
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
I thought that Huck and Jim’s main obstacles to freedom were members of “respectable” society, like Miss Watson, but the more I delved into the book, the more I realized that it was far more subtle than that. Miss Watson and her Sunday-school mentality were the most obvious “villains” in the story, but no society is shaped mainly by its elites, and a Sunday-school mentality appears in different forms throughout the novel, in people vastly different from one another; for example, Pap, the other side of the coin to Miss Watson, her uncouth and unwashed mock-up in more ways than one, and—wait for it—Tom. Yes, Tom! In fact, I would go so far as to say that Tom is the real villain of this story.

My students, both in Iran and in the States, had little trouble accepting this notion, but the first time I suggested it to Farah, she shook her head and said, “I think you are getting carried away. Tom is just a kid—he doesn’t have Miss Watson’s power.”

“Exactly because he is a kid,” I said, “he is even more dangerous. Because no one takes him and what he represents seriously—except for Huck and Jim.” Then I added, “Don’t you worry, Tom is respectable, all right. That’s the root of the problem. He has no heart.”

We had several arguments about this, and she even threatened to attend my class, which she never did, but I would like to believe that I finally convinced her. All one had to do was follow Tom, who appears only at the beginning and the end of the book, each segment mirroring the other: in one he plays a seemingly harmless game, and in the other his game is not so funny anymore, as it has potentially fatal consequences.

The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is a reaction and response to
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
. That story, in fact, ends more with Huck than with Tom. When, at the end of their adventures, the two friends find gold and return home as heroes, Tom goes back to the fold, where Judge Thatcher has grand plans for his future, but Huck disappears, escaping the pious Widow Douglas, who wants to adopt and educate him. The wide search for Huck is fruitless until Tom Sawyer discovers his old friend among some “empty hogsheads,” having just breakfasted “upon some stolen odds and ends of food and was lying off, now, in comfort, with his pipe.”

Tom’s pleas for Huck to return fall on deaf ears. Huck asks his friend to take possession of his share of gold, and every once in a while to give him a few cents. He informs him that in the widow’s house “everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it.” When Tom lamely tells him that is how everybody lives, Huck says, “I ain’t everybody, and I can’t STAND it.” Then he heretically philosophizes that “being rich ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time.” He has no desire to be rich and live in those “smothery houses.”

Huck is softened only when Tom slyly tells him that he can’t be a part of his gang of robbers if he refuses to become a respectable member of the community. Tom reasons that robbers are more high class than pirates: in most countries they are “awful high up in nobility—dukes and such.” If Tom accepts Huck as he is, then “what would people say?” They will say that these robbers are “pretty low characters.” The book ends with Huck promising to return and to stay for a month with the Widow Douglas.

Most of the occupants of the smothery houses in
Tom Sawyer
can be found in
Huckleberry Finn
. Only in
Tom Sawyer
the houses are brighter—they impose discipline but also allow space for mischief, young love and light adventures leading to the discovery of gold treasures. There is deviance and rebellion, but the rebels and the conformists come to some form of peaceful coexistence. Boys will be boys—they play pranks—but all will be well, and in the end they will grow up to become judges and lawyers and respectable citizens.