The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

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The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books Page 8

by Azar Nafisi


  As Huck tries to adjust to life at the Widow Douglas’s home, his tramp of a father appears on the scene. Greedy for the gold Huck found, he steals his own son, beats him to the point of death and locks him in a shed. Pap is perhaps the most repulsively portrayed character in the story, and it is not incidental that the quality most emphasized is his whiteness. “There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white . . . a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.” Pap’s physical repulsiveness matches his character, reflected in his rant against the government for doing nothing to rein in the free black man from Ohio he sees in town, who has the “whitest shirt,” the “shiniest hat,” a “gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane” and is also a “p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything”—and, worst of all, he could vote in his own state. This makes Pap furious. He threatens to never vote again, asking, “What is the country a-coming to?” It’s a comment reminiscent of more recent rants by pundits and politicians.

  As with the Widow Douglas, Huck tries to adjust to his situation with Pap. But there is something restless in him, an urge to question authority. The questioning leads to solitary reflections—“long thinks,” he calls them—that precede all the momentous decisions he makes throughout the story. Huck begins to get used to his routine with his Pap, until something jolts him and makes him run: his Pap tells him that the judge is trying to get him back to the Widow Douglas’s, where Huck envisions himself again becoming “so cramped up and sivilized.” Pap tells him that if the judge decides in her favor, he will hide Huck somewhere no one can find him, leading to Huck’s decision to go so far away that neither “the old man nor the widow couldn’t ever find me any more.”

  “The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” Twain wrote in his journal. This constant interplay of humor and sorrow becomes a structural part of the novel, shaping its characters, scenes and, most important, its language. When Huck is sent by Sophia, the lovelorn girl in the Grangerford household, to return to church and fetch her “Testament,” which she’s left behind, Huck finds that no one is in the church, except “maybe a hog or two,” who might have gotten in because there was no lock on the door and in summer, hogs like cool places. Then he adds, “If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.” This casual comment is as effectively comic as another understated statement is tragic: when Huck witnesses, from up in a tree, as two warring clans, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, massacre one another and he says, “I ain’t a-going to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them.”

  10

  It was a beautiful day, and I was walking toward the West End Library to check out a book. There was some shouting behind me, and I turned around to see Farah, in her bicycle helmet and gear, calling me “kiddo” and laughing. She wanted to join me later to have coffee and talk about Huck. At this point, I was thinking of subtitling my book “Huck Finn’s Mongrels.”

  It was what she called one of her “good days,” and she was in a feisty mood when she joined me an hour later at the Soho coffee shop, on P Street and Twenty-second, one of the few independently owned coffee places in town. I wanted Farah to see it: I told her it reminded me of the coffee shops we’d frequented in Berkeley during our student days—shabby and colorful furniture and cushions, the ponytailed proprietor always present behind the counter. Good coffee, real mugs.

  We got my cappuccino, her green tea and a scone to share and moved to a table at the farthest corner of the room.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “What’s up with you?” I said back.

  She smiled and told me her friend Bahram had said she should do two things for him: “Dye your hair and don’t die.” “So,” Farah said with her most inscrutable smile, “I dyed my hair!” She said it had been difficult for him to articulate his feelings, and the way he had done so had touched her a lot. And then she said again, “So what’s up?”

  I told her I had started reading a biography of Mark Twain. Our exchanges over the previous few months had diverted me toward a whole pile of books that I probably shouldn’t have been reading. The more I read about Twain’s life, the more amazed I was by his almost instinctive hatred of slavery.

  “The next time I teach Huck Finn, I will assign more autobiographical material,” I said. I had become obsessed by Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” I had always been intrigued by this magical interaction, the curious and constant interplay of fiction and reality, their affinities and rivalries.

  “In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery,” Twain reminisced late in life. “I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”

  His childhood memories left such a mark on him that slavery became to his mind a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, stupidity and depravity. In 1904, years after the publication of Huck Finn, he wrote in his notebook, “The skin of every human being contains a slave.” The impact of his childhood experiences grew as he himself grew older and took up other causes: defending the Jews, women, the people of the Congo, workers and all of the oppressed; claiming to be a revolutionary; already predicting the ideological wars to come when he declared not “My country right or wrong” but “My country—when it is right.”

  Witnessing the mistreatment by a German hotel manager of an Indian servant who accepted his punishment without protest, Twain writes that the incident “carried me instantly back to my boyhood and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desire to a slave.” He remembered his own father’s regular cuffing of their slave boy and the accidental murder of a slave by his master, confessing that as a child he had accepted such treatment as natural, although he also felt “sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.”

  Twain felt it was not enough to condemn slavery; he felt he had to investigate as a writer its effects on the lives of individuals. In Notebook 35, he wrote: “In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.”

  Huckleberry Finn is in this respect a bitter indictment of our social conscience, “the unerring monitor,” as he called it. It looks at how ordinary and decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Ho
locaust happen without the complicity and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in Huck Finn, into a murderous mob? It might have been this question that gave Huck such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran.

  Twain remembered his own mother, who, like the Widow Douglas or Aunt Sally, was “kind-hearted and compassionate” but “was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation.” When acting on her instincts, she impulsively took the victim’s side, seemingly unaware of the contradictory nature of her actions and feelings. In his Autobiography, Twain mentions a small slave boy, Sandy, who came from Maryland and had no friends or family. As a young boy, he was bothered by Sandy’s incessant singing and complained about it to his mother. “Poor thing,” she told him, “when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it.” Twain remarks, “It was a simple speech . . . but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more.”

  As a child, Twain recalls, “all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. . . . We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” From one of the slaves on the farm where he grew up, he learned the language and the mesmerizing power of stories. The best on that farm was “Uncle Dan’l,” “whose sympathies were wide and warm and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.” He explains, “He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as ‘Jim,’ and carted him all around—to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon—and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities.”

  In real life, Samuel Clemens befriended Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and paid for the tuition of Warner McGuinn, who was among the first black students to study law at Yale. “The shame is ours, not theirs,” he wrote in his letter to the dean of the Yale Law School in 1885, “& we should pay for it.”

  11

  There were many ways of fighting slavery, from attempting to change the laws to preaching to shaming the slave owners to taking up arms. One way was to write from a silenced and traumatized perspective, which in itself was an act of insubordination and great daring. Memoirs by former slaves, both biographies and fictional accounts, are heartbreaking, reclaiming as they do mutilated and confiscated lives. But the monstrous reality weighed too heavily on their fictional narratives. Their language, often sentimental and formal, cannot adequately give voice to characters, or express their individual burdens. Decades would pass before slave narratives developed the language and the form necessary to escape from the strictures of an authority that not only dominated their reality but also interfered with their imagination. (Notwithstanding the occasional hidden gem, like an astonishing book discovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr., called Our Nig, by Harriet E. Wilson, that in some ways could be considered a companion to Huck Finn.)

  And then, of course, there was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. Despite its defects as a novel, Uncle Tom touched the hearts of millions of readers. Henry James said it was as if “a fish, a wonderful, leaping fish, had simply flown through the air.” It was so effective in stirring up emotion that more than a century later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, my daughter, after finishing the book, woke up every morning for a whole week crying for the death of Uncle Tom and his little friend Eva.

  Unlike Huck Finn, which challenges all authority, perhaps especially that of religion, most of the fictional slave narratives were “Christian” in tone and message. In one sense, of course, they offered up an alternative view of Christianity, challenging slave owners and their preachers to defend and justify slavery. In this sense, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and novels by African Americans such as Iola Leroy claim Christianity and make it their own. As Edmund Wilson writes in Patriotic Gore, which Paul Berman described to me as “wrong analysis, great portraits,” Uncle Tom himself is a true example of Christian charity, turning the other cheek. His triumph lies in his refusal to become vengeful like his white masters.

  It is interesting that the two protagonists in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are also a slave and a young child, as if only a child not yet tainted by “conscience” or trained to hate by society can truly empathize with a slave. Eva, unlike Huck, is not a vagrant but the beautiful daughter of Tom’s new master, whom he loved “as something frail and earthly, yet almost worshipped her as something heavenly and divine.” We are told he “half believed,” when he first saw her, “that he saw one of the angels stepped out of his New Testament.” Tom meets Eva St. Clare on a riverboat headed down the Mississippi River, and the bond between them is based on their good hearts and love of the Bible. Eva’s kindness and friendship make Tom’s separation from his family seem easier. Unlike Huck, Eva does not change much over the course of the story: she is pure and constantly questions the condition of slaves. On her deathbed, she requests that her father free all the family slaves.

  As powerful as Uncle Tom is, it was written for a political and social purpose, and it shows. Rather than let the characters do the work, Harriet Beecher Stowe intervenes and desperately at times tries to persuade the reader of the heinous nature of slavery. And while she portrays many characters forcefully, she cannot resist giving “white attributes” to her black characters. Little Eva, the most important character in the novel after Tom, is also the weakest. She never quite wholly acquires flesh and blood and is a little irritating, reminding us of just how earthy and real Huck Finn is. He does not play on our sentiments, but stirs our hearts in ways we had never imagined possible.

  Stowe was quick to say that she was seduced by ideas; stories were for her a vehicle through which to present those ideas to incite action. Twain was attracted to ideas when he could turn them into stories. She wanted to change the world, while he challenged the world by creating an alternative reality. After touring St. Paul’s Cathedral during a trip to London in 1872, Twain wrote in his notebook: “Expression—expression is the thing—in art. I do not care what it expresses, and I cannot tell, generally, but expression is what I worship, it is what I glory in, with all my impetuous nature.”

  Although from the moment they meet, Jim depends on Huck for his life and freedom, in more ways than one Huck’s own freedom and life depend on Jim. This is not only because Jim looks after Huck and helps him find food and shelter but also because he is the first person to see Huck after his staged death, and so in one sense he resurrects him. Like the rest of us, Huck needs to be seen in order to exist. Later, he discovers that he needs to feel, to empathize with others, in order to become more fully himself. All through their adventures, Huck finds his own moral compass with the help of Jim. As soon as they meet under new circumstances, Jim is transformed from Miss Watson’s “nigger” to his best mate as they go from “he and I” to “we.”

  With his resurrection, Huck’s hitherto hidden qualities come to the surface as he gradually transforms from Tom Sawyer’s second-in-command and Miss Watson’s reform project into a responsible individual, one who knows how to face danger, how to take care of himself and his mate. Their relationship proves the truth of Twain’s maxim that “Lincoln’s proclamation . . . not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.”

  Jim is the most orphaned character in the story, as his whole race has been abducted from its home and subjecte
d to a permanent state of orphanhood—a fact that adds poignancy to his escape in search of the family he has been torn from. While living as Miss Watson’s slave, Jim has no identity of his own. He and Huck need to leave the territory ruled by oppressive conventions in order to become real to each other and true to themselves. In this new territory, for the first time Jim becomes a whole human being, a father and a husband, an individual with a heart and a past. Until he and Huck discovered each other, no white person had ever acknowledged that. Just as Jim resurrects Huck, Huck resurrects Jim.

  In all respects, Jim is different from the white people Huck has left behind. He questions the system of beliefs sanctioned by religious and social authorities, and he is the only individual with whom Huck has genuine exchanges. Despite their lack of articulateness, their fresh, unconventional and unsophisticated views reveal far more than we can glean from any other character in the book.

  Some critics and academics in America have questioned Twain’s presentation of Jim, especially his superstition, which they feel is insulting. It is true that Jim is deeply superstitious: to him, both the animate and inanimate worlds are full of magical signs and symbols, encrypted messages from on high. For those of us who have lost our power to perceive the world magically, this might appear to be a negative point, a sign of his inferiority. And yet Jim’s superstition is not like Miss Watson’s religion—a rigid dogma, a set of rituals used as bargaining chips to secure a future place in heaven. His magical thinking is a key to his survival in a terrible world over which he has no control. Jim’s magic is designed not to harm others but to protect them, just as it protects him.

 

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