Free The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi Page A

handing the galleys to the publisher. I had already started thinking and talking about the main themes for my new book, as well as planning the course for next term, which was to start with
Huck Finn.
I kept feeling that I was on the verge of a new discovery, but not quite there. I hoped talking to Farah would help clarify things for me.
    When Farah arrived, after we bought our drinks and settled on a table situated under a portrait of Duncan Phillips and his wife, I pushed toward her my summary of my
Huck
chapter: “Reading his story, we slowly discover three things: (1) Huck’s adventures, like Edward Hopper’s paintings, are variations on the theme of aloneness. (2) These adventures, although filled with great humor, are not that of a young, restless boy searching for fun and diversion, or a nineteenth-century version of Holden Caulfield rebelling against the shoddy grown-up world, but that of a lonesome boy running for his life. (3) The whole story is shaped around one central theme, best articulated by Mark Twain in a notebook entry of 1895, in which he describes
Huck Finn
as ‘a book of mine where a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat.’”
    I was excited like a child and almost felt like saying, “How cool is that?!”
    I felt I had found the secret, the source of Huck’s rebellion, his individuality, his morality. One of Twain’s greatest contributions was to transform the seat of morality from conscience to the heart, from public mores and dictums to individual experience and choice. I inevitably suggested to Farah “Between a Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience” as the subtitle for my book. For Twain, as for any great novelist, reality was the clay waiting to be shaped. There was a collusion, not a collision, between fiction and reality, and that collusion functioned as antidote to the lies, illusions and fantasies that our monitoring conscience imposes on us. To me, this was the best argument against those who consider fiction irrelevant.
    Farah was intrigued by the idea and against the subtitle. “Too academic,” she said. “By which I mean too abstract.” Which was basically the same reaction I got from my real editor.
    Afterwards, I took Farah to a room where mainly the pictures by African American painters were housed. I wanted her to see the series painted by Jacob Lawrence on the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between the First and Second World Wars. Lawrence had said, “To me, migration means movement. There was conflict and struggle. But out of the struggle came a kind of power and even beauty.”
8
    Huckleberry Finn
was the first book I taught when I went back to Iran in 1979 and accepted a position in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Tehran. So at a time when our leaders were denouncing America to charmed throngs as an imperialist Satan, I found myself struggling to define America, with its complexities and paradoxes, for my restless students through the eyes of its fiction. I had come to believe that American fiction was at once its moral guardian and its best critic. In Iran in those days, as the revolution raged all over the city and on campus, it was easy to feel orphaned in your own home, and most of my students immediately connected to the two homeless refugees, Huck and Jim. The first thing a totalitarian mind-set does is strip its citizens of their sense of identity, rewriting their past to suit its goals, and rewriting history to serve its ends. Already my students understood that Huck’s defiance took courage, that it was not always easy to turn your back on what everyone else was doing, however morally repugnant it might seem. The course, simply called “Research,” its description as vague as its title, was a huge undergraduate class designed to help students do just that: research. I was told that I should teach the different stages of writing a