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Authors: Azar Nafisi
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“old Europe.”)
I had decided to teach a new class on American fiction the following semester. I wanted to start with Huck and to ask my students to consider what it means to write a great American novel. Can one really speak of
American
fiction? I had become obsessed with Eudora Welty’s claim that art “is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.”
6
It is easy to talk about the break with Europe; that aspect is obvious. America, among Britain’s colonies, would become the black sheep of the family, rebellious and unruly. When it chose to cut away from its parents, it had to negate everything about them, but then it was also a direct heir to the traditions and culture of the “old country.” How could one remain true to those traditions and at the same time radically subvert them? One can see this tension in the works of Twain’s giant elder brothers, Hawthorne, Melville, and even Poe. But that is really not Huck’s concern. In creating
Huckleberry Finn,
Twain distanced himself not only from Europe but from those who founded America, the Pilgrims. He started from scratch and conjured a character as yet unborn, one whose language had been alien to fiction until then.
This was the main thrust of the lecture I was preparing on that gray, gloomy day, when, sitting on the couch with my notes on my knees, a cigar that I never smoked dangling from my lips to assuage a nervous tension I had whenever I wrote, pen in one hand and phone in the other, Farah called me on her cell. She was at the clinic around the corner from my house, one of those healing centers that offers alternative remedies when more conventional doctors no longer know what to do. She wanted to talk during the long hour she spent taking her vitamin C cure.
“Huck Finn predicted America,” I told her. “He predicted—or at least laid the groundwork for—the two of us talking and arguing simultaneously in two languages in this city called Washington, D.C.”
Farah would have none of it. Ever the pragmatist, she pointed out that Huck wouldn’t have been much interested in the musings of two middle-aged Iranian women in Washington, D.C. But I wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. I decided, since she wanted to talk, that I would give her a preview of the first lecture of my new class. For some time now, she had been my most committed student, though I often felt that she had more to teach me than vice versa.
I wanted to begin with something that would jolt the class from its usual docile torpor. For a while I entertained the idea of having them all read an outrageous, dazzlingly confected speech that Twain delivered in 1881 to the New England Society of Philadelphia on the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing on Plymouth Rock. Here, as in most of his essays and speeches, he sallies forth with humor, but underneath the pretense of comedy is a message that is dead serious.
Speaking to descendants of the
Mayflower,
he begins by asking his audience why they would wish to celebrate “those ancestors of yours of 1620—the
Mayflower
tribe,” whom he describes as a “hard lot” who “took good care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else’s ancestors.” Twain differentiates himself from his hosts, telling them, “I am a border ruffian from the state of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. I have the morals of Missouri and the culture of Connecticut, and that’s the combination that makes the perfect man.” Then he goes on to say, “But where are my ancestors? Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material?”
Identifying with those “abolished” ancestors, he assumes the identity of America’s persecuted underdogs and says his first
I had decided to teach a new class on American fiction the following semester. I wanted to start with Huck and to ask my students to consider what it means to write a great American novel. Can one really speak of
American
fiction? I had become obsessed with Eudora Welty’s claim that art “is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.”
6
It is easy to talk about the break with Europe; that aspect is obvious. America, among Britain’s colonies, would become the black sheep of the family, rebellious and unruly. When it chose to cut away from its parents, it had to negate everything about them, but then it was also a direct heir to the traditions and culture of the “old country.” How could one remain true to those traditions and at the same time radically subvert them? One can see this tension in the works of Twain’s giant elder brothers, Hawthorne, Melville, and even Poe. But that is really not Huck’s concern. In creating
Huckleberry Finn,
Twain distanced himself not only from Europe but from those who founded America, the Pilgrims. He started from scratch and conjured a character as yet unborn, one whose language had been alien to fiction until then.
This was the main thrust of the lecture I was preparing on that gray, gloomy day, when, sitting on the couch with my notes on my knees, a cigar that I never smoked dangling from my lips to assuage a nervous tension I had whenever I wrote, pen in one hand and phone in the other, Farah called me on her cell. She was at the clinic around the corner from my house, one of those healing centers that offers alternative remedies when more conventional doctors no longer know what to do. She wanted to talk during the long hour she spent taking her vitamin C cure.
“Huck Finn predicted America,” I told her. “He predicted—or at least laid the groundwork for—the two of us talking and arguing simultaneously in two languages in this city called Washington, D.C.”
Farah would have none of it. Ever the pragmatist, she pointed out that Huck wouldn’t have been much interested in the musings of two middle-aged Iranian women in Washington, D.C. But I wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. I decided, since she wanted to talk, that I would give her a preview of the first lecture of my new class. For some time now, she had been my most committed student, though I often felt that she had more to teach me than vice versa.
I wanted to begin with something that would jolt the class from its usual docile torpor. For a while I entertained the idea of having them all read an outrageous, dazzlingly confected speech that Twain delivered in 1881 to the New England Society of Philadelphia on the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing on Plymouth Rock. Here, as in most of his essays and speeches, he sallies forth with humor, but underneath the pretense of comedy is a message that is dead serious.
Speaking to descendants of the
Mayflower,
he begins by asking his audience why they would wish to celebrate “those ancestors of yours of 1620—the
Mayflower
tribe,” whom he describes as a “hard lot” who “took good care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else’s ancestors.” Twain differentiates himself from his hosts, telling them, “I am a border ruffian from the state of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. I have the morals of Missouri and the culture of Connecticut, and that’s the combination that makes the perfect man.” Then he goes on to say, “But where are my ancestors? Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material?”
Identifying with those “abolished” ancestors, he assumes the identity of America’s persecuted underdogs and says his first
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