The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (4 page)

Some came with gifts: a small arrow from New Mexico, a tiny box, a picture book. And as I talked to people old and young, to doctors and soldiers, librarians and teachers, and began to confide my secret desire to connect readers all over the world and engage them in a meaningful dialogue—when I told them about my dream of creating a Republic of Imagination and invited them to join me in a march on Washington so that we would fill the space between the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial, going past all of the war monuments and the jewel in America’s crown, the Smithsonian, and spreading all the way out toward the Library of Congress and the White House, ending in front of Congress, where we would ask, “Who is going to bail out imagination”—many came up to me afterward and said, “How can I help?” “What can I do?” I found a nation of readers, large and small, old and young, rich and poor, of all colors and backgrounds, united by the shared sense that books matter, that they open up a window into a more meaningful life, that they enable us to tolerate complexity and nuance and to empathize with people whose lives and conditions are utterly different from our own.

• • •

When Dorothy and her friends finally find the great Wizard, in response to Oz’s declaration “I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,” Dorothy simply responds, “I am Dorothy, the Small and Meek.” Dorothy and her companions discover in the end that the myth of Oz’s power is as much of a sham as their belief in their own weakness, and that they, led by Dorothy, can do what Oz was powerless to achieve: destroy the Wicked Witch and liberate the frightened citizens—a myth worthy of a people who had defeated a mighty empire in search of their own independence.

Dorothy is one in a long line of American heroines and heroes, small and meek, who somehow manage to appear greater than their mighty opponents. This quality is usually revealed once the protagonists are separated from their actual homes and surroundings. Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most memorable of those humble citizens of the imaginary America who stand up to forces great and terrible, but Huck refuses to return home, thus foreshadowing the destinies and shaping the choices of so many other fictional American characters who either leave home, never to return, or long to do so. These homeless protagonists of American fiction become the true guardians of what is best in American individualism, never identifying happiness with wealth or power. Perhaps in no other fiction, in fact, is materialism so frowned upon, or defined as the root of so many evils—an ironic but salutary reminder for a country so blatantly devoted to the pursuit of wealth and power.

I have always been drawn to America’s vagrant nature, so well portrayed and celebrated in its best works of fiction. I believe that many of those who, like my family and me, migrated to America from all over the world can feel at home in it because it allows us both to belong and to be outsiders. It somehow encourages our vagabond self—befitting a nation that started its life by deliberately choosing to become an orphan. No fictional characters are quite so suspicious of home as those wandering the landscape of American fiction. These homeless characters become disturbing and dangerous, loitering with intent on the margins of our consciousness.

All writers and poets are strangers, or pariahs, as Hannah Arendt chose to call them. They look at the world through the eyes of the outsider, but only American writers turn this attribute into a national characteristic. “All men are lonely,” wrote Carson McCullers, and then she added, “But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. Poe turned inward to discover an eerie and glowing world of his own. Whitman, that noblest of vagabonds, saw life as a broad open road. Henry James abandoned his own adolescent country for England and the airy decadence of nineteenth-century drawing-rooms. Melville sent out his Captain Ahab to self-destruction in the mad sailing for the great white whale. And Wolfe and Crane—they wandered for a lifetime, and I am not sure they knew themselves just what it was they sought.”

McCullers wrote this piece to advise American writers to come back home, to turn inward, as she put it, but the fact is that even in turning inward, we need to reflect on this constant restlessness, this unending questioning, this battle between the desire for prosperity, status and success and the urge to walk away from it all, to be wary of complacency—in short, to perform the miracle of the small vagabond Huck, who followed his heart as he floated on a raft down the Mississippi. “This singular emotion, the nostalgia that has been so much a part of our national character, must be converted to good use,” McCullers continued. “What our seekers have sought for we must find. . . . America is youthful, but it can not always be young. Like an adolescent who must part with his broken family, America feels now the shock of transition. But a new and serene maturity will come if it is worked for. We must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time. . . . We must now be homesick for our own familiar land, this land that is worthy of our nostalgia.” McCullers herself knew that this urge for wandering, for the always new, was what kept America America, what gave it vitality. Meek and small characters, orphans, outcasts—not just because of their race, class or gender but because of what Elizabeth Cady Stanton so eloquently defined as their solitariness—abound in the vast and capacious terrain of American fiction. One can argue that they represent the myth of American rebellion. There is some truth in that, but it has been a long time since America moved from the margins to the center of power, with the privileges of wealth replacing those of birth—a long time since George Washington and Benjamin Franklin refused wages because they felt they were public servants and should be immune from the temptations and corruption of money.

We need to remember that, despite the prevalent attitude today that arrogantly defines success as money, the real heroes of this nation’s fictional landscape are vagrants, marginal and subversive, from Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener whose mantra is “I would prefer not to,” to the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie, Bellow’s Herzog, Philip Roth’s Sabbath or Omar Little of
The Wire,
who reminds us of the importance of a code of honor. All seek integrity and listen to their hearts’ dictates, cautioning us against our willingness to betray the American dream when it is, as Fitzgerald put it, besmirched with the “foul dust that floats in the wake” of our dreams.

• • •

The thought of writing this book first came to me when I was finishing the last chapter of
Reading Lolita in Tehran
. At the time, I thought of calling it
Becoming an American
. I did not want my readers to believe that the books we read were meaningful simply because they were illicit and frowned upon by the moral guardians in Iran. I wanted them to know how vital they were in America, too, as the freedom that so many fictional characters lay claim to is not political but moral, a freedom to turn their back on society and what is expected of them and to forge their own lonely path. I have chosen to focus on three novels, starting with
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
in part because I was fascinated by the idea that Huck, who rejected the concept of roots and tradition, became a parent to so many homeless protagonists of American fiction. Why these three books? The choice was not easy. When I first presented an outline to my publisher, I struggled to slim down the list of books I would discuss to twenty-four. But before long I found Huck dominating the story, just as Lolita had before. I think of this book as the story of Huck Finn’s America, and of his fictional progenies. I chose to focus on two of those—Sinclair Lewis’s
Babbitt,
featuring an anti-Huck who craves status and acceptance and all of the outward signs of material success, and Carson McCullers’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
with its lonely band of listless misfits longing to connect, helpless in a world built on longing but not its fulfillment. I could have chosen dozens more—Melville, Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Dawn Powell, Nathanael West and others all clamored for their own chapters and will have to await another book. I wanted to end before the 1960s because what followed in their wake was a new era, in terms of both social and political realities and the direction of American fiction, and needed a different context. I felt that James Baldwin, as a writer and civil rights activist, was most suited to mark the termination of what I think of as the classical period of American fiction and the beginning of a new epoch. When I made the decision to devote my epilogue to Baldwin, I was not aware of the extent to which he would come to represent to me the truth of the present, its crises and my hope for its future.

Over the course of my readings, reflections and recollections I came to see associations between Baldwin and Twain, an affinity that Baldwin had never acknowledged or even hinted at, one that existed not by choice but as a testament to other affinities unknown and maybe even unwanted. Because in life and writing James Baldwin was a descendant of the “infinitely shaded and exquisite mongrel” that Twain once claimed kinship with.

From the moment Plato’s philosopher king threw the poet out of his Republic, we knew that imagination was dangerous to authority and that the alternative eye of the poet would always be deviant and unpredictable, always subverting authority and captivating souls. It is with this idea in mind that I wrote this book at the dawn of a new century, which has begun with doubts and anxieties and a crisis that goes far beyond the immediate economic one. It is written not out of despair but out of hope, by which I mean not a simple giddy optimism but the belief that once you know what is right and what matters, you can get there with enough determination. My experiences in Iran gave me a definition of hope that is very different from simple optimism. What I have in mind is most closely captured by Václav Havel, who said, “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.”

I believe all great art and literature, all great deeds of humanity, rely on this fragile and most enduring hope. One function of art is to be a witness and historian of man’s endurance, to provide “conclusive evidence” that we have lived. The central theme of the play
Antigone,
written in 441
B.C
., about a young woman’s dilemma as she finds herself caught between the pressures of obeying the dictates of personal honor and burying her brother, who rebelled against the kingdom, or of heeding a more public notion of justice and obeying the law of the king, her uncle, by letting his corpse rot unburied, resurfaces in various guises today even in our most popular story forms, in episodes of
Boston Legal
and
White Collar.
If we need fiction today, it is not because we need to escape from reality; it is because we need to return to it with eyes that are refreshed, or, as Tolstoy would have it, “clean-washed.”

Six years ago, I swore a public oath in a bland government office building, but I became an American citizen long before that, when I first began to trace my imaginary map of America, beginning with Dorothy’s Kansas and the desiccated farmland of the Ingalls sisters. That America is a country of immigrants is a truism, and even now it remains the case—it is populated by people from many parts of the globe who have brought with them the restless ghosts of their original homelands, making homelessness an integral part of American identity. More than any other country, America has become a symbol of exile and displacement, of choosing a home, as opposed to being born in it.

The first immigrants and their descendants devastated the homes of this new land’s original occupants, uprooting some while enslaving others. But their saving grace was the invention of a dream. There was something in that dream, in the imagination of America’s founders and the humanistic spirit they embodied, that made it possible for later generations to question and subvert the conditions under which they wrote their founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, so that later men and women like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr. and others would make those words their own, insisting on new freedoms and reminding us, as the historian Gordon Wood so eloquently put it, that “it is not suffrage that gives life to democracy, it is our democratic society that gives life to suffrage.” This, for me, is the intersection where the real America meets the imaginary one. This is how I explained my view of America to my children. If you believe your country was founded on the actualization of a dream, then an obvious and essential question arises: How can you dream without imagination?

For homelessness and despair, for the injustices and suffering imposed on us by the fickleness of life and the absoluteness of death, imagination has no cure. But it finds a voice that both registers and resists such injustice, evidenced by the fact that we do not accept things as they are. So much of who we are, no matter where we live, depends on how we imagine ourselves to be. So much of the home we live in is defined by that other world in our backyard, be it Dorothy’s Oz or Alice’s Wonderland or Scheherazade’s room, to which we have to travel in order to see ourselves and others more clearly.

Stories endure—they have been with us since the dawn of history—but they need to be refreshed and retold in every generation through the eyes and experiences of new readers sharing a common space that knows no boundaries of politics or religion, ethnicity or gender—a Republic of Imagination, that most democratic republic of all. For every writer deprived of the freedom of speech, millions of readers are also deprived of the freedom to read what they might have told us. That is why the voice of a poet who endured and resisted tyranny should be the voice of conscience, reminding us of what is essential: “Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature,” Joseph Brodsky said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Though we can condemn the material suppression of literature—the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.”