The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  The novel, in its simple and direct manner, at times veers into science fiction. It has about it something of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose protagonist finally succumbs to an alien who sucks out his soul, transforming him into a programmable drone. Babbitt gives up the fight with a whimper: “They’ve licked me; licked me to a finish!” he says. At the end we see him encouraging his son, Ted, to stray and follow his dreams, while admitting, “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life!”

  It is a rather feeble and disappointing ending. We are given the satisfaction neither of complacently judging Babbitt as a villain nor of his redemption and transformation. Ted will never be reconciled to reading Shakespeare, but he does choose what his heart desires. Yet his choice, like his father’s, is limiting.

  So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness but the right to its pursuit. And yet there is a glimmer of hope, just as there is in Gatsby, with its green light at the end of the dock, because Babbitt, despite everything and despite himself, does stray, proving that the faint murmur of the heart cannot be silenced.

  At the party where Babbitt and his friends try to summon the spirit of “the WOP poet,” Dante, for a minute Babbitt has, “without explanation, the impression of a slaggy cliff and on it, in silhouette against menacing clouds, a lone and austere figure.” And that is where the hope lies: no matter how many utilitarian business-minded educators may try to erase the image of the poet, to make it irrelevant, it will endure. It will disturb us in our waking hours and haunt our dreams, because poetry, like love and lunacy, is as much a part of the human condition as fear and the courage to be free.

  PART III

  “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

  —Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

  1

  Every novel has a setting, but the American novel is unique in its conception of the landscape as an integral part of its moral universe. This is something I first came to understand when I started teaching Huckleberry Finn to my students in Iran. To teach a novel is not the same as to read it for pleasure. You notice things that would otherwise slip your attention and you probe it more vigorously. When one thinks of the landscape of Huckleberry Finn, the first thing that comes to mind is of course the river, the abundant Mississippi carrying our two heroes and offering up a spectacle of beauty and horror. But there is another landscape, equally if not more enduring: that of the smothery town with its deadening stillness from which Huck is so desperate to escape. Was this listlessness a particular southern condition or could that fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, stand in for any small town across America? This is a question that occupied my imagination in my own college days when, at some point between sophomore and junior years, I started hanging out with a tall, lanky girl with mousy hair and wonderful long legs with whom I carried on intense and at times heated discussions about art, literature and a boy named Ben Holder.

  Joanna was an art major, a painter to be precise. I first met her in an art history class when our young teacher, unabashedly biased in favor of modern art, introduced us to Mark Rothko and Claes Oldenberg, but we spent most of our time talking about fiction—southern fiction, if you will, though at the time I was almost allergic to the term. Some of my favorite American writers, even my favorite among favorites, William Faulkner, belonged to that group, but they were great writers, not great southern writers. This visceral reaction, which took me some time to shake, was provoked not by a professor or a class but by Joanna, who would sit in the front row near the door, a study in provocation. I never did figure out how she managed to look so comfortable slumping over that unyielding wooden chair. I wouldn’t put it past her to have hoped that one day she might be rewarded when a careless classmate would trip over her long legs, making a fool of himself.

  “My name is Joanna,” she would tell me time and time again—not Joan-anna, as I sometimes jokingly called her, in honor of another artist friend, Joan Frederick, or Joe-Anna, as she claimed I pronounced it, a habit that seemed to both irritate and amuse her. I fell back on my privilege as a foreigner, though, truth be told, I had given up correcting myself when I mispronounced names, reasoning that since few people bothered to pronounce my name correctly, I was simply returning the compliment. For a while, the two of us felt a competitive kinship as foreigners, or more precisely as people who came from somewhere else.

  At first I was bewildered that Joanna, who was born in America, should feel that she too had traveled from another country thousands of miles away, with a different past and a different story. She grew up in Tennessee, although she had only a faint southern accent—in itself an act of rebellion, as her mother had insisted she should remain loyal to her southern heritage. I can’t really say what either one of us was doing at the University of Oklahoma. (Contrary to common belief, she would remind me, Oklahoma is not in the South.) For her it was a short pause before going east—that was her destination, though she never really specified where in the East she was heading.

  My friend Mike Wright, a fellow activist who was not much interested in literature, firmly believed that any focus on regional differences would hurt the unity of the “movement,” as we called it back then. People are people, he would say. We should differentiate among them according to the causes they support and not their geographic origins. “This land is my land and yours, Azar,” he would tell me, quoting his beloved Woody Guthrie—though this didn’t stop him from promptly contradicting himself by announcing that Woody was an Oklahoma boy, and neither East nor West could claim him as theirs. Mike had grown up in Norman. No one knew exactly what year he had graduated, and for some reason he had never moved on. He had been president of Students for a Democratic Society and was active in the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and he made sure we all knew that in the sixties he had participated in the civil rights movement. He was respected and liked by various student groups, who were constantly fighting among themselves, but seemed to be a loner—at least that is how I remember him.

  Mike lived in a small place near the post office. I would sometimes bump into him at Campus Corner, whose shops were the center of university life, most often at the intersection of Boyd and Asp. I was usually coming from a coffee shop or going to the post office, and I have no idea what Mike was doing, walking alone. He never told me where he was coming from or where he was headed; he would just turn around and start walking with me.

  Those short walks, which generally ended at Ernie’s Town Tavern and once or twice at the Library Bar, were the only occasions when Mike and I discussed matters other than those pertaining to the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. (He was the one who interested me in the case of the Scottsboro Boys and the history of protest around them.) I used to think he liked to talk more than listen, because he seldom looked you in the eye when he spoke. His gaze was fixed straight ahead, as if he were searching for something in the distance visible only to himself. And because he so liked to talk—in a droning, monotonous voice, a bit like slow-motion typing, if you can imagine that—much later I was surprised by how much he had been listening, and how carelessly I, in turn, had been listening to him.

  Joanna would from time to time sit in on my English class, and when she did she talked a great deal, usually managing to bring the topic back to what she called the “southern climate”—a term she used in both its literal and metaphorical senses. I thought she was overly focused on where a writer happened to have been born, through no fault of his or her own. I was the only foreigner in the English department and took it as a personal affront that she thought I could not understand Twain or Faulkner as well as she did. She was too narrow, I felt, too possessive of the South and its writers. Of what value is a novel if you
had to have been born in a certain latitude in order to enjoy it?

  Joanna tolerated my objections in silence, waiting for me to finish my sentence so that she could return to her point. There is a southern sensibility, she would say, that’s key to southern fiction. I would rattle off a list of authors—Mark Twain chief among them—whose landscape, while ostensibly southern, was undeniably universal. For a while we hovered in an uneasy truce, but we finally parted company over The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which we read together for that class in the spring of my sophomore year. At some point Joanna became obsessed with Carson McCullers, who had not been my favorite author but whose Heart Is a Lonely Hunter had interested me enough to want to follow up with The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café. Chance and choice, my friend Ladan was fond of saying. How much of what we think we are choosing is already chosen for us by chance? A medley of unrelated encounters reminded me of Joanna and of our conversations: Oprah Winfrey’s selection of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for her book club, after a number of my favorite novels cropped up on her list (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Anna Karenina, three books by Faulkner . . .); a throwaway remark by a student— (“Oh, her—we read that book in high school; what’s the point of her?”); someone’s use of the word “freaks”; but perhaps most of all, the unexpected news and circumstances of Mike’s death. I had not thought of McCullers for twenty-five years, and here I was suddenly checking out her books from the local library, then buying them, then rereading and underlining them once again.

  As I resurrect Joanna, sorting through hazy memories that appear deceptively lucid, I am less irritated by her brashness and her obsessions and more impressed by how much those oh-so-serious discussions over hamburgers at Across the Street; or eggs over easy, hash browns and coffee at Ernie’s Town Tavern; or those walks around campus, ending on the South Oval, have remained as exciting and important to me as they were then. Maybe in choosing to write about Carson McCullers today, I am trying in part to retrieve the freedom and enchantment of those youthful conversations, when it was possible to seriously fight and fall out over a novel, only to make up, mainly in order to pick up the fight where we had left off. Joanna was the one who led me to coin the term “Southern Syndrome,” which I later amended to the more specific “Joanna’s Carson McCullers Syndrome.” At some point it became our Carson McCullers Syndrome, and now it is all mine.

  2

  Despite our vocal disagreements, in a vague and confused way I empathized with Joanna. She felt like an exile in her own country. And even then I felt like an exile myself, so far from home and from people who could understand the texture of my life in Tehran. Joanna and I were not exiles in the true meaning of the word, at least not then—we were both free to return to our places of birth—but we recognized a kinship in each other and knew or suspected we would never simply settle down back home.

  Anyone who has experienced exile knows that in the aching desire to retrieve the lost land, the first thing that comes to mind is not what forced you to leave, but what kept you from leaving. This desire manifests itself as a sensual urge, a desperate longing for certain tangible things whose absence makes them so hauntingly present. Even then, whenever I thought of Iran, I yearned for that special quality of the light, the way it gave a cool, sun-drenched taste to the peaches and apricots and brought out the crisp scent of jasmine at night. Did it smell so strong and so sweet, our jasmine, because of that sun?

  The sun acts in different ways in different places. For me it was a cool light, for Joanna a persistent heat, heavy and suffocating, like the weight of sameness and boredom we find in Faulkner’s Light in August or the murderous and relentless heat in the Algerian desert that incites the protagonist of Camus’s The Stranger to kill a man. Light plays a dominant role in the works of Faulkner, Welty and McCullers, and yet its texture, which ultimately decides its function, is radically different in each one. This is something that Joanna, with her artistic temperament, particularly appreciated. Characters respond to what she called “the climate” not just physically but psychologically.

  Recently I returned to Light in August to find the passage in which the Reverend Hightower, sitting by the window, reflects on his past. It is at the start of chapter twenty, near the very end of the novel, and is narrated in the present tense: “Now the final copper light of afternoon fades; now the street beyond the low maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study window like a stage.” Hightower is reminded of his youth and of “how that fading copper light would seem almost audible, like a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting.”

  “In August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall,” Faulkner said in an interview when asked to explain the title of his novel. “It’s cool,” he said, “there’s a lambence, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone, but every year in August that occurs in my country. . . .”

  In almost every one of Faulkner’s novels—I am thinking most especially of The Sound and the Fury (Shakespeare), As I Lay Dying (Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey) and Light in August—the present time is simultaneously transient and ancient. It is linked to the more immediate past but also to the literary past of our human civilization. “The past is never dead,” says a character in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” This notion of the perpetual presence of the past is perhaps best expressed by the narrator’s incantatory statement in Light in August: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” All of Faulkner’s major novels, be they about a crumbling aristocratic family or a rootless vagrant, are illuminated by that light. There is something in the quality of his prose that captures this twilight effect, at once beautiful and sad, in ruins and yet eternal, like the voice of Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying coming to us after her death.

  In Eudora Welty’s fiction, the light is not quite so thick; it does not have so many layers. In the first chapter of Delta Wedding we are told that the land, which is “perfectly flat and level,” shimmers “like the wing of a lighted dragonfly.” Again the senses intermingle to create a feeling, an impression, so this shimmering land seems to be “strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.” Welty’s descriptions of nature and the play of light are so loving, so tender, as if drawn with the lightest touch of a watercolor brush. Her writing is impressionistic, like the writing of that altogether non-southern writer she loved so much, Virginia Woolf.

  McCullers’s light comes from a different place. It lacks the weight of Faulkner’s past and the shimmer of Welty’s dragonflies. It is a new sun, blazing, ruthless in its glare, and angry. The heat in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is not tropical and lush; it is urban, the reflection of a scorching sun on the asphalt. This sun acts more like a fury than a guardian. It is not the same sun as the one we find lighting the way for Huck and Jim or beating down on the poverty-ridden sharecroppers in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, documenting the cruel transition to industrial farming, a transformation responsible for another kind of poverty, another kind of loneliness.

  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is an urban story, unmistakably set in the South, but this is a South where the sense of community and familial affinities are broken, where even exploitation has taken on a new tone and texture. McCullers’s characters are solitary misfits who cannot create a bond. They might speak in a more “civilized” manner than Huck and Jim, but they do not know how to interact, how to connect, how to communicate—they are spiritually inarticulate, having discovered a new kind of urban loneliness that will cast a long shadow over American fiction.

  “The South has always been a section apart from the rest
of the United States,” McCullers wrote in an essay published in 1941, “having interests and a personality distinctly its own. . . . Economically and in other ways it has been used as a sort of colony to the rest of the nation.” In the year that America entered the Second World War, McCullers proclaimed that modern southern writing was “the progeny of the Russian realists,” an affinity she attributed to the strikingly similar circumstances under which the two societies functioned: “In both old Russia and the South up to the present time a dominant characteristic was the cheapness of human life,” she wrote. “Life is plentiful; children are born and they die, or if they do not die they live and struggle. And in the fight to maintain existence the whole life and suffering of a human being can be bound up in ten acres of washed out land, in a mule, in a bale of cotton.”

  I found the essay almost by accident and was only a few paragraphs in when I felt myself transported back to those muggy spring days in Oklahoma when Joanna and I argued about the southernness of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Joanna was not terribly interested in this central theme of Carson McCullers’s most famous novel, the special kind of loneliness that she described as peculiarly American. What she wanted was to retrieve its texture. At times, frustrated by my abstractions, she would almost shout out, “Yes, but how would you paint that?”