“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,” Azar Nafisi writes of a fellow
student at the University of Oklahoma. “Of what value is a novel if you have to
have been born in a certain latitude in order to enjoy it?”
Indeed. One certainly doesn’t have to be
American to comprehend American literature. Perhaps the greatest work of
criticism ever devoted to the subject is D. H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic
American Literature,” which remains as fresh and biting as it was when first
published by the English novelist in 1923. The French, on the whole, appreciate
Edgar Allan Poe better than we do, perhaps because of Baudelaire’s excellent
translations. In “Written Lives,” the contemporary Spanish novelist Javier
Marías writes piercingly about Henry James, William Faulkner and other
Americans. Some of my favorite insights into Emily Dickinson’s poetry come from
two Dutch writers, Bert Keizer and Henk Romijn Meijer. And so on, endlessly. You
don’t have to be an insider to be admitted to the club.
Nafisi, the author of the best-selling
“Reading Lolita in Tehran,” would like to have it both ways. She wants to hold
on to the outsider status she earned by being born and raised in Iran. At the
same time, she wants to claim and perhaps in some ways vindicate her American
citizenship. As she tells us perhaps one too many times in this new book, she
swore her loyalty to the United States, in 2008, in a “drab,” “bland” government
office building in Fairfax, Va. This makes her as American as anyone: We are,
after all, a nation of immigrants. So nationality isn’t really what’s at issue
here.
Ethically and politically, Nafisi is clearly
an admirable person. She is also a courageous one, as her accounts of the
dangers she endured in Iran and the resistance she put up duly attest. For all I
know, she may be a tremendously inspiring teacher. But she is neither a
sensitive enough critic nor a subtle enough writer to tackle the project she has
now set for herself.
“The Republic of Imagination” bills itself as
an exploration of American culture and values through the careful examination of
three works of literature: Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” Sinclair Lewis’s
“Babbitt” and Carson McCullers’s “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” (There is also
an epilogue that focuses on James Baldwin, which might be seen as a nod to
diversity, though Nafisi explicitly disclaims any tendency toward “political
correctness.”) She hopes to use these literary works to demonstrate certain
ideas she has about the American mind, the American way of life and American
writing in general. She also intends to put forward a larger theory about the
function of literature in relation to society — its enduring importance and
meaning within any culture.
This is all very commendable, and certainly
the book is filled with commendable thoughts, but they’re mainly couched in a
language of anodyne politics sifted through a scrim of mass and social media.
“Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices
that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose,” Nafisi says in
her chapter on “Babbitt.” “And to make the right choices, we need to be able to
think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is
not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president
or representative, your children’s future, your way and view of life.” True
enough in some ways (though the “right to choose” hardly belongs to all of “us”
equally), but do we really need to hear thoughts like this once again, and from
a literature professor? Literature, Ezra Pound said, is supposed to be “news
that stays news,” but Nafisi, rather than taking advantage of this, seems
determined to recycle a plethora of stale notions.
Her platitudinous solemnity serves her
particularly ill when she takes up Mark Twain. “Huckleberry Finn” is a
hard-edge, multifaceted, extremely sharp object. Whatever angle you pick it up
from, it will cut you, especially if you try to use it as an implement to slice
something else. Nafisi treats it as if it were an easily graspable safety razor
with which she can shape a nice little moral. “In the end, Huck is not yet
completely cleansed of his racist conscience,” she tells us, “nor is his future
necessarily brighter than it was at the start of his adventures. But whatever
might happen, no one can erase the bond between Huck and Jim.” Such remarks (and
the chapter is filled with them) hardly do justice to the complicated,
hilarious, searing, deeply intelligent tone of Twain’s masterpiece.
The section on “Babbitt” is much better —
actually, the best in the book — because, among other things, it gives Nafisi a
chance to mount a well-grounded attack on the dire principles of the Common Core
curriculum. She also seems in sympathy with both Sinclair Lewis and his poor,
pathetic butt of a satiric character, and this gives her account of the novel a
complexity largely absent from the other two sections. She understands what’s
sad about Babbitt as well as what’s laughable. “When I first read ‘Babbitt,’ in
college, I was too caught up with the obvious satire on conformity to pay much
attention to the murmuring of its protagonist’s heart. It is easy to catch the
satire, less so the pathos,” she wisely comments. And this, in turn, allows her
to measure the extent to which the culture at large (not to mention his author’s
willfulness) can be blamed for Babbitt’s flaws.
Her chapter on Carson McCullers isn’t bad, but
it doesn’t tell us anything new about the work. Instead, Nafisi veers between
biographical tidbits about the author and straightforward plot summary,
intercutting these with reflections on her own undergraduate past. At one point,
though, the argument gets sidetracked by a digression about Oprah Winfrey, who
apparently invited two deaf people onto her show to talk about John Singer, the
“deaf-mute” in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Expounding on Singer, Nafisi says
he is so mysterious that he allows the other characters “to shape him in their
own desired images — like Jesus, in a sense, or Oprah.” And before you can even
come back with a startled “Huh?” Nafisi has launched herself into the airwaves.
“When Oprah speaks to millions,” she asserts, “she appears to be addressing each
one of us individually, speaking not just to us but also for us. We believe that
she has a personal message for each one of us, but in fact she is looking into
the camera, not into our souls.”
“Well, duh” is the phrase that may leap to
mind, but that reaction fails to acknowledge the positive looniness of this
statement. Can there be a single person in the world capable of reading and
understanding McCullers’s difficult novel (not to mention making her way through
this long chapter and the two preceding ones), but at the same time so ignorant
as to believe that people on television are speaking directly to her? What kind
of reader, in short, is “The Republic of Imagination” addressed to? I don’t
think Nafisi ever asked herself that question, and the result is a book that’s
dutiful and well intentioned, but far short of what its ambitious nature
demands.
THE REPUBLIC OF IMAGINATION
America in Three Books
By Azar Nafisi
Illustrated by Peter Sis
338 pp. Viking. $28.95.
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