The Republic of Imagination

The Republic of Imagination is a 2014 nonfiction book by Iranian-American author Azar Nafisi. Some versions of the book are subtitled, "A Life in Books," while others are subtitled, "America in Three Books." The three books Nafisi largely focuses on are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Nafisi's central thesis is that the protagonists of a nation's most popular books reflect the character of a nation itself at particular times in history.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published by Mark Twain in England in 1884 and in America in 1885. Though slavery had ended in America two decades earlier, the physical, psychological, and economic scars of slavery were still visible and still profoundly felt across the country. The book takes place during the mid-Nineteenth Century in Missouri when slavery is still in full effect. The young prankster Huckleberry Finn helps a slave named Jim escape from Miss Watson's plantation. The two float down the Mississippi River, Jim looking to escape the brutalities of slavery while Huck Finn seeks to escape his violent and abusive alcoholic of a father, "Pap" Finn.

Nafisi has a unique perspective on this book and America because, having been born in Tehran, Iran and with censorship making it impossible to learn about contemporary America through television, newspapers, or the radio, everything Nafisi knew about America as a child she learned from books like Huckleberry Finn. To Nafisi, Huckleberry Finn is about the inspiring capacity for empathy held by Americans at their best. To casual observers or the untrained eye, Huck and Jim couldn't be more dissimilar: a young precocious white adolescent and a large, physically-imposing black man and runaway slave. But the two connect, nevertheless. This is in part due to their shared trauma - Huck at the hands of his abusive father, Jim at the hands of a ceaseless cavalcade of slave-owners, their families, and other workers in the slave trade. But in truth, Huck's trauma doesn't exactly compare to Jim's, which is fully disenfranchising, is targeted at an adult rather than a child, and is representative of systemic racial injustice. But what's important is that Huck and Jim don't need to have anything in common other than their shared humanity and perhaps also their indefatigable survival instinct. Nothing more is needed for the two to connect.



Conversely, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt is described almost as an "anti-Huck." Rather than having a clear plot, Babbitt was revolutionary for its time because of its refusal to peg its characters to recognizable story conventions. Instead, the point of the book is to provide readers with a satirical, fun-house mirror warped reflection of middle-class vacuity, shallowness, greed, consumerism, and absurdity. While Huckleberry Finn celebrates our shared empathy, Nafisi writes, Babbitt ridicules and remonstrates America for its selfishness and what Nafisi calls "the commodification of our souls." If this theme was revolutionary--if still spot-on--when the book was first published in 1922, today it's shockingly relevant, perhaps more so than ever before. Modern Americans' obsession with micro- and macro-celebrities has been exacerbated by a pervasive social media culture in which every individual is their own "personal brand." For the last hundred years, Americans have offered up their minds and bodies to consumer trends, but with the advent of social media, we've really gone so far as to offer up our "souls," as Nafisi suggests. And Babbitt, she writes, predicted it all.

The third book at the center of Nafisi's discussions is Carson McCullers' 1940 debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The book concerns two deaf-mutes who live together in relative harmony until one of them succumbs to long-held mental illness and is put away in a mental institution. If Huckleberry Finn represents America at its best, and Babbitt represents America at its worst, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter seems to diagnose many Americans' collective response to spiritual bankruptcy that's afflicted America in the years between Mark Twain's masterwork and Sinclair Lewis.' The characters in McCullers' novel are hermits of a sort, Nafisi writes, withdrawn from society to avoid being chewed up and spit out by it. Nevertheless, by remaining separate from a corrosive society, they maintain their humanity, even as they suffer from crippling loneliness. Nafisi's diagnosis may be bleak, but it's more humane than the vision of society put forth in Babbitt and is therefore not hopeless.

Nashville Scene has an eloquent summation of the themes Nafisi conjures in this book: "The Republic of Imagination is something of a jeremiad, a lamentation on how we have lost our way. Her complaint, however, contains its own remedy. Her own passionate love of literature is evident on virtually every page, and she has more than enough eloquence to awaken some of the same love in her readers. Anyone who has not read or recently revisited the work of Twain, Carson McCullers, Sinclair Lewis or any of the other writers Nafisi invokes, is likely to come away from this book eager to do so."