The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  Just before she and her friend and neighbor Harry Minowitz have their first sexual experience, one that both shames and frightens them, suddenly plunging them into an adult world of secrets and responsibility, Mick tells him that what she most wants is to see the snow. “That’s what I want to see. Cold, white drifts of snow like in pictures. Blizzards. White, cold snow that keeps falling soft and falls on and on and on through all the winter. Snow like in Alaska.”

  The silent fall of snowflakes is a beautiful metaphor for John Singer, trapped as he is in a muffled world without sound. Singer is like the snow: soft, calming, distant. It is the infinite whiteness and coolness of the snow, its deceptive promise of protection, that makes it so alluring. The characters all flock to Mr. Singer because he is as elusive as snow, distant enough that they can pour into him their dreams, compassionate enough to identify with their pain, which is the magnet that draws them to him. But he also possesses what no other character does: enough distance, enough mystery, so that they will not wholly identify him with themselves, so that there is space left for them to shape him in their own desired images—like Jesus, in a sense, or Oprah. No one asks him about himself. No one really wants to know or cares where he comes from. They want him to listen and to heal their wounds.

  “So the rumors about the mute were rich and varied. The Jews said that he was a Jew. The merchants along the main street claimed he had received a large legacy and was a very rich man. It was whispered in one browbeaten textile union that the mute was an organizer for the C.I.O. A lone Turk who had roamed into the town years ago and who languished with his family behind the little store where they sold linens claimed passionately to his wife that the mute was Turkish. . . . One old man from the country said that the mute had come from somewhere near his home and that the mute’s father had the finest tobacco crop in all the county. All these things were said about him.”

  In fact, more than the deaf divas or the fact that she had urged her viewers to read this book, what made me think of Oprah was my association of her with Singer. Both fulfill our need to find someone who understands, who listens, who knows. And that someone cannot be too intimate. They have to be real enough for us to feel that they can understand us, but distant enough, evasive enough, that we can be allowed to make of them what we wish, to believe that they stand for us, that they feel what we do, that they are the incarnation of who we want to be. Oprah creates her audience as much as they create her.

  When Oprah speaks to millions, 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. Like Singer, she is sympathetic—she does have a real curiosity about people and their lives—but she is only human. She is not really the healer we would like her to be. In truth, we don’t really want her to speak back. We want her to reassure us, to comfort us, to console us, to prove that here is one person in this world who understands us. There is much more to Oprah the real person, just as there is more to Singer—much more than the smiling, reassuring image we find every month on the cover of O magazine. It is not that we don’t know about that real Oprah; it is that we don’t want to know. We are not curious, and if we are, it is in that predatory, voyeuristic manner that pries into her love life and tracks her weight gain in the magazines sold alongside her own. In the end, the icon and her disciples are both alone. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton reminds us, each one of us, king or beggar, comes to the world alone and leaves it alone. We are all responsible for our own lives.

  How would Mick and Biff and Dr. Copeland have reacted if they had known that “the mute,” like them, was desperate to talk and unable to connect—that he, like them, had his own mute, his friend Antonapoulos, who also did not understand him? Did they know that he roamed the streets at night for hours, wandering the different parts of the town, trying to keep his hands, which were eager to speak, quiet and under control? He partially listened to them, and he helped them when he could, but “the want for Antonapoulos was always with him—just as it had been the first months after his friend had gone—and it was better to be with any person than to be too long alone.” Would they have found it ironic that this man whom they had elevated to such heroic stature, this man who seemed to listen and understand, who lightened their burden, was himself so much in need of understanding?

  One day, Singer, who on a much anticipated surprise visit to his friend discovers that Antonapoulos is dead, returns to town, leaves his luggage in the middle of the train station, goes straight to the jewelry shop where he works and comes out with something heavy in his pocket; we are told that for a while he “rambled with bent head along the streets.” But the narrator adds that “the unrefracted brilliance of the sun, the humid heat, oppressed him. He returned to his room with swollen eyes and an aching head. After resting he drank a glass of iced coffee and smoked a cigarette. Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.”

  At some point the snow has to melt. The illusion of comfort and softness is broken. And then, when the snow melts, as Carson’s French editor André Bay would ask, where does the whiteness go?

  18

  Having neglected to ask questions of Mike in real life, I now became greedy to know and collect every scrap of information I could find about him. What had happened to turn a committed activist into an obsessed and obsessive old man? Many in the movement had moved on and now led apolitical lives. Some had become Republicans, some were liberal or progressive, but Mike seems to have stopped at some point. When all the rest of us grew up and got on with our adult lives, he “preferred not to.” The movement he had fought for had long since vanished, but not his cause—that had stayed with him, only at some point the “enemy” he so hated had come to take over his life, and he became a prisoner of his own worst imaginings.

  On the Internet, where our residues have a way of remaining, Mike’s website still exists, forlorn and orphaned. You can still find In Michael’s Opinion, and on YouTube a video of a song he sang parodying Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.” You remember that song? Mike’s answer to it was:

  I’m proud to be a hippie here in Norman,

  A place where long-haired fellers have a ball,

  I still wear old jeans and ragged T-shirts,

  ’Cause I like living free and standing tall.

  Was this enough? No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t get around the fact that the world Mike had so much wanted to pay attention had ignored him. Even his nemesis, David Boren, had remained indifferent; he had not sued him for defamation or even bothered to respond. This resounding indifference would have destroyed Mike had it not been for his obsessions, for his belief.

  I found a few videos on YouTube called “GhostofMikeWright” where cartoon characters discuss some of the issues Mike wrote and talked about. Apparently the videos, one of which portrays a debate between Boren and Mike, were inspired after his death. In another video, “Light Pollution at OU Campus,” which Mike posted before he died, he shows us how the football stadium became a “festival of light” and how historic houses around the stadium were destroyed.

  Maybe Mike wasn’t, as I had always imagined, all about facts. In the end he had been animated by a passion that would not subside. Like Huck and so many other lost souls wandering about the American landscape, he was in fact all heart. My brother, who went to the University of Oklahoma for two semesters, remembered Mike as warm and unusually generous. He reminded me that Mike had been the one who had warned him that the governor of Oklahoma had mounted a court case against him and five other students for interrupting an ROTC drill to protest the Vietnam War. The judge hearing the case had dismissed the trumped-up charges, noting the lack of evidence and commenting that in any case there was more violence at your average campus football game than at the demonstration in quest
ion. Of all our many friends, Mike had been the only one to take the trouble to try to find our address in Tehran so that he could warn him about the charges. People who wrote about Mike after his death—friends, family and strangers—all mentioned his kindness and consideration, even if some, like that former OU student, dismissed his radical ideas. He had meant so much to them, they said. But did he know it? Did they ever tell him as much?

  I had known many in the movement who had joined because they were lonely and wanted companionship, or because they enjoyed power or felt safer belonging to a group, and also some who were there because they believed in the cause. Mike was among the most selfless: he was there for the cause. It is a tragedy that his passion turned into an obsession, one that, ironically, prevented him from differentiating between fact and gossip, or fact and fantasy.

  That sense of loyalty to a cause, that burning passion that might frustrate you to the point of violence, inevitably leaves a trace behind. We find it in so many revolutionaries and idealists, but also in broken spirits damaged by the atrophying of their dream. McCullers explained in her outline that Mick, Jake and Dr. Copeland (especially the last two) were very similar “in spirit” and that despite all the “fettering circumstances . . . the great effort of each of them has been to give and there has been no thought of personal returns.” Mike was, like them, motivated by a passion that burned bright and consumed him with a mixture of righteous commitment to the cause and deep hatred. Hatred is a potent force, and every idealist has to grapple with its distorting fury. If, in his arguments, Mike turned out to be more similar to the ideologues and functionaries he so despised, in his actions he remained an idealist, a loner, more similar to the isolated characters of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter than he himself would ever have imagined.

  19

  “What good was it?” This is a question Mick Kelly asks herself as she gets off work, that stays with her at the New York Café while she waits for her chocolate sundae and a nickel glass of draft beer. Mick used to have her dream, her music, her free hours to roam the streets, her inside and outside rooms, and she also had Mr. Singer to confide in. But now this hope and secret pleasure have been taken away from her. What good was it indeed, when she had to spend ten hours a day working on her feet at the ten-cent store to support her family, giving up school and, instead of reflecting on that fellow Motsart, having to worry about the runs in her stockings and whether she would have the money to mend the worn-out bottoms of her shoes? “There were these two things she could never believe. That Mister Singer had killed himself and was dead. And that she was grown and had to work at Woolworth’s.”

  There is a correlation between Singer’s suicide and the end of Mick’s childhood. She has had her first sexual experience, accompanied by her first sense of guilt and shame, a secret different from her passion for music. For one thing, she looks different: she is no longer the boyish girl wearing khaki shorts and tennis shoes. Now she wears dresses, even a pair of dangling green earrings and a silver bangle bracelet. She has grown up all right, and how better to prove it than by the fact that, although she was the one who had found Singer dead, she had gone to work as usual: she was no longer considered a child who had to be protected, for whom the secrets of life and death were to remain secret. That very day at work, she “wrapped packages and handed them across the counter and rung the money in the till. She walked when she was supposed to walk and ate when she sat down to the table. Only at first when she went to bed at night she couldn’t sleep. But now she slept like she was supposed to.” Back when she went to school, she would come home feeling fresh and could focus on her music, but after a day working at Woolworth’s she could not return to the music; she was too tired. It seemed as if “the inside room was locked somewhere away from her.”

  Mick’s despair is echoed by Singer’s other disciples: the time has come for each of them to grow up and face the world. After Singer’s death, Dr. Copeland’s disease weakens his body and soul to the point that he can no longer practice or keep up the fight. His children want him to live with his father-in-law, but he does not want to leave his dark and empty home. “This could not truly be the end. Other voices called wordless in his heart. The voice of Jesus and of John Brown. The voice of the great Spinoza and of Karl Marx. The calling voices of all those who had fought and to whom it had been vouchsafed to complete their missions. The grief-bound voices of his people. And also the voice of the dead. Of the mute Singer, who was a righteous white man of understanding.” The “mystery” of Singer’s suicide “left him baffled and without support. There was neither beginning nor end to this sorrow. Nor understanding.”

  Where Jake works, meanwhile, there is a murder: a young black boy is killed, and Jake takes off running through the streets. It starts when he gets into the middle of a fight between the black boy and a white boy, which escalates into a full-scale brawl, the crowd joining in with razors and knives. He is knocked out, only to open his eyes and find out that he “lay half on and half beside the body of a young Negro boy.” The boy is dead, the police are coming and Jake starts to run. He runs toward the Kellys’ boardinghouse, seeking Mr. Singer, only to find out that Singer is dead and cannot comfort him. The news made him not sad but angry. It seems to Jake that with Singer’s death, all of the innermost thoughts he had confided in him have also died.

  “What good was it?” Not just for Mick but for Jake, for Dr. Copeland and for Biff Brannon? Singer’s death marks the end of childhood for Mick—the only real adolescent in the story—but it signals a period of transformation for the three adults as well. It takes immense pain and disillusionment, and a death, to awaken them into consciousness and to rescue them from the acts of violence that loneliness and despair can induce. For the first time they cannot just talk and talk in the hope that this one man will understand them. They have to slow down, to reflect, to take account. Singer’s death has in a sense liberated them, forcing them to face reality both on the surface and in their inner lives. They have to do something, to make a move, now that they can no longer go around the circle of their fantasies, repeating them eagerly and longingly to the uncomprehending Singer.

  Growth for McCullers has two stages: consciousness of the self, and the will to belong. “The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us,” she writes. With “the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self.” We leave adolescence behind when we allow ourselves to change by connecting with others. For McCullers this “primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world in which he finds himself.”

  All the characters in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are oppressed by their inability to connect, to express the inner urges that consume them. This crippling inability can lead to violence. After Singer’s death, every one of the principal characters is shocked and grief-stricken. For each, this shock invites a period of transition, or what McCullers calls “maturation.” Of all the characters in the novel, it is Singer—whom everyone in town identifies with, believing that he knows and understands them—who has no real goal or passion beyond connecting with his friend Antonopoulos, who in turn has no understanding of Singer and, unlike Singer, has no real kindness in him.

  Singer’s death is liberating to each of the characters who have grown to depend on him, because it forces them to confront their true selves, to see their yearnings unfiltered and raw. It is a myth that such liberation can come without pain, that we can read Dale Carnegie or one of those bestselling self-help books and learn how to overcome grief, or take solace in one of those life stories whose descriptions of pain and brutality are like a lollipop you suck on to ease your toothache. The characters themselves might not know it, but we as readers realize that in fact the
most childish of them all was Singer. He did not have the passion, the one thing that connects them to the world. Singer’s world, his obsession, begins and ends with his friend Antonapoulos, and it is not enough to live through another person. It is only with Singer’s death that we discover that the others all have something to live for.

  That is why they survive and why they may in the end succeed in obtaining what they are after. To connect, you need something in you that is worth connecting to, some desire to leave the self and become part of something bigger than you. Passion works in mysterious ways—its rewards cannot be counted or saved in the bank—and yet no democracy, no genuine human community, can live without it.

  Until Singer’s death, Biff, Mick, Jake and Dr. Copeland are not only childlike; they are childish. Their inability not just to know what they want but to articulate it leaves them with a gaping void. If it is not filled, this void or inner anguish can lead to violence—a violence that we find manifested in the novel when Jake beats his head against the wall or Dr. Copeland beats the wife he loves. But perhaps the greatest violence is committed by the gentle Singer when he takes his own life.

  Violence is an integral part of so many great works of American fiction. We see it almost unbearably brilliantly portrayed in the works of Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson, who capture the kind of horrendous cruelty that is rooted in life’s everyday tedium and repetitiousness. Or in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, in which people flock to California to escape the boredom of their lives, to be entertained, only to find that the vacancy of their hearts and minds leads them to a scene of mass violence. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter there is more hope and less brutality, but it is no less disturbing. To me the most tragic act of violence in the novel is Singer’s suicide, an act of profound desperation; on the other side of the spectrum is the accidental shooting of Baby, Biff ’s little niece, when the gun in the hands of Mick’s sensitive brother accidentally goes off, turning the lives of both families upside down. Then there is the violence that flares up as a result of repressed anger and frustration, both personal and political, that we see in Jake and Dr. Copeland, whose rage disables him from articulating his emotions and alienates him from his wife and children. The story begins with the personal lives of these isolated small-town characters, but it ultimately links them to the destiny of the whole of humanity as the feeling of menace that only Harry Minowitz, Mick’s Jewish friend, felt threatened by closes in. We are left at the end with Biff, who, while offering us a glimmer of hope, also leaves us with a sense of creeping danger as the transatlantic voices he hears on the radio are as yet distant drums, warning us of what is to come. It is the same urge that compelled the gentle “other Mike” to put his beloved dog in a sack and beat him, and it may also be the urge that has persuaded unhappy and isolated students to turn violently on their teachers and classmates in terrible tragedies like Columbine and Sandy Hook, in which angry and disturbed young men have walked into schools and killed dozens of children. My own son was in a locked-down building adjacent to the one in which the Virginia Tech killer was massacring his classmates. He lost a professor, and for all those hours I spent calling his cell phone, trying vainly to contact him, I kept thinking that our children had survived a revolution and a war—but would my son survive the violence unleashed by this lonely and disturbed outcast in a small, peaceful American town?