The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi

Author:Azar Nafisi [Nafisi, Azar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

5

It seems quite simple, this condemnation of consumer society, until one realizes that we are, of course, part of the problem. What are my exact grievances against my laptop, cell phone and now my iPad? How far am I implicated in the creation and preservation of the very world I find so easy to dismiss and despise? Babbitt is full of surprises, small complications, forewarning of future dilemmas. It is deceptively simple. We don’t like to think that innovation and vitality go hand in hand with complacent commercialism, and yet here we are, and it is this unexpected revelation that has made Babbitt gnaw at me for so many years. Much has been said about the corrosive nature of consumer society, its hazards and the inevitable conformity it generates. Babbitt does not merely condemn this consumerism; it lays open the paradox at the heart of American society: the urge (perhaps “addiction” is a better word) for novelty, for movement, for constant change that creates “Pep” and motivates “invention” while at the same time being an impediment to imagination and reflection.

In her review for the New Statesman, Rebecca West wrote that Babbitt has “that something extra, over and above, which makes the work of art, and it is signed in every line with the unique personality of the writer.” She goes on to quote one of Babbitt’s public speeches, adding, “It is a bonehead Walt Whitman speaking. Stuffed like a Christmas goose as Babbitt is, with silly films, silly newspapers, silly talk, silly oratory, there has yet struck him the majestic creativeness of his own country, its miraculous power to bear and nourish without end countless multitudes of men and women. . . . [T]here is in these people a vitality so intense that it must eventually bolt with them and land them willy-nilly into the sphere of intelligence; and this immense commercial machine will become the instrument of their aspiration.”

Interestingly enough, it is Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, friend of the workingman and astute critic of Zenith and its corrupt leaders, who most understands and appreciates this intense vitality. Responding to a foreign friend who condescendingly criticizes American conformity, Doane reminds him that there is standardization in every country: in England (“every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour”), in France (with its “sidewalk cafes”) and Italy (where the “love-making” is standardized). For him, “Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual in.” Doane goes on to explain how when he saw, in London, the picture of an American suburb in a toothpaste ad on the back of a Saturday Evening Post, “an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of ’em, or with low raking roofs and—the kind of street you’d find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights,” he felt homesick.

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