The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books Read Online Free PDF Page B

they, led by Dorothy, can do what Oz was powerless to achieve: destroy the Wicked Witch and liberate the frightened citizens—a myth worthy of a people who had defeated a mighty empire in search of their own independence.
    Dorothy is one in a long line of American heroines and heroes, small and meek, who somehow manage to appear greater than their mighty opponents. This quality is usually revealed once the protagonists are separated from their actual homes and surroundings. Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most memorable of those humble citizens of the imaginary America who stand up to forces great and terrible, but Huck refuses to return home, thus foreshadowing the destinies and shaping the choices of so many other fictional American characters who either leave home, never to return, or long to do so. These homeless protagonists of American fiction become the true guardians of what is best in American individualism, never identifying happiness with wealth or power. Perhaps in no other fiction, in fact, is materialism so frowned upon, or defined as the root of so many evils—an ironic but salutary reminder for a country so blatantly devoted to the pursuit of wealth and power.
    I have always been drawn to America’s vagrant nature, so well portrayed and celebrated in its best works of fiction. I believe that many of those who, like my family and me, migrated to America from all over the world can feel at home in it because it allows us both to belong and to be outsiders. It somehow encourages our vagabond self—befitting a nation that started its life by deliberately choosing to become an orphan. No fictional characters are quite so suspicious of home as those wandering the landscape of American fiction. These homeless characters become disturbing and dangerous, loitering with intent on the margins of our consciousness.
    All writers and poets are strangers, or pariahs, as Hannah Arendt chose to call them. They look at the world through the eyes of the outsider, but only American writers turn this attribute into a national characteristic. “All men are lonely,” wrote Carson McCullers, and then she added, “But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. Poe turned inward to discover an eerie and glowing world of his own. Whitman, that noblest of vagabonds, saw life as a broad open road. Henry James abandoned his own adolescent country for England and the airy decadence of nineteenth-century drawing-rooms. Melville sent out his Captain Ahab to self-destruction in the mad sailing for the great white whale. And Wolfe and Crane—they wandered for a lifetime, and I am not sure they knew themselves just what it was they sought.”
    McCullers wrote this piece to advise American writers to come back home, to turn inward, as she put it, but the fact is that even in turning inward, we need to reflect on this constant restlessness, this unending questioning, this battle between the desire for prosperity, status and success and the urge to walk away from it all, to be wary of complacency—in short, to perform the miracle of the small vagabond Huck, who followed his heart as he floated on a raft down the Mississippi. “This singular emotion, the nostalgia that has been so much a part of our national character, must be converted to good use,” McCullers continued. “What our seekers have sought for we must find. . . . America is youthful, but it can not always be young. Like an adolescent who must part with his broken family, America feels now the shock of transition. But a new and serene maturity will come if it is worked for. We must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time. . . . We must now be homesick for our own familiar land, this land that is