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Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules.
The class’s favorite book was Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. Even as a child, Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the freshness and beauty of language, while other children “understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences.”
Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret language of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his readers to feel in the act of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones.
The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.
She, Yassi, had much potential; she could be whatever she wanted to be—a good wife or a teacher and poet. What mattered was for her to know what she wanted.
Lolita has a tragic past, with a dead father and a dead two-year-old brother. And now also a dead mother. Like my students, Lolita’s past comes to her not so much as a loss but as a lack, and like my students, she becomes a figment in someone else’s dream.
Before the reader makes his judgment about either Humbert or our own blind censor, I must remind him
“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”
I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people.
Manna, who seemed engrossed by a passage in the book, raised her head. “It’s strange,” she said, “but some critics seem to treat the text the same way Humbert treats Lolita: they only see themselves and what they want to see.”
Was not life exciting when every simple act acquired the complexity of a dangerous secret mission?
Similarities with adulterers and the book club
I have said that we were in that room to protect ourselves from the reality outside. I have also said that this reality imposed itself on us, like a petulant child who would not give his frustrated parents a moment to themselves. It created and shaped our intimacies, throwing us into unexpected complicity. Our relations became personal in many different ways. Not only did the most ordinary activities gain a new luminosity in the light of our secret, but everyday life sometimes took on the quality of make-believe or fiction. We had to reveal aspects of ourselves to one another that we didn’t
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Later, we all wondered how it was that our concern was not so much for our lives or for the fact that five armed strangers were using our house for a shooting match with a neighbor who was also armed and hiding somewhere in our garden. We, like all normal Iranian citizens, were guilty and had something to hide: we were worried about our satellite dish.
I wonder if right now, at this moment, I were to turn to the people sitting next to me in this café in a country that is not Iran and talk to them about life in Tehran, how they would react. Would they condemn the tortures, the executions and the extreme acts of aggression? I think they would. But what about the acts of transgression on our ordinary lives, like the desire to wear pink socks?
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.
We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.
Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can’t experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels—the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.”
He also recommended that women dress properly when sleeping, so that if their houses were hit, they would not be “indecently exposed to strangers’ eyes.”
I unconsciously took up pencil and paper again. I had never wholly given up my pleasurable undergraduate habit of underlining passages and taking notes. Most of my notes on Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary and Tom Jones were made on these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.
Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream. Added to the crimes, to the murders and tortures, we would now face this last indignity—the murder of our dreams. Yet he had done this with our full compliance, our complete assent and complicity.
Why is this different from someone like elon musk? The murders/tortures? Public opinion of what success means? The ends don't justify the means, and musk stops short of nonconsensual work?
What about obama?
It was a tribute to the degree of intimacy that had developed among us that we could easily shift from light banter to serious discussions of the novels. What we had with all the writers, but especially with Austen, was fun. Sometimes we even went wild—we became childish and teasing and just plain enjoyed ourselves. How could one read the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice and not grasp that this was what Austen demanded of her readers?
And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop—there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
Boundaries are constantly threatened by the women in Austen’s novels, who feel more at home in the private than the public domain, the domain of heart and of intricate individual relations. The nineteenth-century novel placed the individual, her happiness, her ordeals and her rights at the center of the story. Thus, marriage was its most important theme. From Richardson’s hapless Clarissa to Fielding’s shy and obedient Sophia to Elizabeth Bennet, women created the complications and tensions that moved the plots forward. They put at the center of our attention what Austen’s novels formulate:
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In an age of ironclad adherence to societal norms (like in Iran!), there is no place in fiction for a wise father, only a restrictive one against whom to fight.
If you promise you’ll behave, my magician said on the phone, I have a nice surprise for you.
Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me—Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to “see” others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others. Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the
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Whenever I think of Nassrin, I always begin and end with that day in my room when she told me she was leaving.
There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out, I discovered that I missed the sense of solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to movies. I am twenty-seven. I don’t know what it means to love. I don’t want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is. You’d call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess, she said, smiling.
(Guilt has become part of your makeup. You felt guilty even while you had no notion of leaving, my magician said later, when I complained to him.)
you always talk about the effect of “these people” on you. Have you ever thought about your effect on them?
