Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
By Azar Nafisi
Random House, 347 pages, $23.95
After the Islamic revolution in Iran made it illegal–in some cases punishable by up to 76 lashes–for a woman to appear in public without either the traditional chador (which veils the body from head to toe) or a long robe and head scarf, Azar Nafisi suddenly found herself wrestling with a peculiar new form of feminine invisibility.
Having recently returned to her native Iran following graduate studies in America, Nafisi was compelled to take her place in a society that sought to erase her physical presence under the weight of the chador and obliterate her intellectual life by enacting restrictions on her academic freedom. As she writes in the memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran”:
“One day in the spring of 1981–I can still feel the sun and the morning breeze on my cheeks–I became irrelevant. Just over a year after I had returned to my country, my city, my home, I discovered that the same decree that had transformed the single word Iran into the Islamic Republic of Iran had made me and all that I had been irrelevant.”
In the post-9/11 chill of life here in America, Nafisi’s efforts to come to terms with the Islamic revolution in Iran and, most importantly for her, to harness the defiant power of art in a world that has been misshapen by a range of religious and political fundamentalisms, take on additional meaning. With the image before her of a young Vladimir Nabokov, writing furiously at his desk while the bullets of the Russian Revolution whiz by, Nafisi attempts to transcend the battles that are being fought all around her by teaching forbidden literature and inspiring her students with the wisdom of “Madame Bovary” or, even more dangerously, the lessons of “Lolita.”
In “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Nafisi, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, explores the revolutionary power of literature, turning to the work of great writers like Nabokov, Gustave Flaubert, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen to challenge the ” `fragile unreality,’ ” in Nabokov’s phrase, of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran and to forge an identity for herself in a world that aims to make her disappear.
“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance,” she writes. “This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.”
Like more commanding and eloquent literary figures such as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera, Nafisi invests literature with enormous power. In “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” she describes her determination to continue teaching books like Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” which a student in one of her classes at the University of Tehran denounced as a form of ” `cultural rape,’ ” and James’ “Daisy Miller” and “Washington Square,” both judged by the Islamic regime that ultimately condemned them–along with most other Western literature–to be prime examples of the decadence of the West.
The new regime’s infamous morality squads, the televised public executions, the abductions and daily invasions of privacy were, by Nafisi’s account, a critical part of the Islamic republic’s attempts to fight this decadence.
Yet Nafisi’s literary memoir of life there is not a “history from below” that documents the oppression of masses of people with little money or power to resist the theocratic leanings of their leaders. If Nafisi empathizes with the millions who have endured privations and abuses first under a dictatorial shah and then under the ayatollah, her perspective on her native country is necessarily a privileged one.
Nafisi’s mother was one of the first six women elected to Parliament in 1963, and her father was a mayor of Tehran during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Nafisi was educated in the U.S., England and Switzerland, and she candidly describes her ambivalent struggles to elude the “prominent family shadows” that followed her all the way to America and back.
When Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 with her unfinished doctoral dissertation in hand, she took her expected place in the academic world and watched with horror as her beloved secular society disappeared.
Expelled from the University of Tehran in 1981 for refusing to wear the veil and then, some years later, finding herself on her own and without a class after she resigned from Allameh Tabatabai University in Tehran, Nafisi finally took her intellectual mission underground. She invited seven of her best female students to her home every Thursday morning (a mixed group would be far too risky, she tells us) to discuss literature and to challenge the censors who increasingly structured their lives.
“Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology. It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction.”
As a woman living and working in Iran during the revolution, Nafisi is admirably bold. But as a reader she is disappointingly timid, rarely straying far from familiar critical interpretations of the books she teaches.
Such immensely rich and complex works of literature as “Pride and Prejudice,” “Daisy Miller” and “The Great Gatsby” emerge as alarmingly simple illustrations of a Universal Wisdom of sorts–about Love, about Courage, about Idealism, about Suffering–that is relevant to all people, in all places, in all times.
The subtlety of the novels, the peculiar ways in which Austen’s depiction of English identity at the dawn of the 19th Century, or Fitzgerald’s ambivalent Jazz Age America, for example, may not simply unravel but, ironically in some cases, also extend some of the fundamental philosophical principles and founding religious assumptions of the ayatollah’s Islamic republic, are glossed over, largely ignored. If Nafisi sets out to give some canonical Western texts new life by placing them in a new and unfamiliar context, she ultimately finds in them remarkably little that is new.
Nafisi’s “memoir in books” is an acutely personal voyage through life and literature. One only wishes that her interpretations of the great novels that she brought to life for her students in her classroom at the university and in the clandestine meetings she convened in her living room had been as artful or as inventive as the perilous adventures in reading that she and her students undertook so courageously.
