Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [108]
I told her my problem was not so much students like Ghomi, who were themselves so bluntly opposed to ambiguity, but my other students, who were victims of Ghomi’s unambiguous attitude towards them. You see, I have a feeling that people like Ghomi always attack, because they are afraid of what they don’t understand. What they say is we don’t need James, but what they really mean is we are afraid of this fellow James—he baffles us, he confuses us, he makes us a little uneasy.
Mina told me that when she wanted to explain the concept of ambiguity in the novel, she always used her chair trick. In the next session I started the class by picking up a chair and placing it in front of me. What do you see? I asked the class. A chair. Then I placed the chair upside down. Now what do you see? Still a chair. Then I straightened the chair and asked a few students to stand in different places around the room, and asked both those standing and those sitting to describe the same chair. You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual?
In order to encourage the silent majority in my classes to openly discuss their ideas, I asked my students to write their impressions of the works we were reading in diary form in a notebook. In their diaries, they were free to write about other matters related to the class or their experiences, but writing about the works was mandatory. Miss Ruhi always described the plot, which at least demonstrated that she had read the books I had assigned, and that she even, in some cases, had not only read them but also read about them. But she seldom expressed her own opinions. In one instance she mentioned that she had objected to Wuthering Heights’s immorality until she read somewhere about its mystical aspects, but in James’s case there seemed to be no mysticism involved—he was very earthy, if at times too idealistic.
Her notebooks were always neat. At the top of each assignment she wrote in beautiful handwriting: “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” She wrote that Daisy was not merely immoral, she was “unreasonable.” Yet it was good to know that even in a decadent society like America there were still some norms, some standards according to which people were judged. She also quoted another teacher, lamenting the fact that certain writers made their unreasonable and immoral characters so attractive that readers instinctively sympathized with them. She lamented the fact that the right-thinking Mrs. Costello or Mrs. Walker was cast in such a negative light. This to her demonstrated a writer’s satanic as well as godly powers. A writer like James, according to her, was like Satan: he had infinite powers, but he used them to do evil, to create sympathy for a sinner like Daisy and distaste for more virtuous people like Mrs. Walker. Miss Ruhi had imbibed the same dregs as Mr. Nyazi and so many others.
Mr. Ghomi was true to his role. He rarely showed any indication of having read the novels. He ranted and raved about immorality and evil. He got into the habit of “educating” me by writing quotations from Imam Khomeini and other worthies about the duty of literature, about the decadence of the West, about Salman Rushdie. He also took to pasting in his notebook newspaper clippings reporting murder and corruption in the United States. One week he got so desperate that he resorted to quoting the slogans posted out in the streets. One such slogan I particularly liked: A WOMAN IN A VEIL IS PROTECTED LIKE A PEARL IN AN OYSTER SHELL. This slogan, when it appeared, was usually accompanied by a drawing of a predatory