Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [109]
Mr. Nahvi, his silent older friend, wrote neat philosophical treatises on the dangers of doubt and uncertainty. He asked whether the uncertainty James made such a fuss over was not the reason for Western civilization’s downfall. Like many others, Mr. Nahvi took certain things for granted, among them the decay of the West. He talked and wrote as if this downfall were a fact that even Western infidels did not protest. Every once in a while he handed his notes in, along with a pamphlet or a book on “Literature and Commitment,” “The Concept of Islamic Literature” or some such.
Years later, when Mahshid and Mitra were in my Thursday class and we returned to Daisy Miller, they both lamented their own silence back then. Mitra confessed that she envied Daisy’s courage. It was so strange and poignant to hear them talk about Daisy as if they had erred in regard to a real person—a friend or a relative.
One day, leaving class, I saw Mrs. Rezvan walking back to her office. She approached me and said, “I keep hearing interesting reports about your classes”—she did have reporters in every nook and cranny. “I hope you believe me now when I tell about the need to put something into these kids’ heads. The revolution has emptied their heads of any form or thought, and our own intelligentsia, the cream of the crop, is no better.”
I told her I was still not convinced that the best way of going about this was through the universities. I thought perhaps we could address it better through a united front with intellectuals outside the university. She gave me a sidelong glance and said, Yes, you could do that as well, but what makes you think you will have more success? After all, our intellectual elite has not acted any better than the clerics. Haven’t you heard about the conversation between Mr. Davaii, our foremost novelist, and the translator of Daisy Miller? One day they were introduced. The novelist says, Your name is familiar—aren’t you the translator of Henry Miller? No, Daisy Miller. Right, didn’t James Joyce write that? No. Henry James. Oh yes, of course, Henry James. By the way what’s Henry James doing nowadays? He’s dead—been dead since 1916.
18
I told my magician that I could best describe my friend Mina with a phrase Lambert Strether, the protagonist of James’s The Ambassadors, uses to describe himself to his “soul mate,” Maria Gostrey. He tells her, “I’m a perfectly equipped failure.” A perfectly equipped failure? he asked. Yes, and you know how she responds?
“Thank goodness you’re a failure—it’s why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you—look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour? Look, moreover,” she continued, “at me.”
For a little accordingly their eyes met. “I see,” Strether returned. “You too are out of it.”
“The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “announces my futility. If you knew,” she sighed, “the dreams of youth! But our realities are what has brought us together. We’re beaten brothers in arms.”
I told him, One day I will write an essay called “Perfectly Equipped Failures.” It will be about their importance in works of fiction, especially modern fiction. I think of this particular brand as semi-tragic—sometimes comic and sometimes pathetic, or both. Don Quixote comes to mind, but this character is essentially modern, born and created at a time when failure itself was obliquely celebrated. Let us see, Pnin is one, and Herzog, and Gatsby perhaps, but perhaps not—he does not choose failure, after all. Most of James’s and Bellow’s favorite characters belong to this category. These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards. James, I believe, felt that in many ways he was one, with his misunderstood novels and his tenacity in keeping to the kind of fiction he felt was right, and so is my friend Mina, and your friend Reza, and of course you are one, most definitely, but you are