Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [21]
Where they opened up and became excited was in our discussion of the works. The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the university and the morality squads in the streets. There was a certain innocence with which we read these books; we read them apart from our own history and expectations, like Alice running after the White Rabbit and jumping into the hole. This innocence paid off: I do not think that without it we could have understood our own inarticulateness. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.
Unlike the generation of writers and intellectuals I was brought up with and now consorted with, this new generation, the one my girls belonged to, was not interested in ideologies or political positions. They had a genuine curiosity, a real thirst for the works of great writers, those condemned to obscure shadows by both the regime and the revolutionary intellectuals, most of their books banned and forbidden. Unlike in pre-revolutionary times, now the “non-Revolutionary writers,” the bearers of the canon, were the ones celebrated by the young: James, Nabokov, Woolf, Bellow, Austen and Joyce were revered names, emissaries of that forbidden world which we would turn into something more pure and golden than it ever was or will be.
In one sense the desire for beauty, the instinctive urge to struggle with the “wrong shape of things,” to borrow from Vadim, the narrator of Nabokov’s last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, drove many from various ideological poles to what we generally label as culture. This was one domain where ideology played a relatively small part.
I would like to believe that all this eagerness meant something, that there was in the air, in Tehran, something not quite like spring but a breeze, an aura that promised spring was on its way. This is what I cling to, the faint whiff of a sustained and restrained excitement, reminding me of reading a book like Lolita in Tehran. I still find it in my former students’ letters when, despite all their fears and anxieties for a future without jobs or security and a fragile and disloyal present, they write about their search for beauty.
12
I wonder if you can imagine us. We are sitting around the iron-and-glass table on a cloudy November day; the yellow and red leaves reflected in the dining room mirror are drenched in a haze. I and perhaps two others have copies of Lolita on our laps. The rest have a heavy Xerox. There is no easy access to these books—you cannot buy them in the bookstores anymore. First the censors banned most of them, then the government stopped them from being sold: most of the foreign-language bookstores were closed or had to rely on their pre-revolutionary stock. Some of these books could be found at secondhand bookstores, and a very few at the annual international book fair in Tehran. A book like Lolita was difficult to find, especially the annotated version that my girls wanted to have. We photocopied all three hundred pages for those without copies. In an hour when we take a break, we will have tea or coffee with pastry. I don’t remember whose turn it is for pastry. We take turns; every week, one of us provides the pastry.
13
“Moppet,” “little monster,” “corrupt,” “shallow,” “brat”—these are some of the terms assigned to Lolita by her critics. Compared to these assaults, Humbert’s similar attacks on Lolita and her mother seem almost mild. Then there are others—among them Lionel Trilling, no less—who see the story as a great love affair, and still others who condemn