Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [27]
I tried to explain how Lolita was a more complex novel than any of the previous ones we had read by Nabokov. On the surface of course Lolita is more realistic, but it also has the same trapdoors and unexpected twists and turns. I showed them a small photograph of Joshua Reynolds’s painting The Age of Innocence, which I had found accidentally in an old graduate paper. We were discussing the scene in which Humbert, paying a visit to Lolita’s school, finds her in a classroom. Reynolds’s print of a young girl-child in white, with brown curly hair, hangs above the chalkboard. Lolita is sitting behind another “nymphet,” an exquisite blonde with a “very naked porcelain-white neck” and “wonderful platinum hair.” Humbert settles in beside Lolita, “just behind that neck and that hair,” and unbuttons his overcoat and, for a bribe, forces Lolita to put her “inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand” under her desk to satisfy what in ordinary language is called his lust.
Let us pause for a moment on this casual description of Lolita’s schoolgirl hands. The innocence of the description belies the action Lolita is forced to perform. The words “inky, chalky, red-knuckled” are enough to take us to the edge of tears. There is a pause. . . . Do I imagine it now?—was there a long pause after we discussed that scene?
“What bothers us most, of course,” I said, “is not just the utter helplessness of Lolita but the fact that Humbert robs her of her childhood.” Sanaz picked up her Xerox of the novel and began. “ ‘And it struck me,’ ” she read, “ ‘as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply didn’t know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions . . .’ ”
I tried to ignore the meaningful glances they exchanged among themselves.
“It is hard for me,” Mahshid said at last, “to read the parts about Lolita’s feelings. All she wants is to be a normal girl. Remember the scene when Avis’s father comes to pick her up and Lolita notices the way the fat little daughter and father cling to each other? All she wants is to live a normal life.”
“It is interesting,” said Nassrin, “that Nabokov, who is so hard on poshlust, would make us pity the loss of the most conventional forms of life.”
“Do you think Humbert changes when he sees her in the end,” Yassi interrupted, “broken, pregnant and poor?”
The time for our break had come and gone, but we were too absorbed in our discussion to notice. 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.” She turned to me and continued: “I mean, the censors, or some of our politicized critics, don’t they do the same thing, cutting up books and re-creating them in their own image? What Ayatollah Khomeini tried to do to our lives, turning us, as you said, into figments of his imagination, he also did to our fiction. Look at Salman Rushdie’s case.”
Sanaz, playing with her long hair and rolling it around her finger, looked up and said, “Many people feel that Rushdie portrayed their religion in a distorted and irreverent manner. I mean, they don’t object to his writing fiction but to his being offensive.”
“Is it possible to write a reverent novel,” said Nassrin, “and to have it be good? Besides, the contract with the reader is that this is not reality, it’s an invented world. There must be some blasted space in life,” she added crossly, “where we can be offensive,