Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [58]
I had started having nightmares and sometimes woke up screaming, mainly because I felt I would never again be able to leave the country. This was partly based on fact, since the first two times I tried to leave I was turned down at the airport and once I was even escorted back to the headquarters of the Revolutionary Court. In the end, I did not leave Iran for eleven years: even after I was confident that they would give me permission, I could not perform the simple act of going to the passport office and asking for a passport. I felt impotent and paralyzed.
11
Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women’s dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is useful as bread.
This rather long statement, which comes from an essay by Mike Gold, “Toward Proletarian Art,” was written in 1929 in the radical New Masses. The essay in its time attracted a great deal of attention and gave birth to a new term in the annals of American literature: the proletarian writer. The fact that it could be influential and taken seriously by serious authors was a sign of changing times. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and Tender Is the Night in 1934. In between the publication of these two great novels, many things happened in the United States and Europe that made Gold influential for a while and diminished Fitzgerald’s importance, making him almost irrelevant to the social and literary scene. There was the Depression, the increasing threat of fascism and the growing influence of Soviet Marxism.
Before I started teaching The Great Gatsby, we had discussed in class some short stories by Maxim Gorky and Mike Gold. Gorky was very popular at the time—many of his stories and his novel The Mother had been translated into Persian, and he was read widely by the revolutionaries, both old and young. This made Gatsby seem oddly irrelevant, a strange choice to teach at a university where almost all the students were burning with revolutionary zeal. Now, in retrospect, I see that Gatsby was the right choice. Only later did I come to realize how the values shaping that novel were the exact opposite of those of the revolution. Ironically, as time went by, it was the values inherent in Gatsby that would triumph, but at the time we had not yet realized just how far we had betrayed our dreams.
We started reading Gatsby in November, but couldn’t finish it until January, because of the constant interruptions. I was taking some risks in teaching such a book at such a time, when certain books had been banned as morally harmful. Most revolutionary groups were in agreement with the government on the subject of individual freedoms, which they condescendingly called “bourgeois” and “decadent.” This made it easier for the new ruling elite to pass some of the most reactionary laws, going so far as to outlaw certain gestures and expression of emotions, including love. Before it established a new constitution or parliament, the new regime had annulled the marriage-protection law. It banned ballet and dancing and told ballerinas they had a choice between acting or singing. Later women were banned from singing, because a woman’s voice, like her hair, was sexually provocative and should be kept hidden.
My choice of Gatsby was not based on the political climate of the time but on the fact that it was a great novel. I had been asked to teach a course on twentieth-century fiction, and this seemed to me a reasonable principle for inclusion. And beyond that, it would give my students a glimpse of that other world that was now receding from us, lost in a clamor of denunciations. Would my students feel the same sympathy as Nick for Gatsby’s fatal love for the beautiful and faithless Daisy Fay? I read and reread Gatsby with greedy wonder. I could not wait to share the book with my class, yet I was held back by a strange feeling that I did not want to share it with