Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [59]
My students were slightly baffled by Gatsby. The story of an idealistic guy, so much in love with this beautiful rich girl who betrays him, could not be satisfying to those for whom sacrifice was defined by words such as masses, revolution and Islam. Passion and betrayal were for them political emotions, and love far removed from the stirrings of Jay Gatsby for Mrs. Tom Buchanan. Adultery in Tehran was one of so many other crimes, and the law dealt with it accordingly: public stoning.
I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.
I told them that although the novel was specifically about Gatsby and the American dream, its author wanted it to transcend its own time and place. I read to them Fitzgerald’s favorite passage from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” about how the artist “appeals to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain . . . and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
I tried to explain to my students that Mike Gold and F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about the same subject: dreams or, more specifically, the American dream. What Gold had only dreamed of had been realized in this faraway country, now with an alien name, the Islamic Republic of Iran. “The old ideals must die . . .” he wrote. “Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories.” Such sentences could have come out of any newspaper in Iran. The revolution Gold desired was a Marxist one and ours was Islamic, but they had a great deal in common, in that they were both ideological and totalitarian. The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.
Don’t go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked on to it. Let’s pick a scene to demonstrate this point. Please turn to page 125. You will remember Gatsby is visiting Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s house for the first time. Mr. Bahri, could you please read the few lines beginning with “Who wants to . . .”?
“Who wants to go to town?” demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
“You always look so cool,” she repeated.
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.
On one level, Daisy is simply telling Gatsby he looks cool and Fitzgerald is telling us that she still loves him, but he doesn’t want to just say so. He wants to put us there in the room. Let’s look at what he’s done to give this scene the texture of a real experience. First he creates a tension between Gatsby and Daisy, and then he complicates it with Tom’s sudden insight into their relationship. This moment, suspended in mid-air, is far more effective than if Nick had simply reported that Daisy tried to tell Gatsby that she loved him.
“Yes,” cut in Mr. Farzan, “because he is in love with the money and not with Daisy. She is