Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [70]
She smiled, turning sweetly towards “our prosecutor,” trapped in his chair. “He leaves no space, no breathing room, between the two worlds. He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment, crude and simplistic exaltation of right and wrong.” Mr. Nyazi raised his head at these words, turning a deep red, but he said nothing. “But is a novel good,” continued Zarrin, addressing the class, “because the heroine is virtuous? Is it bad if its character strays from the moral Mr. Nyazi insists on imposing not only on us but on all fiction?”
Mr. Farzan suddenly leapt up from his chair. “Ma’am,” he said, addressing me. “My being a judge, does it mean I cannot say anything?”
“Of course not,” I said, after which he proceeded to deliver a long and garbled tirade about the valley of the ashes and the decadence of Gatsby’s parties. He concluded that Fitzgerald’s main failure was his inability to surpass his own greed: he wrote cheap stories for money, and he ran after the rich. “You know,” he said at last, by this point exhausted by his own efforts, “Fitzgerald said that the rich are different.”
Mr. Nyazi nodded his head in fervent agreement. “Yes,” he broke in, with smug self-importance, clearly pleased with the impact of his own performance. “And our revolution is opposed to the materialism preached by Mr. Fitzgerald. We do not need Western materialisms, or American goods.” He paused to take a breath, but he wasn’t finished. “If anything, we could use their technical know-how, but we must reject their morals.”
Zarrin looked on, composed and indifferent. She waited a few seconds after Mr. Nyazi’s outburst before saying calmly, “I seem to be confronting two prosecutors. Now, if you please, may I resume?” She threw a dismissive glance towards Mr. Farzan’s corner. “I would like to remind the prosecutor and the jury of the quotation we were given at our first discussion of this book from Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste: ‘To me the freedom of [the author’s] style is almost the guarantee of the purity of his morals.’ We also discussed that a novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in. If that is true, then Gatsby has succeeded brilliantly. This is the first time in class that a book has created such controversy.
“Gatsby is being put on trial because it disturbs us—at least some of us,” she added, triggering a few giggles. “This is not the first time a novel—a non-political novel—has been put on trial by a state.” She turned, her ponytail turning with her. “Remember the famous trials of Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita? In each case the novel won. But let me focus on a point that seems to trouble his honor the judge as well as the prosecutor: the lure of money and its role in the novel.
“It is true that Gatsby recognizes that money is one of Daisy’s attractions. He is in fact the one who draws Nick’s attention to the fact that in the charm of her voice is the jingle of money. But this novel is not about a poor young charlatan’s love of money.” She paused here for emphasis. “Whoever claims this has not done his homework.” She turned, almost imperceptibly, to the stationary prosecutor to her left, then walked to her desk and picked up her copy of Gatsby. Holding it up, she addressed Mr. Farzan, turning her back on Nyazi, and said, “No, Your Honor, this novel is not about ‘the rich are different from you and me,’ although they are: so are the poor, and so are you, in fact, different from me. It is about wealth but not about the vulgar materialism that you and Mr. Nyazi keep focusing on.”
“You tell them!” a voice said from the back row. I turned around. There were