Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [76]
He taught drama and film—Greek theater, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Stoppard, as well as Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. He loved Vincente Minnelli, John Ford and Howard Hawks. I registered these stories unconsciously and put them aside for later. Years later, when he gave me as a birthday present videotapes of The Pirate, Johnny Guitar and A Night at the Opera, I would remember that day on the steps of the university.
Vida asked me if I had heard about his latest stunt before he was expelled. He left before he could be expelled, another student corrected her. I had not heard anything about his departure, I said, including this stunt, as she put it. But after I heard the story for the first time, I was always eager to repeat it to any sympathetic listener. When I knew him—my magician—much later, I forced him to tell and retell it to me many times.
One day the radical students and faculty members in the Drama Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts convened to change the student curriculum. They felt certain courses were too bourgeois and were not needed anymore, and they wanted to add new, revolutionary courses. Heated debates had ensued in that packed meeting as drama students demanded that Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Racine be replaced with Brecht and Gorky, as well as some Marx and Engels—revolutionary theory was more important than plays. The faculty had all sat on the platform in the hall, except for this particular professor, who stood at the back by the door.
In a nod to democracy, it was asked if anyone disapproved of the new proposal. From the back of the room, a voice said quietly, “I disagree.” A silence fell over the room. The voice gave as his reason his conviction that as far as he was concerned, there was no one, and he meant no one, certainly no revolutionary leader or political hero, more important than Racine. What he could teach was Racine. If they did not want to know about Racine, that was up to them. Whenever they decided they wanted to run a proper university and reinstate Racine, then he would be happy to come back and teach. Heads turned abruptly towards the voice in disbelief. It was the impertinent magician. Some started to attack him and his “formalist” and “decadent” views. They claimed his ideas were old-fashioned and that he should get with the times. A girl rose and tried to calm the cries of indignation. She said this professor always had the students’ best interests at heart and that he should be given a chance to defend himself.
Later, when I told him the story as I had heard it, he corrected me: he had started to talk from the back but was asked to go to the podium. He had walked to the podium in the silence that had already put him on trial.
When he spoke again, it was to say that he felt one single film by Laurel and Hardy was worth more than all their revolutionary tracts, including those of Marx and Lenin. What they called passion was not passion, not even madness; it was some coarse emotion not worthy of true literature. He said that if they changed the curriculum, he would refuse to teach. True to his word, he never did go back, although he participated in the vigils against the closing of the universities. He wanted his students to know that his withdrawal that day was not out of fear of government reprisal.
I was told that he almost imprisoned himself in his apartment, meeting with a select group of friends and disciples. “I bet he’d see you, Professor,” one of my students said eagerly. I was not so sure.
21
The last day we gave to Gatsby was in January; heavy snow had covered the streets. There were two images I wanted my students to discuss. I no longer have my battered Gatsby with me, the