Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  Nabokov’s art is revealed in his ability to make us feel sympathy for Humbert’s victims—at least for his two wives, Valeria and Charlotte—without our approving of them. We condemn Humbert’s acts of cruelty towards them even as we substantiate his judgment of their banality. What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, Nabokov’s villains are the vulgar and brutal totalitarian rulers trying to possess and control imaginative minds; in Lolita, the villain is the one with the imaginative mind. The reader could never be confused by Monsieur Pierre, but how is he to judge a Monsieur Humbert?

  Humbert makes fullest use of his art and guile in setting the reader up for his most heinous crime: his first attempt at possessing Lolita. He prepares us for the ultimate scene of seduction with the same immaculate precision with which he prepares to dope Lolita and take advantage of her listless body. He tries to win us to his side by placing us in the same category as himself: as ardent critics of consumer culture. He describes Lolita as a vulgar vixen—“a disgustingly conventional little girl,” he calls her. “And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel.”

  Like the best defense attorneys, who dazzle with their rhetoric and appeal to our higher sense of morality, Humbert exonerates himself by implicating his victim—a method we were quite familiar with in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (“We are not against cinema,” Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, “we are against prostitution!”) Addressing the “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury,” Humbert informs us: “I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me. . . . [N]ot a trace of modesty,” he confides, “did I perceive in this beautiful badly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to others.”

  So far it would seem that Humbert the criminal, with the help of Humbert the poet, has succeeded in seducing both Lolita and the reader. Yet in fact he fails on both fronts. In the case of Lolita, he never succeeds in possessing her willingly, so that every act of lovemaking from then on becomes a crueler and more tainted act of rape; she evades him at every turn. And he fails to completely seduce the reader, or some readers at least. Again ironically, his ability as a poet, his own fancy prose style, exposes him for what he is.

  You do see how Nabokov’s prose provides trapdoors for the unsuspecting reader: the credibility of every one of Humbert’s assertions is simultaneously challenged and exposed by the hidden truth implied by his descriptions. Thus another Lolita emerges that reaches beyond the caricature of the vulgar insensitive minx, although she is that, too. A hurt, lonely girl, deprived of her childhood, orphaned and with no refuge. Humbert’s rare insights give glimpses into Lolita’s character, her vulnerability and aloneness. Were he to paint the murals in the Enchanted Hunters, the motel where he first raped her, he tells us, he would have painted a lake, an arbor in flames and finally there would have been “a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.” (Child, please remember, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, although this child, had she lived in the Islamic Republic, would have been long ripe for marriage to men older than Humbert.)

  As the story develops, Humbert’s list of grievances grows. He calls her “the vile and beloved slut” and talks of her “obscene young legs,” yet we soon discover what Humbert’s complaints mean: she sits on his lap, picking her nose, engrossed in “the lighter section of a newspaper, indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket.” Of course, all murderers and all oppressors have a long list of grievances against their victims, only most are not as eloquent as Humbert Humbert.

  Nor is he always the gentle lover: her slightest attempt at independence brings on his most furious wrath: “I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheek bone. And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself . . . but it was all of no avail. Both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution.”

  No fact is more touching than Lolita’s utter helplessness. The very first morning after their painful (to Lo, putting on a brave show) and ecstatic (to Humbert) sexual encounter, she demands some money to call her mother. “Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?” “Because,” Humbert answers, “your mother is dead.” That night at the hotel, Lo and Humbert have separate rooms, but “in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

  And this of course was the whole crux of the matter: she had nowhere else to go, and for two years, in dingy motels and byways, in his home or even in school, he forces her to consent to him. He prevents her from mixing with children her own age, watches over her so she never has boyfriends, frightens her into secrecy, bribes her with money for acts of sex, which he revokes when he has had his due.

  Before the reader makes his judgment about either Humbert or our own blind censor, I must remind him that at some point Humbert addresses his audience as “Reader! Bruder!”—a reminder of a well-known line by Baudelaire, the preface to his book of poems Les Fleurs du Mal:—“Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

  14

  Reaching for a pastry, Mitra says that something has been bothering her for some time. Why is it that stories like Lolita and Madame Bovary—stories that are so sad, so tragic—make us happy? Is it not sinful to feel pleasure when reading about something so terrible? Would we feel this way if we were to read about it in the newspapers or if it happened to us? If we were to write about our lives here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, should we make our readers happy?

  That night, like many other nights, I took the class to bed with me. I felt I had not adequately answered Mitra’s question, and was tempted to call my magician and talk to him about our discussion. It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster to descend on our house or for a telephone call that would give us the bad news about a friend or a relative. I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen, that bad things would come in the middle of my dreams.

  I can trace my nightly tremors back to the time when, in my sophomore year, while studying at a horrible school in Switzerland, I was summoned in the middle of a history lesson with a stern American teacher to the principal’s office. There I was told that they had just heard on the radio that my father, the youngest mayor in Tehran’s history, had been jailed. Only three weeks earlier I had seen a large color photograph of him in Paris Match, standing by General de Gaulle. He was not with the Shah or any other dignitary—it was just Father and the General. Like the rest of my family, my father was a culture snob, who went into politics despising politicians and defying them almost at every turn. He was insolent to his superiors, at once popular and outspoken and on good terms with journalists. He wrote poetry and thought his real vocation should have been writing. I learned later that the General had taken a special liking to him after my father’s welcoming speech, which was delivered in French and filled with allusions to great French writers such as Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. De Gaulle chose to reward him with the Legion of Honor. This did not go over well with the Iranian elite, who had resented my father’s insubordinate attitude before and were now jealous of the extra attentions paid him.

  One small compensation for the bad news was that I did not have to continue my Swiss education. That Chri
stmas I went back home with a special escort to take me to the airport. The reality of my father’s imprisonment was established for me when I landed at the Tehran airport and did not find him waiting for me there. For the four years that they kept him in his “temporary” jail—in the jail’s library, adjacent to the morgue—we were told alternately that he was going to be killed or that he would be set free almost at once. He was eventually exonerated of all charges except one, insubordination. This I always remember—insubordination: it became a way of life for me after that. Much later, when I read a sentence by Nabokov—“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—the verdict against my father came to my mind.

  I never recovered from the shock of that moment when I was pulled out of the security of Mr. Holmes’s—I think that was his name—stern classroom and told that my father, the mayor, was now in jail. Later, the Islamic Revolution took away whatever sense of security I had managed to re-establish after my father’s release from jail.

  Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away. In one, perhaps my own, the dreamer wanted to run but she couldn’t: she was rooted to the ground, right outside her front door. She could not turn around, open the door and hide inside. The only one among us who claimed she had never experienced such fear was Nassrin. “I was always afraid of having to lie. You know what they say: to thine own self be true and all that. I believed in that sort of thing,” she said with a shrug. “But I have improved,” she added as an afterthought.

  Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an “illegal dream.” He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.

  In Invitation to a Beheading, on the wall of Cincinnatus C.’s jail, which is decorated like a third-rate hotel, there are certain instructions for the prisoners, such as: “A prisoner’s meekness is a prison’s pride.” Rule number six, one that lies at the heart of the novel, is: “It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape.”

  In the daytime it was better. I felt brave. I answered the Revolutionary Guards, I argued with them, I was not afraid of following them to the Revolutionary Committees. I did not have time to think about all the dead relatives and friends, about our own narrow and lucky escapes. I paid for it at night, always at night, when I returned. What will happen now? Who will be killed? When will they come? I had internalized the fear, so that I did not think of it always consciously, but I had insomnia; I roamed the house and I read and fell asleep with my glasses on, often holding on to my book. With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem, as Nassrin had painfully reminded us.

  Certain things saved me: my family and a small group of friends, the ideas, the thoughts, the books that I discussed with my underground man when we took our afternoon walks. He worried constantly—if we were stopped, what excuse could we give? We were not married; we were not brother and sister. . . . He worried for me and for my family, and every time he worried, I became bolder, letting my scarf slip, laughing out loud. I could not do much to “them,” but I could get angry at him or at my husband, at all the men who were so cautious, so worried about me, for “my sake.”

  After our first discussion of Lolita, I went to bed excited, thinking about Mitra’s question. Why did Lolita or Madame Bovary fill us with so much joy? Was there something wrong with these novels, or with us?—were Flaubert and Nabokov unfeeling brutes? By the next Thursday, I had formulated my thoughts and could not wait to share them with the class.

  Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.

  Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.

  15

  Manna and Yassi had come in early. Somehow we got to talking about the definitions we had concocted for the members of the class. I told them I called Nassrin my Cheshire cat, because she was in the habit of appearing and disappearing at strange times. When Nassrin came in with Mahshid, we told her what we had been saying. Manna said, “If I had to come up with a definition for Nassrin, I would call her a contradiction in terms.” This, for some reason, made Nassrin angry. She turned to Manna, almost accusingly: “You are the poet, Mitra the painter, and what am I—a contradiction in terms?”

  There was a certain truth to Manna’s half-ironic definition. The sun and clouds that defined Nassrin’s infinite moods and temperaments were too intimate, too inseparable. She lived by startling statements that she blurted out in a most awkward manner. My girls all surprised me at one point or another, but she more than the rest.

  One day Nassrin had stayed on after class, to help me sort out and file my lecture notes. We had talked randomly, about the university days and the hypocrisy of some officials and activists in various Muslim associations. She had gone on to tell me, as she calmly put sheets of paper in blue file folders and entered the date and subject for each file, that her youngest uncle, a very pious man, had sexually abused her when she was barely eleven years old. Nassrin recounted how he used to say that he wanted to keep himself chaste and pure for his future wife and refused friendships with women on that count. Chaste and pure, she mockingly repeated. He used to tutor Nassrin—a restless and unruly child—three times a week for over a year. He helped her with Arabic and sometimes with mathematics. During those sessions as they sat side by side at her desk, his hands had wandered over her legs, her whole body, as he repeated the Arabic tenses.

  This was a memorable day in many ways. In class, we were discussing the concept of the villain in the novel. I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image. I reminded them of Humbert’s statement that he wished to stop time and keep Lolita forever on “an island of entranced time,” a task undertaken only by Gods and poets.

  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 s
mall 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 . . .’ ”