Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  “Perhaps our honorable prosecutor should not be so harsh,” Vida said once it was clear that Nyazi had at last exhausted his argument. “Gatsby dies, after all, so one could say that he gets his just deserts.”

  But Mr. Nyazi was not convinced. “Is it just Gatsby who deserves to die?” he said with evident scorn. “No! The whole of American society deserves the same fate. What kind of a dream is it to steal a man’s wife, to preach sex, to cheat and swindle and to . . . and then that guy, the narrator, Nick, he claims to be moral!”

  Mr. Nyazi proceeded in this vein at some length, until he came to a sudden halt, as if he had choked on his own words. Even then he did not budge. Somehow it did not occur to any of us to suggest that he return to his original seat as the trial proceeded.

  18

  Zarrin was summoned next to defend her case. She stood up to face the class, elegant and professional in her navy blue pleated skirt and woolen jacket with gold buttons, white cuffs peering out from under its sleeves. Her hair was tied back with a ribbon in a low ponytail and the only ornament she wore was a pair of gold earrings. She circled slowly around Mr. Nyazi, every once in a while making a small sudden turn to emphasize a point. She had few notes and rarely looked at them as she addressed the class.

  As she spoke, she kept pacing the room, her ponytail, in harmony with her movements, shifting from side to side, gently caressing the back of her neck, and each time she turned she was confronted with Mr. Nyazi, sitting hard as rock on that chair. She began with a passage I had read from one of Fitzgerald’s short stories. “Our dear prosecutor has committed the fallacy of getting too close to the amusement park,” she said. “He can no longer distinguish fiction from reality.”

  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 giggles and murmurs. Zarrin paused, smiling. The judge, rather startled, cried out, “Silence! Who said that?” Not even he expected an answer.

  “Mr. Nyazi, our esteemed prosecutor,” Zarrin said mockingly, “seems to be in need of no witnesses. He apparently is both witness and prosecution, but let us bring our witnesses from the book itself. Let us call some of the characters to the stand. I will now call to the stand our most important witness.

  “Mr. Nyazi has offered himself to us as a judge of Fitzgerald’s characters, but Fitzgerald had another plan. He gave us his own judge. So perhaps we should listen to him. Which character deserves to be our judge?” Zarrin said, turning towards the class. “Nick, of course, and you remember how he describes himself: ‘Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.’ If there is a judge in this novel, it is Nick. In a sense he is the least colorful character, because he acts as a mirror.

  “The other characters are ultimately judged in term of their honesty. And the representatives of wealth turn out to be the most dishonest. Exhibit A: Jordan Baker, with whom Nick is romantically involved. There is a scandal about Jordan that Nick cannot at first remember. She had lied about a match, just as she would lie about a car she had borrowed and then left out in the rain with the top down. ‘She was incurably dishonest,’ Nick tells us. ‘She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.’

  “Exhibit B is Tom Buchanan. His dishonesty is more obvious: he cheats on his wife, he covers up her crime and he feels no guilt. Daisy’s case is more complicated because, like everything else about her, her insincerity creates a certain enchantment: she makes others feel they are complicit in her lies, because they are seduced by them. And then, of course, there is Meyer Wolfshiem, Gatsby’s shady business partner. He fixes the World Cup. ‘It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.’ So the question of honesty and dishonesty, the way people are and the way they present themselves to the world, is a sub-theme that colors all the main events in the novel. And who are the most dishonest people in this novel?” she asked, again focusing on the jury. “The rich, of course,” she said, making a sudden turn towards Mr. Nyazi. “The very people our prosecutor claims Fitzgerald approves of.

  “But that’s not all. We are not done with the rich.” Zarrin picked up her book and opened it to a m
arked page. “With Mr. Carraway’s permission,” she said, “I should like to quote him on the subject of the rich.” Then she began to read: ” ‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .’

  “So you see,” said Zarrin, turning again to Mr. Farzan, “this is the judgment the most reliable character in the novel makes about the rich. The rich in this book, represented primarily by Tom and Daisy and to a lesser extent Jordan Baker, are careless people. After all, it is Daisy who runs over Myrtle and lets Gatsby take the blame for it, without even sending a flower to his funeral.” Zarrin paused, making a detour around the chair, seemingly oblivious to the judge, the prosecutor and the jury.

  “The word careless is the key here,” she said. “Remember when Nick reproaches Jordan for her careless driving and she responds lightly that even if she is careless, she counts on other people being careful? Careless is the first adjective that comes to mind when describing the rich in this novel. The dream they embody is an alloyed dream that destroys whoever tries to get close to it. So you see, Mr. Nyazi, this book is no less a condemnation of your wealthy upper classes than any of the revolutionary books we have read.” She suddenly turned to me and said with a smile, “I am not sure how one should address a book. Would you agree that your aim is not a defense of the wealthy classes?”

  I was startled by Zarrin’s sudden question but appreciated this opportunity to focus on a point that had been central to my own discussions about fiction in general. “If a critique of carelessness is a fault,” I said, somewhat self-consciously, “then at least I’m in good company. This carelessness, a lack of empathy, appears in Jane Austen’s negative characters: in Lady Catherine, in Mrs. Norris, in Mr. Collins or the Crawfords. The theme recurs in Henry James’s stories and in Nabokov’s monster heroes: Humbert, Kinbote, Van and Ada Veen. Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can’t experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels—the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.” I said all this in one breath, rather astonished at my own fervor.

  “Yes,” said Zarrin, interrupting me now. “Could one not say in fact that this blindness or carelessness towards others is a reminder of another brand of careless people?” She threw a momentary glance at Nyazi as she added, “Those who see the world in black and white, drunk on the righteousness of their own fictions.

  “And if,” she continued with some warmth, “Mr. Farzan, in real life Fitzgerald was obsessed with the rich and with wealth; in his fiction he brings out the corrupt and decaying power of wealth on basically decent people, like Gatsby, or creative and lively people, like Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. In his failure to understand this, Mr. Nyazi misses the whole point of the novel.”

  Nyazi, who for some time now had been insistently scrutinizing the floor, suddenly jumped up and said, “I object!”

  “To what, exactly, do you object?” said Zarrin with mock politeness.

  “Carelessness is not enough!” he shot back. “It doesn’t make the novel more moral. I ask you about the sin of adultery, about lies and cheating, and you talk about carelessness?”

  Zarrin paused and then turned to me again. “I would now like to call the defendant to the stand.” She then turned to Mr. Nyazi and, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes, said, “Would you like to examine the defendant?” Nyazi murmured a defiant no. “Fine. Ma’am, could you please take the stand?” I got up, rather startled, and looked around me. There was no chair. Mr. Farzan, for once alert, jumped up and offered me his. “You heard the prosecutor’s remarks,” Zarrin said, addressing me. “Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  I felt uncomfortable, even shy, and reluctant to talk. Zarrin had been doing a great job, and it seemed to me there was no need for my pontifications. But the class was waiting, and there was no way I could back down now.

  I sat awkwardly on the chair offered me by Mr. Farzan. During the course of my preparations for the trial, I had found that no matter how hard I tried, I could not articulate in words the thoughts and emotions that made me so excited about Gatsby. I kept going back to Fitzgerald’s own explanation of the novel: “That’s the whole burden of this novel,” he had said, “the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.” I wanted to tell them that this book is not about adultery but about the loss of dreams. For me it had become of vital importance that my students accept Gatsby on its own terms, celebrate and love it because of its amazing and anguished beauty, but what I had to say in this class had to be more concrete and practical.

  “You don’t read Gatsby,” I said, “to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil . . .”

  “But, ma’am,” Mr. Nyazin interrupted me. “There is nothing complicated about having an affair with another man’s wife. Why doesn’t Mr. Gatsby get his own wife?” he added sulkily.

  “Why don’t you write your own novel?” a muffled voice cracked from some indefinable place in the middle row. Mr. Nyazi looked even more startled. From this point on, I hardly managed to get a word in. It seemed as if all of a sudden everyone had discovered that they needed to get in on the discussion.

  At my suggestion, Mr. Farzan called for a ten-minute recess. I left the room and went outside, along with a few students who felt the need for fresh air. In the hall I found Mahtab and Nassrin deep in conversation. I joined them and asked them what they thought of the trial.

  Nassrin was furious that Nyazi seemed to think he had a monopoly on morality. She said she didn’t say she’d approve of Gatsby, but at least he was prepared to die for his love. The three of us began walking down the hallway. Most of the students had gathered around Zarrin and Nyazi, who were in the midst of a heated argument. Zarrin was accusing Nyazi of calling her a prostitute. He was almost blue in the face with anger and indignation, and was accusing her in turn of being a liar and a fool.

  “What am I to think of your slogans claiming that women who don’t wear the veil are prostitutes and agents of Satan? You call this morality?” she shouted. “What about Christian women who don’t believe in wearing veils? Are they all—every single one of them—decadent floozies?”

  “But this is an Islamic country,” Nyazi shouted vehemently. “And this is the law, and whoever . . .”

  “The law?” Vida interrupted him. “You guys came in and changed the laws. Is it the law? So was wearing the yellow star in Nazi Germany. Should all the Jews have worn the star because it was the blasted law?”

  “Oh,” Zarrin said mockingly, “don’t even try to talk to him about that. He would call them all Zionists who deserved what they got.” Mr. Nyazi seemed ready to jump up and slap her across the face.

  “I think it’s about time I used my authority,” I whispered to Nassrin, who was standing by, transfixed. I asked them all to calm down and return to their seats. When the shouts had died down and the accusations and counteraccusations had more or less subsided, I suggested that we open the floor to discussion. We wouldn’t vote on the outcome of the trial, but we should hear from the jury. They could give us their verdict in the form of their opinions.

  A few of the le
ftist activists defended the novel. I felt they did so partly because the Muslim activists were so dead set against it. In essence, their defense was not so different from Nyazi’s condemnation. They said that we needed to read fiction like The Great Gatsby because we needed to know about the immorality of American culture. They felt we should read more revolutionary material, but that we should read books like this as well, to understand the enemy.

  One of them mentioned a famous statement by Comrade Lenin about how listening to “Moonlight Sonata” made him soft. He said it made him want to pat people on the back when we needed to club them, or some such. At any rate, my radical students’ main objection to the novel was that it distracted them from their duties as revolutionaries.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the heated arguments, many of my students were silent, although many gathered around Zarrin and Vida, murmuring words of encouragement and praise. I discovered later that most students had supported Zarrin, but very few were prepared to risk voicing their views, mainly because they lacked enough self-confidence to articulate their points as “eloquently,” I was told, as the defense and the prosecutor. Some claimed in private that they personally liked the book. Then why didn’t they say so? Everyone else was so certain and emphatic in their position, and they couldn’t really say why they liked it—they just did.

  Just before the bell rang, Zarrin, who had been silent ever since the recess, suddenly got up. Although she spoke in a low voice, she appeared agitated. She said sometimes she wondered why people bothered to claim to be literature majors. Did it mean anything? she wondered. As for the book, she had nothing more to say in its defense. The novel was its own defense. Perhaps we had a few things to learn from it, from Mr. Fitzgerald. She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that? And are revolutionaries devoid of personal feelings and emotions? Do they never fall in love, or enjoy beauty? This is an amazing book, she said quietly. It teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also, to look for integrity in unusual places. Anyway, she enjoyed reading it, and that counts too, can’t you see?