The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  The novel has not withered; it holds on, held in the warmth of the hand. "It can do simply everything," Henry James wrote a century ago, "and that is its strength and its life. Its plasticity, its elasticity is infinite." These words appeared tinder the head "The Future of the Novel." There are advanced minds who may wish to apply them to the Internet—with predictive truth, no doubt, on their side. Communications technology may indeed widen and widen, and in ways beyond even our current fantasies. But the novel commands a realm far more perceptive than the "exchange of ideas" that, in familiar lingo, is heralded as communication, and means only what the crowd knows. Talk-show hosts who stimulate the public outpourings of the injured are themselves hedged behind the inquisitive sympathy of crowds, which is no sympathy at all. Downloading specialized knowledge—one of the encyclopedic triumphs of communications technology—is an act equal in practicality to a wooden leg; it will support your standing in the world, but there is no blood in it.

  What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel's intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings fanning their tiny threads, stirring up nuances and disclosures. The arcane designs and driftings of metaphor—what James called the figure in the carpet, what Keats called negative capability, what Kafka called explaining the inexplicable—are what the novel knows. It can make sentient even the furniture in a room:

  Pavel Petrovich meanwhile had gone back to his elegant study. Its walls were covered with grayish wallpaper and hung with an assortment of weapons on a many-hued Persian tapestry. The walnut furniture was upholstered in dark green velvet. There was a Renaissance bookcase of old black oak, bronze statuettes on the magnificent writing-table, an open hearth. He threw himself on the sofa, clasped his hands behind his head and remained motionless, staring at the ceiling with an expression verging on despair. Perhaps because he wanted to hide from the very walls what was reflected in his face, or for some other reason—anyway, he got up, unfastened the heavy window curtains and threw himself back on the sofa.

  That is Turgenev. A modernist would have omitted that "expression verging on despair." The despair is in the wallpaper, as Turgenev hinted; it was the literary habits of the nineteenth century that made him say the word outright. Virginia Woolf's wallpaper is sentient, too—though, because she is a modernist, she never explicitly names its mood:

  Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flaps of the wallpaper, asking, would it hang much longer, when will it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wallpaper whether they would fade, questioning (gendy, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the waste-paper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?

  Two small portraits, each of a room—but the subject of both (if such wavering tendrils of sensation can be termed a subject) is incorporeal, intuitional, deeply interior. A weight of sorrow inheres in Turgenev's heavy black bookcase; the feather-tap of the ephemeral touches Woolf's torn letters. And both scenes breathe out the one primordial cry: Life! Life!

  Life—the inner life—is not in the production of story lines alone, or movies would suffice. The micro-universe of the modem? Never mind. The secret voices in the marrow elude these multiplying high-tech implements that facilitate the spread of information. (High tech! Facilitate the spread of information! The jargon of the wooden leg, the wooden tongue.) The din in our heads, that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread—where, in an age of machines addressing crowds, and crowds mad for machines, can it be found? In the art of the novel; in the novel's infinity of plasticity and elasticity; in a flap of imaginary wallpaper. And nowhere else.

  The Rule of the Bus

  TOWARD THE CLOSE OF Reading Lolita in Tehran, her troubled yet inspiriting memoir of life under the ayatollahs, Azar Nafisi recounts the course of an attempted massacre. Twenty-one writers, members of the Iranian writers' association, had been invited to attend a literary conference in Armenia. Government agents at first discouraged the trip, then appeared to relent. The long bus journey had stretched well into the night, with most of the travelers asleep in their seats, when an alert passenger all at once became aware that the driver was missing and the bus was motionless: it had been abandoned at the brink of a precipice. Someone seized the wheel and swerved the vehicle out of danger. As the dazed writers emerged, the security forces who had been posted at the site beforehand—to "discover" the unfortunate "accident"—sped forward to arrest them. A plot to dispatch an entire cohort of intellectuals had gone awry. "The next day," Nafisi writes, "the whole of Tehran had heard the news.... There were many jokes about this incident."

  As it happened—not in Tehran but at home in New York, and some time before coming upon Nafisi's despairing history—I had already encountered one of these jokes, as well as two of the targeted passengers. In the autumn of 1999, during an interval of thaw in the Islamic Republic's unsparing regime, a group of four Iranian writers was permitted to depart for New York. It was a private visit, closed to the press, and presided over by an Iranian exile, the chair of a Middle Eastern department at an elite American university. * In response to an invitation from the Freedom to Write Committee of the PEN American Center, the visitors, their academic cicerone, and a pair of translators joined an attentive circle of about twenty American writers at a large round table in a small secluded room. The mood was cautious, hesitant on both sides. The Americans, conscious of their liberties in the face of writers under duress, feared giving offense by pressing too hard, and the Iranians, for their part, accustomed to wary reticence, seemed apprehensive, unsure of what unsuspected quagmires might await. But there was a prevailing good will, edged by mutual watchfulness, and the suppressed jubilation that accompanies sympathetic recognition. Here they were, these alien messengers bearing the unfathomable scars of tyranny—yet what were they really? Familiar middle-aged scribblers in shirtsleeves, worn intellectuals marked by deepening creases. You could meet their like anywhere, splitting literary hairs and grinding out cigarette butts in coffee dregs. One had a droopy Mark Twain mustache and a humorous shoulder tweaked upward by spasms of irony. He was the first to tear down the curtain of formality that shadowed the table, and it was from him that I heard the joke—it was a kind of joke—about the bus. In Iran, he said, we don't have the Rule of Law; instead we have the Rule of the Bus, mandated to pitch a score of writers over a cliff, and good riddance to critical thinking. He had spent the last twenty years, he confided, "humbly, in the corner of the kitchen"—a refuge from the despotic storm.

  At the time of this visit, the despotic storm had engulfed thirteen Iranian Jews falsely accused of spying for Israel; they were charged with the sin of "world arrogance" and threatened with execution, a public iniquity that was drawing international protest and dominating the news almost daily. Only four months before, in July of 1998, another scapegoated Jew had been hanged, the most recent in a series of "anti-Zionist" persecutions. In view of the Rule of the Bus—and since hatred of "Zionists" remained a salient and enduring tenet of the ayatollahs' statecraft—it struck me as imperative not to exclude the condition of Iranian Jews in a conversation touching on human rights and free expression. The gruff and shaggy spokesman for the four, who had been introduced as "the poet of the streets," began instantly to reply in rapid Farsi. One word leaped into comprehension: Falastin. It was on account of the Palestinians, he explained stiffly; that was why Jews born in Isfahan were guilty. "A governmental answer," I countered, "not an answer from the corner of the kitchen." But the kitchen finally won out: th
e poet of the streets, it developed, had had his work banned for years, during which he earned his living writing advertising copy. He had been accused of "accepting money from Israel." He was officially a dissident. They were all dissidents; they were all secularists; they were all subject to the malevolent whims of a theocratic tyranny.

  "Theocratic tyranny"—this was the Middle Eastern professor's scalding phrase. He was angry at the ayatollahs; he was angry at the fanatical influences that had corrupted a society and was punishing its intellectuals; clearly he was on the side of freedom and humanity. Yet now—startlingly, improbably—he stepped forward, bitter, strident, enraged. It was not the distant ayatollahs who were inflaming him at this hour: it was something nearer, something that was happening in this very room. The professor was white-faced. He was shouting. While an entire nation of millions is suffering under a theocratic tyranny, you, he scolded, are unfair, you are arrogant, to ask about thirteen Jews! Why do you pick out only the Jews to worry about? Why do they deserve separate mention?

  Unfair? During the ongoing campaign against Jews, the thirteen had been selected for maltreatment in a place where, as the professor knew, the notion of judicial fairness was Galgenhumor. Arrogant? Surprisingly, the professor's idiom was almost identical to that of the abusive regime's typical canard of "world arrogance," employed in the usual way. And why, the American inquired, shouldn't a demographic minority—Iranian Jews—merit the same attention as the Iranian millions? Didn't the demographic minority count as part of those millions? Who was it really who was focusing too zealously on the Jews of Iran? Was it the objectionable American, or was it the Islamic Republic, with its nonsensical anti-Semitic inventions and its persistent cry of "Death to Israel"? Or was it, just then, the distinguished professor for whom the mere mention of Jews was an irritant?

  And that is how, on November 2, 1999, the mephitic vapors of Tehran seeped, all unexpectedly, into a human rights colloquy in New York. It may be noted, though, that afterward, when the meeting was done, the man with the droopy Mark Twain mustache—the same man who had joked about the Rule of the Bus—approached the chastised American, shrugged his wry shy shrug, and smiled his tired, sensible, honest smile.

  Since then, I have often thought of the man with the droopy Mark Twain mustache, and of the clandestine heroism of the corner of the kitchen. I fancy that I have met him again in Azar Nafisi's pages, where he can be fitfully glimpsed—now forcefully, now flickeringly. Nafisi calls him "my magician." His face (perhaps he is clean-shaven?) is hidden from us; how he gets his bread is left indistinct. But his principles are plain: he has succeeded in living as a free man in a brutal society. He will not accede to becoming, as Nafisi puts it, a figment of the ayatollahs' imagination. His credo is anonymity: "I want to be forgotten; I am not a member of this club.... In fact, I don't exist." His dissent is as absolute as it is private—and only because it is acutely private can it be absolute. Yet there is always the twisted paradox of oppression: in the ayatollahs' imagination all privacy, including the most sequestered corner of the kitchen, is transgression, and all transgression is rebellion. Hence the private individual, the invisible dissenter, is "as dangerous to the state," Nafisi concludes, "as an armed rebel."

  Inspired by her magician, Nafisi herself took up arms. She and her co-conspirators—seven young women—gathered se-cretly on Thursday mornings in Nafisi's living room, on soft couches, over tea and cream puffs. The cream puffs and cushions are misleading: this was a war room, roiling with insurrection; the young women, arriving shrouded in their long robes and headscarves, were ardent insurgents. Their maps and weapons were at the ready—Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Pride and Prejudice. And also A Thousand and One Nights, banned in Iran and available only on the black market: the dangerously subversive Scheherazade, who knows how stories can outwit ruthlessness and confer life. That Nafisi's rebels were women is not insignificant. In the Islamic Republic, all citizens, male and female, are subject to the caprices of tyranny; but women, even as victims, are less than equal. With the ascension of Khomeini and the introduction of sharia law, the age of marriage for females was reduced from eighteen to nine. Stoning became the punishment for prostitution and adultery. Women were obliged to cover themselves from head to toe; to sit in the back of the bus; to avoid bright colors in coats and scarves and shoelaces. A hint of lipstick or a wayward strand of hair was likely to draw the savage solicitude of the roving moral police. Running was forbidden; licking an ice cream cone in public was forbidden; walking with a man not one's near relation was forbidden.

  In her covert seminar, Nafisi's retort to these depredations was literary generalship. Her allies were Nabokov, Austen, Fitzgerald, and James—each of whom yields a powerful refraction of internal freedom and cultural despotism, of autonomy and usurpation. "The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man," Nafisi argues, "but the confiscation of one individual's life by another.... Nabokov, through his portrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other people's lives." James's Daisy Miller declines to be ruled by the expectations of her conditioning; Catherine Sloper of Washington Square resists not merely local convention but a deep-seated drive to manipulate and subordinate her. In Pride and Prejudice, Nafisi points out, "there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist," and it is this many-voiced disharmony—dialogue on all sides—that underlies Austen's "democratic imperative." Nafisi had come to this perception alone; but in a period of grim discouragement, reinforcement was at hand. "You used to preach to us all," her friend the magician reminded her, "that [Austen] ignored politics, not because she didn't know any better but because she didn't allow her work, her imagination, to be swallowed up by the society around her. At a time when the world was engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars, she created her own independent world, a world that you, two centuries later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, teach as the fictional ideal of democracy. Remember all that talk of yours about how the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to ... satisfy your own conscience?"

  She remembered; she did not forget. Unlike her students, born into the ayatollahs' imperium—wherein women were legally half the value of men, and "temporary marriage," a form of sanctioned philandering, was the law—Nafisi had experienced the pre-Khomeini era. Her father had been the mayor of Tehran. Her mother had been elected to Parliament. After the Islamic revolution the two women who had been cabinet ministers were sentenced to death, "for the sins of warring with God and for spreading prostitution." The first happened to be safely abroad. The second—the former principal of Nafisi's high school—was put in a sack and stoned. Denunciations, coerced confessions, the murder of political prisoners, amputations of the limbs of thieves, show trials, and an unending procession of executions were now commonplace. The young women in Nafisi's private seminar suffered from nightmares, both in their dreams (the fear of going about unveiled) and in quotidian reality. One was allowed to attend by means of a ruse: her father believed she was translating religious texts. Another had a dictatorial husband who beat her. Still others had been jailed, or subjected to humiliatingly invasive virginity tests. Everywhere in the streets slogans on posters bawled "Death to America! Down with Imperialism and Zionism!" It was against all this that Nafisi's seven seditionists were pitted. In the conspiratorial sanctum that was Nafisi's living room, where a mirror reflected distant mountains, they threw off their somber scarves and shapeless robes and burst into an individuality of color and loosened hair. In all of Iran on a Thursday morning, it was only here that Gatsby's green light burned.

  Nafisi had once been a revolutionary of a different stripe. An early marriage (it ended in divorce) took her to the University of Oklahoma, where her then husband was studying engineering. When he returned to Iran, she stayed on, joining the demonstrations protesting the Vietnam War, "occupying" a university building, reading Lenin and Mao together with Melville and Poe. Oklahoma's Iranian students were rad
ical Marxists. Nafisi went to their rallies, yelled their slogans, and speechified against United States support for the shah. Along the way she acquired a doctorate in literature: her dissertation was on the American proletarian novelists, exemplified by Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses, a 1930s periodical sympathetic to Bolshevism. Her career as a professor of literature began in the English department of the University of Tehran, just as the regime was starting its religious and political penetration of public institutions. "Almost every week, sometimes every day of the week," she recalls, "there were either demonstrations or meetings, and we were drawn to these like a magnet, independently of our will." When a popular young ayatollah, a hero of the revolution, died, rivalrous Islamic factions fought over delivering the body to its grave, while an oceanic crowd frothed in a mania of mourning and chanting. Nafisi was caught up in the communal rhapsody; she had voted for Khomeini; she had willed the revolution.

  And then, as revolutions do, it swallowed her up. Vigilantes and fanatics took over. The veil was imposed on women. Books were banned. Baha'i burials were prohibited. The enemies of God multiplied; torture and executions multiplied. Nafisi's students were turning rigidly ideological. Characters in novels were judged by Islamic standards and condemned for "cultural aggression." Gatsby's Daisy was denounced as dissolute and decadent, and Gatsby was scorned as a swindler representing Western materialism. In a mordant parody that Nafisi plainly recognized—"be careful what you wish for, be careful of your dreams," she admonished one of her students, "one day they may just come true"—the ghost of the doctrinaire proletarian novel, dressed now in radical Islamic robes, rose up to haunt her: once again literature was being cut to fit prevailing dogma.