The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  To undermine the spreading zealotry, Nafisi devised an ingenious pedagogical scheme. "This is a good time for trials," she commented dryly—her classroom would assume the trappings of a court: The Great Gatsby was to be put on trial. The novel would be the defendant. The students would enact judge, prosecutor, defense, and jury. Here was the prosecutor (a young man): "Imam Khomeini has relegated a great task to our poets and writers.... If our Imam is the shepherd who guides the flock to its pasture, then the writers are the faithful watchdogs who must lead according to the shepherd's dictates.... This book preaches illicit relations." And here was the defense (a young woman): "Our prosecutor 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. But is a novel good because the heroine is virtuous?" And now the defendant (in the voice of Nafisi): "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." Gatsby, the defendant insisted, is "about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality."

  At the close of the mock tribunal—a virtuoso passage in this vividly braided memoir—Nafisi appears to confront her own complicity, and that of her generation. "What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald," she muses, "was this dream that became our obsession and took over reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified and forgiven." But was the dream of a politicized Islamic society, even one initially pledged to reform, ever as beautiful as it was surely terrible? When Nafisi speaks tenderly of religion, it is through her regard for her grandmother's chador, "a symbol of her sacred relationship to God.... It was a shelter, a world apart from the world." This serene image of pious withdrawal, an expression of inner devotion, is inescapably foreign to the bristling political belligerence of the chador under the ayatollahs' hard rule. In the falsified name of holiness thousands were arrested, movie houses were burned down, teenagers were sentenced to death, gun-toting morality squads prowled. With provocations on both sides, the eight-year war with Iraq was soon to be prosecuted. Tehran would be repeatedly bombed, and hundreds of young "martyrs," the keys to heaven swinging from their necks, would be sent to march through fields littered with land mines.

  In circumstances such as these, Nafisi was expelled from the University of Tehran. She had refused to wear the veil; her refusal seemed to signify an end to teaching. She would not compromise, she could not be coerced. She entered the silenced zone of interiority, though not on the style of her friend the magician, whose principled disappearance she could not approximate. Occupied with family life, a husband and children, she was perforce in the world of common necessity. Was there, then, a middle way between compliance with the ayatollahs and the desolating seclusion of internal exile? A determined academic dynamo named Mrs. Rezvan claimed that there could be: she pressured Nafisi to take a position at Allameh Tabatabai, her "liberal" university, where, though the veil was mandatory in the classroom, Nafisi would be permitted to teach what she pleased—and besides, given that the veil was law, wasn't she already veiled when she walked out to the grocery store? A university is not a grocery, Nafisi objected; but she yielded. "Some thought I would be a traitor," she writes, "if I neglected the young and left them to the teachings of corrupt ideologies; others insisted I would be betraying everything I stood for if I worked for a regime responsible for ruining the lives of so many.... Both were right."

  But "liberalism" in a state-controlled university was relative. The president of the faculty averted his eyes from her; religion forbade him to look at a woman. The Muslim Students Association and Islamic Jihad were active and fanatic. The walls were lined with the usual inflammatory posters. The students, constrained by beliefs and certainties that allowed no independent thought, were fearful of individuality—and it was the perplexities of individuality and autonomy that Nafisi drew from the novels her impassioned readings illumined. Jane Austen was pelted with charges of "vile," "decadent," "corrupt," the regime's hackneyed terminology. Unaccountably, there was still another source for the perversion of the aims of literature:

  One day after class, Mr. Nahvi followed me to my office. He tried to tell me that Austen was not only anti-Islamic but that she was guilty of another sin: she was a colonial writer. I was surprised to hear this from the mouth of someone who until then had mainly quoted and misquoted the Koran. He told me that Mansfield Park was a book that condoned slavery.... What confounded me was that I was almost certain that Mr. Nahvi had not read Mansfield Park.

  Nafisi's astonishment was dispelled much later, presumably in an American academic environment, when she was introduced to the views of Edward Said; it hardly counts as a witticism to note that she was spared this particular debasement of fiction only by the intellectual isolation imposed by life under tyranny. That a Muslim fundamentalist with a circumscribed mind had gotten wind of Said's lucubrations on Mansfield Park suggests something about the uses of foolish ideas.

  Because the intensity of the Iraqi bombings had grown unendurable, Khomeini was compelled to accept what he called the "cup of poison"—the recognition of defeat and the termination of the war. Domestic loyalties now emerged as the regime's latest motif, and again there were mass executions. Nafisi's classes expanded—strangers, students from other universities, former graduates, outsiders crowded her lectures. They came for Nabokov, for James, for Austen; they came to hear what had been taken from them. In 1989 Khomeini died. The mammoth funeral, the turbulence of the mobs, the prolonged official lamentations ignited a public frenzy comparable (though Nafisi does not tell us this) to the orgiastic obsequies surrounding Stalin's death. The ruler who was mourned as "the breaker of idols" was placed in an air-conditioned glass case. His image, it was said, could be seen in the moon. "Even perfectly modern and educated individuals came to believe this," Nafisi marvels. And Mrs. Rezvan, despite her zeal for the possibility of the liberalization of at least one Iranian university, escaped to Canada. Allameh Tabatabai had been tagged by some in the Ministry of Education as no better than Switzerland—a touchstone of Western decay.

  Nafisi escaped to her living room, where her surreptitious confederates, stripped of empathy in the ayatollahs' withering domain, found it in the voices of novels, and in the safety of an intimate confessional space. Satire became the lance to pierce the hide of repressive law. Jane Austen, far from conspiring with imperialist subjugation, was, in this room of a thousand hurts, a rebel captain:

  "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife." So declared Yassi, in that special tone of hers, deadpan and wildly ironic, which on some occasions, and this was one of them, bordered on the burlesque.

  "Or is it a truth universally acknowledged," Manna shot back, "that a Muslim man must be in want not just of one but of many wives?"

  Inexorably, the personal travail of the seven began to wash over their Thursday mornings. The social condition of women in Iran—where nail polish remained an offense worthy of flogging and prison—and the outrage of authoritarian confiscation possessed the seminar: there it was in Lolita, here it was in Tehran. One of Nafisi's recurrent "jokes"—not unlike the joke about the Rule of the Bus—is her account of the official censor, whose job it was to guard against insult to religion in film, theater, and television. What made him highly suitable as a judge of the visual arts was that he could not see what he condemned—he was virtually blind.

  The sightless censor is Nafisi's metaphor for the Islamic Republic: it declined to see or discern. This blind callousness—Nafisi rightly terms it solipsism—ruled every cranny of the nation's existence. The answer to governmental solipsism, Nafisi determined, was insubordination through clinging to what the regime could neither see nor feel: the sympathies and openness of humane art, art
freed from political manipulation—the inchoate glimmerings of Fitzgerald's green light, Nabokov's "world of tenderness, brightness and beauty," James's "Feel, feel, I say—feel for all you're worth."

  But the strains of insubordination, and the tensions of oppositional thinking, could not last. "You will be leaving us soon," her friend the magician said.

  She left Iran in 1997, impelled by what the great novels reveal: the right to choose. Or perhaps it was only the ayatollahs' Iran she abandoned. She kept the Iran she prized—the mountains in her living room mirror; the Persian classics, whose names, Rumi, Hafez, Sa'adi, Khayyam, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Attar, Beyhaghi, are an elixir of language; the memory of her underground magician, on whose repudiations civilization finally depends.

  In Iran, until recently, the straits of courage through which one might pass with conscience nearly unscathed seemed few. The magician's way: I am not a member of this club. Mrs. Rezvan's way: why deprive the young of what they deserve to have, and only you can give?—which led first to compromise and then to disillusionment. And last, emigration, whenever it proved feasible, and if not, then through the connivance of smugglers. The Rule of the Bus rendered any other solution unthinkable.

  Yet lately, especially among the young, there are rumblings of cracks in the ayatollahs' regime. A fore-echo was heard even before Nafisi's departure, when a former student, no longer wearing the chador, confided that she had named her child Daisy: "I want my daughter to be what I never was." Once an ideologically indignant adherent of the Muslim Students Association, she had resisted Nafisi's charge that a novel is "not an exercise in censure." She had admired a professor who erased the impious word "wine" from his readings. And she had emphatically assailed James's Daisy as licentious. "As I write," Nafisi notes in her epilogue, "I open the paper to read about the student demonstrations in support of a dissident who was sentenced to death for suggesting that the clergy should not be blindly followed like monkeys."

  And as I write, in the summer of 2003, I open the paper to read of student protests in Tehran—the burning of tires, the burning of trees—directed against Khamenei, the current ruling ayatollah, and also against President Khatami, the designated reformist figure. (When Khatami appeared on American television some months past, it was all a matter of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.*) Twenty-four years ago, the students of the Islamic revolution were chanting "Death to America." Now their sons and daughters are chanting "Death to Khamenei, kill all the mullahs," and still the tune is death. A generation has been reared on death—death as justice, death as retribution, death as religion, death as victory, death as intoxication. Revolutions are rarely velvet, and most often cannot be, especially when sanctified thugs and their truncheons come calling—but death-yelps as the birth pangs of democracy?

  Nafisi's anguished and glorious memoir contemplates another theme: "how fragile is his life," she thinks, visiting her magician for the last time. She is with him in the corner of the kitchen, imagining the future. She will go on reading Lolita in the United States. He will stay behind. How much more promising it would be if the beleaguered summoners of a world yet unborn were moved to cry "Long life to Sheherazade!" in the streets of Tehran.

  Isaac Babel: "Let Me Finish"

  ON MAY 15, 1939, Isaac Babel, a writer whose distinction had earned him the Soviet privilege of a villa in the country, was arrested at Peredelkino and taken to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, headquarters of the secret police. His papers were confiscated and destroyed—among them half-completed stories, plays, film scripts, translations. Six months later, after three days and nights of hellish interrogation, he confessed to a false charge of espionage. The following year, a clandestine trial was briefly held in the dying hours of January 25; Babel recanted his confession, appealed to his innocence, and at 1:40 the next morning was summarily shot by a firing squad. He was forty-five. His final plea was not for himself, but for the power and truth of literature: "Let me finish my work."

  What Kafka's art hallucinates—trial without cause, an inescapable predicament directed by an irrational force, a malignant social order—Babel is at last condemned to endure in the living flesh. Kafka and Babel can be said to be the twentieth century's European coordinates: they are separated by language, style, and temperament; but where their fevers intersect lies the point of infection. Each was an acutely conscious Jew. Each witnessed a pogrom while still very young, Kafka in enlightened Prague, Babel under a czarist regime that promoted harsh legal disabilities for Jews. Each invented a type of literary modernism, becoming a movement in himself, with no possibility of successors. To be influenced by Kafka is to end in parody; and because the wilderness of an astoundingly variegated experience is incised, unduplicatably, in the sinews of Babel's prose, no writer can effectively claim to be his disciple.

  But of course they are opposites: Kafka ingrown, self-dissatisfied, indifferent to politics; hardly daring, despite genius, to feel entitlement to his own language; endlessly agonizing over a broken engagement; rarely leaving home. And here is Babel, insouciant, reckless, a womanizer, half a vagabond, a horseman, a propagandist, the father of three by three different women, only one of them legally his wife. Then why bring up Kafka when speaking of Babel? Kafka at least died in his bed. Babel was murdered by the criminal agency of a cynically criminal government. Kafka requested that his writing be destroyed, and was not obeyed. Babel's name and work were erased—as if he had never written at all—until 1954, when, during a "thaw," he was, in Soviet terminology, rehabilitated.

  Yet taken together, they tell us what we in our time are obliged to know about the brutal tracings of force and deception, including self-deception. Kafka alone is not enough; his interiors are too circumscribed. Babel alone is not enough; his landscapes are too diffuse. Kafka supplies the grandly exegetical metaphor: the man who thinks but barely lives, the metaphysician who is ultimately consumed by a conflagration of lies. Babel, by contrast, lives, lives, lives! He lives robustly, inquisitively, hungrily; his appetite for unpredictable human impulse is gargantuan, inclusive, eccentric. He is trickster, rapscallion, ironist, wayward lover, imprudent impostor—and out of these hundred fiery selves insidious truths creep out, one by one, in a face, in the color of the sky, in a patch of mud, in a word. Violence, pity, comedy, illumination. It is as if he is an irritable membrane, subject to every creaturely vibration.

  He was born in Odessa, a cosmopolitan and polyglot city that looked to the sea and beyond. It was, he wrote,

  the most charming city of the Russian Empire. If you think about it, it is a town in which you can live free and easy. Half the population is made up of Jews, and Jews are a people who have learned a few simple truths along the way. Jews get married so as not to be alone, love so as to live through the centuries, save money so they can buy houses and give their wives astrakhan jackets, love children because, let's face it, it is good and important to love one's children. The poor Odessa Jews get very confused when it comes to officials and regulations, but it isn't all that easy to get them to budge in their opinions, their very antiquated opinions. You might not be able to budge these Jews, but there's a whole lot you can learn from them. To a large extent it is because of them that Odessa has this light and easy atmosphere.

  There is much of the affectionate and mirthful Babel in this paragraph: the honest yet ironic delight in people exactly as they are, the teasing sense of laughing entitlement ("so as to live through the centuries"), prosperity and poverty rubbing elbows, ordinary folk harried by officialdom, confusion and stubbornness, love and loneliness. As for poor Jews, Babel began as one of these, starting life in the Moldavanka, a mixed neighborhood with a sprinkling of mobsters. What he witnessed there, with a bright boy's perceptiveness, catapulted him early on into the capacious worldliness that burst out (he was twenty-nine) in the exuberant tales of Benya Krik and his gang—tough but honorable criminals with a Damon Runyonesque strain.

  Lionel Trilling, among the first to write seriously about Babel in English, mistook h
im for "a Jew of the ghetto." If "ghetto" implies a narrow and inbred psyche, then Babel stands for the reverse. Though he was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with the traditional texts and their demanding commentaries, he added to these a lifelong infatuation with Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were composed in fluent literary French. The breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. He befriended whores, cab drivers, jockeys; he knew what it was to be penniless, to live on the edge and off the beaten track. He was at once a poet of the city—"the glass sun of Petersburg"—and a lyricist of the countryside: "the walls of sunset collapsing into the sky." He was drawn to spaciousness and elasticity, optimism and opportunity, and it was through these visionary seductions of societal freedom, expressed politically, that he welcomed the Revolution.

  He not only welcomed it; he joined it. In order to be near Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, Babel had been living illegally in St. Petersburg, one of the cities prohibited to Jews under the hobbling restrictions of the czarist Pale of Settlement. With the advent of the Revolution the Pale dissolved, discriminatory quotas ceased, censorship vanished, promises multiplied, and Babel zealously attached himself to the Bolshevik cause. In 1920, as a war correspondent riding with the Red Cavalry to deliver Communist salvation to the reluctant Polish villages across the border, he fell into disenchantment. "They all say they're fighting for justice and they all loot," he wrote in his diary. "Murderers, it's unbearable, baseness and crime.... Carnage. The military commander and I ride along the tracks, begging the men not to butcher the prisoners." Six years later, Babel published his penetratingly authoritative Red Cavalry stories, coolly steeped in pity and blood, and found instant fame.