Reading Lolita in Tehran

I haven't finished the article that I'm reading, and I'll probably keep reading it as I write. Just, you know, heads up.

So, when I wrote my last entry, I was completely unaware of the discussion surrounding Reading Lolita; I mentioned the book to Jesse last week and he said he had heard a lecture on it last year at a conference. I did a little more research about the allegations against Nafisi, namely, that she is a big neo-con imperialist and is undoing the work of postcolonialist theorists everywhere (I'm reading Hamid Dabashi's article Native informers and the making of the American empire). It is all very fascinating. Dabashi identifies Nafisi as a "native informer," a designation which carries with it the implication of treachery; Nafisi has, according to Dabashi, turned on her country by denouncing the Iranian revoluation and enthusiastically endoring the classic works of the Western canon, supporting the imperialist project of "White men saving brown women from brown men," quoting Spivak. Dabashi accuses Nafisi of "(1) systematically and unfailingly denigrating an entire culture of revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism; (2) doing so by blatantly advancing the presumed cultural foregrounding of a predatory empire; and (3) while at the very same time catering to the most retrograde and reactionary forces within the United States, waging an all out war against a pride of place by various immigrant communities and racialised minorities seeking curricular recognition on university campuses and in the American society at large." Quite the statement.

I find this fascinating not because of the argument it entails (passionate and largely predictable, with ample quotations from Orientalism), but because Nafisi, throughout Reading Lolita and in the brief statements cited in the Wikipedia article, wants to separate literature and politics, the public and the private. This, however, undercuts everything that makes Reading Lolita meaningful; Nafisi's literature class, which I was so excited about in the last post, is obviously only subversive if literature is intensely political-- being apolitical is not an effective counterpart to political injustice. The whole project of Reading Lolita seems to recognise this, even if Nafisi herself doesn't, and so occasional statements such as (following her account of a conversation with a friend about James' The Ambassadors) "[i]t seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the person or the private" (237) undercut what it is that makes Reading Lolita worth reading.

Anyway, I'm not interested in providing a passionate defense of either Nafisi or her book; maybe she is a big neo-con and maybe that does matter. At the moment I don't care enough to do all the research required to ascertain any of the "facts" of the matter; I feel as if both sides have valid points to make. Hamid Dabashi, the only critic I've read, overstates these arguments to the point where I find him a little bit difficult to take seriously, but one can easily read between the melodrama.

Conversation topics for another day: what makes a native informer? and how does the author/narrator function in the genre of memoir given the "death of the author", or can we not accept Barthes' proclamation in the case of a work like Nafisi's?

Reading Lolita In Tehran

Azar Nafisi's "memoir in books" has been on my reading list since the summer of 2008, when I read Lisa Adams and John Heath's Why We Read What We Read, which picks apart the Publishers Weekly and USA Today bestseller lists from the past 10 years (I think that ends up being 1996-2006; the book was published in 2007). It's a really fascinating book that more or less confirms what we all suspect-- most people are pretty happy to read shit. Reading Lolita in Tehran was far and away Adams and Heath's favourite book; from what I recall, it seemed to redeem the entire doubtless-depressing project for them. I found a copy at Aqua Books for $7 or so this spring and brought it with me with the 15 or 20 other titles to take up temporary residence at my summer sublet. Also, Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel is one of my favourite books of all time.

Reading Lolita in Tehran uses four sections to chronicle Nafisi's experiences a professor of American literature in revolutionary Iran. I'm a little less than halfway through, having finished the section on Lolita (which introduces Nafisi's intimate class of seven of her most studious female students who meet in her living room to study novels forbidden by the Iranian government) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in which Nafisi describes her first year of teaching at the University of Tehran during the early years of the revolution. 

 I'm really excited about the basic premise of the book-- namely, that literature, and the study of literature, can be a radically subversive enterprise. It's so easy even for me, as a literature major, to assume that studying literature is entertaining but ultimately self-serving and irrelevant. This notion probably won't cease to bother me-- there are, after all, people starving in the streets of my own city while I pay a lot of money to read books all day. However, studying liberal arts has taught me that the major movements of history, especially the revolutions, have their roots in philosophical, religious and literary texts. Reading Lolita in Tehran gives us two of these movements, or communities-- the Islamic Republic of Iran, shaped, formed and created by the doctrines of the Qu'ran, and Nafisi's class, informed by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. The consequences of reading these texts in the Islamic Republic of Iran are dire, and although we in North America rail against censorship as a violation of our innate right to free speech, the Iranian censors, in a way, take literature much more seriously than we possibly can in our easy-going environment-- great literature is explosive, life-changing, person-forming and very, very serious. The scene I read recently, in which Nafisi's first-year students at the University of Tehran hold a highly-charged mock trial of The Great Gatsby, while real trials sentencing intellectuals to public stoning are going on around them, is an amazingly dramatic illustration of this. 

Intro

So, the purpose of this journal is going to be, more or less, to keep track of what I think about books I read. I read a lot, and think a lot about what I read, but a month or so after I've finished reading a book I was really passionate about, I couldn't tell you what I thought or why I liked it so much (although I will remember that I had thoughts, and that I did like it.) Seeing as I now have a degree in literature, I feel like people expect articulate thoughts from me than "Oh yeah, it was amazing, it was really-- you should read it." I want to keep track of my thoughts for my own sake; if other people want to read them, that is great, but not something I'm looking for.

This summer, I've designed a little curriculum for myself. I did the same thing a couple summers ago, when I felt that my reading experience up to that point had included way too little 20th-century literature. It was a great summer, I read a lot of really important books, and I felt like I had rounded out at least one deflated area of knowledge. This summer, it's "world literature", which I realise is an impossibly broad category, but it's a broad area in which I have done almost no reading. So far, it's been mostly writers with exotic-sounding names who nevertheless write in English and probably live somewhere in the States, but one has to start somewhere.

This is what I've read so far this summer, not counting some nostalgia reading I did in June:

• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
• Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

That said, I'll begin the next post with thoughts on Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.