A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, or, what I probably thought about this thing I read last week

I guess the idea of writing this journal was to write my thoughts down before I forgot about them.

BUT. BUT. I am just blazing through my new and unread shelf! I am now on my third book post-Midnight's Children! I am incredible!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers
Vintage 2001
ISBN 978-0375725784






Ummmm, right, so, generally I hate memoirs and also books dealing with the "family" theme... which memoirs usually are, because everyone has a family. Somewhat. More or less because they're boring, but also because they're self-involved and useless as a genre. I mean, obviously there are exceptions and that's probably unfair, but the idea of writing a memoir, if you are not fucking, like, Gandhi or someone, is preposterous. As if anyone cares.

(Inconsistently, I love blogs and the entire idea of blogging. I have absolutely no philosophical integrity.)

Time to be intelligent. Family: another theme I dislike. I dislike the language of "family values" because of its obvious ties to conservative politics, and as an extension of that, I find (crappy) literature's obsession with family in general to be an example of essentialism, and thus conservativism, that makes this kind of literature philosophically, if not offensive, at least irritating. Family-oriented literature asks "How do we deal with what we are given?" Whereas the question I am more interested in asking is "How do we change what we are given to make it better for everyone?"-- thus making the radical change necessary for any sort of social justice possible. Just because something is "natural" does not make it good. This is a very common intellectual error that is completely unfounded.

That said, Dave Eggers' Pulitzer-prize nominated A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is both a memoir, and about family, which I didn't realise when I bought it. It is about Dave's life as a twenty-something raising his kid brother after both parents die of cancer within months-- one month?-- of each other.

It kind of reminded me of one of my favourite favourite albums of all time, The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, in that it is about family tragedy and California. Those are really the only real reasons, but also because of the joy that gets mingled in with the anger and bitterness-- I would not have described The Mountain Goats as anything but completely tragic before I saw them perform in May, but John Darnielle's performance at the Garrick Centre was so joyful, he hardly ever stopped smiling, even during songs like Woke Up New, objectively the saddest song from the saddest album in the history of indie rock-- which is saying something. Likewise, Eggers' sense of humour, along with his textbook postmodern self-awareness, makes an Oprah's-book-club-type tragedy much more than it could be.

(Disclaimer, there are some very good books in Oprah's book club. But you know what I mean. Stuff your mom reads and cries a little bit while reading.)

Other thoughts. I don't know. I generally liked it; I found the self-aware, postmodern discussions on the necessary violence in turning life to art fairly interesting and not nearly as irritating as stuff like that can be. I mean, you can't do stuff like that without a certain air of clever-assery, but I think Eggers' very funny list of themes and metaphors preceding the actual "text" did a lot to help that-- i.e., if you've got to be self-aware, at least be self-deprecating about it. And they were infrequent enough so as to actually be interesting, allowing the story to function on its own without the added metafictional layer. Which I remember someone saying was the particular strength of The French Lieutenant's Woman-- that it functioned equally well as a nineteenth-century novel and a twentieth century novel. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius reads equally well as a memoir and a postmodern treatise on the act writing. Or something.

Anyway, clearly I don't have much to say on this one, and I was going to do some actual work while I was here this evening, in order to make my 45-minute bus ride not completely irrelevant.

Next: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

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.