Reading Lolita in Tehran

As Henry David Thoreau puts it: “A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.” Whether you like it or not, any human that comes in contact with literature must be affected by it, it is unavoidable, and Azar Nafisi points this out in her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran. This memoir is formatted as if she was talking; her prose jumps sporadically from the minor and overall meanings of different books she taught in her many classes, to what took place during class time. Sometimes, it seems as if she gets them mixed up, and for a reader with a standard IQ, it is difficult to distinguish fiction from reality. This, however unattractive it may be, adds to one of the themes in the text, which is the influence of literature in our daily lives.
Professor Nafisi keeps referring to this “secret magician” throughout the book. She says that Nabokov wrote about a magician or, “an underground man”. This magician at first seems fictional, but as time progresses, it turns out that he really isn’t a magician (Although Nafisi likes to call him “her magician”) and he is a real person. I never truly understood if he was still a fictional character, maybe Nafisi enamored her magician from the inspiration of one of her favorite authors. Truthfully, it is more than likely that there was a secret magician in Nabokov’s many words, but the fact of the matter is that we never truly know who this magician is. At one point, she tells the magicians story, and mentions that he was once a very popular Professor R at the University of Tehran, but when he wasn’t allowed to teach the plays that he preferred to teach, he quit teaching as well as society. It is hard to say if he is real, he could be a myth that Nafisi dreamed up in place of her conscience. In my opinion, he added to the illusion of fact verses fiction that Nafisi created within her book.
Her book is divided into four parts: Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen. These four parts are Nafisi’s memories of reading these books and books by these authors in Tehran while being persecuted and subjected to molestation and deprivation of personal freedom. Nafisi recognizes that the Ayatollah is, in a sense, molesting Iran. She however states, “I want to emphasize once more that we were not Lolita, the Ayatollah was not Humbert and this republic was not what Humbert called his princedom by the sea.” This, I think is further proof of the crime, considering when a child is molested, that child wants to deny it, and uses all it’s might to deny it. In most cases, the child defends its personal rapist.
At the time Nafisi wrote this book, however, she had been living in the states for at least three years. My theory is that she wrote this sentence to hammer in how important it was to believe that she was comparing the Humbert to the Ayatollah and she was comparing Iran to Lolita. This was a sort of reverse psychology; the statement makes a connection between the two situations while imprinting this into our memory of things that didn’t quite fit. From what we know of both Nafisi and the Iranian government so far, we know that it does compare Nabokov’s book, Lolita, so you can rightly assume that Nafisi is lying to get the readers attentions. At the end of the book, Nafisi admits to the fact the relationship between the woman of Iran and the Iranian government compares with rape.
The second part of Reading Lolita in Tehran is entitled Gatsby. In this section Nafisi relates the events that took place while reading this book with her class at the University of Tehran. At this point in time the leftists and the Islamic students are at each other’s throats, and there are protests left and right. These protests delay classes and cause a large percentage of absent and tardy students. In fact, it takes almost the whole semester to read one book because every class period she has to explain what just happened in the book and what they had talked about. Because the Islamic students do not agree with the sexual references in The Great Gatsby, and are completely taken aback with the beguiling Daisy, the class puts the book on trial. Even after the trial (in which Gatsby wins) the Islamic students overpower the leftist ones, and it seems as if no one agrees with the judge’s decision. In fact, some students even corner Nafisi in the halls and rat her out for teaching such a seductive book in class. They would rather have read a censored version. However during the years to follow, whenever Nafisi runs into a female student who attended the trial, that student had become a fan of Daisy’s courage and wishes with all her strength that she could be like her. The fact is, Daisy’s courage taught them that they didn’t have to be subjected by males. The males subconsciously new this, and it seemed like every time anyone lashed out in class on Daisy’s account, it was a male.