Reading Lolita in Tehran: Literature as Political Resistance

Introduction: Literature Beyond Politics

Lolita — otherwise known as Dolores Haze, the object of Humbert Humbert's obsessive affection. Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Daisy Miller, protagonist of Henry James' most celebrated long short story. These heroes and heroines of fiction might not, upon their surfaces, seem to be politically oriented protagonists. Indeed, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran asks her presumably Western reader not to make superficial analogies between, for instance, Humbert Humbert's child victim Lolita and the marginalized status of women intellectuals in Iran. Although a reader could argue that both were small, fragile, and oppressed by outside forces that could not appreciate their true inner worth until it was too late, Azar Nafisi contends that it is even more radical to simply appreciate Western works of literature for what they are: great texts that create and explore the world within their own plot frameworks. A reader does not need to make easy symbolic analogies for these texts to be relevant.

Private Reading as Radical Act

Rather than politicize every aspect and element of books — as the Iranian regime desires to do — the women whom the author teaches in her home as part of a small seminar, conducted apart from the university after the fundamentalist revolution has taken hold, find a private life in dialogue and in the discussion of great works of Western literature. Some of the women are fundamentalists. Others are more secular in their outlook. But by leaving their own time and place in their minds — a land where everything is judged according to its significance, merit, and relationship to the politics of the Islamic regime — and by entering instead, momentarily, into the different fictional worlds of the West, the students participate in perhaps the most radical act of all. By reading Lolita, they are asserting that there are other issues of relevance not immediately applicable to Islam, Iran, or that particular moment in Iranian history.

The Great Gatsby and the Trial of Western Literature

Nafisi loves her native country — that is why she stays, and perhaps stays too long, even while professional opportunities close up all around her. She also loves literature's potential to give her a life and a voice that the public discourse of Iran increasingly denies her as a woman. She encourages her students to find their own voices in literature as well.

Many of the works Nafisi studied with her students — and even earlier during her professorship at an Iranian university — were either banned at the time, difficult to obtain, or later prohibited by the ruling government. One of the most compelling moments of the book occurs in a flashback, when the author recounts how, even before the Khomeini regime came to power and during the student revolts that protested the Shah's reign, Nafisi had an argument with one of her students about the relevance of The Great Gatsby. Her student viewed Gatsby as evidence of the decadence of the West and wanted to read the work strictly within its geographical and social context. Yet in a way, both professor and student were right: Gatsby, despite his love for Daisy, pursues his affections in a false and superficial manner rooted in capitalist tropes of material success. Gatsby is spiritually bankrupt in a very American way — and yet, ironically, reading the book would later be condemned by the fundamentalist Islamic regime as useless simply because it was not written by a Muslim. It was banned even though The Great Gatsby is fundamentally a critique of American culture.

Conclusion: The Color Beneath the Veil

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003.