EDNOTE. NABOKV-L correspondent Suellen Stringer-Hye
presents the first part of an interview with Azar Nafisi whose _Reading LOLITA
in Tehran_ is on the bestseller list. Dr. Nafici is the author of the
first critical monograph on Nabokov published in Iran. NABOKV-L earlier ran an
account by one the students who formed Dr. Nafisi's unofficial study
group in Tehran.
Last April, when "Reading Lolita in Tehran" was first
published, I contacted AzarNafisi and asked her if she would be
interested in participating in an email interview exchange for final publication
on Zembla and Nabokv-L. She was very interested but as
RLiT gained in popularity the resulting book tour began to take much of
her time. In between stops, she did however, answer some of my questions and we
hope to pick up the exchange when the book tour ends in March. As she stated in
her last email, "To be in touch with Nabokovians is very important to
me." Here then, is what I hope to be the first installment of our interview.
Q:
Nabokov, while not exactly a character in "Reading Lolita in
Tehran" seems to be the guiding, guarding spirit of the book. You
mention receiving a gift of "Ada" while studying in Oklahoma during
the 1970s. What was your original impression of Nabokov and
how did that evolve as your life became more entwined with the
Islamic Revolution? A:You
are right. The idea for this book first occurred to me when I was writing my
book on Nabokov, Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels. I
started writing that book as a straight critical study, but as I progressed more
and more I wanted to write about Nabokov through following the different times I
had read Ada and the different realities Ada and I had experienced together. The
first draft for that book began with these words: "The first time I read Ada I
was very young and the man I was in love with gave me the book, writing in the
flyleaf: 'to Azar, my Ada, love, Ted.' But I could never write that way in the
Islamic Republic. In the Persian version of that story, the inscription had to
be removed and Ted transformed into a friend, his name deleted and he was
mentioned in a way to hide his gender.
When I first read Ada, I
was simply enchanted by the book, I did not look up the allusions, did not try
to delve into the deeper meanings, I simply was enchanted. I was also amazed by
Nabokov's magical powers as a "painterly" writer. There were scenes in Ada whose
beauty and poignancy literally took my breath away. My imagination is
visual and I empathized with this quality in Nabokov. He has never ceased to
amaze me in that respect.
Even then, when I was so young and had no
reason to feel nostalgic, Ada gave me a feeling akin to nostalgia. Ada's scenes
had no relation to my own experiences, yet they stirred longings about memories
that were not mine; what Ada evoked in me was a feeling akin to the nature of
memory, beyond images from a particular past. Ada's effect was more like that of
a music you had never heard or the perfume of a flower you had never smelt
before. No other novel had influenced me in this manner. Ada had the same
texture as the fairy tales, making me ask myself does the need for storytelling
not arise from a familiar/unfamiliar feeling that we have about retrieving a
lost paradise? Yet of course we know that this particular fairy tale was created
as much out of paradise as of hell.
What amazed me was not only the way
he turned Ada and Van both into monsters and irresistible lovers but also the
portrayal of the discarded, the crazy, Lucette and Aqua, characters that never
exactly fit, that are in one sense strangers and exiles in their own lands, his
need for creating another world, always another world. I just fit into
his world. Ad=hell, da=yes, therefore A, da=joy.
In 1979 when I
returned to Iran I took a few of my favorite books with me along with the Ada
given to me by my passionate and feckless boyfriend. I had waited for years to
return home, but on arriving at the Tehran airport I knew at once that home was
not home anymore. The Islamic Republic was not, is not merely an oppressive
state, but it is a totalitarian state, much like the former Soviet Union that
attempts to demolish and destroy its' citizens' individual claims to identity
and integrity. It targeted everything that I identified with as a woman,
teacher, writer, and human being.
In this new orphaned state more than
anything else I survived and kept my sense of balance as an individual through
reading and writing. And I also rediscovered Nabokov. I found new depth to the
way he structured such amazing worlds,mixing love and anguish and
loss and always retrieving the loss and surpassing the anguish through
imagination. His Russian nuances shining through his English prose, always
poignant and always giving us a sense of power in the creative power of
his stories. There were aspects of him that I had not paid attention to before:
I had not noticed how that sense of beauty came out of an irretrievable sense of
grief, of an exile that went far beyond geographical locations. All of these I
am writing about now, in hindsight as I try to tidy up and find links
between my different experiences. In those days I merely felt this amazing sense
of attraction to Nabokov's works, for more than anything else reading for me was
a matter of passion and feeling.
When I returned to Iran, I
started rereading the classics including Nabokov's works. I found Laughter in
the Dark in my father's library marked some date in late 50s, and Luzhin
Defense. One day browsing in an old second hand store I came across Speak Memory
and later a copy of Lolita, to which I had not paid as much attention before as
I did to Ada. This time what first caught my attention in all these works
was that sense of loss, a feeling of anguish with which I now related more
strongly, realities constantly lost and confiscated. Memory and the idea that
you can never capture the past, life is like holding the wind in your hands,
constantly brushing against you and evading you. How do we encounter this?
Reading Nabokov led me to rethink ways in which fiction relates to reality, how
a work of fiction by remaining true to its own nature becomes subversive of
reality and reshapes it. Reduction of all life and all areas of life into
politics was so dangerous. It fascinated me how Nabokov took control over the
reality of his life through his act of writing. The act of writing became an act
of defiance, a brave attitude towards the absolutism of both life and death.
It was at this point that Nabokov became not a great read but an
obsession. I started collecting his books and writing to friends abroad to send
me copies of his works and works published about him. The first Nabokov book I
taught was Invitation to a Beheading. I was really worried about how it
would be received (will they understand it, will they decipher it?) but
my students linked to the structure of that novel, they immediately detected the
comic/tragic absurdity of the life he was depicting, for them it was not
at all abstract. The theatricality of life under such a regime.
Teaching
first Invitation to a Beheading, later Pnin, and later Lolita to a group of
girls in my private class, made me realize the main reason we could correspond
to Nabokov's novels was because of a structural affinity between his fiction and
our reality. There was of course no one to one correspondence, but he created
worlds that were poignant and comic, absurd and arbitrary, constantly
challenging our habits and our complicity in our own everyday oppression. More
than anything else, Nabokov made me reexamine and reformulate my ideas and
feelings about what was fiction and what was reality. Nabokov was not merely
fairy tale, his novels pulled me into voids like the voice of sirens, like
reality his novels were full of real mirages. For Nabokov the security and
happiness of childhood are as real as the orphaned state and pains of exile. The
reason we empathized him with as I keep saying was not what we call the message
or content of his book but the structure. The gaps and voids in his novels, the
carpets he pulled from under your feet, the arbitrariness of both his
characters' lives and life itself.
If you lived in a kingdom where the
age of marriage had been lowered from eighteen to nine, where Ophelia was cut
from the Russian version of Hamlet, where the bachelor professors at the
universities were issued ultimatums to either marry according to the edicts or
be expelled, the absurdity, the tragic farce of Invitation to a Beheading would
be easier to understand. It was as if he had predicted us.Did he
not say in the Gift about how life imitates art?
When I wrote my
book on him, I wanted to demonstrate how,when a writer is
genuinely faithful to the kingdom of imagination, to his land of dreams he
becomes genuinely subversive of the social and political realities of his time.
At first I was going to name my book In Tartary, because Nabokov's description
of that land was so close to the actual land I lived in. But it was in
the book I wrote in Washington DC that I could portray that Tartary. And this is
how Nabokov presides over and colors this last book.
So, here is the
story, from reading him in Norman Oklahoma to Tehran Iran, and later, now in
Washington DC: when all is said and done what is important no matter where you
read a great work of art, what remains long after the reality of time and
place have become faded memories, is the hidden and indirect feelings and
emotions a great work of art evoke, simultaneously strange and familiar, waking
the familiar stranger in us.
Q:Although Americans do not
live under the kind of oppression you experienced in Iran, Invitation to a
Beheading has always been one of my favorite books; a metaphor for the
invisibility of the value of the individual. Do you think that oppressive
societies are simply the extreme representations of tendencies inherent in
all human societies or do there need to be additional triggers. In other
words, is it simply a matter of degree or of kind?
A: I agree that
much of what happens in totalitarian states and under extreme conditions is a
reflection of what happens or could happen in democratic societies and under
'normal' conditions. Genuine creativity and imagination are always threatened by
smugness and the kind of blindness that exist in both societies. This is the
beauty of Invitation...Nabokov does not confine his story to a particular
location, rather he is creating a mindset, one that is existentially
opposed to individuality and therefore to imagination....I would like to write
more but that needs more time and thinking....
Q: Sometimes
these things are hard to discuss in the current American context.
A:I
know, i just had an interview where the interviewer informed me his wife would
not be seen in public with a copy of Lolita for the fear of what might be
thought of her! is it not bloody amazing?? this in the 'freest country in the
world" and yet in Iran apart from the censor, carrying a copy of Lolita
in public would earn you so much respect.
Q:Oh yes...but
that's because when Lolita was first introduced into American culture, during
the so called "sexual revolution" , even critics like Lionel Trilling thought it
a "love story" (as you note in your book). Now, of course, people have become
conscious of pedophilia and now some think Lolita condones it.
A:You know it is so strange because even now, I cant help thinking
about Lolita and her immense helplessness without an actual lump in the
throat.
--------------------------------------- Stringer-Hye,
Suellen Vanderbilt University Email:
suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu