Reading Lolita in Tehran
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination. Stalin emptied Russia of its soul by pouring on the old death. Mandelstam and Sinyavsky restored that soul by reciting poetry to fellow convicts and by writing about it in their journals. "Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances," Bellow wrote, "is to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place--the foreground."
On Gatsby:
Imagination in these novels is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that others have gone through, but we can udnerstand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic--not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so......."You don't read Gatsby," I said, "to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil..."
On Jane Austen's novels:
All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen's ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel. In Austen's novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space--not just space but a necessity--for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. We needed no message, no outright call for plurality, to prove our point. All we needed was to read and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. This was where Austen's danger lay.It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy...
One of the most powerful things that Azar Nafisi talks about in Reading Lolita in Tehran is the ability of literature to illuminate our lives, to help us see that nothing is black and white, and even so, we manage to do good, to progress, to make a better life. Literature shows us that perfect and good are not the same, that we can love other flawed and broken people, that we can strive beyond our fears, and that all of us can aspire to something beyond what we know.
Read this book.