Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  I described his apartment in detail. It was bare and white—flagrantly white: the walls, the tiles, even the kitchen cabinets. The only decoration in the living room was a large painting on the otherwise empty wall facing the entrance. The painting was of trees, shades of thick textured green on green. There was no light, yet the trees were illuminated, as if reflecting a luminosity that came not from the sun but from within.

  The furniture in the magician’s living room consisted of one brown sofa, a small table and two matching chairs. A rocking chair seemed stranded in the space between the living and dining area. A small rug, the gift of an already forgotten lost love, was thrown in front of the rocking chair. In this room, on that sofa, the underground man received his carefully selected visitors. They were famous filmmakers, scriptwriters, painters, writers, critics, former students and friends. They all came to ask his advice about their films, books and lovers; they wanted to know how they could bypass the regulations, how they could cheat the censor or carry on their clandestine love affairs. He shaped their works and their lives for them. He spent hours talking through the structure of an idea or, in the cutting room, editing a film. He advised some friends on how to make up with their lovers. He advised others that if they wanted to write better, they should fall in love. He read almost all the publications in the Soviet Union and was somehow up-to-date on the latest or best films and books written abroad.

  Many wished to be part of his hidden kingdom, but he picked only a few who passed his secret test. He made all the bids, accepting and rejecting them for reasons of his own. In return for his help, he asked that his friends never acknowledge or mention his name publicly. There were many whom he had cut from his life because they had gone against this demand. I remember one of his oft-repeated sentences: “I want to be forgotten; I am not a member of this club.”

  The look on Yassi’s face encouraged me to shape and invent my story. She reminded me of what I must have looked like as a very small child when my father, at night and also in the early morning before he went to work, would sit by my bed and weave stories. When he was angry at something I had done, when he wanted me to do something, when he wished to appease me, all the mundane details of an everyday relationship he transformed into a tale that choked me with sudden thrills and tremors.

  What I did not tell Yassi that day was that Nabokov’s magician, the man who was as dangerous to the state as an armed rebel, did not exist—or, at least, not in fiction. He was real and lived less than fifteen minutes away from where she and I were sitting, aimlessly stirring our long spoons in the tall glasses.

  That was how I chose to ask Yassi to participate in my class.

  10

  I have asked you to imagine us, to imagine us in the act of reading Lolita in Tehran: a novel about a man who, in order to possess and captivate a twelve-year-old girl, indirectly causes the death of her mother, Charlotte, and keeps her as his little entrapped mistress for two years. Are you bewildered? Why Lolita? Why Lolita in Tehran?

  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. Lolita was not a critique of the Islamic Republic, but it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives.

  Let us go to the part when Humbert arrives at Lolita’s summer camp to pick her up after her mother’s death, of which she knows nothing. This scene is the prelude to two years of captivity, during which the unwitting Lolita drifts from one motel to another with her guardian-lover:

  “Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright ‘. . . and five!’; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (’nature study’); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (’fair to good; keen on swimming and boating’); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart . . . I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her respiration and voice behind me.”

  Although this is not one of the more spectacular scenes in Lolita, it demonstrates Nabokov’s skill, and I believe it is at the heart of the novel. Nabokov called himself a painterly writer, and this scene gives a good indication of what he meant. The description is pregnant with the tension between what has gone on before (Charlotte’s discovery of Humbert’s treachery and their confrontation, leading to Charlotte’s fatal accident) and the knowledge of more terrible things to come. Through the juxtaposition of insignificant objects (a framed diploma, photographs of girl-children), ordinary transactions (“fair to good; keen on swimming and boating”) with personal feeling and emotions (“my impatient palm,” “my trembling hands,” “my pounding heart”), Nabokov foreshadows Humbert’s terrible deeds and Lolita’s orphaned future.

  Ordinary objects in this seemingly descriptive scene are destabilized by emotions, revealing Humbert’s guilty secret. From now on, Humbert’s shiver and tremble will color every nuance of his narrative, imposing emotion onto landscape, time and incident, however seemingly marginal or insignificant. Did you, like my girls, feel that the evil implied in Humbert’s actions and emotions is all the more terrifying because he parades as a normal husband, normal stepfather, normal human being?

  Then there is the butterfly—or is it a moth? Humbert’s inability to differentiate between the two, his indifference, implies a moral carelessness in other matters. This blind indifference echoes his callous attitude towards Charlotte’s dead son and Lolita’s nightly sobs. Those who tell us Lolita is a little vixen who deserved what she got should remember her nightly sobs in the arms of her rapist and jailer, because you see, as Humbert reminds us with a mixture of relish and pathos, “she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

  This came to mind when we were discussing in our class Humbert’s confiscation of Lolita’s life. The first thing that struck us in reading Lolita—in fact it was on the very first page—was how Lolita was given to us as Humbert’s creature. We only see her in passing glimpses. “What I had madly possessed,” he informs us, “was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita . . . having no will, no consciousness—indeed no real life of her own.” Humbert pins Lolita by first naming her, a name that becomes the echo of his desires. There, on the very first page, he adumbrates her various names, names for different occasions, Lo, Lola and in his arms always Lolita. We are also informed of her “real” name, Dolores, the Spanish word for pain.

  To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own, turning Lolita into a reincarnation of his lost, unfulfilled young love, Annabel Leigh. We know Lolita not directly but through Humbert, and not through her own past but through her narrator/molester’s past or imaginary past. This is what Humbert, a number of critics and in fact one of my students, Nima, called Humbert’s solipsization of Lolita.

  Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses. Nabokov’s art makes these orphaned glimmers all the more poignant in contrast to Humbert’s all-encompassing obsession with his own past. Lolita has a tragic past, with a dead father and a dead two-year-old brother. And now also a dead mother. Like my students, Lolita’s past comes to her not so much as a loss but as a lack, and like my students, she becomes a figment in someone else’s dream.

  At some point, the truth of Iran’s past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita’s is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita’s truth, her desires and life, must lose color before Humbert’s one obsession, his desire to turn a twelve-year-old unruly child into his mistress.

  When I think
of Lolita, I think of that half-alive butterfly pinned to the wall. The butterfly is not an obvious symbol, but it does suggest that Humbert fixes Lolita in the same manner that the butterfly is fixed; he wants her, a living breathing human being, to become stationary, to give up her life for the still life he offers her in return. Lolita’s image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars.

  This is how I read Lolita. Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students’ hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

  11

  I used big diaries for my class notes. The pages of these diaries were almost all blank, except for Thursdays and sometimes spilling over to Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. When I left Iran, the diaries were too heavy to take with me, so I tore out the relevant pages, and this is what I have in front of me: torn and scarred pages of those unforgotten diaries. There are some scrawls and references that I can no longer decipher, but my notes for the first few months are tidy and clean. They mostly refer to insights I gained during our discussions.

  In the first few weeks of class, we read and discussed the books I had assigned in an orderly, almost formal manner. I had prepared a set of questions for my students, modeled on those a friend had sent me from her women’s-studies program, aimed at drawing them out. They answered the questions dutifully—What do you think of your mother? Name six personalities you admire most in life and six you dislike most. What two words would you use to describe yourself? . . . Their answers to these dull questions were dull; they wrote what was expected of them. I remember that Manna tried to personalize her responses. In answer to “What is your image of yourself?” she had written, “I am not ready for that question yet.” They were not ready—not yet.

  From the beginning, I took notes, as if of an experiment. As early as November, just over a month into the meetings, I wrote: “Mitra: other women say that having children is their destiny as if they are doomed.” I added: “Some of my girls are more radical than I am in their resentment of men. All of them want to be independent. They think they cannot find men equal to them. They think they have grown and matured, but men in their lives have not, they have not bothered to think.” November 23: “Manna: I am scared of myself, nothing I do or have is like that of others around me. Others scare me. I scare me.” Throughout, from start to finish, I observe that they have no clear image of themselves; they can only see and shape themselves through other people’s eyes—ironically, the very people they despise. I have underlined love yourself, self-confidence.

  Where they opened up and became excited was in our discussion of the works. The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the university and the morality squads in the streets. There was a certain innocence with which we read these books; we read them apart from our own history and expectations, like Alice running after the White Rabbit and jumping into the hole. This innocence paid off: I do not think that without it we could have understood our own inarticulateness. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

  Unlike the generation of writers and intellectuals I was brought up with and now consorted with, this new generation, the one my girls belonged to, was not interested in ideologies or political positions. They had a genuine curiosity, a real thirst for the works of great writers, those condemned to obscure shadows by both the regime and the revolutionary intellectuals, most of their books banned and forbidden. Unlike in pre-revolutionary times, now the “non-Revolutionary writers,” the bearers of the canon, were the ones celebrated by the young: James, Nabokov, Woolf, Bellow, Austen and Joyce were revered names, emissaries of that forbidden world which we would turn into something more pure and golden than it ever was or will be.

  In one sense the desire for beauty, the instinctive urge to struggle with the “wrong shape of things,” to borrow from Vadim, the narrator of Nabokov’s last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, drove many from various ideological poles to what we generally label as culture. This was one domain where ideology played a relatively small part.

  I would like to believe that all this eagerness meant something, that there was in the air, in Tehran, something not quite like spring but a breeze, an aura that promised spring was on its way. This is what I cling to, the faint whiff of a sustained and restrained excitement, reminding me of reading a book like Lolita in Tehran. I still find it in my former students’ letters when, despite all their fears and anxieties for a future without jobs or security and a fragile and disloyal present, they write about their search for beauty.

  12

  I wonder if you can imagine us. We are sitting around the iron-and-glass table on a cloudy November day; the yellow and red leaves reflected in the dining room mirror are drenched in a haze. I and perhaps two others have copies of Lolita on our laps. The rest have a heavy Xerox. There is no easy access to these books—you cannot buy them in the bookstores anymore. First the censors banned most of them, then the government stopped them from being sold: most of the foreign-language bookstores were closed or had to rely on their pre-revolutionary stock. Some of these books could be found at secondhand bookstores, and a very few at the annual international book fair in Tehran. A book like Lolita was difficult to find, especially the annotated version that my girls wanted to have. We photocopied all three hundred pages for those without copies. In an hour when we take a break, we will have tea or coffee with pastry. I don’t remember whose turn it is for pastry. We take turns; every week, one of us provides the pastry.

  13

  “Moppet,” “little monster,” “corrupt,” “shallow,” “brat”—these are some of the terms assigned to Lolita by her critics. Compared to these assaults, Humbert’s similar attacks on Lolita and her mother seem almost mild. Then there are others—among them Lionel Trilling, no less—who see the story as a great love affair, and still others who condemn Lolita because they feel Nabokov turned the rape of a twelve-year-old into an aesthetic experience.

  We in our class disagreed with all of these interpretations. We unanimously (I am rather proud to say) agreed with Véra Nabokov and sided with Lolita. “Lolita discussed by the papers from every possible point of view except one: that of its beauty and pathos,” Véra wrote in her diary. “Critics prefer to look for moral symbols, justification, condemnation, or explanation of HH’s predicament. . . . I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along culminating in that squalid but essentially pure and healthy marriage, and her letter, and her dog. And that terrible expression on her face when she had been cheated by HH out of some little pleasure that had been promised. They all miss the fact that the ‘horrid little brat’ Lolita is essentially very good indeed—or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly, and found a decent life with poor Dick more to her liking than the other kind.”

  Humbert’s narration is confessional, both in the usual sense of the term and in that he is literally writing a confession in jail, awaiting trial for the murder of the playwright Claire Quilty, with whom Lolita ran away to escape him and who cast her off after she refused to participate in his cruel sex games. Humbert appears to us both as narrator and seducer—not just of Lolita but also of us, his readers, whom throughout the book he addresses as “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” (sometimes as “Winged gentlemen of the jury”). As the story unfolds, a deeper crime, more serious than Quilty’s murder, is revealed: the entrapment and rape of Lolita (you will notice that while Lo
lita’s scenes are written with passion and tenderness, Quilty’s murder is portrayed as farce). Humbert’s prose, veering at times towards the shamelessly overwrought, aims at seducing the reader, especially the high-minded reader, who will be taken in by such erudite gymnastics. Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such, she becomes a double victim: not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.

  Lolita and her mother are doomed before we see them: the Haze house, as Humbert calls it, more gray than white, is “the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower.” By the time we stand in the front hall (graced with door chimes and “that banal darling of arty middle class, van Gogh’s ‘Arlesienne’ “) our smile has already turned smug and mocking. We glance at the staircase and hear Mrs. Haze’s “contralto voice” before Charlotte (“a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich”) descends into view. Sentence by sentence and word by word, Humbert destroys Charlotte even as he describes her: “She was obviously one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or a bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.”

  She never has a chance, poor woman; nor does she improve on further acquaintance as the reader is regaled with descriptions of her superficiality, her sentimental and jealous passion for Humbert and her nastiness to her daughter. Through his beautiful language (“you can always trust a murderer for his fancy prose style”), Humbert focuses the reader’s attention on the banalities and small cruelties of American consumerism, creating a sense of empathy and complicity with the reader, who is encouraged to conceive of as understandable his ruthless seduction of a lonely widow and his eventual marriage to her in order to seduce her daughter.