by Azar Nafisi
In her “can’t you see?” there was a genuine note of concern that went beyond her disdain and hatred of Mr. Nyazi, a desire that even he should see, definitely see. She paused a moment and cast a look around the room at her classmates. The class was silent for a while after that. Not even Mr. Nyazi had anything to say.
I felt rather good after class that day. When the bell rang, many had not even noticed it. There had been no formal verdict cast, but the excitement most students now showed was the best verdict as far as I was concerned. They were all arguing as I left them outside the class—and they were arguing not over the hostages or the recent demonstrations or Rajavi and Khomeini, but over Gatsby and his alloyed dream.
19
Our discussions of Gatsby for a short while seemed as electric and important as the ideological conflicts raging over the country. In fact, as time went by, different versions of this debate did dominate the political and ideological scene. Fires were set to publishing houses and bookstores for disseminating immoral works of fiction. One woman novelist was jailed for her writings and charged with spreading prostitution. Reporters were jailed, magazines and newspapers closed and some of our best classical poets, like Rumi and Omar Khayyam, were censored or banned.
Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.
Personally, the Gatsby “trial” had opened a window into my own feelings and desires. Never before—not during all my revolutionary activities—did I feel so fervently as I did now about my work and about literature. I wanted to spread this spirit of goodwill, so I made a point the next day of asking Zarrin to stay after class, to let her know how much I had appreciated her defense. I’m afraid it fell on deaf ears, she said somewhat despondently. Don’t be so sure, I told her.
A colleague, passing me two days later in the hall, said: I heard shouts coming from the direction of your class the other day. Imagine my surprise when instead of Lenin versus the Imam I heard it was Fitzgerald versus Islam. By the way, you should be thankful to your young protégé. Which one? I asked him with a laugh. Mr. Bahri—he seems to have become your knight in shining armor. I hear he quieted down the voices of outrage and somehow convinced the Islamic association that you had put America on trial.
The university was going through many rapid changes in those days, and bouts between the radical and Muslim students became more frequent and more apparent. “How is it that you have sat idle and allowed a handful of Communists to take control of the university?” Khomeini reprimanded a group of Muslim students. “Are you less than them? Challenge them, argue with them, stand up to them and express yourselves.” He went on to tell a story, as he so often did—a parable of sorts. Khomeini had asked a leading political cleric, Modaress, what he should do when an official in his town decided to call his two dogs Sheikh and Seyyed, a clear insult to clerics. Modaress’s advice, according to Khomeini, had been brief and to the point: “Kill him.” Khomeini concluded by quoting Modaress: “You hit first and let others complain. Don’t be the victim, and don’t complain.”
20
A few days after the Gatsby trial, I hastily gathered my notes and books and left the classroom somewhat preoccupied. The aura of the trial still dominated the class. Some students had waylaid me in the halls to talk about Gatsby and present their views. There were even two or three papers written voluntarily on the subject. Stepping outside into the gentle light of the late afternoon sun, I paused on the steps, drawn by a heated argument between a handful of Muslim students and their Marxist and secular opponents. They were gesticulating and shouting. I noticed Nassrin standing a little apart from the crowd, listening to their arguments.
Soon Zarrin, Vida and a friend of theirs from another class joined me. We were all standing there idly, observing the show, making desultory comments, when Mr. Bahri came out the door with a purposeful frown. He paused for a moment, hovering beside me on the wide steps. His gaze followed mine to the intersection of the argument. He turned to me with a smile and said, “Nothing unusual. They are just having a bit of fun,” and left. I stood there somewhat stupefied with Zarrin and her friends.
As the crowd dispersed, Nassrin remained alone and hesitant, and I beckoned for her to join us. She walked shyly towards our group. It was a mild afternoon; the trees and their shadows seemed to be engaged in a flirtatious dance. Somehow my students got me talking about my own student days. I was telling them about American students’ idea of protest: boys with long hair streaking across the quad.
After I finished my stories, there was some laughter, followed by silence as we returned to the scene in front of us. I told them that perhaps my best memories were of my professors. In fact, I laughed, four of my very favorites were Dr. Yoch, who was conservative, the revolutionary Dr. Gross and Dr. Veile and Dr. Elconin, both liberals. Someone said, “Oh, Professor”—they called me Professor; it sounded even stranger to me then than it does now—“you would have liked Professor R, who taught in our department until very recently.”
One or two students had not heard of him, some knew of him and one had been to his classes a few times. He was a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, a well-known and controversial film and theater critic and writer of short stories. He was what one would call a trendsetter: at twenty-one, he had become the literary editor of a magazine, and in a short time he and a few of his friends had made many enemies and admirers among the literary set. It seemed that now, in his late thirties, he had announced his retirement. Rumors were circulating that he was writing a novel.
One of the students said that he was moody and unpredictable. Zarrin’s friend corrected him: he was not moody, just different. Another, with a flash of insight, turned to me and said, “You know, Professor, he is one of those people who have a knack for becoming legendary. I mean, they cannot be ignored.”
The legend was that he set no time limits for his classes, that a class could start at three in the afternoon and continue for five or six hours. The students had to stay for as long as it continued. Soon his reputation spread, especially among those interested in film. Many from other universities, despite the threat of penalization, sneaked out of their classes to attend his. They were not allowed into the University of Tehran without a student I.D. card, but by now participating in his classes had become a challenge. The most dedicated and rebellious jumped over the fences to escape the guards at the entrance. His lectures were always crowded; students sometimes had to stand for hours just to get in.
He taught drama and film—Greek theater, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Stoppard, as well as Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. He loved Vincente Minnelli, John Ford and Howard Hawks. I registered these stories unconsciously and put them aside for later. Years later, when he gave me as a birthday present videotapes of The Pirate, Johnny Guitar and A Night at the Opera, I would remember that day on the steps of the university.
Vida asked me if I had heard about his latest stunt before he was expelled. He left before he could be expelled, another student corrected her. I had not heard anything about his departure, I said, including this stunt, as she put it. But after I heard the story for the first time, I was always eager to repeat it to any sympathetic listener. When I knew him—my magician—much later, I forced him to tell and retell it to me many times.
One day the radical students and faculty members in the Drama Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts convened to change the student curriculum. They felt certain courses were too bourgeois and were not needed anymore, and they wanted to add new, revolutionary courses. Heated debates had ensued in that packed meeting as drama students demanded that Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Racine be replaced with Brecht and Gorky, as well as some Marx and Engels—revolutionary theory was more important than plays. The faculty had all sat o
n the platform in the hall, except for this particular professor, who stood at the back by the door.
In a nod to democracy, it was asked if anyone disapproved of the new proposal. From the back of the room, a voice said quietly, “I disagree.” A silence fell over the room. The voice gave as his reason his conviction that as far as he was concerned, there was no one, and he meant no one, certainly no revolutionary leader or political hero, more important than Racine. What he could teach was Racine. If they did not want to know about Racine, that was up to them. Whenever they decided they wanted to run a proper university and reinstate Racine, then he would be happy to come back and teach. Heads turned abruptly towards the voice in disbelief. It was the impertinent magician. Some started to attack him and his “formalist” and “decadent” views. They claimed his ideas were old-fashioned and that he should get with the times. A girl rose and tried to calm the cries of indignation. She said this professor always had the students’ best interests at heart and that he should be given a chance to defend himself.
Later, when I told him the story as I had heard it, he corrected me: he had started to talk from the back but was asked to go to the podium. He had walked to the podium in the silence that had already put him on trial.
When he spoke again, it was to say that he felt one single film by Laurel and Hardy was worth more than all their revolutionary tracts, including those of Marx and Lenin. What they called passion was not passion, not even madness; it was some coarse emotion not worthy of true literature. He said that if they changed the curriculum, he would refuse to teach. True to his word, he never did go back, although he participated in the vigils against the closing of the universities. He wanted his students to know that his withdrawal that day was not out of fear of government reprisal.
I was told that he almost imprisoned himself in his apartment, meeting with a select group of friends and disciples. “I bet he’d see you, Professor,” one of my students said eagerly. I was not so sure.
21
The last day we gave to Gatsby was in January; heavy snow had covered the streets. There were two images I wanted my students to discuss. I no longer have my battered Gatsby with me, the one with cryptic notes in the margins and at the end of book. When I left Iran, I left my precious books behind. This Gatsby is new, published in 1993. The cover is unfamiliar and I don’t know how to treat it.
I would like to begin with a quote from Fitzgerald that is central to our understanding, not just of Gatsby but of Fitzgerald’s whole body of work, I began. We have been talking about what Gatsby is all about and we’ve mentioned some themes, but there is an overall undercurrent to the novel which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion. Nick disapproves of all the people with whom Gatsby is in one way or another involved, but he does not pass the same judgment on Gatsby. Why? Because Gatsby possesses what Fitzgerald, in his story “Absolution,” calls the “honesty of imagination.”
At this point, Mr. Nyazi’s hand shot up. “But Gatsby is even more dishonest than all the others,” he squealed. “He earns his money through unlawful activities and he consorts with criminals.”
In a sense you are right, I said. Gatsby fakes everything, even his own name. All the other characters in the novel have more stable positions and identities. Gatsby is constantly being made and remade by others. At all of his parties, most of his guests speculate in conspiratorial whispers about who he is and the fabulous or awful deeds he has committed. Tom sets out to investigate his true identity and Nick himself is curious about the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Yet what Gatsby inspires is curiosity tinged with awe. The reality of Gatsby’s life is that he is a charlatan. But the truth is that he is a romantic and tragic dreamer, who becomes heroic because of his belief in his own romantic delusion.
Gatsby cannot tolerate the shabbiness of his life. He has an “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness,” and “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” He cannot change the world, so he re-creates himself according to his dream. Let’s see how Nick explains this: “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
Gatsby’s loyalty was to his reinvented self, which saw its fulfillment in Daisy’s voice. It was to the promises of that self that he remained faithful, to the green light at the end of the dock, not a shabby dream of wealth and prosperity. Thus the “colossal illusion” is born for which he sacrifices his life. As Fitzgerald puts it, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
Gatsby’s loyalty to Daisy is linked to his loyalty to his imagined idea of himself. “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . .”
The dream, however, remains incorruptible and it extends beyond Gatsby and his personal life. It exists in a broader sense in the city, in New York itself, and the East, the harbor that once became the dream of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and is now the mecca of Midwesterners, who came to it in search of a new life and thrills. While the city evokes enchanted dreams and half-promises, in reality it harbors shabby love affairs and relationships such as Tom and Myrtle’s. The city, like Daisy, has in it a promise, a mirage that when reached becomes debased and corrupted. The city is the link between Gatsby’s dream and the American dream. The dream is not about money but what he imagines he can become. It is not a comment on America as a materialistic country but as an idealistic one, one that has turned money into a means of retrieving a dream. There is nothing crass here, or the crassness is so mingled with the dream that it becomes very difficult to differentiate between the two. In the end, the best ideals and the most sordid of realities all come together. Could you please turn to the last page. You remember that this is Nick’s last good-bye to Gatsby’s house. Mr. Bahri, I see you have honored us with your presence today. Could you kindly read the passage, third line in the paragraph beginning with “Most of the big shore places . . .”
“ ‘And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.’ ”
Shall I read on? Please continue until the end of the next paragraph.
“ ‘And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.’ ”
He could be dishonest in life and he could lie about himself, but one thing he could not do was to betray his own imagination. Gatsby is ultimately betrayed by the “honesty of his imagination.” He dies, for in reality no such person can survive.
We, the readers, like Nick, both approve and disapprove of Gatsby. We are more certain of what we disapprove of than of what we admire, for, like Nick, we are caught in the rom
antic implications of his dream. His story reverberates with the tales of the pioneers who came to the shores of America in search of a new land and a new future and of their dream, already tainted with the violence that had gone into making it real.
Gatsby never should have tried to possess his dream, I explained. Even Daisy knows this; she is as much in love with him as she can ever be and yet she cannot go against her own nature and not betray him.
One autumn night they stop at a place where “the sidewalk was white with moonlight. . . . Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”
Now, could you kindly turn to page 8, read from “No—Gatsby . . .”
“ ‘No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.’ ”
For Gatsby, access to wealth is a means to an end; it is a means to the possession of his dream. That dream removes from him the power to differentiate between imagination and reality—of “foul dust” he tries to create a fairyland. His reveries for a while “provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”