Reading Lolita in Tehran

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

Nafisi interviewed by Brancaccio on _NOW_ @ 9pm EST
Ch. 13 (PBS) in NYC, or:

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_nafisi.html

  (...)

AZAR NAFISI: When you think like that it's icky. I mean, that 
is the whole point that good literature can take something that 
is very sacred-- that is very profane and turn it into sacred and 
vice versa. A bad author can take the most moral-- issue and 
make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue. 
The first page of Nabokov's novel s about the fact that he was in 
love with a young girl when he was 13. And that love is not con-
summated. So what does he do? He turns that unconsummated
love into the dream and obsession of his life. And when he meets 
Lolita, he wants to turn Lolita into Annabelle Lee. The biggest 
crime in Nabokov's LOLITA is imposing your own dream upon 
someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see 
Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees 
Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian 
state does. 

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But Lolita, it's hard to understand that character 
because the author doesn't give you much of a sense of her own identity.

 AZAR NAFISI: The whole point is that Lolita, like my girls in Iran, would 
be constantly defined by their oppressors. And this is the heart-breaking 
part of LOLITA. And Nabokov is such a great writer that he makes you 
see it. He makes you see that even the name Lolita is a name that Humbert 
chooses for her because she's called Dolores in real life. And some people 
call her Dolly. But in his arms is always Lolita. And that is the heart-
breaking aspect of these systems. That they make you so much 
yours-- theirs that-- that they rewrite you. And that is why fiction is 
so powerful because we rewrite them. When my girls wrote about 
their experiences in the Islamic Republic, the way they felt, they were 
rewriting what the Ayatollah had said. And they were revisiting it. And 
in this way, they were gaining over control over their life, and that is what 

Nabokov was doing....

    
respectfully

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