Now perhaps you can understand why reading Lolita in Tehran took on so much significance.
Like any guardians of morality, the Powers That Be took umbrage at Lolita and Madame Bovary, calling them corrupting: These books set bad examples for readers, they said, inciting them to commit immoral acts. Like all totalitarians, they could not differentiate between reality and imagination, and they attempted to impose their own version of truth upon life and fiction. They couldn't see what should be absolutely clear to those who have free minds: We do not read Lolita to learn about pedophilia. We do not read Moby-Dick to learn how to hunt whales. We do not decide to live in trees after reading Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees. We do not learn about fishing from The Old Man and the Sea. We read for the pure, sensual and unadulterated pleasure of reading. Our reward is the discovery of the many layers within these works that do not merely reflect reality: They reveal the truth.
I have often asked myself: How is it that under the worst political and social conditions, during war and revolution, in jails and in concentration camps, most victims turn toward works of imagination? I remember, almost a decade ago, listening to a former student, who was newly released from jail, telling me that she and one of her cellmates, another former student, kept their spirits up by exchanging stories about their class discussions, about the books they read, about Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald. At the end of her story, my student informed me that she had been luckier than her friend, who had been executed shortly before her release. Since then I have been haunted by the idea of the places to which these beloved books have traveled -- from the warmth of their libraries, from the vivid conversations of classrooms, to the dark cells of executioners.
We know that fiction does not save us from torture or the brutality of tyrannical regimes, or from the banalities and cruelties of life itself. Henry James did not save my student's luckless friend from her untimely death. But we do know that, when confronted by utter degradation, by confiscation of all that gives life its individual worth and integrity, many instinctively go to the highest achievements of mankind, to works that appeal to our sense of beauty, memory, harmony -- those that celebrate what is humane, those that we consider original works of the imagination.
You might say that such works gain added significance in a country deprived of its basic freedoms, but they do not matter much here, not in a free and democratic country. How relevant are Fitzgerald, Twain and Flannery O'Connor, you might ask, to our lives in Washington, D.C.?
I would respond by reminding you of a passage in Huckleberry Finn in which Huck contemplates whether or not he should give up Jim. Huck knows that, had he gone to Sunday school, "they'd a learnt you there that people that acts as I'd been" -- letting a slave go free -- "goes to ever lasting fire." But his heart rebels against the threats of those "moral" authorities. He sees Jim before his mind's eye in "day and nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind." When he remembers Jim's friendship and warmth, and imagines him not as a slave but as a human being, he decides: "All right, then, I'll go to hell." He never contemplates "reforming" and decides to free Jim from slavery again.
In American fiction, Huck has many unlikely fellow travelers: the gentle and genteel women of Henry James, the restless and haunted women of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, the dreamers like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, and they all decide that they would rather give up heaven and risk hell in order to follow the dictates of their hearts and consciences. They combine a heartbreaking blend of courage and vulnerability that defies easy answers, smug formulas, simplistic solutions. How many of us today would give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck ultimately chose?
As Saul Bellow reminds us, a culture that has lost its poetry and its soul is a culture that faces death. And death does not always come in the image of totalitarian rulers who belong to distant countries; it lives among us, in different guises, not as enemy but as friend. To mistake sound bites for deep thought, politics for action, reality shows for creative entertainment; to forget the value of dreams; to lose the ability to imagine a violent death in Darfur, in Afghanistan, in Iraq; to look at this as passing news: Are these not indications that now -- more than ever -- we need the courage and integrity, the faith, vision and dreams that these books instilled in us? Is this not a good time to worry with Bellow's hero in The Dean's December about what will happen if a country loses its poetry and soul?
We need to write about this. We need to recount what happens to us and to others when we strive to save ourselves from despair, to remind ourselves that tyrants cannot confiscate what we value most. The zealots may come in many garbs; they may rail and kill and mutilate in the name of progress or of God. But they cannot rob us of our ideals. They cannot take away our essential humanity.
As Calvino once said, "We can liberate ourselves only if we liberate others, for this is the sine qua non of one's own liberation. There must be fidelity to a goal, and purity of heart, values fundamental to salvation and triumph." And then he added a simple sentence, which, for me, summarizes everything: "There must also be beauty."
It is in just such notions -- in a purely human insistence on beauty, in our reveling in ideas, in the storied details of who we are, what we fear, what we wish for -- that the human imagination thrives.
Too often we conclude that we are practical creatures, essentially political animals. But in us there is a far greater impulse -- a longing for the universal, a desire for a shared humanity. It is in that leap toward middle ground that we move toward what truly binds us: toward culture, toward stories, toward language. And it is here, in the republic of the imagination, that we are most humane. •
Azar Nafisi is a professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran." She is also director of the Dialogue Project, an organization dedicated to bridging the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.
