[转帖]禁锢在德黑兰的洛丽塔

二十月

349 主题	0 好友	1万积分

略有小成

Rank: 7 Rank: 7 Rank: 7

发消息

2^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:40:27 |只看该作者

禁书调动了人们最大的阅读欲望，从这个意义上说，审查制度也不错。

Narkomfin

89 主题	0 好友	2282 积分

勒兵十

Rank: 3 Rank: 3

发消息

3^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:40:42 |只看该作者

找到了这本书的英文文本，将传到邮箱里。

改博克 http://copperhia.blog.sohu.com

89 主题	0 好友	2282 积分

勒兵十

Rank: 3 Rank: 3

发消息

4^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:40:42 |只看该作者

READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN  Azar Nafisi   AUTHOR\'S NOTE Aspects of characters and events in this story have been changed mainly to protect individuals, not just from the eye of the censor but also from those who read such narratives to discover who\'s who and who did what to whom, thriving on and filling their own emptiness through others\' secrets. The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.

ART I Lolita   1 In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature. They were all women-to teach a mixed class in the privacy of my home was too risky, even if we were discussing harmless works of fiction. One persistent male student, although barred from our class, insisted on his rights. So he, Nima, read the assigned material, and on special days he would come to my house to talk about the books we were reading. I often teasingly reminded my students of Muriel Spark\'s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and asked, Which one of you will finally betray me? For I am a pessimist by nature and I was sure at least one would turn against me. Nassrin once responded mischievously, You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ. Manna pointed out that I was no Miss Brodie, and they, well, they were what they were. She reminded me of a warning I was fond of repeating: do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth. Yet I suppose that if I were to go against my own recommendation and choose a work of fiction that would most resonate with our lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it would not be The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or even 1984 but perhaps Nabokov\'s Invitation to a Beheading or better yet, Lolita. A couple of years after we had begun our Thursday-morning seminars, on the last night I was in Tehran, a few friends and students came to say good-bye and to help me pack. When we had deprived the house of all its items, when the objects had vanished and the colors had faded into eight gray suitcases, like errant genies evaporating into their bottles, my students and I stood against the bare white wall of the dining room and took two photographs. I have the two photographs in front of me now. In the first there are seven women, standing against a white wall. They are, according to the law of the land, dressed in black robes and head scarves, covered except for the oval of their faces and their hands. In the second photograph the same group, in the same position, stands against the same wall. Only they have taken off their coverings. Splashes of color separate one from the next. Each has become distinct through the color and style of her clothes, the color and the length of her hair; not even the two who are still wearing their head scarves look the same. The one to the far right in the second photograph is our poet, Manna, in a white T-shirt and jeans. She made poetry out of things most people cast aside. The photograph does not reflect the peculiar opacity of Manna\'s dark eyes, a testament to her withdrawn and private nature. Next to Manna is Mahshid, whose long black scarf clashes with her delicate features and retreating smile. Mahshid was good at many things, but she had a certain daintiness about her and we took to calling her "my lady." Nassrin used to say that more than defining Mahshid, we had managed to add another dimension to the word lady. Mahshid is very sensitive. She\'s like porcelain, Yassi once told me, easy to crack. That\'s why she appears fragile to those who don\'t know her too well; but woe to whoever offends her. As for me, Yassi continued good-naturedly, I\'m like good old plastic; I won\'t crack no matter what you do with me. Yassi was the youngest in our group. She is the one in yellow, bending forward and bursting with laughter. We used to teasingly call her our comedian. Yassi was shy by nature, but certain things excited her and made her lose her inhibitions. She had a tone of voice that gently mocked and questioned not just others but herself as well. I am the one in brown, standing next to Yassi, with one arm around her shoulders. Directly behind me stands Azin, my tallest student, with her long blond hair and a pink T-shirt. She is laughing like the rest of us. Azin\'s smiles never looked like smiles; they appeared more like preludes to an irrepressible and nervous hilarity. She beamed in that peculiar fashion even when she was describing her latest trouble with her husband. Always outrageous and outspoken, Azin relished the shock value of her actions and comments, and often clashed with Mahshid and Manna. We nicknamed her the wild one. On my other side is Mitra, who was perhaps the calmest among us. Like the pastel colors of her paintings, she seemed to recede and fade into a paler register. Her beauty was saved from predictability by a pair of miraculous dimples, which she could and did use to manipulate many an unsuspecting victim into bending to her will. Sanaz, who, pressured by family and society, vacillated between her desire for independence and her need for approval, is holding on to Mitra\'s arm. We are all laughing. And Nima, Manna\'s husband and my one true literary critic-if only he had had the perseverance to finish the brilliant essays he started to write-is our invisible partner, the photographer. There was one more: Nassrin. She is not in the photographs-she didn\'t make it to the end. Yet my tale would be incomplete without those who could not or did not remain with us. Their absences persist, like an acute pain that seems to have no physical source. This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences. When I see Nassrin in my mind\'s eye, she\'s slightly out of focus, blurred, somehow distant. I\'ve combed through the photographs my students took with me over the years and Nassrin is in many of them, but always hidden behind something-a person, a tree. In one, I am standing with eight of my students in the small garden facing our faculty building, the scene of so many farewell photographs over the years. In the background stands a sheltering willow tree. We are laughing, and in one corner, from behind the tallest student, Nassrin peers out, like an imp intruding roguishly on a scene it was not invited to. In another I can barely make out her face in the small V space behind two other girls\' shoulders. In this one she looks absentminded; she is frowning, as if unaware that she is being photographed. How can I describe Nassrin? I once called her the Cheshire cat, appearing and disappearing at unexpected turns in my academic life. The truth is I can\'t describe her: she was her own definition. One can only say that Nassrin was Nassrin. For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time, I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self. Our world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below. The theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality. We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights, along with Western classics-Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The Dean\'s December and, yes, Lolita. As I write the title of each book, memories whirl in with the wind to disturb the quiet of this fall day in another room in another country. Here and now in that other world that cropped up so many times in our discussions, I sit and reimagine myself and my students, my girls as I came to call them, reading Lolita in a deceptively sunny room in Tehran. But to steal the words from Humbert, the poet/criminal of Lolita, I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won\'t really exist if you don\'t. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn\'t dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us. If I write about Nabokov today, it is to celebrate our reading of Nabokov in Tehran, against all odds. Of all his novels I choose the one I taught last, and the one that is connected to so many memories. It is of Lolita that I want to write, but right now there is no way I can write about that novel without also writing about Tehran. This, then, is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov\'s novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.   2 And so it happened that one Thursday in early September we gathered in my living room for our first meeting. Here they come, one more time. First I hear the bell, a pause, and the closing of the street door. Then I hear footsteps coming up the winding staircase and past my mother\'s apartment. As I move towards the front door, I register a piece of sky through the side window. Each girl, as soon as she reaches the door, takes off her robe and scarf, sometimes shaking her head from side to side. She pauses before entering the room. Only there is no room, just the teasing void of memory. More than any other place in our home, the living room was symbolic of my nomadic and borrowed life. Vagrant pieces of furniture from different times and places were thrown together, partly out of financial necessity, and partly because of my eclectic taste. Oddly, these incongruous ingredients created a symmetry that the other, more deliberately furnished rooms in the apartment lacked. My mother would go crazy each time she saw the paintings leaning against the wall and the vases of flowers on the floor and the curtainless windows, which I refused to dress until I was finally reminded that this was an Islamic country and windows needed to be dressed. I don\'t know if you really belong to me, she would lament. Didn\'t I raise you to be orderly and organized? Her tone was serious, but she had repeated the same complaint for so many years that by now it was an almost tender ritual. Azi-that was my nickname-Azi, she would say, you are a grown-up lady now; act like one. Yet there was something in her tone that kept me young and fragile and obstinate, and still, when in memory I hear her voice, I know I never lived up to her expectations. I never did become the lady she tried to will me into being. That room, which I never paid much attention to at that time, has gained a different status in my mind\'s eye now that it has become the precious object of memory. It was a spacious room, sparsely furnished and decorated. At one corner was the fireplace, a fanciful creation of my husband, Bijan. There was a love seat against one wall, over which I had thrown a lace cover, my mother\'s gift from long ago. A pale peach couch faced the window, accompanied by two matching chairs and a big square glass-topped iron table. My place was always in the chair with its back to the window, which opened onto a wide cul-de-sac called Azar. Opposite the window was the former American Hospital, once small and exclusive, now a noisy, overcrowded medical facility for wounded and disabled veterans of the war. On "weekends"-Thursdays and Fridays in Iran-the small street was crowded with hospital visitors who came as if for a picnic, with sandwiches and children. The neighbor\'s front yard, his pride and joy, was the main victim of their assaults, especially in summer, when they helped themselves to his beloved roses. We could hear the sound of children shouting, crying and laughing, and, mingled in, their mothers\' voices, also shouting, calling out their children\'s names and threatening them with punishments. Sometimes a child or two would ring our doorbell and run away, repeating their perilous exercise at intervals. From our second-story apartment-my mother occupied the first floor, and my brother\'s apartment, on the third floor, was often empty, since he had left for England-we could see the upper branches of a generous tree and, in the distance, over the buildings, the Elburz Mountains. The street, the hospital and its visitors were censored out of sight. We felt their presence only through the disembodied noises emanating from below. I could not see my favorite mountains from where I sat, but opposite my chair, on the far wall of the dining room, was an antique oval mirror, a gift from my father, and in its reflection, I could see the mountains capped with snow, even in summer, and watch the trees change color. That censored view intensified my impression that the noise came not from the street below but from some far-off place, a place whose persistent hum was our only link to the world we refused, for those few hours, to acknowledge. That room, for all of us, became a place of transgression. What a wonderland it was! Sitting around the large coffee table covered with bouquets of flowers, we moved in and out of the novels we read. Looking back, I am amazed at how much we learned without even noticing it. We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.   3 Six A.M.: the first day of class. I was already up. Too excited to eat breakfast, I put the coffee on and then took a long, leisurely shower. The water caressed my neck, my back, my legs, and I stood there both rooted and light. For the first time in many years, I felt a sense of anticipation that was not marred by tension: I would not need to go through the torturous rituals that had marked my days when I taught at the university-rituals governing what I was forced to wear, how I was expected to act, the gestures I had to remember to control. For this class, I would prepare differently. Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms. It was unpredictable: the regime would go through cycles of some tolerance, followed by a crackdown. Now, after a period of relative calm and so-called liberalization, we had again entered a time of hardships. Universities had once more become the targets of attack by the cultural purists who were busy imposing stricter sets of laws, going so far as to segregate men and women in classes and punishing disobedient professors. The University of Allameh Tabatabai, where I had been teaching since 1987, had been singled out as the most liberal university in Iran. It was rumored that someone in the Ministry of Higher Education had asked, rhetorically, if the faculty at Allameh thought they lived in Switzerland. Switzerland had somehow become a byword for Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un-Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland. The pressure was hardest on the students. I felt helpless as I listened to their endless tales of woe. Female students were being penalized for running up the stairs when they were late for classes, for laughing in the hallways, for talking to members of the opposite sex. One day Sanaz had barged into class near the end of the session, crying. In between bursts of tears, she explained that she was late because the female guards at the door, finding a blush in her bag, had tried to send her home with a reprimand. Why did I stop teaching so suddenly? I had asked myself this question many times. Was it the declining quality of the university? The ever-increasing indifference among the remaining faculty and students? The daily struggle against arbitrary rules and restrictions? I smiled as I rubbed the coarse loofah over my skin, remembering the reaction of the university officials to my letter of resignation. They had harassed and limited me in all manner of ways, monitoring my visitors, controlling my actions, refusing a long-overdue tenure; and when I resigned, they infuriated me by suddenly commiserating and by refusing to accept my resignation. The students had threatened to boycott classes, and it was of some satisfaction to me to find out later that despite threats of reprisals, they in fact did boycott my replacement. Everyone thought I would break down and eventually return. It took two more years before they finally accepted my resignation. I remember a friend told me, You don\'t understand their mentality. They won\'t accept your resignation because they don\'t think you have the right to quit. They are the ones who decide how long you should stay and when you should be dispensed with. More than anything else, it was this arbitrariness that had become unbearable. What will you do? my friends had asked. Will you just stay home now? Well, I could write another book, I would tell them. But in truth I had no definite plans. I was still dealing with the aftershocks of a book on Nabokov I had just published, and only vague ideas, like vapors, formed when I turned to consider the shape of my next book. I could, for a while at least, continue the pleasant task of studying Persian classics, but one particular project, a notion I had been nurturing for years, was uppermost in my mind. For a long time I had dreamt of creating a special class, one that would give me the freedoms denied me in the classes I taught in the Islamic Republic. I wanted to teach a handful of selected students wholly committed to the study of literature, students who were not handpicked by the government, who had not chosen English literature simply because they had not been accepted in other fields or because they thought an English degree would be a good career move. Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules. Always, the joy of teaching was marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime-how well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was not the quality of one\'s work but the color of one\'s lips, the subversive potential of a single strand of hair? Could one really concentrate on one\'s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery? I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams. The colors of my dreams, I repeated to myself, stepping out of the shower and onto the cool tiles. I liked that. How many people get a chance to paint the colors of their dreams? I put on my oversize bathrobe-it felt good to move from the security of the embracing water to the protective cover of a bathrobe wrapped around my body. I walked barefoot into the kitchen, poured some coffee into my favorite mug, the one with red strawberries, and sat down forgetfully on the divan in the hall. This class was the color of my dreams. It entailed an active withdrawal from a reality that had turned hostile. I wanted very badly to hold on to my rare mood of jubilance and optimism. For in the back of my mind, I didn\'t know what awaited me at the end of this project. You are aware, a friend had said, that you are more and more withdrawing into yourself, and now that you have cut your relations with the university, your whole contact with the outside world will be mainly restricted to one room. Where will you go from here? he had asked. Withdrawal into one\'s dreams could be dangerous, I reflected, padding into the bedroom to change; this I had learned from Nabokov\'s crazy dreamers, like Kinbote and Humbert. In selecting my students, I did not take into consideration their ideological or religious backgrounds. Later, I would count it as the class\'s great achievement that such a mixed group, with different and at times conflicting backgrounds, personal as well as religious and social, remained so loyal to its goals and ideals. One reason for my choice of these particular girls was the peculiar mixture of fragility and courage I sensed in them. They were what you would call loners, who did not belong to any particular group or sect. I admired their ability to survive not despite but in some ways because of their solitary lives. We can call the class "a space of our own," Manna had suggested, a sort of communal version of Virginia Woolf\'s room of her own. I spent longer than usual choosing my clothes that first morning, trying on different outfits, until I finally settled on a red-striped shirt and black corduroy jeans. I applied my makeup with care and put on bright red lipstick. As I fastened my small gold earrings, I suddenly panicked. What if it doesn\'t work? What if they won\'t come? Don\'t, don\'t do that! Suspend all fears for the next five or six hours at least. Please, please, I pleaded with myself, putting on my shoes and going into the kitchen.   4 I was making tea when the doorbell rang. I was so preoccupied with my thoughts that I didn\'t hear it the first time. I opened the door to Mahshid. I thought you weren\'t home, she said, handing me a bouquet of white and yellow daffodils. As she was taking off her black robe, I told her, There are no men in the house-you can take that off, too. She hesitated before uncoiling her long black scarf. Mahshid and Yassi both observed the veil, but Yassi of late had become more relaxed in the way she wore her scarf. She tied it with a loose knot under her throat, her dark brown hair, untidily parted in the middle, peeping out from underneath. Mahshid\'s hair, however, was meticulously styled and curled under. Her short bangs gave her a strangely old-fashioned look that struck me as more European than Iranian. She wore a deep blue jacket over her white shirt, with a huge yellow butterfly embroidered on its right side. I pointed to the butterfly: did you wear this in honor of Nabokov? I no longer remember when Mahshid first began to take my classes at the university. Somehow, it seems as if she had always been there. Her father, a devout Muslim, had been an ardent supporter of the revolution. She wore the scarf even before the revolution, and in her class diary, she wrote about the lonely mornings when she went to a fashionable girls\' college, where she felt neglected and ignored-ironically, because of her then-conspicuous attire. After the revolution, she was jailed for five years because of her affiliation with a dissident religious organization and banned from continuing her education for two years after she was out of jail. I imagine her in those pre-revolutionary days, walking along the uphill street leading to the college on countless sunny mornings. I see her walking alone, her head to the ground. Then, as now, she did not enjoy the day\'s brilliance. I say "then, as now" because the revolution that imposed the scarf on others did not relieve Mahshid of her loneliness. Before the revolution, she could in a sense take pride in her isolation. At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless. Mahshid is proper in the true sense of the word: she has grace and a certain dignity. Her skin is the color of moonlight, and she has almond-shaped eyes and jet-black hair. She wears pastel colors and is soft-spoken. Her pious background should have shielded her, but it didn\'t. I cannot imagine her in jail. Over the many years I have known Mahshid, she has rarely alluded to her jail experiences, which left her with a permanently impaired kidney. One day in class, as we were talking about our daily terrors and nightmares, she mentioned that her jail memories visited her from time to time and that she had still not found a way to articulate them. But, she added, everyday life does not have fewer horrors than prison. I asked Mahshid if she wanted some tea. Always considerate, she said she\'d rather wait for the others and apologized for being a little early. Can I help? she asked. There\'s really nothing to help with. Make yourself at home, I told her as I stepped into the kitchen with the flowers and searched for a vase. The bell rang again. I\'ll get it, Mahshid cried out from the living room. I heard laughter; Manna and Yassi had arrived. Manna came into the kitchen holding a small bouquet of roses. It\'s from Nima, she said. He wants to make you feel bad about excluding him from the class. He says he\'ll carry a bouquet of roses and march in front of your house during class hours, in protest. She was beaming; a few brief sparkles flashed in her eyes and died down again.

utting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer. The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. Manna was one of those people who would experience ecstasy but not happiness. Come here, I want to show you something, I said, leading her into our bedroom. When I was very young, I was obsessed with the colors of places and things my father told me about in his nightly stories. I wanted to know the color of Scheherazade\'s dress, her bedcover, the color of the genie and the magic lamp, and once I asked him about the color of paradise. He said it could be any color I wanted it to be. That was not enough. Then one day when we had guests and I was eating my soup in the dining room, my eyes fell on a painting I had seen on the wall ever since I could remember, and I instantly knew the color of my paradise. And here it is, I said, proudly pointing to a small oil painting in an old wooden frame: a green landscape of lush, leathery leaves with two birds, two deep red apples, a golden pear and a touch of blue. My paradise is swimming-pool blue! Manna shot in, her eyes still glued to the painting. We lived in a large garden that belonged to my grandparents, she said, turning to me. You know the old Persian gardens, with their fruit trees, peaches, apples, cherries, persimmons and a willow or two. My best memories are of swimming in our huge irregularly shaped swimming pool. I was a swimming champion at our school, a fact my dad was very proud of. About a year after the revolution, my father died of a heart attack, and then the government confiscated our house and our garden and we moved into an apartment. I never swam again. My dream is at the bottom of that pool. I have a recurring dream of diving in to retrieve something of my father\'s memory and my childhood, she said as we walked to the living room, for the doorbell had rung again. Azin and Mitra had arrived together. Azin was taking off her black kimonolike robe-Japanese-style robes were all the rage at the time-revealing a white peasant blouse that made no pretense of covering her shoulders, big golden earrings and pink lipstick. She had a branch of small yellow orchids-from Mitra and myself, she said in that special tone of hers that I can only describe as a flirtatious pout. Nassrin came in next. She had brought two boxes of nougats: presents from Isfahan, she declared. She was dressed in her usual uniform-navy robe, navy scarf and black heelless shoes. When I had last seen her in class, she was wearing a huge black chador, revealing only the oval of her face and two restless hands, which, when she was not writing or doodling, were constantly in motion, as if trying to escape the confines of the thick black cloth. More recently, she had exchanged the chador for long, shapeless robes in navy, black or dark brown, with thick matching scarves that hid her hair and framed her face. She had a small, pale face, skin so transparent you could count the veins, full eyebrows, long lashes, lively eyes (brown), a small straight nose and an angry mouth: an unfinished miniature by some master who had suddenly been called away from his job and left the meticulously drawn face imprisoned in a careless splash of dark color. We heard the sound of screeching tires and sudden brakes. I looked out the window: a small old Renault, cream-colored, had pulled up on the curb. Behind the wheel, a young man with fashionable sunglasses and a defiant profile rested his black-sleeved arm on the curve of the open window and gave the impression that he was driving a Porsche. He was staring straight in front of him as he talked to the woman beside him. Only once did he turn his head to his right, with what I could guess was a cross expression, and that was when the woman got out of the car and he angrily slammed the door behind her. As she walked to our front door, he threw his head out and shouted a few words, but she did not turn back to answer. The old Renault was Sanaz\'s; she had bought it with money saved from her job. I turned towards the room, blushing for Sanaz. That must be the obnoxious brother, I thought. Seconds later the doorbell rang and I heard Sanaz\'s hurried steps and opened the door to her. She looked harassed, as if she had been running from a stalker or a thief. As soon as she saw me, she adjusted her face into a smile and said breathlessly: I hope I am not too late? There were two very important men dominating Sanaz\'s life at the time. The first was her brother. He was nineteen years old and had not yet finished high school and was the darling of their parents, who, after two girls, one of whom had died at the age of three, had finally been blessed with a son. He was spoiled, and his one obsession in life was Sanaz. He had taken to proving his masculinity by spying on her, listening to her phone conversations, driving her car around and monitoring her actions. Her parents had tried to appease Sanaz and begged her, as the older sister, to be patient and understanding, to use her motherly instincts to see him through this difficult period. The other was her childhood sweetheart, a boy she had known since she was eleven. Their parents were best friends, and their families spent most of their time and vacations together. Sanaz and Ali seemed to have been in love forever. Their parents encouraged this union and called it a match made in heaven. When Ali went away to England six years ago, his mother took to calling Sanaz his bride. They wrote to each other, sent photographs, and recently, when the number of Sanaz\'s suitors increased, there were talks of engagement and a reunion in Turkey, where Iranians did not require entrance visas. Any day now it might happen, an event Sanaz looked forward to with some fear and trepidation. I had never seen Sanaz without her uniform, and stood there almost transfixed as she took off her robe and scarf. She was wearing an orange T-shirt tucked into tight jeans and brown boots, yet the most radical transformation was the mass of shimmering dark brown hair that now framed her face. She shook her magnificent hair from side to side, a gesture that I later noticed was a habit with her; she would toss her head and run her fingers through her hair every once in a while, as if making sure that her most prized possession was still there. Her features looked softer and more radiant-the black scarf she wore in public made her small face look emaciated and almost hard. I\'m sorry I\'m a little late, she said breathlessly, running her fingers through her hair. My brother insisted on driving me, and he refused to wake up on time. He never gets up before ten, but he wanted to know where I was going. I might be off on some secret tryst, you know, a date or something. I have been worrying in case any of you would get into trouble for this class, I said, inviting them all to take their seats around the table in the living room. I hope your parents and spouses feel comfortable with our arrangement. Nassrin, who was wandering around the room, inspecting the paintings as if seeing them for the first time, paused to say offhandedly, I mentioned the idea very casually to my father, just to test his reaction, and he vehemently disapproved. How did you convince him to let you come? I asked. I lied, she said. You lied? What else can one do with a person who\'s so dictatorial he won\'t let his daughter, at this age, go to an all-female literature class? Besides, isn\'t this how we treat the regime? Can we tell the Revolutionary Guards the truth? We lie to them; we hide our satellite dishes. We tell them we don\'t have illegal books and alcohol in our houses. Even my venerable father lies to them when the safety of his family is at stake, Nassrin added defiantly. What if he calls me to check on you? I said, half teasingly. He won\'t. I gave a brilliant alibi. I said Mahshid and I had volunteered to help translate Islamic texts into English. And he believed you? Well, he had no reason not to. I hadn\'t lied to him before-not really-and it was what he wanted to believe. And he trusts Mahshid completely. So if he calls me, I should lie to him? I persisted. It\'s up to you, Nassrin said after a pause, looking down at her twisting hands. Do you think you should tell him? By now I could hear a note of desperation in her voice. Am I getting you into trouble? Nassrin always acted so confident that sometimes I forgot how vulnerable she really was under that tough-girl act. Of course I would respect your confidence, I said more gently. As you said, you are a big girl. You know what you\'re doing. I had settled into my usual chair, opposite the mirror, where the mountains had come to stay. It is strange to look into a mirror and see not yourself but a view so distant from you. Mahshid, after some hesitation, had taken the chair to my right. On the couch, Manna settled to the far right and Azin to the far left; they instinctively kept their distance. Sanaz and Mitra were perched on the love seat, their heads close together as they whispered and giggled. At this point Yassi and Nassrin came in and looked around for seats. Azin patted the empty part of the couch, inviting Yassi with her hand. Yassi hesitated for a moment and then slid between Azin and Manna. She slumped into place and seemed to leave little room for her two companions, who sat upright and a little stiff in their respective corners. Without her robe, she looked a little overweight, as if she had not as yet lost her baby fat. Nassrin had gone to the dining room in search of a chair. We can squeeze you in here, said Manna. No, thank you, I actually prefer straight-backed chairs. When she returned, she placed her chair between the couch and Mahshid. They kept that arrangement, faithfully, to the end. It became representative of their emotional boundaries and personal relations. And so began our first class.   5 "Upsilamba!" I heard Yassi exclaim as I entered the dining room with a tray of tea. Yassi loved playing with words. Once she told us that her obsession with words was pathological. As soon as I discover a new word, I have to use it, she said, like someone who buys an evening gown and is so eager that she wears it to the movies, or to lunch. Let me pause and rewind the reel to retrace the events leading us to Yassi\'s exclamation. This was our first session. All of us had been nervous and inarticulate. We were used to meeting in public, mainly in classrooms and in lecture halls. The girls had their separate relationships with me, but except for Nassrin and Mahshid, who were intimate, and a certain friendship between Mitra and Sanaz, the rest were not close; in many cases, in fact, they would never have chosen to be friends. The collective intimacy made them uncomfortable. I had explained to them the purpose of the class: to read, discuss and respond to works of fiction. Each would have a private diary, in which she should record her responses to the novels, as well as ways in which these works and their discussions related to her personal and social experiences. I explained that I had chosen them for this class because they seemed dedicated to the study of literature. I mentioned that one of the criteria for the books I had chosen was their authors\' faith in the critical and almost magical power of literature, and reminded them of the nineteen-year-old Nabokov, who, during the Russian Revolution, would not allow himself to be diverted by the sound of bullets. He kept on writing his solitary poems while he heard the guns and saw the bloody fights from his window. Let us see, I said, whether seventy years later our disinterested faith will reward us by transforming the gloomy reality created of this other revolution. The first work we discussed was A Thousand and One Nights, the familiar tale of the cuckolded king who slew successive virgin wives as revenge for his queen\'s betrayal, and whose murderous hand was finally stayed by the entrancing storyteller Scheherazade. I formulated certain general questions for them to consider, the most central of which was how these great works of imagination could help us in our present trapped situation as women. We were not looking for blueprints, for an easy solution, but we did hope to find a link between the open spaces the novels provided and the closed ones we were confined to. I remember reading to my girls Nabokov\'s claim that "readers were born free and ought to remain free." What had most intrigued me about the frame story of A Thousand and One Nights were the three kinds of women it portrayed-all victims of a king\'s unreasonable rule. Before Scheherazade enters the scene, the women in the story are divided into those who betray and then are killed (the queen) and those who are killed before they have a chance to betray (the virgins). The virgins, who, unlike Scheherazade, have no voice in the story, are mostly ignored by the critics. Their silence, however, is significant. They surrender their virginity, and their lives, without resistance or protest. They do not quite exist, because they leave no trace in their anonymous death. The queen\'s infidelity does not rob the king of his absolute authority; it throws him off balance. Both types of women-the queen and the virgins-tacitly accept the king\'s public authority by acting within the confines of his domain and by accepting its arbitrary laws. Scheherazade breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement. She fashions her universe not through physical force, as does the king, but through imagination and reflection. This gives her the courage to risk her life and sets her apart from the other characters in the tale. Our edition of A Thousand and One Nights came in six volumes. I, luckily, had bought mine before it was banned and sold only on the black market, for exorbitant prices. I divided the volumes among the girls and asked them, for the next session, to classify the tales according to the types of women who played central roles in the stories. Once I\'d given them their assignment, I asked them each to tell the rest of us why they had chosen to spend their Thursday mornings here, discussing Nabokov and Jane Austen. Their answers were brief and forced. In order to break the ice, I suggested the calming distraction of cream puffs and tea. This brings us to the moment when I enter the dining room with eight glasses of tea on an old and unpolished silver tray. Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer\'s skill. I step into the dining room with eight slim-waisted glasses whose honey-colored liquid trembles seductively. At this point, I hear Yassi shout triumphantly, "Upsilamba!" She throws the word at me like a ball, and I take a mental leap to catch it. Upsilamba!-the word carries me back to the spring of 1994, when four of my girls and Nima were auditing a class I was teaching on the twentieth-century novel. The class\'s favorite book was Nabokov\'s Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatu

改博克 http://copperhia.blog.sohu.com

89 主题	0 好友	2282 积分

勒兵十

Rank: 3 Rank: 3

发消息

5^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:40:42 |只看该作者

8 Mr. Bahri, who was at first reserved and reluctant to talk in class, began after our meeting to make insightful remarks. He spoke slowly, as if forming his ideas in the process of expressing them, pausing between words and sentences. Sometimes he seemed to me like a child just beginning to walk, testing the ground and discovering unknown potentials within himself. He was also at this time becoming increasingly immersed in politics. He had become an active member of the student group supported by the government-the Muslim Students\' Association-and more and more often I would find him in the hallways immersed in arguments. His movements had gained an urgency, his eyes purpose and determination. As I got to know him better, I noticed he was not as arrogant as I had thought him to be. Or perhaps I grew more accustomed to his special kind of arrogance, that of a naturally shy and reserved young man who had discovered an absolutist refuge called Islam. It was his doggedness, his newfound certainty, that gave him this arrogance. At times he could be very gentle, and when he talked, he would not look you in the eyes-not just because a Muslim man should not look a woman in the eyes, but because he was too timid. It was this mixture of arrogance and shyness that aroused my curiosity. When we spoke, we always seemed to be in some private conference. We almost never agreed, but it seemed necessary that we argue out our differences and persuade each other of the rightness of our position. The more irrelevant I became, the more powerful he grew, and slowly and imperceptibly our roles reversed. He was not an agitator-he did not give fine, passionate speeches-but he worked his way up doggedly, with patience and dedication. By the time I was expelled from the university, he had become the head of the Muslim Students\' Association. When the radical students canceled classes, he was among the few who showed up, with evident disapproval. During these canceled classes, we usually talked about the various events unfolding at the university or the political issues of the day. He cautiously tried to make me understand what political Islam meant, and I rebuffed him, because it was exactly Islam as a political entity that I rejected. I told him about my grandmother, who was the most devout Muslim I had ever known, even more than you, Mr. Bahri, and still she shunned politics. She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr. Bahri, with Islam or the state? I was not unfond of Mr. Bahri, and yet I developed a habit of blaming him and holding him responsible for everything that went wrong. He was baffled by Hemingway, felt ambivalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and thought we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.   9 I do not remember what I was doing or where I was on that Sunday when I first heard the news that the American embassy had been occupied by a ragtag group of students. It is strange, but the only thing I remember was that it was sunny and mild, and the news did not sink in until the next day, when Ahmad, Khomeini\'s son, announced his father\'s support of the students and issued a defiant statement: "If they do not give us the criminals," he said, referring to the Shah and Bakhtiar, "then we will do whatever is necessary." Two days later, on November 6, Prime Minister Bazargan, who was being increasingly attacked by the religious hard-liners and the left as liberal and pro-Western, resigned. Soon the walls of the embassy were covered with new slogans: AMERICA CAN\'T DO A DAMN THING AGAINST US! THIS IS NOT A STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE U.S. AND IRAN, IT\'S A STRUGGLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND BLASPHEMY. THE MORE WE DIE, THE STRONGER WE WILL BECOME. A tent was raised on the sidewalk and filled with propaganda against America, exposing its crimes around the world and proclaiming the necessity to export the revolution. At the university, the mood was both jubilant and apprehensive. Some of my students, Bahri and Nyazi among them, had disappeared and were presumably active on the front lines of this new struggle. Tense discussions and excited whispers replaced regular classes. Both the religious and leftist organizations, especially the Mujahideen and the Marxist Fedayin, supported the hostage-taking. I remember one heated debate where one of the students who was mocked as a liberal kept saying, What\'s the point of taking them hostage? Haven\'t we already kicked them out? And one of my students unreasonably reasoned that no, not yet, that American influence was still everywhere. We wouldn\'t be free until the Voice of America was shut down. By now the American embassy was no longer known as the American embassy-it was "the nest of spies." When taxi drivers asked us where we wanted to go, we would say, Please take us to the nest of spies. People were bused in daily from the provinces and villages who didn\'t even know where America was, and sometimes thought they were actually being taken to America. They were given food and money, and they could stay and joke and picnic with their families in front of the nest of spies-in exchange, they were asked to demonstrate, to shout, "Death to America," and every now and then to burn the American flag. Three men sit in a semicircle talking eagerly, while a little farther on two women in black chadors, with three or four small children hovering around them, are making sandwiches and handing them over to the men. A festival? A picnic? An Islamic Woodstock? If you move a little closer to this small group, you can hear their conversation. Their accents indicate that they come from the province of Isfahan. One of them has heard that the Americans are becoming Muslims by the thousands and that Jimmy Carter is really scared. He should be scared, another one says as he bites into his sandwich. I hear the American police are confiscating all portraits of the Imam. Truth is mixed with wild rumors, rumors of the Shah\'s mistreatment by his former Western allies, of the imminent Islamic revolution in America. Will America hand him over? Farther down, you can hear sharper and more clipped cadences. "But this isn\'t democratic centralism . . . religious tyranny . . . long-term allies . . ." and, more than any other word, liberals. Four or five students with books and pamphlets under their arms are deep in discussion. I recognize one of my leftist students, who sees me, smiles and comes towards me. Hello, Professor. I see you\'ve joined us. Who is us? I ask him. The masses, the real people, he says quite seriously. But this is not your demonstration, I say. You\'re wrong there. We have to be present every day, to keep the fire going, to prevent the liberals from striking a deal, he says. The loudspeakers interrupt us. "Neither East, nor West; we want the Islamic Republic!" "America can\'t do a damn thing!" "We will fight, we will die, we won\'t compromise!" I could never accept this air of festivity, the jovial arrogance that dominated the crowds in front of the embassy. Two streets away, a completely different reality was unfolding. Sometimes it seemed to me that the government operated in its own separate universe: it created a big circus, put on a big act, while people went about their business. The fact was that America, the place I knew and had lived in for so many years, had suddenly been turned into a never-never land by the Islamic Revolution. The America of my past was fast fading in my mind, overtaken by all the clamor of new definitions. That was when the myth of America started to take hold of Iran. Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost. A sly curiosity about America had been kindled that in time would turn the hostage-takers into its hostages.   10 In my diary for the year 1980 I have a small note: "Gatsby from Jeff." Jeff was an American reporter from New York with whom I roamed the streets of Tehran for a few months. At the time I didn\'t understand why I had become so dependent on these rambles. Some people take up alcohol during periods of stress, and I took up Jeff. I needed desperately to describe what I had witnessed to that other part of the world I had now left behind, seemingly forever. I took up writing letters to my American friends, giving minute and detailed accounts of life in Iran, but most of those letters were never sent. It was obvious that Jeff was lonely, and, despite his obsessive love for his job, for which he had been greatly acknowledged, he needed to talk to someone who could speak his language and share a few memories. I discovered to my surprise that I was afflicted by the same predicament. I had just returned to my home, where I could speak at last in my mother tongue, and here I was longing to talk to someone who spoke English, preferably with a New York accent, someone who was intelligent and appreciated Gatsby and Häagen-Dazs and knew about Mike Gold\'s Lower East Side. I had started having nightmares and sometimes woke up screaming, mainly because I felt I would never again be able to leave the country. This was partly based on fact, since the first two times I tried to leave I was turned down at the airport and once I was even escorted back to the headquarters of the Revolutionary Court. In the end, I did not leave Iran for eleven years: even after I was confident that they would give me permission, I could not perform the simple act of going to the passport office and asking for a passport. I felt impotent and paralyzed.   11 Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women\'s dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is useful as bread. This rather long statement, which comes from an essay by Mike Gold, "Toward Proletarian Art," was written in 1929 in the radical New Masses. The essay in its time attracted a great deal of attention and gave birth to a new term in the annals of American literature: the proletarian writer. The fact that it could be influential and taken seriously by serious authors was a sign of changing times. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and Tender Is the Night in 1934. In between the publication of these two great novels, many things happened in the United States and Europe that made Gold influential for a while and diminished Fitzgerald\'s importance, making him almost irrelevant to the social and literary scene. There was the Depression, the increasing threat of fascism and the growing influence of Soviet Marxism. Before I started teaching The Great Gatsby, we had discussed in class some short stories by Maxim Gorky and Mike Gold. Gorky was very popular at the time-many of his stories and his novel The Mother had been translated into Persian, and he was read widely by the revolutionaries, both old and young. This made Gatsby seem oddly irrelevant, a strange choice to teach at a university where almost all the students were burning with revolutionary zeal. Now, in retrospect, I see that Gatsby was the right choice. Only later did I come to realize how the values shaping that novel were the exact opposite of those of the revolution. Ironically, as time went by, it was the values inherent in Gatsby that would triumph, but at the time we had not yet realized just how far we had betrayed our dreams. We started reading Gatsby in November, but couldn\'t finish it until January, because of the constant interruptions. I was taking some risks in teaching such a book at such a time, when certain books had been banned as morally harmful. Most revolutionary groups were in agreement with the government on the subject of individual freedoms, which they condescendingly called "bourgeois" and "decadent." This made it easier for the new ruling elite to pass some of the most reactionary laws, going so far as to outlaw certain gestures and expression of emotions, including love. Before it established a new constitution or parliament, the new regime had annulled the marriage-protection law. It banned ballet and dancing and told ballerinas they had a choice between acting or singing. Later women were banned from singing, because a woman\'s voice, like her hair, was sexually provocative and should be kept hidden. My choice of Gatsby was not based on the political climate of the time but on the fact that it was a great novel. I had been asked to teach a course on twentieth-century fiction, and this seemed to me a reasonable principle for inclusion. And beyond that, it would give my students a glimpse of that other world that was now receding from us, lost in a clamor of denunciations. Would my students feel the same sympathy as Nick for Gatsby\'s fatal love for the beautiful and faithless Daisy Fay? I read and reread Gatsby with greedy wonder. I could not wait to share the book with my class, yet I was held back by a strange feeling that I did not want to share it with anyone. My students were slightly baffled by Gatsby. The story of an idealistic guy, so much in love with this beautiful rich girl who betrays him, could not be satisfying to those for whom sacrifice was defined by words such as masses, revolution and Islam. Passion and betrayal were for them political emotions, and love far removed from the stirrings of Jay Gatsby for Mrs. Tom Buchanan. Adultery in Tehran was one of so many other crimes, and the law dealt with it accordingly: public stoning. I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past-we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future. I told them that although the novel was specifically about Gatsby and the American dream, its author wanted it to transcend its own time and place. I read to them Fitzgerald\'s favorite passage from Conrad\'s preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," about how the artist "appeals to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain . . . and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." I tried to explain to my students that Mike Gold and F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about the same subject: dreams or, more specifically, the American dream. What Gold had only dreamed of had been realized in this faraway country, now with an alien name, the Islamic Republic of Iran. "The old ideals must die . . ." he wrote. "Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories." Such sentences could have come out of any newspaper in Iran. The revolution Gold desired was a Marxist one and ours was Islamic, but they had a great deal in common, in that they were both ideological and totalitarian. The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done. Don\'t go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked on to it. Let\'s pick a scene to demonstrate this point. Please turn to page 125. You will remember Gatsby is visiting Daisy and Tom Buchanan\'s house for the first time. Mr. Bahri, could you please read the few lines beginning with "Who wants to . . ."? "Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby\'s eyes floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. "You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago. On one level, Daisy is simply telling Gatsby he looks cool and Fitzgerald is telling us that she still loves him, but he doesn\'t want to just say so. He wants to put us there in the room. Let\'s look at what he\'s done to give this scene the texture of a real experience. First he creates a tension between Gatsby and Daisy, and then he complicates it with Tom\'s sudden insight into their relationship. This moment, suspended in mid-air, is far more effective than if Nick had simply reported that Daisy tried to tell Gatsby that she loved him. "Yes," cut in Mr. Farzan, "because he is in love with the money and not with Daisy. She is only a symbol." No, she is Daisy, and he is in love with her. There is money too, but that is not all; that is not even the point. Fitzgerald does not tell you-he takes you inside the room and re-creates the sensual experience of that hot summer day so many decades ago, and we, the readers, draw our breath along with Tom as we realize what has just happened between Gatsby and Daisy. "But what use is love in this world we live in?" said a voice from the back of the room. "What kind of a world do you think is suitable for love?" I asked. Mr. Nyazi\'s hand darted up. "We don\'t have time for love right now," he said. "We are committed to a higher, more sacred love." Zarrin turned around and said sardonically, "Why else do you fight a revolution?" Mr. Nyazi turned very red, bowed his head and after a short pause took up his pen and started to write furiously. In retrospect it appears strange to me only now, as I write about it, that as I was standing there in that classroom talking about the American dream, we could hear from outside, beneath the window, the loudspeakers broadcasting songs whose refrain was "Marg bar Amrika!"-"Death to America!" A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don\'t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won\'t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.   12 Throughout that year, between the fall of 1979 and the summer of 1980, many events happened that changed the course of the revolution and of our lives. Battles were being fought and lost. One of the most significant of these was over women\'s rights: from the very start, the government had waged a war against women, and the most important battles were being fought then. One day, I think it was in early November, I announced to my students, after the last straggler had drifted in, that they had canceled class many times for their own reasons and I in principle did not agree with this, but on that day I would be forced to go against my own principles and cancel class. I told them I was going to a protest meeting, to oppose the government\'s attempts to impose the veil on women and its curtailment of women\'s rights. I had missed some of the large demonstrations against the revolutionary government\'s policies against women, and I was determined not to miss any more. Unconsciously, I was developing two different ways of life. Publicly, I was involved in what I considered to be a defense of myself as a person. This was very different from my political activities during my student days, made in behalf of an unknown entity called the "oppressed masses." This was more personal. At the same time, a more private rebellion began to manifest itself in certain tendencies, like incessant reading, or the Herzog-like passion of writing letters to friends in the States that were never sent. I felt a silent defiance that may also have shaped my public desire to defend a vague and amorphous entity I thought of as myself. From the beginning of the revolution there had been many aborted attempts to impose the veil on women; these attempts failed because of persistent and militant resistance put up mainly by Iranian women. In many important ways the veil had gained a symbolic significance for the regime. Its reimposition would signify the complete victory of the Islamic aspect of the revolution, which in those first years was not a foregone conclusion. The unveiling of women mandated by Reza Shah in 1936 had been a controversial symbol of modernization, a powerful sign of the reduction of the clergy\'s power. It was important for the ruling clerics to reassert that power. All this I can explain now, with the advantage of hindsight, but it was far from clear then. Mr. Bahri\'s body stiffened as he focused on my words. Zarrin kept her usual smile, and Vida whispered to her conspiratorially. I did not pay much attention to their reactions: I was very angry, and this anger was a new feeling for me. Mr. Bahri lingered on after I dismissed the class, hovering for a while near the cluster of students who had gathered around me-but he made no attempt to come closer. I had returned my notes and books to my bag, except my Gatsby, which I held absentmindedly in one hand. I did not want to enter a debate with Mahtab and her friends, whose Marxist organization had tacitly taken sides with the government, denouncing the protesters as deviant, divisive and ultimately acting in the service of the imperialists. Somehow I found myself arguing not with Mr. Bahri but with them, the ostensibly progressive ones. They claimed that there were bigger fish to fry, that the imperialists and their lackeys needed to be dealt with first. Focusing on women\'s rights was individualistic and bourgeois and played into their hands. What imperialists, which lackeys? Do you mean those battered and bruised faces shown on nightly television confessing to their crimes? Do you mean the prostitutes they recently stoned to death or my former school principal, Mrs. Parsa, who, like the prostitutes, was accused of "corruption on earth," "sexual offenses" and "violation of decency and morality," for having been the minister of education? For which alleged offenses she was put in a sack and either stoned or shot to death? Are those the lackeys you are talking about, and is it in order to wipe these people out that we have to defer and not protest? I am familiar with your line of arguments, I shot back-after all, I was in the same business not so long ago. Arguing with my leftist students, I had a funny feeling that I was talking to a younger version of myself, and the gleam I saw in that familiar stranger\'s face frightened me. My students were more respectful, less aggressive than I had been when I argued a point-they were talking to their professor, after all, with whom they sort of sympathized, to a fellow traveler who might be saved. As I write about them in the opaque glow of hindsight, Mahtab\'s face slowly fades and is transformed into the image of another girl, also young, in Norman, Oklahoma.   13 At the time I lived in Oklahoma, one of our rival factions in the student movement, the most radical group within the Confederation of Iranian Students, convened a conference in Oklahoma City. I missed the conference, having gone to another meeting in Texas. When I returned I noticed an unusual air of excitement among both "our" people and "theirs." Apparently one of their members, a former running champion, was suspected of being an agent of the Iranian secret police, SAVAK. Some zealous members had decided to "extract" the truth from him. They had lured him into a room at the Holiday Inn and tried to get him to confess by means of torture, including burning his fingers with a cigarette. When they had left the room and were in the parking lot, their victim managed to escape. The next day the door flew open in the middle of the conference, admitting several FBI agents with dogs and the "culprit," who was told to identify his assailants. One of our friends, who had previously admonished me for my anti-revolutionary clothes, her voice breaking with excitement, related to me what had happened, boasting about "the power of the masses." By "masses" she meant the participants in the conference who had stood aside, creating an avenue for the agents, their dogs and the hapless culprit to walk through. As he passed by, they muttered threats in Persian. When he finally reached one of the leaders of that faction, the most popular in fact, a short, intense-looking guy who like many of his comrades had dropped out of college to become a full-time revolutionary and who usually sported a cap and coat in imitation of Lenin, he broke down and started crying and asked him in Persian why he had treated him so cruelly. The self-proclaimed Lenin of the Iranian revolution looked at him triumphantly, daring him to "spill" to the FBI. He could not bring himself to expose his tormentors and left with the agents, once more proving the justness of the oppressed masses. The following day, there was a short report in The Oklahoma Daily. More than the report, it was the way so many students reacted that frightened me. In the coffee shops, in the student union, even in the sunny streets of Norman, whenever the political Iranian students met they carried on heated discussions. Many quoted Comrade Stalin approvingly, spouting lines from a fashionable book, A Brief History of the Bolshevik Party or some such, about the need to destroy once and for all the Trotskyites, the White Guards, the termites and poisonous rats who were bent on destroying the revolution. Sitting in the student union drinking coffee or Coke, our comrades, disturbing the next table\'s flirtations, flared up and defended the right of the masses to torture and physically eliminate their oppressors. I still remember one of them, a chubby guy with a soft, boyish face, the outlines of his round belly protruding from under his navy blue woolen sweater. He refused to sit down and, towering over our table, swinging a glass of Coke precariously in one hand, he argued that there were two kinds of torture, two kinds of killing-those committed by the enemy and those by the friends of the people. It was okay to murder enemies. I could tell Mr. Bahri, now eternally bending towards me in some urgent argument: listen, be careful what you wish for. Be careful with your dreams; one day they may just come true. I could have told him to learn from Gatsby, from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flesh and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. He was killed, left at the bottom of the swimming pool, as lonely in death as in life. I know you most probably have not read the book to the end, you have been so busy with your political activities, but let me tell you the ending anyway-you seem to be in need of knowing. Gatsby is killed. He is killed for a crime Daisy committed, running over Tom\'s mistress in Gatsby\'s yellow car. Tom fingered Gatsby to the bereaved husband, who killed Gatsby as he lay floating in his swimming pool waiting for Daisy to call. Could my former comrades have predicted that one day they would be tried in a Revolutionary Court, tortured and killed as traitors and spies? Could they, Mr. Bahri? I can tell you with complete confidence that they could not. Not in their wildest dreams.   14 I left Mahtab and her friends, but those memories could not easily be left behind: they pursued me like mischievous beggars to the protest meeting. Two distinct and hostile groups had formed among the protesters, eyeing each other suspiciously. The first, smaller group consisted mainly of government workers and housewives. They were there instinctively, because their interests were at stake. They were clearly not used to demonstrations: they stood together in a huddle, uncertain and resentful. Then there were the intellectuals like myself, who did know a thing or two about demonstrations, and the usual hecklers, shouting obscenities and brandishing slogans. Two of them took photographs of the crowd, jumping menacingly from side to side. We covered our faces and shouted back. Soon the number of vigilantes increased. They gathered in small groups and began moving towards us. The police fired a few perfunctory shots into the air while men with knives, clubs and stones approached us. Instead of protecting the women, the police started to disperse us, pushing some with the butt of their guns and ordering the "sisters" to make no trouble and go home. There was a feeling of desperate anger in the air, thick with taunting jeers. The meeting continued despite the provocations. A few nights later, another protest was convened at the Polytechnic University. A huge crowd had gathered in the auditorium by the time I arrived, laughing and talking. As one of the speakers-a tall, stately woman wearing a long, sturdy skirt, her long hair tied back behind her ears-moved towards the podium, the electricity was turned off. There were murmurs of protest, but no one moved. The speaker stood stiffly and defiantly with the text in front of her and two people held a candle and a flashlight for her to read by. All we could see was her disembodied face and the white paper in her hands, illuminated by the light behind her. Only the cadence of her voice and that light have remained with me. We were not listening to the words: we were there to support and to bear witness to the act, to preserve the image of her flickering in the candlelight. That woman and I were destined to meet mainly at public events. The last time I saw her was in the fall of 1999 in New York, when, as Iran\'s foremost feminist publisher, she was invited to a talk at Columbia University. After the meeting, we reminisced over coffee. I hadn\'t seen her since the Tehran book fair in 1993, when she had invited me to give a talk on the modern novel. The talk was held on the second floor of an open cafeteria in the main building of the book fair. As I spoke, I became more and more excited about my theme and my scarf kept slipping back from my hair. The number of people in the audience grew until there was no room to sit or stand. As soon as the talk ended, this woman was summoned by security and reprimanded for my improper veil and inflammatory talk. The fact that I had spoken about works of fiction was inconsequential to them. After that, her lecture series was banned. We were smiling over these memories, sitting in a dark corner of a restaurant, secure in the busy indifference of a mild New York evening. For a moment I felt that she had not changed at all since she had given that talk years earlier: she was still wearing a long, sturdy skirt, and her long hair was still gathered behind her ears. Only her smile had changed: it was a smile of desperation. A few months later she was arrested with a number of prominent activists, journalists, writers and student leaders. These arrests were part of a new wave of repression, during which over twenty-five publications were closed down and many dissenters arrested or jailed. Hearing the news as I sat in my office in Washington, D.C., a feeling I had not experienced for a long time came over me: a sense of utter helplessness, of inarticulate anger tinged with vague but persistent guilt.   15 It was around this time, mid-fall, that I spoke again with Mr. Bahri. He said, Well, Professor, they most probably deserve it: the students are very angry. We were talking about three faculty members who were being threatened with expulsion, one of whom had been singled out mainly because he was Armenian. The other was my colleague who described himself as Little Great Gatsby: both had been accused of using obscene language in class. A third was accused of being a CIA agent. Dr. A, who was still head of the department, had refused to accept their expulsion. Dr. A himself was rapidly falling out of favor. In the early days of the revolution, he had been put on trial by the students at Tehran University for defending a prison guard. Eighteen years after the event, I read about it in an homage that one of his former students, herself a well-known translator, paid him in a magazine. She described how one day she had been watching the trial of a secret-police agent on television when a familiar voice, Dr. A\'s, attracted her attention. He had come to testify in favor of his former student, whom he believed to be a compassionate individual, a man who often helped out his less fortunate classmates. Dr. A told the Revolutionary Court: "I believe it is my duty as a human being to acquaint you with this aspect of the accused\'s personality." Such an action, during those initial black-and-white days of the revolution, was unheard of and very dangerous. The accused, who had been enrolled in the university\'s night classes, was a prison guard who had apparently been charged with beating and torturing political prisoners. It was said that mainly because of Dr. A\'s testimony in his favor, he got off easy, with only a two-year jail sentence. None of my friends and acquaintances knew what happened to him later. Dr. A\'s student regrets in her account that she participated in his trial without voicing a protest. She goes on to conclude that Dr. A\'s action was a manifestation of the principles he had taught in his literature classes. "Such an act," she explains, "can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality. . . . Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual\'s personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else\'s shoes and understand the other\'s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . . . If we had learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today." The threats of expulsion were an extension of the purges that continued throughout that year, and have never really ceased, up to this day. After a meeting with Dr. A and two other colleagues about this matter, I stormed down the hall and came across Mr. Bahri. He was standing at the corner of the long corridor talking to the president of the Islamic Association of University Staff. The two were leaning towards each other in the attitude of men who are involved in deeply serious matters, matters of life and death. I called Mr. Bahri, who walked towards me with respect, gracefully dissimulating any irritation he might have felt at this disruption. I questioned him about trying the faculty members and dismissing them illegally. His expression changed into one of alarm mixed with determination. He explained that I had to understand that things had changed. What does this mean, I said, that things have changed? It means that morality is important to our students; it means that the faculty is answerable to the students. Did this make it all right, then, to put a responsible and dedicated teacher like Dr. A on trial? Mr. Bahri said that he himself had not participated in that trial. Of course Dr. A is too Western in his attitudes, he added. He is flirtatious and loose. So is this our new definition of the word Western, I shot back-are we now officially living in the Soviet Union or China? And should Dr. A now be tried for his flirtations? No, but he should understand certain things. You cannot go and support a spy, a lackey, someone who is responsible for the deaths of so many. He went on to tell me that he thought there were far more important people than Dr. A to be tried. There were CIA spies, such as our own Professor Z, who were free to come and go as they pleased. I told him they had no proof that the gentleman in question was a CIA agent, and in any case I doubted the CIA would be foolish enough to employ someone like him. But even those whom he called the functionaries of the old regime, regardless of their guilt, shouldn\'t be treated this way. I could not understand why the Islamic government had to gloat over these people\'s deaths, brandishing their photographs after they had been tortured and executed. Why did they show us these pictures? Why did our students every day shout slogans demanding new death sentences? Mr. Bahri did not respond at first. He stood still, his head bent, his hands linked in front of him. Then he started to speak, slowly and with tense precision. Well, they have to pay, he said. They are on trial for their past deeds. The Iranian nation will not tolerate their crimes. And these new crimes? I asked as soon as he had uttered his last word. Should they be tolerated in silence? Everyone nowadays is an enemy of God-former ministers and educators, prostitutes, leftist revolutionaries: they are murdered daily. What had these people done to deserve such treatment? His face had become hard, and the shadow of obstinacy had colored his eyes. He repeated that people had to pay for their past crimes. This is not a game, he said. It is a revolution. I asked him if I too was on trial for my past. But he was right in a sense: we all have to pay in the end. There were no innocents in the game of life, that was for sure. We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle. I did not know then that I had already begun to pay, that what was happening was part of the payment. It was much later that these feelings would be clarified.   16 It was late; I had been at the library. I was spending a great deal of time there now, as it was becoming more and more difficult to find "imperialist" novels in bookstores. I was emerging from the library with a few books under my arm when I noticed him standing by the door. His two hands were joined in front of him in an expression of reverence for me, his teacher, but in his strained grimace I could feel his sense of power. I remember Mr. Nyazi always with a white shirt, buttoned up to the neck-he never tucked it in. He was stocky and had blue eyes, very closely cropped light brown hair and a thick, pinkish neck. It seemed as if his neck were made of soft clay; it literally sat on his shirt collar. He was always very polite. "Ma\'am, may I talk to you for a second?" Although we were in the middle of the semester, I had not as yet been assigned an office, so we stood in the hall and I listened. His complaint was about Gatsby. He said he was telling me this for my own good. For my own good? What an odd expression to use. He said surely I must know how much he respected me, otherwise he would not be there talking to me. He had a complaint. Against whom, and why me? It was against Gatsby. I asked him jokingly if he had filed any official complaints against Mr. Gatsby. And I reminded him that any such action would in any case be useless as the gentleman was already dead. But he was serious. No, Professor, not against Mr. Gatsby himself but against the novel. The novel was immoral. It taught the youth the wrong stuff; it poisoned their minds-surely I could see? I could not. I reminded him that Gatsby was a work of fiction and not a how-to manual. Surely I could see, he insisted, that these novels and their characters became our models in real life? Maybe Mr. Gatsby was all right for the Americans, but not for our revolutionary youth. For some reason the idea that this man could be tempted to become Gatsby-like was very appealing to me. There was, for Mr. Nyazi, no difference between the fiction of Fitzgerald and the facts of his own life. The Great Gatsby was representative of things American, and America was poison for us; it certainly was. We should teach Iranian students to fight against American immorality, he said. He looked earnest; he had come to me in all goodwill. Suddenly a mischievous notion got hold of me. I suggested, in these days of public prosecutions, that we put Gatsby on trial: Mr. Nyazi would be the prosecutor, and he should also write a paper offering his evidence. I told him that when Fitzgerald\'s books were published in the States, there were many who felt just as he did. They may have expressed themselves differently, but they were saying more or less the same thing. So he need not feel lonely in expressing his views. The next day I presented this plan to the class. We could not have a proper trial, of course, but we could have a prosecutor, a lawyer for the defense and a defendant; the rest of the class would be the jury. Mr. Nyazi would be the prosecutor. We needed a judge, a defendant and a defense attorney. After a great deal of argument, because no one volunteered for any of the posts, we finally persuaded one of the leftist students to be the judge. But then Mr. Nyazi and his friends objected: this student was biased against the prosecution. After further deliberation, we agreed upon Mr. Farzan, a meek and studious fellow, rather pompous and, fortunately, shy. No one wanted to be the defense. It was emphasized that since I had chosen the book, I should defend it. I argued that in that case, I should be not the defense but the defendant and promised to cooperate closely with my lawyer and to talk in my own defense. Finally, Zarrin, who was holding her own conference in whispers with Vida, after a few persuasive nudges, volunteered. Zarrin wanted to know if I was Fitzgerald or the book itself. We decided that I would be the book: Fitzgerald may have had or lacked qualities that we could detect in the book. It was agreed that in this trial the rest of the class could at any point interrupt the defense or the prosecution with their own comments and questions. <span lang="EN-NZ" style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: \'Times New Roman\'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: \'MS Mincho\

改博克 http://copperhia.blog.sohu.com

89 主题	0 好友	2282 积分

勒兵十

Rank: 3 Rank: 3

发消息

6^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:40:42 |只看该作者

16 If Mr. Ghomi had strong opinions about the Daisy Millers of the world, the class vacillated with the novel\'s hero, Winterbourne. With the exception of A Doll\'s House, there was no other work to which they responded so passionately. Their passion came from their bewilderment, their doubts. Daisy unhinged them, made them not know what was right and what was wrong. One day at the end of class, a timid girl who sat in the front row but somehow managed to create the impression that she was hiding somewhere in the shadow of the last row hesitated shyly by my desk. She wanted to know if Daisy was a bad girl. "What do you think?" she asked me simply. What did I think? And why did her simple question irritate me so? I am now positive that my hedging and hesitation, my avoidance of a straight answer, my insistence on the fact that ambiguity was central to the structure of the Jamesian novel, badly disappointed her and that from then on I lost some of my authority with her. We opened the book to the crucial scene at the Colosseum. Daisy, defying all caution and decorum, has gone to watch the moonlight with Mr. Giovanelli, an unscrupulous Italian who follows her everywhere, to the chagrin of her correct countrymen and -women. Winterbourne discovers them, and his response says more about his character than hers: "Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror; and, it must be added, with a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed upon the ambiguity of Daisy\'s behavior and the riddle had become easy to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect." Daisy\'s night at the Colosseum is fatal to her in more ways than one: she catches the Roman fever that night from which she will die. But her death is almost predetermined by Winterbourne\'s reaction. He has just declared his indifference, and when she returns to the carriage to leave, he recommends that she take her pills against Roman fever. " \'I don\'t care,\' said Daisy, in a strange little tone, \'whether I have Roman fever or not.\' " We all agreed in class that, symbolically, the young man\'s attitude towards Daisy determines her fate. He is the only one whose good opinion she desires. She is constantly asking him what he thinks about her actions. Without ever telling him, she poignantly and defiantly desires that he prove his devotion to her not by preaching, but by approving of her as she is, without any preconditions. It is ironic that ultimately Daisy is the one who really cares, and proves her devotion by dying. Winterbourne was not the only one to feel relief on discovering the answer to Daisy\'s riddle. Many of my students shared his relief. Miss Ruhi asked why the novel did not end with Daisy\'s death. Did that not seem the best place to stop? Daisy\'s death seemed like a nice ending for all parties concerned. Mr. Ghomi could gloat over the fact that she had paid for her sins with her life, and most others in the class could now sympathize with her without any feeling of guilt. But this is not the end. The novel ends just as it started, not with Daisy but with Winterbourne. At the beginning of the story, his aunt warned him that he was in danger of making a grave mistake about Daisy. She had meant that he could be duped by her. Now, after Daisy\'s death, Winterbourne ironically reminds his aunt, " \'You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts.\' " He had underestimated Daisy. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator tells us of a rumor that Winterbourne is attached to a foreign woman. The novel ends, bringing us around full circle, with this same statement: "Nevertheless, he went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he is \'studying\' hard-an intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady." The reader, who has identified with the hero until that moment, is left out in the cold. We are left to believe that Daisy, like the flower she is named after, is a beautiful and brief interruption. But this conclusion also is not wholly true. The narrator\'s tone at the end leads us to doubt if Winterbourne could ever see life the way he saw it before. Nothing will really be the same again, either for Winterbourne or for the unsuspecting reader-as I had occasion to find out much later, when my former students went back to their "mistakes" about Daisy in their writings and conversations.   17 In The Tragic Muse, James explains that his goal in writing is to produce "art as a human complication and social stumbling block," my friend Mina reminded me. This is what made James so difficult. Mina was a scholar of James and I had told her about my students\' difficulties with Daisy Miller. Mina added, a little anxiously, I hope you are not thinking of dropping him because he is too difficult. I assured her that I had no such intention; anyway, it was not that he was too difficult for them, it was that he made them uncomfortable. I told her my problem was not so much students like Ghomi, who were themselves so bluntly opposed to ambiguity, but my other students, who were victims of Ghomi\'s unambiguous attitude towards them. You see, I have a feeling that people like Ghomi always attack, because they are afraid of what they don\'t understand. What they say is we don\'t need James, but what they really mean is we are afraid of this fellow James-he baffles us, he confuses us, he makes us a little uneasy. Mina told me that when she wanted to explain the concept of ambiguity in the novel, she always used her chair trick. In the next session I started the class by picking up a chair and placing it in front of me. What do you see? I asked the class. A chair. Then I placed the chair upside down. Now what do you see? Still a chair. Then I straightened the chair and asked a few students to stand in different places around the room, and asked both those standing and those sitting to describe the same chair. You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual? In order to encourage the silent majority in my classes to openly discuss their ideas, I asked my students to write their impressions of the works we were reading in diary form in a notebook. In their diaries, they were free to write about other matters related to the class or their experiences, but writing about the works was mandatory. Miss Ruhi always described the plot, which at least demonstrated that she had read the books I had assigned, and that she even, in some cases, had not only read them but also read about them. But she seldom expressed her own opinions. In one instance she mentioned that she had objected to Wuthering Heights\'s immorality until she read somewhere about its mystical aspects, but in James\'s case there seemed to be no mysticism involved-he was very earthy, if at times too idealistic. Her notebooks were always neat. At the top of each assignment she wrote in beautiful handwriting: "In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful." She wrote that Daisy was not merely immoral, she was "unreasonable." Yet it was good to know that even in a decadent society like America there were still some norms, some standards according to which people were judged. She also quoted another teacher, lamenting the fact that certain writers made their unreasonable and immoral characters so attractive that readers instinctively sympathized with them. She lamented the fact that the right-thinking Mrs. Costello or Mrs. Walker was cast in such a negative light. This to her demonstrated a writer\'s satanic as well as godly powers. A writer like James, according to her, was like Satan: he had infinite powers, but he used them to do evil, to create sympathy for a sinner like Daisy and distaste for more virtuous people like Mrs. Walker. Miss Ruhi had imbibed the same dregs as Mr. Nyazi and so many others. Mr. Ghomi was true to his role. He rarely showed any indication of having read the novels. He ranted and raved about immorality and evil. He got into the habit of "educating" me by writing quotations from Imam Khomeini and other worthies about the duty of literature, about the decadence of the West, about Salman Rushdie. He also took to pasting in his notebook newspaper clippings reporting murder and corruption in the United States. One week he got so desperate that he resorted to quoting the slogans posted out in the streets. One such slogan I particularly liked: A WOMAN IN A VEIL IS PROTECTED LIKE A PEARL IN AN OYSTER SHELL. This slogan, when it appeared, was usually accompanied by a drawing of a predatory half-open oyster shell revealing a glossy pearl inside. Mr. Nahvi, his silent older friend, wrote neat philosophical treatises on the dangers of doubt and uncertainty. He asked whether the uncertainty James made such a fuss over was not the reason for Western civilization\'s downfall. Like many others, Mr. Nahvi took certain things for granted, among them the decay of the West. He talked and wrote as if this downfall were a fact that even Western infidels did not protest. Every once in a while he handed his notes in, along with a pamphlet or a book on "Literature and Commitment," "The Concept of Islamic Literature" or some such. Years later, when Mahshid and Mitra were in my Thursday class and we returned to Daisy Miller, they both lamented their own silence back then. Mitra confessed that she envied Daisy\'s courage. It was so strange and poignant to hear them talk about Daisy as if they had erred in regard to a real person-a friend or a relative. One day, leaving class, I saw Mrs. Rezvan walking back to her office. She approached me and said, "I keep hearing interesting reports about your classes"-she did have reporters in every nook and cranny. "I hope you believe me now when I tell about the need to put something into these kids\' heads. The revolution has emptied their heads of any form or thought, and our own intelligentsia, the cream of the crop, is no better." I told her I was still not convinced that the best way of going about this was through the universities. I thought perhaps we could address it better through a united front with intellectuals outside the university. She gave me a sidelong glance and said, Yes, you could do that as well, but what makes you think you will have more success? After all, our intellectual elite has not acted any better than the clerics. Haven\'t you heard about the conversation between Mr. Davaii, our foremost novelist, and the translator of Daisy Miller? One day they were introduced. The novelist says, Your name is familiar-aren\'t you the translator of Henry Miller? No, Daisy Miller. Right, didn\'t James Joyce write that? No. Henry James. Oh yes, of course, Henry James. By the way what\'s Henry James doing nowadays? He\'s dead-been dead since 1916.   18 I told my magician that I could best describe my friend Mina with a phrase Lambert Strether, the protagonist of James\'s The Ambassadors, uses to describe himself to his "soul mate," Maria Gostrey. He tells her, "I\'m a perfectly equipped failure." A perfectly equipped failure? he asked. Yes, and you know how she responds? "Thank goodness you\'re a failure-it\'s why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you-look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour? Look, moreover," she continued, "at me." For a little accordingly their eyes met. "I see," Strether returned. "You too are out of it." "The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces my futility. If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of youth! But our realities are what has brought us together. We\'re beaten brothers in arms." I told him, One day I will write an essay called "

erfectly Equipped Failures." It will be about their importance in works of fiction, especially modern fiction. I think of this particular brand as semi-tragic-sometimes comic and sometimes pathetic, or both. Don Quixote comes to mind, but this character is essentially modern, born and created at a time when failure itself was obliquely celebrated. Let us see, Pnin is one, and Herzog, and Gatsby perhaps, but perhaps not-he does not choose failure, after all. Most of James\'s and Bellow\'s favorite characters belong to this category. These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards. James, I believe, felt that in many ways he was one, with his misunderstood novels and his tenacity in keeping to the kind of fiction he felt was right, and so is my friend Mina, and your friend Reza, and of course you are one, most definitely, but you are not fictional, or are you? And he said, Well, right now I seem to be a figment of your imagination. I believe I had picked Mina as a perfectly equipped failure when I first met her after the revolution, during one of my last department meetings at the University of Tehran. I was late and as I entered the room I saw, sitting opposite the door, to the right of the department head, a woman dressed in black. Her eyes and short, thick hair were also jet-black, and she appeared indifferent to the hostile arguments flying around her. She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time. This is what I remember about her: a shabby gentility, an air of "better days" clinging to all she wore. From that very first glance to our last meeting many years later, I was always oppressed by two sets of emotions when I met her: intense respect and sorrow. There was a sense of fatalism about her, about what she had accepted as her lot, that I could not bear. Farideh and Dr. A had talked a great deal about Mina-her knowledge, her commitment to literature and to her work. There was a generosity to Farideh, which, despite her dogged commitment to what she called revolution, opened her up to certain people even when they were ideological opponents. She had an instinct for picking out the rebels, the genuine ones who, like Dr. A or Mina or Laleh, disagreed with her political principles. So it was that she instinctively sympathized with Mina and tried to console her, although she disagreed with her on almost all counts. Mina had been recalled from a two-year sabbatical at Boston University, where she\'d gone to write her book. She was given an ultimatum, and she, in my opinion, had made a mistake in returning to Iran. Her book was on Henry James. She had studied under Leon Edel, and when I first saw her, it was difficult for her, quite an effort, to utter the simplest sentence. She of course never taught again: she came back to be expelled. She refused to wear the veil or to compromise; her only compromise had been to return. And maybe that was not a compromise but a necessity. Mina\'s father had been the poet laureate-her family was cultured and well-off. Our families had gone on weekend outings together when we were young. She was older than me and never really talked to me during these family gatherings, but I remembered her vaguely. She is in some of the old photographs from my childhood, standing behind her father in their garden, with one of her uncles and my father and a young man I cannot identify. She looks solemn, with the shadow of a conditional smile. Farideh and I tried to tell Mina how much we appreciated her, how outraged we were that the university did not. She listened impassively but seemed to enjoy our esteem. Her favorite brother, the president of a large company, had been arrested at the start of the revolution. Unlike most, he refused to put up with the new regime. Although he was not politically active, he supported the monarchy and like his sister he spoke his mind, even in jail. He had been insolent and that was enough. He was executed. Mina nowadays always dressed in black. Almost all her time in those days seemed to be devoted to her brother\'s widow and children. Mina lived alone with her mother in a ridiculously large mansion. The day Farideh and I went to visit her, each carrying a large bouquet of flowers, was a sunny day clipped short as soon as we entered the mausoleum of her front hall. Her mother opened the door. She knew my parents and spent some time talking to me about them and then abruptly but politely left us as soon as her daughter descended the winding staircase. We were standing at the bottom of the steps with our colorful bouquets and pastel dresses, looking too breezy and light in the face of the somber gravity of that house, which seemed to pull all things into its shadows. Mina\'s joys, the way she expressed her appreciation, were solemn. Yet she was very happy to see us and she led us into the huge semicircle of her living room. The room seemed to have complaints of its own, like a widow appearing for the first time in public without her husband. It was sparsely furnished; there were empty spaces where there should have been chairs, tables and a piano. Mina\'s mother, a dignified woman in her late sixties, served us tea on a silver tray, with dainty glass teacups in silver filigree containers. Her mother was a wonderful cook, so going to her house was always a feast. But it was a mournful feast, because no amount of good food could bring cheer to that deserted mansion. Our hostesses\' gracious hospitality, their efforts to make us feel welcomed, only made their well-concealed loss more emphatic. Realism in fiction was Mina\'s obsession, and James her passion. What she knew, she knew thoroughly. We complemented each other, because my knowledge was impulsive and untidy, and hers meticulous and absolute. We could talk for hours on end. Before Farideh went into hiding and then joined her revolutionary group, escaping to Kurdistan and then to Sweden, the three of us used to talk about fiction and politics for hours, sometimes deep into the night. Farideh and Mina were polar opposites when it came to politics-one was a dedicated Marxist and the other a determined monarchist. What they shared was their unconditional hatred for the present regime. When I think of how their talents were wasted, my resentment grows for a system that either physically eliminated the brightest and most dedicated or forced them to lay waste to the best in themselves, transforming them into ardent revolutionaries, like Farideh, or hermits, like Mina and my magician. They withdrew and simmered in their dashed dreams. For what good could Mina be without her James?   19 The air attacks on Tehran were resumed after a long period of calm in the late winter and early spring of 1988. I cannot think of those months and of the 168 missile attacks on Tehran without thinking of the spring, of its peculiar gentleness. It was a Saturday when Iraq hit the Tehran oil refinery. The news triggered the old fears and anxieties that had been lurking for over a year, since the last bombs had hit the city. The Iranian government responded with an attack on Baghdad, and on Monday, Iraq started its first round of missile attacks on Tehran. The intensity of what followed transformed that event into a symbol of all that I had experienced over the past nine years, like a perfect poem. Soon after the first attacks, we decided to stick adhesive tape to our windows. We moved the children first to our own room, covering the windows in addition with thick blankets and shawls, and then, later, into the tiny windowless hall outside our bedrooms, the scene of my sleepless assignations with James and Nabokov. A few times we thought seriously of leaving Tehran, and once, in a frenzy, cleaned a small room that was later turned into my office near the garage, fortifying its windows; then we moved back up to sleep in our own bedrooms. I, who had been most frightened during the first round of attacks on Tehran, now seemed the calmest, as if to compensate for my former behavior. On the first night of the missile attacks we watched with a few friends a German TV documentary commemorating the life of the late exiled Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. In an attempt to appease the intellectuals, the annual Fajr (formerly Tehran) Film Festival presented a special screening of Tarkovsky\'s films. Although the films were censored and shown in the original Russian with no subtitles, there were lines outside the cinema hours before the box office opened. Tickets were sold on the black market at many times the actual price, and fights broke out over admittance, especially among those who had traveled from the provinces for the occasion. Mr. Forsati came to see me after one class to inform me that he had obtained two extra tickets to a showing of Tarkovsky\'s The Sacrifice, a film I had expressed some desire to see. Since Mr. Forsati was the head of Islamic Jihad, one of the two Muslim students\' associations at the university, he had access to the coveted tickets. He said the Tarkovsky mania was so pervasive that even the oil minister and his family had gone to a screening. People were starved for films. He told me laughingly that the less they understood, the more they treated it with respect. I said if that is the case, then they must love James. He responded, shrewdly, That is different; they respect Joyce the way they respect Tarkovsky. With James, they think they understand him, or that they should understand him, so they just get angry. They have more problems with James than with the more obviously difficult writers, like Joyce. I asked Mr. Forsati if he was going to see Tarkovsky. He said, If I do go, it is only to be a Roman in Rome; otherwise, I much prefer Tom Hanks. The afternoon I went to see The Sacrifice was a fine winter day: not really winter, a mixture of winter and spring. Yet the most amazing feature of the day was not the heavenly weather, not even the movie itself, but the crowd in front of the movie house. It looked like a protest rally. There were intellectuals, office workers, housewives, some with their small children in tow, a young mullah standing uncomfortably to the side-the kind of mix of people you would never have found at any other gathering in Tehran. Inside, the sudden burst of luminous colors on the screen brought a hushed silence over the audience. I had not been inside a movie theater for five years: all you could see in those days were old revolutionary movies from Eastern Europe, or Iranian propaganda films. I cannot honestly say what I thought of the film-the experience of sitting in a movie house, ensconced in the deep, cool leather, with a full-size screen in front of me, was too amazing. Knowing that I could not understand the words and that if I thought about the censorship I would be too angry to watch, I surrendered to the magic of colors and images. Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored or even disliked his work, arose from our intense sensory deprivation. We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution. The film itself was about war, and about its hero\'s vow never to speak again if his family was spared from the ravages of war. It concentrated on the hidden menace behind the seemingly calm flow of everyday life and the lush beauty of nature: the way war made itself felt by the rattle of the furniture caused by the bomber planes, and the terrible sacrifice required to confront this menace. For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped through extreme anguish and expressed through art.   20 In a period of twenty-four hours, fourteen missiles hit Tehran. Since we had moved the children back to their room again, that night I pulled a small couch into their room and stayed awake reading until three in the morning. I read a thick Dorothy Sayers mystery, safe and secure with Lord Peter Wimsey, his faithful manservant and his scholarly beloved. My daughter and I were woken up at dawn with the sound of a nearby explosion. It was not just the very loud noise-if one could call it a noise-of the explosion: more than the sound, we felt the explosion, like the fall of a massive weight on the house. The house shook, and the glass trembled in the window frames. After this last explosion I got up and went upstairs to the terrace. The sky was blue and pink, the mountains capped with snow; at a distance the smoke curled upwards from the fire where the missile had landed. From that day on, we resumed the routine that had been imposed on our daily lives during the bombing and missile attacks. After each explosion there would be numerous phone calls to and from friends and relatives to find out if they were still alive. A savage relief, one of which I always felt a little ashamed, was inevitably triggered by the sound of familiar greetings. The general reaction in those days was a mixture of panic, anger and helplessness. After eight years of war, the Iranian government had done virtually nothing other than expand its propaganda effort to protect the city. It could only boast of the Iranian people\'s eagerness for martyrdom. After the first attack, the notoriously overpopulated and polluted city of Tehran had become a ghost town. Many people fled to safer places. I recently read in an account that over a quarter of the population, including many government officials, had deserted the city. A new joke making the rounds was that this was the government\'s most effective policy yet to deal with Tehran\'s pollution and population problems. To me, the city had suddenly gained a new pathos, as if, under the attacks and the desertions, it had shed its vulgar veil to reveal a decent, humane face. Tehran looked the way most of its remaining citizens must have felt: sad, forlorn and defenseless, yet not without a certain dignity. The adhesive tape pasted on the windowpanes to prevent the implosion of shattered glass told the story of its suffering, a suffering made more poignant because of its newly recovered beauty, the fresh green of trees, washed by spring showers, the blossoms and the rising snowcapped mountains now so near, as if pasted against the sky. Two years into the war, Iran liberated the city of Khorramshahr, which had been captured by the Iraqis. In the context of other noticeable defeats, Saddam Hussein, encouraged by his worried Arab neighbors, had shown serious signs of reconciliation. But Ayatollah Khomeini and some within the ruling elite refused to sign a truce. They were determined now to capture the holy city of Karballa, in Iraq, the site of martyrdom of Imam Hussein. Any and all methods were used to achieve their purposes, including what became known as "human wave" attacks, where thousands of Iranian soldiers, mainly very young boys ranging in age from ten to sixteen and middle-aged and old men, cleared the minefields by walking over them. The very young were caught up in the government propaganda that offered them a heroic and adventurous life at the front and encouraged them to join the militia, even against their parents\' wishes. My vigils at night with Dashiell Hammett and others resumed. The result was that four years later I added a new section to my class-the mystery tale, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe.   21 With the resumption of the bombing, we moved our classes to the second floor. Every time there was an attack, people impulsively ran to the door and down the stairs; it was safer to move the classes downstairs. The new emergency had emptied the classrooms, so most were now half-full. Many students went back to their hometowns or to towns and cities that were not under attack; some simply stayed home. The renewal of bombing had made people like Mr. Ghomi more important. They came and went after this with a new sense of urgency. The Islamic associations used every opportunity to disrupt the classes, playing military marches to announce a new victory, or to mourn for a member of the university community who had been martyred in the war. Midway through a passage from Washington Square or Great Expectations, suddenly the sound of the military march would take over, and after that, no matter how hard we tried to continue, all attempts at discussion were conquered by the march. This boisterous cacophony was in marked contrast to the silence of the majority of the students and staff. I was actually surprised that more students didn\'t use these events as an excuse to cut classes or to refrain from doing their homework. Their seeming docility reflected a larger mood of resignation in the city itself. As the war raged on, with no victories, into the eighth year, signs of exhaustion were apparent even among the most zealous. By now, in the streets and in public places, people expressed anti-war sentiments or cursed the perpetrators of the war, while on television and radio the regime\'s ideal continued to play itself out undeterred. The recurrent image in those days was that of an elderly, bearded, turbaned man calling for unceasing jihad to an audience of adolescent boys with red "martyrs\' " bands stretched across their foreheads. These were the dwindling remainders of a once vast group of young people who had been mobilized by the excitement of carrying real guns and the promise of keys to a heaven where they could finally enjoy all the pleasures from which they had abstained in life. Theirs was a world in which defeat was impossible, hence compromise meaningless. The mullahs would regale us with stories of the unequal battles in which the Shiite saints had been martyred by infidels, while at times breaking into hysterical sobs, whipping their audience into a frenzy, welcoming martyrdom for the sake of God and the Imam. In contrast, the world of the viewers was one of silent defiance, a defiance that was meaningful only in the context of the raucous commitment demanded by the ruling hierarchy, but otherwise permeated, inevitably and historically, by resignation. Life in death, the death wish of the regime and the obliging missiles of Iraq, could only be tolerated when one knew that the missile would deliver the final message at a moment exactly predetermined and that there was no point in trying to escape it. It was during these days that I realized what this silent resignation meant. It reflected the much maligned mysticism that we all held responsible, at least in part, for our country\'s historical failures. I understood then that this resignation was perhaps, under the circumstances, the only form of dignified resistance to tyranny. We could not openly articulate what we wished, but we could by our silence show our indifference to the regime\'s demands.   22 I can still hear the mourning and victory marches that disrupted so many classes to announce the death of a student or staff member in the line of duty or some victory of the army of Islam over its heathen foe. No one bothered to point out that the heathen foe in this warfare were fellow Muslims. The day I have in mind, the march was playing to commemorate the death of one of the leaders of the Muslim Students\' Association. After class, I joined a few of my girls who were standing together outside in the yard. They were making fun of the dead student and laughing. They joked that his death was a marriage made in heaven-didn\'t he and his comrades say that their only beloved was God? This was an allusion to the last wills and testaments made by the martyrs of the war, which were given a great deal of publicity. Almost all claimed that death by martyrdom was their highest desire, because it promised them ultimate union with their true "Beloved." "Oh yeah, sure, God." The girls were laughing. "God in the guise of all the women he devoured with his eyes before he filed complaints against them for indecency. This was how he got his kicks! They are all sexual perverts, the whole lot of them!" Nassrin started to tell a story about a teacher of religion in her twelve-year-old cousin\'s school. This teacher instructed her students to cover themselves and promised them that in paradise they would get their just reward. There, in paradise, they would find streams running with wine and would be wooed by strong, muscular young men. Her fat lips seemed to be drooling when she spoke about the muscular young men that, like prize lamb, she could already see cooked to perfection. I think something in my rather shocked expression stopped the flow of their mirth. I had not known the young martyr, and if I had, I would most likely not have been fond of him, but this air of jubilation was still shocking. They felt some explanation was necessary. You don\'t know him, Mojgan told me. Next to him, Mr. Ghomi is an absolute angel. He was sick, sexually sick. You know, he got a friend expelled because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him. They were like hounds. Then Nassrin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards. Her searches were like sexual assaults, she insisted. One day she squeezed and fondled Niloofar until she became hysterical. They expel us for laughing out loud, but you know what they did to this woman when she was discovered? She was reprimanded, expelled for a semester and then she was back at her job. Later, I told Nassrin that as I watched them mocking the dead student, a poem by Bertolt Brecht kept running through my mind. I don\'t remember it well: "Indeed we live in dark ages, where to speak of trees is a sort of a crime," it went. I wish I could remember the poem better, but there is a line towards the end, something like "Alas, we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves." Nassrin was quiet for a moment after that. "You don\'t know what we have suffered," she said at last. "Last week they dropped a bomb near our house. It fell on an apartment building. The neighbors said that in one of the flats there was a birthday party and some twenty-odd children were killed. "Immediately after the bombs fell and before the ambulances came, six or seven motorcycles arrived from out of nowhere and started circling the area. The riders all wore black, with red headbands across their foreheads. They started shouting slogans: Death to America! Death to Saddam! Long live Khomeini! People were very quiet. They just watched them with hatred. Some tried to go forward to help the wounded, but the thugs wouldn\'t let anyone go near the place. They kept shouting, \'War! War! Until victory!\' How do you think we all felt as we stood there watching them?" This was a ritual: after the bombings, these emissaries of death would prevent any sign of mourning or protest. When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law. We exchanged stories as we walked that day. Nassrin told me more about her time in jail. The whole thing was an accident. I remember how young she had been, still in high school. You\'re worried about our brutal thoughts against "them," she said, but you know most of the stories you hear about the jails are true. The worst was when they called people\'s names in the middle of the night. We knew they had been picked for execution. They would say good-bye, and soon after that, we would hear the sound of bullets. We would know the number of people killed on any given night by counting the single bullets that inevitably came after the initial barrage. There was one girl there-her only sin had been her amazing beauty. They brought her in on some trumped-up immorality charge. They kept her for over a month and repeatedly raped her. They passed her from one guard to another. That story got around jail very fast, because the girl wasn\'t even political; she wasn\'t with the political prisoners. They married the virgins off to the guards, who would later execute them. The philosophy behind this act was that if they were killed as virgins, they would go to heaven. You talk of betrayals. Mostly they forced those who had "converted" to Islam to empty the last round into the heads of their comrades as tokens of their new loyalty to the regime. If I were not privileged, she said with rancor, if I were not blessed with a father who shared their faith, God knows where I would be now-in hell with all the other molested virgins or with those who put a gun to someone\'s head to prove their loyalty to Islam.   23 On August 4, 1914, Henry James added an entry to his journal: "Everything blackened over for the time blighted by the hideous Public situation. This is (Monday) the August Bank Holiday but with horrible suspense and the worst possibilities in the air." In his last two years of life, Henry James was radically transformed by his intense involvement in the First World War. For the first time, he became socially and politically active, a man who all his life had done his best to keep aloof from the actual passions of existence. His critics, like H. G. Wells, blamed him for his mandarin attitude towards life, which prevented him from any involvement with the social and political issues of the day. He wrote about his experience of World War I that it "almost killed me. I loathed so having lived on and on into anything so hideous and horrible." When still very young, James had witnessed the Civil War in America. Physically, he was prevented from participating in a war in which his two younger brothers fought with courage and honor by a mysterious backache, acquired on a mission to rescue a burning barn. Psychologically, he kept the war at bay by writing and reading. Perhaps his frenetic activities to support and aid the British in World War I were partly to compensate for his earlier inactivity. It is also true that the war that had evoked his horror mesmerized him. He wrote to a friend, "But I have an imagination of disaster-and see life as ferocious and sinister." In his youth, James wrote to his father that he was convinced of the "transitory organization of the actual social body. The only respectable state of mind is to constantly express one\'s perfect dissatisfaction with it." And in his best works of fiction this is what he did. In almost all of his novels the struggle for power is central to the way the plot moves and is resolved. This struggle for power is rooted in the central character\'s resistance to socially acceptable norms and in his desire for integrity and recognition. In Daisy Miller, the tension between the old and the new leads to Daisy\'s death. In The Ambassadors, it is Mrs. Newsome\'s almost awesome power and pressure over her ambassador and her family that creates the central tension in the plot. It is interesting to note that in this struggle the antagonist always represents worldly concerns, while the protagonist\'s desire is to preserve a sense of personal integrity in the face of outside aggression. During the Civil War, when James was discovering his own powers, he wrote in part to compensate for his inability to participate in the war. Now, at the end of his life, he complained about the impotence of words in the face of such inhumanity. In an interview on March 21, 1915, with The New York Times, he said: "The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk." Despite his despair, he turned to words again, this time to write not fiction but war pamphlets, appeals to America to join the war and not to remain indifferent to the suffering and atrocities in Europe. He also wrote poignant letters. In some he expressed his horror at events; in others he consoled friends who had lost a son or a husband in the war. He fell into a round of activities, visiting wounded Belgian soldiers, and later British soldiers, in hospitals, raising money for Belgian refugees and the wounded and writing war propaganda from the fall of 1914 until December 1915. He also accepted the post of honorary head of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps and joined the Chelsea Fund for Belgian refugees. All these were whirlwind activities for a shy and reclusive writer whose most ardent pursuits and passions had previously been reserved for his fiction. As his biographer Leon Edel would later say: ". . . the world seemed to find too much comfort in him and he had to often protect himself against its weeping too profusely on his shoulders." While visiting the hospitals, James likened himself to Whitman visiting the wounded during the Civil War. He said it made him feel less "finished and doddering when I go on certain days and try to pull the conversational cart uphill for them." What inner horror and fascination drove this man, who all his life had shied away from public activity, to become so actively involved in the war effort? One reason for his involvement was the carnage, the death of so many young men, and the dislocation and destruction. While he mourned the mutilation of existence, he had endless admiration for the simple courage he encountered, both in the many young men who went to war and in those they left behind. In September, James moved to London. "I can hear and see and have informational contact," he wrote; "I eat my heart out alone." He lobbied the U.S. ambassador to Britain and other high American officials and reproached them for their neutrality. And he wrote pamphlets in defense of Britain and her allies. James emphasized in his many letters one important resource to counter the senselessness of the war. He was aware, as many were not, of the toll such cruelty takes on emotions and of the resistance to compassion that such events engender. In fact, this insensitivity becomes a way of survival. As in his novels, he insisted on the most important of all human attributes-feeling-and railed against "the paralysis of my own powers to do anything but increasingly and inordinately feel." Years later, on a pink index card I carried across the oceans from Tehran to Washington, D.C., I found two quotations about James\'s wartime experiences. I had written them out for Nassrin, but I never showed them to her. The first was from a letter he wrote to Clare Sheridan, a friend whose husband-they were newly married-had gone to war and been killed. "I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel," he wrote, "because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say-feel for all you\'re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration." In letters to friends, again and again he urges them to feel. Feeling would stir up empathy and would remind them that life was worth living. One of the peculiarities of James\'s reaction to the war was the fact that his feelings and emotions were not aroused for patriotic reasons. His own country, America, was not at war. Britain, the country where he had lived for forty years, was, but in all those forty years he had not asked for British citizenship. Now, he finally did. In June 1915, a few months before his death, Henry James was granted British nationality. He had written to his nephew Harry that he wished to make his civil status compatible with his moral and material status. "Hadn\

改博克 http://copperhia.blog.sohu.com

89 主题	0 好友	2282 积分

勒兵十

Rank: 3 Rank: 3

发消息

7^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:40:42 |只看该作者

9 Olga was silent. "Ah," cried Vladimir, "Why can\'t you love me as I love you." "I love my country," she said. "So do I," he exclaimed. "And there is something I love even more strongly," Olga continued, disengaging herself from the young man\'s embrace. "And that is?" he queried. Olga let her limpid blue eyes rest on him, and answered quickly: "It is the Party." Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology. It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction. Nowhere was this challenge more apparent than in the case of Jane Austen. I had spent a great deal of time in my classes at Allameh contrasting Flaubert, Austen and James to the ideological works like Gorky\'s Mother, Sholokhov\'s And Quiet Flows the Don and some of the so-called realistic fiction coming out of Iran. The above passage, quoted by Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature, caused a great deal of mirth in one of my classes at Allameh. What happens, I asked my students, when we deny our characters the smallest speck of individuality? Who is more realized in her humanity, Emma Bovary or Olga of the limpid blue eyes? One day after class, Mr. Nahvi followed me to my office. He tried to tell me that Austen was not only anti-Islamic but that she was guilty of another sin: she was a colonial writer. I was surprised to hear this from the mouth of someone who until then had mainly quoted and misquoted the Koran. He told me that Mansfield Park was a book that condoned slavery, that even in the West they had now seen the error of their ways. What confounded me was that I was almost certain Mr. Nahvi had not read Mansfield Park. It was only later, on a trip to the States, that I found out where Mr. Nahvi was getting his ideas from when I bought a copy of Edward Said\'s Culture and Imperialism. It was ironic that a Muslim fundamentalist should quote Said against Austen. It was just as ironic that the most reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and co-opt the work and theories of those considered revolutionary in the West. Mr. Nahvi kept following me to my office and spouting these pearls of wisdom. He seldom brought them up in class; there, he usually kept silent, preserving a placid and detached expression, as if he had agreed to remain in class as a favor to us. Mr. Nahvi was one of the few students in whom I was unable to find a single redeeming quality. I could say, like Eliza Bennet, that he was not a sensible man. One day, after a really exhausting argument, I told him, Mr. Nahvi, I want to remind you of something: I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure-you are as different as man and mouse. But remember how she is obsessed with Darcy, constantly trying to find fault with him, almost cross-examining every new acquaintance to confirm that he is as bad as she thinks? Remember her relations with Wickham? How the basis for her sympathy is not so much her feelings for him as his antipathy for Darcy? Look at how you speak about what you call the West. You can never talk about it without giving it an adjective or an attribute-decadent, vile, corrupt, imperial. Beware of what happened to Elizabeth! I still remember the look on his face as I said this and, for once, used my privilege as his teacher to have the last word. Mr. Nahvi exercised a great deal of influence in our university, and he once reported Nassrin to the disciplinary committee. His eagle eyes had detected her running up the stairs one day when she was late for a class. Nassrin at first refused to sign a retraction stating that she would promise never again to run on the university premises, even when she was late for class. She had finally conceded, persuaded by Mrs. Rezvan, who had reasoned with her that her obstinate resistance was not worth expulsion from the university. During our reminiscences about Mr. Nahvi, I noticed Mitra and Sanaz whispering and giggling. When I asked them to share with us the source of their mirth, Sanaz encouraged a blushing Mitra to tell her story. She confessed that among their friends, they called Mr. Nahvi the Mr. Collins of Tabatabai University, after Jane Austen\'s pompous clergyman. One evening after class, Mr. Nahvi had suddenly appeared in front of Mitra. He had not seemed his usual . . . "Redoubtable self?" the incorrigible Yassi suggested. No, not exactly. "

ontificating? Pompous? Ponderous?" Yassi continued, unabashed. No. Anyway, Mr. Nahvi did not seem himself. His arrogance had given way to extreme nervousness as he handed Mitra an envelope. Sanaz nudged Mitra to describe the envelope. It was a hideous blue, she said. And it reeked. It reeked? Yes, it smelled of cheap perfume, of rosewater. Inside the envelope, Mitra had found a one-page letter, with the same dreadful color and smell, written in immaculate handwriting, in black ink. "Tell \'em how he started the letter," Sanaz encouraged Mitra. "Well, he, he actually began by writing . . ." Mitra trailed off, as if lost for words. "My golden daffodil!" shouted Sanaz, bursting into laughter. Really? Golden daffodil? Yes, and he had gone on to express his undying love for Mitra, whose every move and every word were ingrained in his heart and mind. Nothing-no power-had ever done to him what her smile, which he hoped was for him and him alone, could do. And so on and so forth. What had Mitra done? we all wanted to know. All this had taken place in the middle of Mitra and Hamid\'s highly secretive courtship, Sanaz reminded us. The next day, when Mr. Nahvi happened to jump out of nowhere and waylay her in the street, she tried to explain to him how impossible it was for her to return his affections. He nodded philosophically and went away, only to reappear two days later. She had parked in an alley near the university and was in the process of opening the door to her small car when she became aware of a presence right behind her. "Like the shadow of Death," Nassrin ominously interjected. Well, she had turned to find Mr. Nahvi, wavy hair, squished eyes, ears jutting out-he had a book in his hands, a book of poems by e. e. cummings. And the blue of another envelope could be detected from between its pages. Before Mitra had time to protest, he thrust the book into her hands and disappeared. "Tell Dr. Nafisi what he wrote," prompted Sanaz. "She\'d love to know that her classes were of some use to Mr. Nahvi." Inside he had written, To my bashful rose. And what else? And, well, he reproduced a poem that you used to teach in your introduction to literature class: somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyondany experience,your eyes have their silence:in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose methough i have closed myself as fingers,you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose or if your wish be to close me,i andmy life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,as when the heart of this flower imaginesthe snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing which we are to perceive in this world equalsthe power of your intense fragility:whose texturecompels me with the colour of its countries,rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closesand opens;only something in me understandsthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands It\'s enough to put you off teaching poetry, I said, infected by their girlish mood. "From now on, you should only teach morbid poems like Childe Harold or \'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,\' " suggested Mahshid. This time, Mitra felt she had to resort to more drastic measures before things got out of hand. After several consultations with her friends, she reached the conclusion that a plain outright no would be dangerous to deliver to someone as influential as Mr. Nahvi. Best to tell him a convincing lie that would put him in an impossible position. By the time they next crossed paths, Mitra had plucked up the courage to stop Mr. Nahvi. Blushing and stammering, she told him that she had been too bashful to reveal the real reason for her rejection: she was engaged to be married to a distant relative. His family was influential and very traditional, and she was scared of what they would resort to if they found out about Mr. Nahvi\'s outpourings. The young man paused for a fraction of a second, as if rooted to the ground, and then turned away without a word, leaving Mitra, still slightly trembling, in the middle of the wide street.   10 The last New Year Mrs. Rezvan was in Tehran, she bought me three small clips. They were hair clips that many women used to keep their head scarves in place. I never learned to wear my scarf properly, and it had become a ritual between us that before talks or lectures she would check and make sure that it was more or less in place. She said, My dear Mrs. Nafisi, I\'m sorry that this is what you will remember me by, but I do worry about you. Will you promise me you will wear these when I am gone? I want to see you here when I return. Mrs. Rezvan was preparing to go to Canada. She had finally, after years of toil, managed to get her coveted scholarship to pursue her Ph.D. For years she had dreamed of this, but now she was too anxious to enjoy the moment. She constantly fretted about whether she would succeed, whether she was up to the task. I was happy that she was leaving, both for her sake and for my own. It came almost as a relief. I felt at the time that she was overly ambitious, and that she used me and people like me to get where she wanted to go. Later I discovered there was more to the story. Hers was not a mere ambition to go places, to become president of the faculty, although she had that in mind too. She yearned to become a literary personage: her love of literature was real, yet her talents were limited and her ambition for power and control sometimes surpassed and even came to clash with that love. She managed to evoke such contradictory feelings in me. I felt she was always on the verge of telling me something important about herself, something that would reveal her to me. Perhaps I should have been more curious. Perhaps if I had been less wrapped up in her intrusions and demands, I would have noticed more. In the late summer of 1990, for the first time in eleven years, my family and I left for Cyprus for a vacation and to meet up with my sisters-in-law, who had never seen our children. For years I was not allowed to leave the country, and when they finally did give me permission to leave, I felt paralyzed and could not make myself apply for a passport. If it were not for Bijan\'s patience and persistence, I never would have followed through. But I got my passport in the end, and we did really leave, without any misadventures. We stayed with a friend, one of Mrs. Rezvan\'s former students. She said Mrs. Rezvan used to ask her about me, my work and my family. Later, after we had returned home, my friend informed me that the day we left, probably on the same plane aboard which we had flown to Tehran, Mrs. Rezvan had come to Cyprus on vacation. She was alone. She called my friend inquiring after me and was told that I was gone. My friend told me Mrs. Rezvan wanted her to take her to the same places we had visited together during my stay. She asked what I had done there, where I had gone. One day, they went to the beach where we had gone swimming. Mrs. Rezvan was shy. She hesitated about putting on a swimsuit, and when she did, she wanted to go to a deserted part of the beach, where no one could see her. She ran into the water but came out after a short while, telling my friend that no matter how hard she tried, she could not get used to parading around in a swimsuit. When she left Iran, Mrs. Rezvan disappeared from my life. Her absence was as complete as her presence had been pervasive. She did not write or call when she came back for her occasional visits; I heard about her from the secretary at the English Department. Twice she had asked for an extension in order to finish her dissertation. At times, walking down the halls or passing by her office, I was reminded of Mrs. Rezvan, whose absence was both a relief and a sorrow. A few months after I came to America, I heard she was ill with cancer. I called her; she was not home. She called me back. Her voice was filled with the intimate formality of Tehran. She wanted to know about some of our common students and my work. And then for the first time she opened up and started talking about herself. She could not write-it involved so much pain-and she was always weak and fatigued. Her eldest daughter helped her. She had so many dreams, and she was hopeful. The openness was not so much in what she said as in her tone of voice, which conferred a certain air of confidence to her simple report of her weakness, her inability to write, her dependence on her daughter. She was optimistic about the latest treatment, although her cancer had spread far. She asked me about my work. I did not tell her that I was healthy and writing a book and, on the whole, enjoying myself. That was the last time I talked to her; she was soon too sick to speak on the telephone. I thought of her almost obsessively. It seemed so unfair that she should have cancer when she was so near to reaching her goal. I did not want to talk to her to remind her that once again I had been the lucky one-I was granted a little more time on earth, the time she was so unfairly cheated of. She died soon after our last conversation. Her intrusions now have taken a different form. In my mind from time to time, I resurrect and re-create her. I try to penetrate the unsaid feelings and emotions that hung between us. She keeps coming towards me through the flickering light, as in our first meeting, with that ironic sideways glance, and passes through me, leaving me with my doubts and regrets.   11 It was around the spring of 1996, early March in fact, that I first noticed Nassrin\'s metamorphosis. One day she came to class without her usual robe and scarf. Mahshid and Yassi wore different-colored scarves, and they took these off once they came into my apartment. But Nassrin was always dressed identically; the one variety she allowed herself was the color of her robe, which was interchangeably navy, black or dark brown. That day, she had come to class later than usual and had casually taken off her coat, revealing a light blue shirt, a navy jacket and jeans. Her hair was long and soft and black, woven into a single plait that moved from side to side with the movement of her head. Manna and Yassi exchanged looks, and Azin told her she was looking good, as if she had changed her hairstyle. Yassi said in her mocking tone, You look . . . you look absolutely intrepid! I mean, divine. By the end of the class, Nassrin seemed so natural in her new attire that I already had a hard time envisioning the other Nassrin. When Nassrin walked around in her chador or veil, her gait was defiant; she walked as she did everything else-restlessly, but with a sort of bravado. Now, without the veil, she slumped, as if she were trying to cover something. It was in the middle of our discussion of Austen\'s women that I noticed what it was she was trying to hide. Under the chador, one could not see how curvy and sexy her figure really was. I had to control myself and not command her to drop her hands, to stop covering her breasts. Now that she was unrobed, I noticed how the chador was an excuse to cover what she had tried to disown-mainly because she really and genuinely did not know what to do with it. She had an awkward way of walking, like a toddler taking its first steps, as if at any moment she would fall down. A few weeks later, she stayed after class and asked if she could make an appointment to see me. I told her to come to our house, but she had become very formal and asked if we could meet at a coffee shop that my students and I were in the habit of frequenting. Now that I look at those times, I see how many of their most private stories, their confidences, were told in public places: in my office, in coffee shops, in taxis and walking through the winding streets near my home. Nassrin was sitting at a small wooden table with a vase of bloodred wax carnations when I entered the coffee shop. We gave our orders: vanilla and chocolate ice cream for Nassrin and café glacé for me. Nassrin had called this meeting to officially register the existence of a boyfriend. Do I know him? I asked her as she ferociously dipped her spoon into the ice cream. No. I mean-she fumbled with her words-you may have seen him. He obviously knows you. I\'ve known him for a long time, she continued, as if finally admitting to a shameful act. For over two years now, she sighed, but we have been sort of going together for the past few months. I was startled by her news. I tried to hide my surprise, searching for something appropriate to say, but her expression did not allow such evasion. I\'ve wanted to introduce him to you for a long time, she said, but I just didn\'t know how to go about it. And then I was afraid. Afraid of what? Is he a frightening person? I said, my feeble attempt at a joke. No, I was afraid you might not like him, she said, making swirls with her melting ice cream. Nassrin, I said. I\'m not the one who should like him. I felt sorry for her. She was in love-this should have been the best time of her life-but she was anxious about so many things. Of course, she had to lie to her father-more time on translating texts. She lived in so many parallel worlds: the so-called real world of her family, work and society; the secret world of our class and her young man; and the world she had created out of her lies. I wasn\'t sure what she expected of me. Should I take on the role of a mother and tell her about the facts of life? Should I show more curiosity, ask for more details about him and their relationship? I waited, trying with some effort to pull my eyes off the hypnotic red carnation and to focus on Nassrin. "I wouldn\'t blame you if you made fun of me," she said with great misery, twirling her spoon in the puddle of ice cream. "Nassrin, I would never do such a thing," I protested. "And why should I? I am very happy for you." "It is pathetic," she said, without paying attention to my words, following her own thoughts. "My mother had a grown-up kid when she was my age. You were already teaching, and here I am acting like a ten-year-old kid. This is what we should be talking about in class." "About your being ten years old?" I asked, in an awkward attempt to lighten her mood. "No, no, about"-she put her spoon down-"about how all of us-girls like me, who have read their Austen and Nabokov and all that, who talk about Derrida and Barthes and the world situation-how we know nothing, nothing about the relation between a man and a woman, about what it means to go out with a man. My twelve-year-old niece probably knows all about this, has probably gone out with more boys than I have." She spoke furiously, locking and unlocking her fingers. In a sense she was right, and the fact that she was prepared to talk about it made me feel tender and protective towards her. Nassrin, I told her, none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with every new person, as if I am starting anew. These things are instinctive. What you need to learn is to lay aside your inhibitions, to go back to your childhood when you played marbles or whatever with boys and never thought anything of it. Nassrin did not respond. She was playing with the petals of the wax flowers, caressing their slippery surface. "You know," I said, "with my first husband . . . Yes, I was married before Bijan, when I was barely eighteen. You know why he married me? He told me he liked my innocence-I didn\'t know what a French kiss was. I was born and bred in liberal times, I grew up in a liberal family-my parents sent me abroad when I was barely thirteen-and yet there you are: I chose to marry a man I despised deep down, someone who wanted a chaste and virginal wife and, I am sorry to say, chose me. He had been out with many girls, and when I went to Oklahoma with him, where he went to college, his friends were surprised, because right up to the day he returned to Iran for the summer, he had been living with an American girl he had introduced to everyone as his wife. So don\'t feel too bad. These things are complicated. "Are you happy?" I asked her anxiously. There was a long pause during which I picked up the vase and pushed it to the side, next to the wall. "I don\'t know," she said. "No one ever taught me how to be happy. We\'ve been taught that pleasure is the great sin, that sex is for procreation and so on and on and forth. I feel guilty, but I shouldn\'t-not because I am interested in a man. In a man," she repeated. "At my age! The fact is I don\'t know what I want, and I don\'t know if I am doing the right thing. I\'ve always been told what is right-and suddenly I don\'t know anymore. I know what I don\'t want, but I don\'t know what I want," she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched. "Well, you\'re not going to get an answer from me," I said. I leaned over, wanting to touch her hand, to provide her with some consolation. Only I didn\'t touch her. I didn\'t dare; she seemed so distant and withdrawn. "I\'ll be here for you when you need me, but if you\'re asking for my advice, I can\'t give it-you\'ll have to find out for yourself." Enjoy yourself, I pleaded lamely. How could one be in love and deny oneself a little joy? Nassrin\'s young man was called Ramin. I had seen him on several occasions, the first time at a gathering for my book on Nabokov. He had a master\'s degree in philosophy and taught part-time. Nassrin had met him at a conference where he was presenting a paper and they had started talking afterward. Was it love at first sight? I wanted to ask her. How long had it taken them to confess their feelings? Did they ever kiss? These were some of the details I badly wanted to know, but of course I did not ask. As we were leaving the coffee shop, Nassrin said hesitantly, Would you go to a concert with us? A concert? Some of Ramin\'s students are playing. We could get you and your family some tickets . . .   12 I should put the word concert in quotation marks, because such cultural affairs were parodies of the real thing, performed either in private homes or, more recently, at a cultural center built by the municipality in the south of Tehran. They were the focus of considerable controversy, because despite the many limitations set upon them, many in government considered them disreputable. The performances were closely monitored and mostly featured amateur players like the ones we went to see that night. But the house was always packed, the tickets were always sold out and the programs always started a little late. Bijan was reluctant to go. He preferred listening to good music in the comfort and privacy of our home to subjecting himself to these mediocre live performances with their long lines and the inevitable harassment that ensued. But in the end, he gave in to the children\'s enthusiasm, and to me. After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public-seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends-shifted to private homes. It was refreshing to go out once in a while, even to such a desultory event. We met them at the entrance. Nassrin looked nervous and Ramin was shy. He was tall and lanky, in his early thirties but with an air about him of an eternal graduate student, attractive in a bookish way. I had remembered him as confident and talkative, but now that he was introduced to us in his new role, he seemed to have lost his usual articulateness and his desire to talk. I thanked Ramin for the invitation and we all proceeded towards a long line filled with mainly young men and women. Nassrin busied herself with the children and I, who had suddenly become tongue-tied, tried to ask Ramin about his classes. Only Bijan seemed unconcerned by the awkwardness of the moment. He had made a sacrifice by leaving his comfortable home on a weeknight and felt no obligation to socialize as well. When we finally entered the auditorium, we found people stuffed into the concert hall, sitting in the aisles, on the floor and standing clustered against the wall. We were among the guests of honor, so our place was in the second row, and we actually got seats. The program began late. We were greeted by a gentleman who insulted the audience for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, telling us that the management did not wish to entertain audiences of "rich imperialists" contaminated by decadent Western culture. This brought smiles to many of those who had come that evening to hear the music of the Gipsy Kings. The gentleman also admonished that if anyone acted in an un-Islamic manner, he or she would be kicked out. He went on to instruct women to observe the proper rules and regulations regarding the use of the veil. It is hard to conjure an accurate image of what went on that night. The group consisted of four young Iranian men, all amateurs, who entertained us with their rendition of the Gipsy Kings. Only they weren\'t allowed to sing; they could only play their instruments. Nor could they demonstrate any enthusiasm for what they were doing: to show emotion would be un-Islamic. As I sat there in that packed house, I decided that the only way the night could possibly be turned into an entertainment was if I pretended to be an outside observer who had come not to have fun but to report on a night out in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet despite these restrictions and the quality of the performance, our young musicians could not have found anywhere in the world an audience so receptive, so forgiving of their flaws, so grateful to hear their music. Every time the audience, mostly young and not necessarily rich, started to move or clap, two men in suits appeared from either side of the stage and gesticulated for them to stop clapping or humming or moving to the music. Even when we tried to listen, to forget these acrobats, they managed to impose themselves on our field of vision, always present, always ready to jump out and intervene. Always, we were guilty. The players were solemn. Since it was almost impossible to play with no expression at all, their expressions had become morose. The lead guitarist seemed to be angry with the audience; he frowned, trying to prevent his body from moving-a difficult task, since he was playing the Gipsy Kings. At Bijan\'s suggestion, we tried to get out early-before, as he said, we were trampled by the mob, which, not being able to emote during the show, might choose to exercise its vengeance by trampling fellow concertgoers. Outside, we stood for some minutes by the entrance. Bijan, who seldom talked, was moved by the occasion. "I feel sorry for these kids," he said. "They\'re not entirely without talent, but they\'ll never be judged by the quality of their music. The regime criticizes them for being Western and decadent, and the audience gives them uncritical praise-not because they\'re first-rate but because they play forbidden music. So," he added, addressing us in general, "how will they ever learn to play?" "It\'s true," I said, feeling an obligation to fill the silence that followed. "No one is judged on the merit of their work. People without the least knowledge of music are running around calling themselves musicians." Nassrin was sullen, and Ramin quiet and mortified. I was astounded by his metamorphosis and decided not to add to his discomfort by forcing him to talk. Suddenly Nassrin became animated. "Nabokov would\'ve had nothing to do with this," she said excitedly. "Look at us-it\'s pathetic, running to this for entertainment." She moved her arms and spoke breathlessly, eager to hide her embarrassment behind a volley of nervous talk. "He would have had a field day if he\'d been here-talk about poshlust!" "What?" said Negar, who\'d enjoyed not so much the music as the excitement of a night out. "

oshlust," Nassrin repeated and, uncharacteristically, left it at that.   13 I was grumbling to myself as I put the plates on the table absentmindedly for dinner. Bijan turned to me and said, What are you mumbling about? You wouldn\'t be interested, I said unnecessarily sharply. Try me, he said. Okay, I was thinking about menopause. He turned back to the BBC. You\'re right-I\'m not interested, he said. Why shouldn\'t he be interested? Shouldn\'t he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress? I knew I was being unfair to him. He was not insensitive to the hardships of life in the Islamic Republic, but he was on the defensive these days whenever I complained. I protested as if he were responsible for all the woes brought upon us by the regime, and this in turn made him withdraw into himself and act as if he were indifferent about things he actually felt very strongly about. Our last class meeting had ended on a strange note: we were discussing my girls\' mothers-their trials and tribulations and the fact that they really knew nothing about menopause. The discussion had begun with Manna. The night before, she and Nima had seen for the third time Vincente Minnelli\'s Designing Woman, which they\'d picked up on their satellite dish. Watching the film had made Manna very sad. It occurred to her that she had never imaginatively experienced love in a Persian context. Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it. When she read Madame Bovary, or saw Casablanca, she could experience the sensual texture of the work; she could hear, touch, smell, see. She had never heard a love song, read a novel or seen a film that made her think that this could be her experience. Even in Persian films, when two people are supposed to be in love, you didn\'t really feel it in their looks and gestures. Love was forbidden, banished from the public sphere. How could it be experienced if its expression was illegal? That discussion had been an eye-opener. I had discovered that almost all of my girls separated what they described as intellectual or spiritual love (good) from sex (not good). What mattered, apparently, was the more exalted realm of spiritual affinity. Even Mitra had dimpled her way through the argument that sex was not important in a relationship, that sexual satisfaction had never mattered to her. The worst blow, I felt, came from Azin. With a flirtatious tone that implied she was back to normal-this was a period of semi-truce with her husband-Azin had said that the most important thing in life was the mystical union one felt with the universe. She added, philosophically, that men were just vessels for that higher spiritual love. Vessels? There went all her claims to sexual pleasure and physical compatibility. Even Mahshid, who exchanged a quick glance with Manna, was surprised. "So," said Nassrin, who had been quiet until then, "when your husband beats you, you can pretend it\'s all in your mind, since he\'s just an empty vessel to fill up your fantasies. And it\'s not just Azin," she said. "The rest of you are basically saying the same thing." "What about you and Nima?" Mitra asked Manna. "You seem to have a balanced relationship." "I like him because there is no one in the world I can talk to like Nima," Manna said with a shrug. "

oor Nima," said Yassi. "He\'s not so poor." Manna was feeling savage that day. "He too has no one else to talk to. Misery loves company-and can be as strong a force as love." "You all disappoint me," Yassi said. "I was hoping you\'d tell me how physical attraction does matter, how love isn\'t just spiritual and intellectual. I was hoping you\'d tell me that I\'d learn to love physically and see that I was wrong. I\'m utterly flabbergasted," she said, sinking deeper into the couch. "In fact, I\'m discombobulated," she concluded with a triumphant smile. Ouch! I shouted. Bijan glanced up from the TV and said, "Nothing wrong, is there?" No, I just cut myself. I was slicing cucumbers to go with Bijan\'s famous chicken kebab. He went to the bathroom and returned with a Band-Aid, which he carefully put on my finger. Without saying a word, smiling indulgently, he then went to the cabinet, poured a measure of homemade vodka into the small glass, put it on the side table beside a dish of pistachio nuts and settled back in front of the BBC. I went in and out of the kitchen, grumbling to myself. No wonder he enjoys life; this is what he\'d do if we lived in the States. It\'s hard on me, I grumbled, pleading with some unknown interlocutor, who always questioned and mocked my every complaint. It\'s really hard on me, I repeated one more time, ignoring the guilty knowledge that Bijan bore his hardships without much complaint and should not be begrudged his vodka and his BBC. By the time I had chopped the cucumbers and the herbs, adding them to the yogurt, I had come to a conclusion: our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it. It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key. We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin\'s uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality. These girls, my girls, knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discuss Joyce and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about their own bodies, about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation. How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love? By the time I added the salt and pepper to my dish, I had come up with an answer to this question. I went to the next session armed with a copy of Pride and Prejudice in one hand and Our Bodies, Ourselves-the only book I had available on sexuality-in the other.   14 Charlotte Brontë did not like Jane Austen. "The Passions are perfectly unknown to her," she complained to a friend, " . . . even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would but ruffle the elegance of her progress." Knowing Charlotte Brontë and her proclivities, one can understand how one perfectly good novelist could dislike another as much as Brontë disliked Austen. She was fierce and insistent in her dismissal, and had written to G. H. Lewes in 1848: "Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. . . . I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses." There is something to this perhaps, yet Brontë\'s indictment is not entirely fair. One cannot say that Austen\'s novels lack passion. They lack a certain kind of overripe sensuousness, an appetite for the more unfiltered romantic abandon of Jane Eyre and Rochester. Theirs is a more muted sensuality, desire by indirection. Please turn to page 148, and try to visualize the scene as you read the passage. Darcy and Elizabeth are alone in Mr. Collins\'s house. Darcy is gradually coming to the realization that he cannot live without Elizabeth. They are talking about the significance of the distance between a woman\'s married home and her parents\' home. Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, "You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn." Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and, glancing over it, said, in a colder voice,- "Are you pleased with Kent?" Let us return to the aforementioned scene. The insistence in Darcy\'s voice is a symptom of his passion for Elizabeth; it emerges even in their most mundane interactions. We can trace the development of Darcy\'s feelings for Elizabeth in the tone of his voice. This reaches its climax in the scene in which he proposes to her. His negative persistence, beginning his speech with "In vain have I struggled. It will not do," becomes almost violent, in part because the novel itself is so restrained and Darcy is the most restrained of all the characters.

改博克 http://copperhia.blog.sohu.com