Read Online Azar Nafisi by Reading Lolita in Tehran - Free Book Online

mirror are drenched in a haze. I and perhaps two others have copies of
Lolita
on our laps. The rest have a heavy Xerox. There is no easy access to these books—you cannot buy them in the bookstores anymore. First the censors banned most of them, then the government stopped them from being sold: most of the foreign-language bookstores were closed or had to rely on their pre-revolutionary stock. Some of these books could be found at secondhand bookstores, and a very few at the annual international book fair in Tehran. A book like
Lolita
was difficult to find, especially the annotated version that my girls wanted to have. We photocopied all three hundred pages for those without copies. In an hour when we take a break, we will have tea or coffee with pastry. I don’t remember whose turn it is for pastry. We take turns; every week, one of us provides the pastry.
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    â€œMoppet,” “little monster,” “corrupt,” “shallow,” “brat”—these are some of the terms assigned to Lolita by her critics. Compared to these assaults, Humbert’s similar attacks on Lolita and her mother seem almost mild. Then there are others—among them Lionel Trilling, no less—who see the story as a great love affair, and still others who condemn
Lolita
because they feel Nabokov turned the rape of a twelve-year-old into an aesthetic experience.
    We in our class disagreed with all of these interpretations. We unanimously (I am rather proud to say) agreed with Véra Nabokov and sided with Lolita. “Lolita discussed by the papers from every possible point of view except one: that of its beauty and pathos,” Véra wrote in her diary. “Critics prefer to look for moral symbols, justification, condemnation, or explanation of HH’s predicament. . . . I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along culminating in that squalid but essentially pure and healthy marriage, and her letter, and her dog. And that terrible expression on her face when she had been cheated by HH out of some little pleasure that had been promised. They all miss the fact that the ‘horrid little brat’ Lolita is essentially very good indeed—or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly, and found a decent life with poor Dick more to her liking than the other kind.”
    Humbert’s narration is confessional, both in the usual sense of the term and in that he is literally writing a confession in jail, awaiting trial for the murder of the playwright Claire Quilty, with whom Lolita ran away to escape him and who cast her off after she refused to participate in his cruel sex games. Humbert appears to us both as narrator and seducer—not just of Lolita but also of us, his readers, whom throughout the book he addresses as “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” (sometimes as “Winged gentlemen of the jury”). As the story unfolds, a deeper crime, more serious than Quilty’s murder, is revealed: the entrapment and rape of Lolita (you will notice that while Lolita’s scenes are written with passion and tenderness, Quilty’s murder is portrayed as farce). Humbert’s prose, veering at times towards the shamelessly overwrought, aims at seducing the reader, especially the high-minded reader, who will be taken in by such erudite gymnastics. Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such, she becomes a double victim: not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.
    Lolita and her mother are doomed before we see them: the Haze house, as Humbert calls it, more gray than white, is “the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube