Azar Nafisi (20 page)

“Yes,” said Zarrin, interrupting me now. “Could one not say in fact that this blindness or carelessness towards others is a reminder of another brand of careless people?” She threw a momentary glance at Nyazi as she added, “Those who see the world in black and white, drunk on the righteousness of their own fictions.

“And if,” she continued with some warmth, “Mr. Farzan, in real life Fitzgerald was obsessed with the rich and with wealth; in his fiction he brings out the corrupt and decaying power of wealth on basically decent people, like Gatsby, or creative and lively people, like Dick Diver in
Tender Is the Night.
In his failure to understand this, Mr. Nyazi misses the whole point of the novel.”

Nyazi, who for some time now had been insistently scrutinizing the floor, suddenly jumped up and said, “I object!”

“To what, exactly, do you object?” said Zarrin with mock politeness.

“Carelessness is not enough!” he shot back. “It doesn't make the novel more moral. I ask you about the sin of adultery, about lies and cheating, and you talk about carelessness?”

Zarrin paused and then turned to me again. “I would now like to call the defendant to the stand.” She then turned to Mr. Nyazi and, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes, said, “Would you like to examine the defendant?” Nyazi murmured a defiant no. “Fine. Ma'am, could you please take the stand?” I got up, rather startled, and looked around me. There was no chair. Mr. Farzan, for once alert, jumped up and offered me his. “You heard the prosecutor's remarks,” Zarrin said, addressing me. “Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

I felt uncomfortable, even shy, and reluctant to talk. Zarrin had been doing a great job, and it seemed to me there was no need for my pontifications. But the class was waiting, and there was no way I could back down now.

I sat awkwardly on the chair offered me by Mr. Farzan. During the course of my preparations for the trial, I had found that no matter how hard I tried, I could not articulate in words the thoughts and emotions that made me so excited about
Gatsby.
I kept going back to Fitzgerald's own explanation of the novel: “That's the whole burden of this novel,” he had said, “the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.” I wanted to tell them that this book is not about adultery but about the loss of dreams. For me it had become of vital importance that my students accept
Gatsby
on its own terms, celebrate and love it because of its amazing and anguished beauty, but what I had to say in this class had to be more concrete and practical.

“You don't read
Gatsby,
” I said, “to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil . . .”

“But, ma'am,” Mr. Nyazin interrupted me. “There is nothing complicated about having an affair with another man's wife. Why doesn't Mr. Gatsby get his own wife?” he added sulkily.

“Why don't you write your own novel?” a muffled voice cracked from some indefinable place in the middle row. Mr. Nyazi looked even more startled. From this point on, I hardly managed to get a word in. It seemed as if all of a sudden everyone had discovered that they needed to get in on the discussion.

At my suggestion, Mr. Farzan called for a ten-minute recess. I left the room and went outside, along with a few students who felt the need for fresh air. In the hall I found Mahtab and Nassrin deep in conversation. I joined them and asked them what they thought of the trial.

Nassrin was furious that Nyazi seemed to think he had a monopoly on morality. She said she didn't say she'd approve of Gatsby, but at least he was prepared to die for his love. The three of us began walking down the hallway. Most of the students had gathered around Zarrin and Nyazi, who were in the midst of a heated argument. Zarrin was accusing Nyazi of calling her a prostitute. He was almost blue in the face with anger and indignation, and was accusing her in turn of being a liar and a fool.

“What am I to think of your slogans claiming that women who don't wear the veil are prostitutes and agents of Satan? You call this morality?” she shouted. “What about Christian women who don't believe in wearing veils? Are they all—every single one of them—decadent floozies?”

“But this is an Islamic country,” Nyazi shouted vehemently. “And this is the law, and whoever . . .”

“The law?” Vida interrupted him. “You guys came in and changed the laws. Is it the law? So was wearing the yellow star in Nazi Germany. Should all the Jews have worn the star because it was the blasted law?”

“Oh,” Zarrin said mockingly, “don't even try to talk to him about that. He would call them all Zionists who deserved what they got.” Mr. Nyazi seemed ready to jump up and slap her across the face.

“I think it's about time I used my authority,” I whispered to Nassrin, who was standing by, transfixed. I asked them all to calm down and return to their seats. When the shouts had died down and the accusations and counteraccusations had more or less subsided, I suggested that we open the floor to discussion. We wouldn't vote on the outcome of the trial, but we should hear from the jury. They could give us their verdict in the form of their opinions.

A few of the leftist activists defended the novel. I felt they did so partly because the Muslim activists were so dead set against it. In essence, their defense was not so different from Nyazi's condemnation. They said that we needed to read fiction like
The Great Gatsby
because we needed to know about the immorality of American culture. They felt we should read more revolutionary material, but that we should read books like this as well, to understand the enemy.

One of them mentioned a famous statement by Comrade Lenin about how listening to “Moonlight Sonata” made him soft. He said it made him want to pat people on the back when we needed to club them, or some such. At any rate, my radical students' main objection to the novel was that it distracted them from their duties as revolutionaries.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the heated arguments, many of my students were silent, although many gathered around Zarrin and Vida, murmuring words of encouragement and praise. I discovered later that most students had supported Zarrin, but very few were prepared to risk voicing their views, mainly because they lacked enough self-confidence to articulate their points as “eloquently,” I was told, as the defense and the prosecutor. Some claimed in private that they personally liked the book. Then why didn't they say so? Everyone else was so certain and emphatic in their position, and they couldn't really say why they liked it—they just did.

Just before the bell rang, Zarrin, who had been silent ever since the recess, suddenly got up. Although she spoke in a low voice, she appeared agitated. She said sometimes she wondered why people bothered to claim to be literature majors. Did it mean anything? she wondered. As for the book, she had nothing more to say in its defense. The novel was its own defense. Perhaps we had a few things to learn from it, from Mr. Fitzgerald. She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that? And are revolutionaries devoid of personal feelings and emotions? Do they never fall in love, or enjoy beauty? This is an amazing book, she said quietly. It teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also, to look for integrity in unusual places. Anyway, she enjoyed reading it, and that counts too, can't you see?

In her “can't you see?” there was a genuine note of concern that went beyond her disdain and hatred of Mr. Nyazi, a desire that even
he
should see, definitely see. She paused a moment and cast a look around the room at her classmates. The class was silent for a while after that. Not even Mr. Nyazi had anything to say.

I felt rather good after class that day. When the bell rang, many had not even noticed it. There had been no formal verdict cast, but the excitement most students now showed was the best verdict as far as I was concerned. They were all arguing as I left them outside the class—and they were arguing not over the hostages or the recent demonstrations or Rajavi and Khomeini, but over Gatsby and his alloyed dream.

19

Our discussions of
Gatsby
for a short while seemed as electric and important as the ideological conflicts raging over the country. In fact, as time went by, different versions of this debate did dominate the political and ideological scene. Fires were set to publishing houses and bookstores for disseminating immoral works of fiction. One woman novelist was jailed for her writings and charged with spreading prostitution. Reporters were jailed, magazines and newspapers closed and some of our best classical poets, like Rumi and Omar Khayyam, were censored or banned.

Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.

Personally, the
Gatsby
“trial” had opened a window into my own feelings and desires. Never before—not during all my revolutionary activities—did I feel so fervently as I did now about my work and about literature. I wanted to spread this spirit of goodwill, so I made a point the next day of asking Zarrin to stay after class, to let her know how much I had appreciated her defense. I'm afraid it fell on deaf ears, she said somewhat despondently. Don't be so sure, I told her.

A colleague, passing me two days later in the hall, said: I heard shouts coming from the direction of your class the other day. Imagine my surprise when instead of Lenin versus the Imam I heard it was Fitzgerald versus Islam. By the way, you should be thankful to your young protégé. Which one? I asked him with a laugh. Mr. Bahri—he seems to have become your knight in shining armor. I hear he quieted down the voices of outrage and somehow convinced the Islamic association that you had put America on trial.

The university was going through many rapid changes in those days, and bouts between the radical and Muslim students became more frequent and more apparent. “How is it that you have sat idle and allowed a handful of Communists to take control of the university?” Khomeini reprimanded a group of Muslim students. “Are you less than them? Challenge them, argue with them, stand up to them and express yourselves.” He went on to tell a story, as he so often did—a parable of sorts. Khomeini had asked a leading political cleric, Modaress, what he should do when an official in his town decided to call his two dogs Sheikh and Seyyed, a clear insult to clerics. Modaress's advice, according to Khomeini, had been brief and to the point: “Kill him.” Khomeini concluded by quoting Modaress: “You hit first and let others complain. Don't be the victim, and don't complain.”

20

A few days after the
Gatsby
trial, I hastily gathered my notes and books and left the classroom somewhat preoccupied. The aura of the trial still dominated the class. Some students had waylaid me in the halls to talk about
Gatsby
and present their views. There were even two or three papers written voluntarily on the subject. Stepping outside into the gentle light of the late afternoon sun, I paused on the steps, drawn by a heated argument between a handful of Muslim students and their Marxist and secular opponents. They were gesticulating and shouting. I noticed Nassrin standing a little apart from the crowd, listening to their arguments.

Soon Zarrin, Vida and a friend of theirs from another class joined me. We were all standing there idly, observing the show, making desultory comments, when Mr. Bahri came out the door with a purposeful frown. He paused for a moment, hovering beside me on the wide steps. His gaze followed mine to the intersection of the argument. He turned to me with a smile and said, “Nothing unusual. They are just having a bit of fun,” and left. I stood there somewhat stupefied with Zarrin and her friends.

As the crowd dispersed, Nassrin remained alone and hesitant, and I beckoned for her to join us. She walked shyly towards our group. It was a mild afternoon; the trees and their shadows seemed to be engaged in a flirtatious dance. Somehow my students got me talking about my own student days. I was telling them about American students' idea of protest: boys with long hair streaking across the quad.

After I finished my stories, there was some laughter, followed by silence as we returned to the scene in front of us. I told them that perhaps my best memories were of my professors. In fact, I laughed, four of my very favorites were Dr. Yoch, who was conservative, the revolutionary Dr. Gross and Dr. Veile and Dr. Elconin, both liberals. Someone said, “Oh, Professor”—they called me Professor; it sounded even stranger to me then than it does now—“you would have liked Professor R, who taught in our department until very recently.”

One or two students had not heard of him, some knew of him and one had been to his classes a few times. He was a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, a well-known and controversial film and theater critic and writer of short stories. He was what one would call a trendsetter: at twenty-one, he had become the literary editor of a magazine, and in a short time he and a few of his friends had made many enemies and admirers among the literary set. It seemed that now, in his late thirties, he had announced his retirement. Rumors were circulating that he was writing a novel.

One of the students said that he was moody and unpredictable. Zarrin's friend corrected him: he was not moody, just different. Another, with a flash of insight, turned to me and said, “You know, Professor, he is one of those people who have a knack for becoming legendary. I mean, they cannot be ignored.”