Azar Nafisi (29 page)

Mr. Ghomi makes this little speech and sits down triumphantly, looking around him to see if anyone will challenge him. No one does. Except me, of course; they all expect me to perform the task. Mr. Ghomi always managed to divert the class from its course. At first I would get angry with him, but in time I came to see that sometimes he articulated sentiments that others did not dare express.

When I ask the class what they think of this, no one speaks. Mr. Ghomi, encouraged by this silence, raises his hand once more. We are more moral, because we've experienced real evil; we are in a war against evil, he says, a war both at home and abroad. At this point Mahshid decides to speak. If you remember, she says quietly, James experienced two terrible wars. When he was young, there was a civil war in America, and before he died he had witnessed the First World War. Mr. Ghomi's response was an imperceptible shrug; perhaps he felt those wars were not the righteous ones.

I see myself sitting in my chair in silence. The silence seems deliberate. After the class I continue to sit in my chair, caught in a vacuum of light coming from the large curtainless windows that cover one side of the room. Three of my female students come and hover by my desk. “We want you to know that the majority of this class disagrees with those guys,” one of them says. “People are afraid to talk. This is a controversial subject. If we tell the truth, we're afraid he will report us. If we say what he wants to hear, we are afraid of you. We all appreciate your class.”

Yes, I thought as I walked home that evening and, long after that, whenever this conversation returned to mind. You appreciate the class, but do you appreciate
Daisy Miller
? Well, do you?

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 “Perfectly 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.