Azar Nafisi (38 page)

“After six years, God knows what he'll be like,” said Nassrin, absentmindedly rotating the coffee mug in her hands. I looked at her with some concern, as I almost always did when our talks turned to marriage and men. I couldn't help but wonder how she dealt with her buried memories. Did she compare herself with her friends who were free of such experiences? And
were
they free of such experiences?

Sanaz glanced at Nassrin reproachfully. Did she really need to hear this now? At any rate, going to Turkey would be good for her, even if it didn't work out. At least she'd get him out of her system.

“Do you love him?” I asked her, trying to ignore the girls' sardonic smiles. “You'll always be taking a risk when you decide to marry, but the question is, Do you love him
now
?”

“I loved him when I was very young,” Sanaz said slowly, too excited to participate in their joke. “I don't know anymore. I've always loved the idea of him, but he's been away for so long. He's had so many chances to meet other women. . . . What chance have I had of meeting other men? My aunt says I don't have to say yes or no. She says if we want to find out how we really feel about each other, we should meet in Turkey
alone.
We should spend some time together without our families' interfering presence.”

“What an unusually wise aunt,” I said, unable to stop myself from breaking in like a referee. “She's right, you know.”

Mahshid raised her eyes in my direction for a fraction of a second before lowering them again. Azin, quickly catching Mahshid's look, said, “I agree with Dr. Nafisi. You'd be wise to try to live together for a while before making any decisions.”

Mahshid decided not to take the bait, and remained demurely silent. Was it my imagination or did she cast a reproachful glance in my direction as she lowered her eyes, fixing them once more on an imperceptible spot in the carpet?

“The first thing you should do to test your compatibility,” said Nassrin, “is dance with him.”

At first we were puzzled by her statement, which seemed far-fetched even for Nassrin. It took me a second before I grasped her meaning. But of course! She was referring to the Dear Jane Society we'd invented in my last year at Allameh! The idea for that society—defunct even before it started—had begun with a memorable dance.

2

I see it now as if through the large window of a house in the middle of an empty garden. I've pressed my face to the window, and here they come: five women, all in black robes and head scarves. As each passes by the window, I can begin to differentiate their faces; one is standing and watching the other four. They are not graceful; they bump into one another and into the chairs. They are boisterous in a peculiarly subdued manner.

In my graduate seminar that spring, I had compared the structure of
Pride and Prejudice
to an eighteenth-century dance. After class, some of the girls had stayed behind to talk this over—they were confused by what I'd meant. I thought it best to explain myself by going over the motions of the dance with them. Close your eyes and imagine the dance, I suggested. Imagine you are moving back and forth; it would help if you could imagine that the man standing opposite you was the incomparable Mr. Darcy, or maybe not—whoever is on your mind, imagine him. I heard a giggle from one of the girls. Suddenly hit by inspiration, I took Nassrin's reluctant hands and started to dance with her, one-two and one-two. Then I asked the others to form a line, and pretty soon we were all dancing, our long black robes twirling as we bumped into one another and into the chairs.

They stand opposite their partners, give a slight bow, step forward, touch hands and twirl. I say, Now, as you touch hands, look into each other's eyes; okay, let's see how much of a conversation you can hold. Say something to each other. They can barely keep their faces straight. Mojgan says, The trouble is we all want to be Elizabeth and Darcy. I don't mind being Jane, says Nassrin—I always wanted to be the most beautiful. We need a Mr. Collins. Come on, Mahshid, won't you enjoy stepping on my toes? Mahshid demurs. I've never danced in my life, she says awkwardly. This is one dance you needn't worry about, I said. In fact as your professor, I command you to do it. As part of your homework, I added, and it was one of the rare times I actually enjoyed my authority. Forward, backwards, pause, turn, turn, you have to harmonize your steps with the rest in the set, that's the whole point; you are mainly concerned with yourself and your partner but also with all the others—you can't be out of step with them. Well, yes, that is the difficult part, but for Miss Eliza Bennet it comes naturally.

All dance is performance and presentation, I tell them, but do you see how different dances invite different interpretations? Oh yes, says Nassrin. Compare this to the Persian dance. If those British could quiver their bodies the way we do . . . next to us, they are so chaste!

I ask, Who can dance Persian-style? Everyone looks at Sanaz. She is shy and refuses to dance. We start to tease her and goad her on, and form a circle around her. As she begins to move, self-consciously at first, we start to clap and murmur a song. Nassrin cautions us to be quieter. Sanaz begins shyly, taking graceful little steps, moving her waist with a lusty grace. As we laugh and joke more, she becomes bolder; she starts to move her head from side to side, and every part of her body asserts itself, vying for attention with the other parts. Her body quivers as she takes her small steps and dances with her fingers and her hands. A special look has appeared on her face. It is daring and beckoning, designed to attract, to pull in, but at the same time it retracts and refracts with a power she loses as soon as she stops dancing.

There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. I found Sanaz's look, years later, in the face of my sophisticated French-educated friend Leyly as she suddenly began to dance to music that was filled with stretches of
naz
and
eshveh
and
kereshmeh,
all words whose substitutes in English
—coquettishness, teasing, flirtatiousness—
seem not just poor but irrelevant.

This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and uncurl while the waist seems to coil and recoil. It is calculated. It predicts its effect before another little step is taken, and then another little step. It is flirtatious in a way Miss Daisy Miller and her likes could never dream of being. It is openly seductive but not surrendering. All this is there in Sanaz's dance. Her large black robe and black head scarf—framing her bony face, her large eyes and very slim and fragile body—oddly enough add to the allure of the movements. With each move she seems to free herself from her layers of black cloth. The robe becomes diaphanous; its texture adds to the mystery of her dance.

We were surprised by a startled student who opened the door. The lunch hour was over; we had not noticed the time. Looking at the student standing on the threshold, with one foot in the classroom, we started to laugh.

That meeting created a secret pact among us. We talked about creating a clandestine group and calling it the Dear Jane Society. We would meet and dance and eat cream puffs, and we would share the news. Although we never formed any such secret society, the girls referred to themselves from then on as Dear Janes, and it planted the seed for our present complicity. I would have forgotten all about it had I not recently started to think about Nassrin.

I now remember that it was that day as Mahshid, Nassrin and I walked to my office that quite suddenly, without thinking of it, I asked them to join in my secret class. Looking at their astonished faces, I quickly sketched out the concept, improvising perhaps on what I had dreamed of and planned for so many years in my mind. What will be required of us? Mahshid asked.
Absolute
commitment to the works, to the class, I said with an impetuous air of finality. More than committing them, I had now committed myself.

3

I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating. Although that is in fact my urge—to narrate, to reinvent myself along with all those others. As I write the road is clear, the tin man recovers his heart and the lion his courage, but this is not my story. I walk down a different road, whose end I cannot foresee. I know as little about where this road leads as Alice knew when she first ran after the White Rabbit, the one who was wearing a waistcoat and a watch and muttering, “I'm late, I'm late.”

I could not find a better way of explaining the overall structure of
Pride and Prejudice
to my classes than to compare it to the eighteenth-century dance, the kind one imagines Darcy and Elizabeth performed in one of the numerous balls they attended. Although balls and dances are instruments of plot in some of Austen's other novels—in
Mansfield Park,
for example, and
Emma—
in no other novel does dance play such a focal role. It is not the specific number of dances that I am concerned with here. As I said, the whole structure of the novel is like a dance, which is both a public and a private act. The atmosphere in
Pride and Prejudice
does carry the festive air of a ball.

So the structure is that of dance and digression. It moves in parallels, contrapuntally, in terms not only of events and characters but also settings. First we see Elizabeth in her setting, then we see her out of her setting and in Darcy's, then we see Darcy in his true setting—each of these shifts in perspective brings them closer. Darcy's proposal to Elizabeth runs parallel to Collins's proposal. There are also parallels between the characters of Darcy and Wickham. Like a camera, Darcy's view of Elizabeth pans in to a close-up; in the second part of the novel, the reverse happens as Elizabeth moves closer to Darcy.

All the main actors are introduced at the first dance, and the conflict sparked there is the tension that will carry us through the novel. Elizabeth becomes Darcy's enemy at that first dance, when she overhears him telling Bingley she is not handsome enough to dance with. Later, when he meets her at the next ball, he has begun to change his mind, but she refuses his offer to dance. At Netherfield they meet again, and this time they dance, a dance that, despite its civilized appearance, is charged with tension; his attraction to her increases in direct ratio to her repulsion. The discordant notes in their dialogue contradict the smooth movements of their bodies on the dance floor.

Austen's protagonists are private individuals set in public places. Their desire for privacy and reflection is continually being adjusted to their situation within a very small community, which keeps them under its constant scrutiny. The balance between the public and the private is essential to this world.

The backwards-and-forward rhythm of the dance is repeated in the actions and movements of the two protagonists, around whom the plot is shaped. Parallel events bring them closer together and then thrust them apart. Throughout the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy constantly move towards and away from each other. Each time they move forward, the ground is prepared for the next move. Moving backwards is accompanied by a re-appraisal of the former forward move. There is a give-and-take in the dance, a constant adapting to the partner's needs and steps. Note for example how terrible Mr. Collins is on the dance floor, as is the uncouth Thorpe in
Northanger Abbey.
Their inability to dance well is a sign of their inability to adapt themselves to the needs of their partners.

The centrality of dialogue in
Pride and Prejudice
fits well into the dancelike structure of the novel. It seems that in almost every scene there is an ongoing dialogue between Elizabeth and Darcy. This dialogue is either real or imagined, but it is a constant preoccupation, leading from exchanges with the other to exchanges with the self. This central dialogue, between Elizabeth and Darcy and Elizabeth and herself, is accompanied by a multiplicity of other conversations.

One of the most wonderful things about
Pride and Prejudice
is the variety of voices it embodies. There are so many different forms of dialogue: between several people, between two people, internal dialogue and dialogue through letters. All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen's ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel. In Austen's novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space—not just space but a necessity—for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. We needed no message, no outright call for plurality, to prove our point. All we needed was to read and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. This was where Austen's danger lay.

It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy. Later, in Nabokov, this incapacity takes on monstrous forms in characters such as Humbert Humbert in
Lolita
and Kinbote in
Pale Fire.

Pride and Prejudice
is not poetic, but it has its own cacophonies and harmonies; voices approach and depart and take a turn around the room. Right now, as I flip through the pages, I can hear them leaping out. I catch Mary's pathetic, dry voice and Kitty's cough and Miss Bingley's chaste insinuations, and here I catch a word by the courtly Sir Lucas. I can't quite hear Miss Darcy, shy and reserved as she is, but I hear steps going up and down the stairs, and Elizabeth's light mockery and Darcy's reserved, tender tone, and as I close the book, I hear the ironic tone of the narrator. And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop—there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.