Azar Nafisi (19 page)

Zarrin rose again to her feet. “Your Honor,” she said with barely disguised contempt, “these are all baseless allegations, falsehoods . . .”

Mr. Nyazi did not allow his honor to respond. He half rose from his seat and cried out: “Will you let me finish? You will get your turn! I will tell you why, I will tell you why . . .” And then he turned to me and in a softer voice said, “Ma'am, no offense meant to you.”

I, who had by now begun to enjoy the game, said, “Go ahead, please, and remember I am here in the role of the book. I will have my say in the end.”

“Maybe during the reign of the corrupt Pahlavi regime,” Nyazi continued, “adultery was the accepted norm.”

Zarrin was not one to let go. “I object!” she cried out. “There is no factual basis to this statement.”

“Okay,” he conceded, “but the values were such that adultery went unpunished. This book preaches illicit relations between a man and woman. First we have Tom and his mistress, the scene in her apartment—even the narrator, Nick, is implicated. He doesn't like their lies, but he has no objection to their fornicating and sitting on each other's laps, and, and, those parties at Gatsby's . . . remember, ladies and gentlemen, this Gatsby is the hero of the book—and who is he? He is a charlatan, he is an adulterer, he is a liar . . . this is the man Nick celebrates and feels sorry for, this man, this destroyer of homes!” Mr. Nyazi was clearly agitated as he conjured the fornicators, liars and adulterers roaming freely in Fitzgerald's luminous world, immune from his wrath and from prosecution. “The only sympathetic person here is the cuckolded husband, Mr. Wilson,” Mr. Nyazi boomed. “When he kills Gatsby, it is the hand of God. He is the only victim. He is the genuine symbol of the oppressed, in the land of, of, of the Great Satan!”

The trouble with Mr. Nyazi was that even when he became excited and did not read from his paper, his delivery was monotonous. Now he mainly shouted and cried out from his semi-stationary position.

“The one good thing about this book,” he said, waving the culprit in one hand, “is that it exposes the immorality and decadence of American society, but we have fought to rid ourselves of this trash and it is high time that such books be banned.” He kept calling Gatsby “this Mr. Gatsby” and could not bring himself to name Daisy, whom he referred to as “that woman.” According to Nyazi, there was not a single virtuous woman in the whole novel. “What kind of model are we setting for our innocent and modest sisters,” he asked his captive audience, “by giving them such a book to read?”

As he continued, he became increasingly animated, yet he refused throughout to budge from his chair. “Gatsby is dishonest,” he cried out, his voice now shrill. “He earns his money by illegal means and tries to buy the love of a married woman. This book is supposed to be about the American dream, but what sort of a dream is this? Does the author mean to suggest that we should all be adulterers and bandits? Americans are decadent and in decline because this is their dream. They are going down! This is the last hiccup of a dead culture!” he concluded triumphantly, proving that Zarrin was not the only one to have watched
Perry Mason.

“Perhaps our honorable prosecutor should not be so harsh,” Vida said once it was clear that Nyazi had at last exhausted his argument. “Gatsby dies, after all, so one could say that he gets his just deserts.”

But Mr. Nyazi was not convinced. “Is it just Gatsby who deserves to die?” he said with evident scorn. “
No!
The whole of American society deserves the same fate. What kind of a dream is it to steal a man's wife, to preach sex, to cheat and swindle and to . . . and then that guy, the narrator, Nick, he claims to be moral!”

Mr. Nyazi proceeded in this vein at some length, until he came to a sudden halt, as if he had choked on his own words. Even then he did not budge. Somehow it did not occur to any of us to suggest that he return to his original seat as the trial proceeded.

18

Zarrin was summoned next to defend her case. She stood up to face the class, elegant and professional in her navy blue pleated skirt and woolen jacket with gold buttons, white cuffs peering out from under its sleeves. Her hair was tied back with a ribbon in a low ponytail and the only ornament she wore was a pair of gold earrings. She circled slowly around Mr. Nyazi, every once in a while making a small sudden turn to emphasize a point. She had few notes and rarely looked at them as she addressed the class.

As she spoke, she kept pacing the room, her ponytail, in harmony with her movements, shifting from side to side, gently caressing the back of her neck, and each time she turned she was confronted with Mr. Nyazi, sitting hard as rock on that chair. She began with a passage I had read from one of Fitzgerald's short stories. “Our dear prosecutor has committed the fallacy of getting too close to the amusement park,” she said. “He can no longer distinguish fiction from reality.”

She smiled, turning sweetly towards “our prosecutor,” trapped in his chair. “He leaves no space, no breathing room, between the two worlds. He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment, crude and simplistic exaltation of right and wrong.” Mr. Nyazi raised his head at these words, turning a deep red, but he said nothing. “But is a novel good,” continued Zarrin, addressing the class, “because the heroine is virtuous? Is it bad if its character strays from the moral Mr. Nyazi insists on imposing not only on us but on all fiction?”

Mr. Farzan suddenly leapt up from his chair. “Ma'am,” he said, addressing me. “My being a judge, does it mean I cannot say anything?”

“Of course not,” I said, after which he proceeded to deliver a long and garbled tirade about the valley of the ashes and the decadence of Gatsby's parties. He concluded that Fitzgerald's main failure was his inability to surpass his own greed: he wrote cheap stories for money, and he ran after the rich. “You know,” he said at last, by this point exhausted by his own efforts, “Fitzgerald said that the rich are different.”

Mr. Nyazi nodded his head in fervent agreement. “Yes,” he broke in, with smug self-importance, clearly pleased with the impact of his own performance. “And our revolution is opposed to the materialism preached by Mr. Fitzgerald. We do not need Western materialisms, or American goods.” He paused to take a breath, but he wasn't finished. “If anything, we
could
use their technical know-how, but we
must
reject their morals.”

Zarrin looked on, composed and indifferent. She waited a few seconds after Mr. Nyazi's outburst before saying calmly, “I seem to be confronting two prosecutors. Now, if you please, may I resume?” She threw a dismissive glance towards Mr. Farzan's corner. “I would like to remind the prosecutor and the jury of the quotation we were given at our first discussion of this book from Diderot's
Jacques le Fataliste:
‘To me the freedom of [the author's] style is almost the guarantee of the purity of his morals.' We also discussed that a novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in. If that is true, then
Gatsby
has succeeded brilliantly. This is the first time in class that a book has created such controversy.

“
Gatsby
is being put on trial because it disturbs us—at least some of us,” she added, triggering a few giggles. “This is not the first time a novel—a non-political novel—has been put on trial by a state.” She turned, her ponytail turning with her. “Remember the famous trials of
Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover
and
Lolita
? In each case the novel won. But let me focus on a point that seems to trouble his honor the judge as well as the prosecutor: the lure of money and its role in the novel.

“It is true that Gatsby recognizes that money is one of Daisy's attractions. He is in fact the one who draws Nick's attention to the fact that in the charm of her voice is the jingle of money. But this novel is
not
about a poor young charlatan's love of money.” She paused here for emphasis. “Whoever claims this has not done his homework.” She turned, almost imperceptibly, to the stationary prosecutor to her left, then walked to her desk and picked up her copy of
Gatsby.
Holding it up, she addressed Mr. Farzan, turning her back on Nyazi, and said, “No, Your Honor, this novel is not about ‘the rich are different from you and me,' although they are: so are the poor, and so are you, in fact, different from me. It is about wealth but not about the vulgar materialism that you and Mr. Nyazi keep focusing on.”

“You tell them!” a voice said from the back row. I turned around. There were giggles and murmurs. Zarrin paused, smiling. The judge, rather startled, cried out, “Silence! Who said that?” Not even he expected an answer.

“Mr. Nyazi, our esteemed prosecutor,” Zarrin said mockingly, “seems to be in need of no witnesses. He apparently is both witness and prosecution, but let us bring our witnesses from the book itself. Let us call some of the characters to the stand. I will now call to the stand our most important witness.

“Mr. Nyazi has offered himself to us as a judge of Fitzgerald's characters, but Fitzgerald had another plan. He gave us his own judge. So perhaps we should listen to him. Which character deserves to be our judge?” Zarrin said, turning towards the class. “Nick, of course, and you remember how he describes himself: ‘Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.' If there is a judge in this novel, it is Nick. In a sense he is the least colorful character, because he acts as a mirror.

“The other characters are ultimately judged in term of their honesty. And the representatives of wealth turn out to be the most dishonest. Exhibit A: Jordan Baker, with whom Nick is romantically involved. There is a scandal about Jordan that Nick cannot at first remember. She had lied about a match, just as she would lie about a car she had borrowed and then left out in the rain with the top down. ‘She was incurably dishonest,' Nick tells us. ‘She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.'

“Exhibit B is Tom Buchanan. His dishonesty is more obvious: he cheats on his wife, he covers up her crime and he feels no guilt. Daisy's case is more complicated because, like everything else about her, her insincerity creates a certain enchantment: she makes others feel they are complicit in her lies, because they are seduced by them. And then, of course, there is Meyer Wolfshiem, Gatsby's shady business partner. He fixes the World Cup. ‘It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.' So the question of honesty and dishonesty, the way people are and the way they present themselves to the world, is a sub-theme that colors all the main events in the novel. And who are the most dishonest people in this novel?” she asked, again focusing on the jury. “The rich, of course,” she said, making a sudden turn towards Mr. Nyazi. “The very people our prosecutor claims Fitzgerald approves of.

“But that's not all. We are not done with the rich.” Zarrin picked up her book and opened it to a marked page. “With Mr. Carraway's permission,” she said, “I should like to quote him on the subject of the rich.” Then she began to read: ” ‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .'

“So you see,” said Zarrin, turning again to Mr. Farzan, “this is the judgment the most reliable character in the novel makes about the rich. The rich in this book, represented primarily by Tom and Daisy and to a lesser extent Jordan Baker, are careless people. After all, it is Daisy who runs over Myrtle and lets Gatsby take the blame for it, without even sending a flower to his funeral.” Zarrin paused, making a detour around the chair, seemingly oblivious to the judge, the prosecutor and the jury.

“The word
careless
is the key here,” she said. “Remember when Nick reproaches Jordan for her careless driving and she responds lightly that even if she is careless, she counts on other people being careful?
Careless
is the first adjective that comes to mind when describing the rich in this novel. The dream they embody is an alloyed dream that destroys whoever tries to get close to it. So you see, Mr. Nyazi, this book is no less a condemnation of your wealthy upper classes than any of the revolutionary books we have read.” She suddenly turned to me and said with a smile, “I am not sure how one should address a book. Would you agree that your aim is not a defense of the wealthy classes?”

I was startled by Zarrin's sudden question but appreciated this opportunity to focus on a point that had been central to my own discussions about fiction in general. “If a critique of carelessness is a fault,” I said, somewhat self-consciously, “then at least I'm in good company. This carelessness, a lack of empathy, appears in Jane Austen's negative characters: in Lady Catherine, in Mrs. Norris, in Mr. Collins or the Crawfords. The theme recurs in Henry James's stories and in Nabokov's monster heroes: Humbert, Kinbote, Van and Ada Veen. Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of
Gatsby,
like so many other great novels—the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.” I said all this in one breath, rather astonished at my own fervor.