Azar Nafisi (7 page)

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 affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower.” By the time we stand in the front hall (graced with door chimes and “that banal darling of arty middle class, van Gogh's ‘Arlesienne' “) our smile has already turned smug and mocking. We glance at the staircase and hear Mrs. Haze's “contralto voice” before Charlotte (“a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich”) descends into view. Sentence by sentence and word by word, Humbert destroys Charlotte even as he describes her: “She was obviously one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or a bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.”

She never has a chance, poor woman; nor does she improve on further acquaintance as the reader is regaled with descriptions of her superficiality, her sentimental and jealous passion for Humbert and her nastiness to her daughter. Through his beautiful language (“you can always trust a murderer for his fancy prose style”), Humbert focuses the reader's attention on the banalities and small cruelties of American consumerism, creating a sense of empathy and complicity with the reader, who is encouraged to conceive of as understandable his ruthless seduction of a lonely widow and his eventual marriage to her in order to seduce her daughter.

Nabokov's art is revealed in his ability to make us feel sympathy for Humbert's victims—at least for his two wives, Valeria and Charlotte—without our approving of them. We condemn Humbert's acts of cruelty towards them even as we substantiate his judgment of their banality. What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In
Invitation to a Beheading
and
Bend Sinister,
Nabokov's villains are the vulgar and brutal totalitarian rulers trying to possess and control imaginative minds; in
Lolita,
the villain is the one with the imaginative mind. The reader could never be confused by Monsieur Pierre, but how is he to judge a Monsieur Humbert?

Humbert makes fullest use of his art and guile in setting the reader up for his most heinous crime: his first attempt at possessing Lolita. He prepares us for the ultimate scene of seduction with the same immaculate precision with which he prepares to dope Lolita and take advantage of her listless body. He tries to win us to his side by placing us in the same category as himself: as ardent critics of consumer culture. He describes Lolita as a vulgar vixen—“a disgustingly conventional little girl,” he calls her. “And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel.”

Like the best defense attorneys, who dazzle with their rhetoric and appeal to our higher sense of morality, Humbert exonerates himself by implicating his victim—a method we were quite familiar with in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (“We are not against cinema,” Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, “we are against prostitution!”) Addressing the “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury,” Humbert informs us: “I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me. . . . [N]ot a trace of modesty,” he confides, “did I perceive in this beautiful badly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster's furtive world, unknown to others.”

So far it would seem that Humbert the criminal, with the help of Humbert the poet, has succeeded in seducing both Lolita and the reader. Yet in fact he fails on both fronts. In the case of Lolita, he never succeeds in possessing her willingly, so that every act of lovemaking from then on becomes a crueler and more tainted act of rape; she evades him at every turn. And he fails to completely seduce the reader, or some readers at least. Again ironically, his ability as a poet, his own fancy prose style, exposes him for what he is.

You do see how Nabokov's prose provides trapdoors for the unsuspecting reader: the credibility of every one of Humbert's assertions is simultaneously challenged and exposed by the hidden truth implied by his descriptions. Thus another Lolita emerges that reaches beyond the caricature of the vulgar insensitive minx, although she is that, too. A hurt, lonely girl, deprived of her childhood, orphaned and with no refuge. Humbert's rare insights give glimpses into Lolita's character, her vulnerability and aloneness. Were he to paint the murals in the Enchanted Hunters, the motel where he first raped her, he tells us, he would have painted a lake, an arbor in flames and finally there would have been “a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.” (Child, please remember, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, although this child, had she lived in the Islamic Republic, would have been long ripe for marriage to men older than Humbert.)

As the story develops, Humbert's list of grievances grows. He calls her “the vile and beloved slut” and talks of her “obscene young legs,” yet we soon discover what Humbert's complaints mean: she sits on his lap, picking her nose, engrossed in “the lighter section of a newspaper, indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket.” Of course, all murderers and all oppressors have a long list of grievances against their victims, only most are not as eloquent as Humbert Humbert.

Nor is he always the gentle lover: her slightest attempt at independence brings on his most furious wrath: “I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheek bone. And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself . . . but it was all of no avail. Both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution.”

No fact is more touching than Lolita's utter helplessness. The very first morning after their painful (to Lo, putting on a brave show) and ecstatic (to Humbert) sexual encounter, she demands some money to call her mother. “Why can't I call my mother if I want to?” “Because,” Humbert answers, “your mother is dead.” That night at the hotel, Lo and Humbert have separate rooms, but “in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

And this of course was the whole crux of the matter: she had nowhere else to go, and for two years, in dingy motels and byways, in his home or even in school, he forces her to consent to him. He prevents her from mixing with children her own age, watches over her so she never has boyfriends, frightens her into secrecy, bribes her with money for acts of sex, which he revokes when he has had his due.

Before the reader makes his judgment about either Humbert or our own blind censor, I must remind him that at some point Humbert addresses his audience as “Reader!
Bruder!
”—a reminder of a well-known line by Baudelaire, the preface to his book of poems
Les Fleurs du Mal:—
“
Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!
”

14

Reaching for a pastry, Mitra says that something has been bothering her for some time. Why is it that stories like
Lolita
and
Madame Bovary—
stories that are so sad, so tragic—make us happy? Is it not sinful to feel pleasure when reading about something so terrible? Would we feel this way if we were to read about it in the newspapers or if it happened to us? If we were to write about our lives here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, should we make our readers happy?

That night, like many other nights, I took the class to bed with me. I felt I had not adequately answered Mitra's question, and was tempted to call my magician and talk to him about our discussion. It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster to descend on our house or for a telephone call that would give us the bad news about a friend or a relative. I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen, that bad things would come in the middle of my dreams.

I can trace my nightly tremors back to the time when, in my sophomore year, while studying at a horrible school in Switzerland, I was summoned in the middle of a history lesson with a stern American teacher to the principal's office. There I was told that they had just heard on the radio that my father, the youngest mayor in Tehran's history, had been jailed. Only three weeks earlier I had seen a large color photograph of him in
Paris Match,
standing by General de Gaulle. He was not with the Shah or any other dignitary—it was just Father and the General. Like the rest of my family, my father was a culture snob, who went into politics despising politicians and defying them almost at every turn. He was insolent to his superiors, at once popular and outspoken and on good terms with journalists. He wrote poetry and thought his real vocation should have been writing. I learned later that the General had taken a special liking to him after my father's welcoming speech, which was delivered in French and filled with allusions to great French writers such as Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. De Gaulle chose to reward him with the Legion of Honor. This did not go over well with the Iranian elite, who had resented my father's insubordinate attitude before and were now jealous of the extra attentions paid him.

One small compensation for the bad news was that I did not have to continue my Swiss education. That Christmas I went back home with a special escort to take me to the airport. The reality of my father's imprisonment was established for me when I landed at the Tehran airport and did not find him waiting for me there. For the four years that they kept him in his “temporary” jail—in the jail's library, adjacent to the morgue—we were told alternately that he was going to be killed or that he would be set free almost at once. He was eventually exonerated of all charges except one, insubordination. This I always remember—insubordination: it became a way of life for me after that. Much later, when I read a sentence by Nabokov—“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—the verdict against my father came to my mind.

I never recovered from the shock of that moment when I was pulled out of the security of Mr. Holmes's—I think that was his name—stern classroom and told that my father, the mayor, was now in jail. Later, the Islamic Revolution took away whatever sense of security I had managed to re-establish after my father's release from jail.

Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away. In one, perhaps my own, the dreamer wanted to run but she couldn't: she was rooted to the ground, right outside her front door. She could not turn around, open the door and hide inside. The only one among us who claimed she had never experienced such fear was Nassrin. “I was always afraid of having to lie. You know what they say: to thine own self be true and all that. I believed in that sort of thing,” she said with a shrug. “But I have improved,” she added as an afterthought.

Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an “illegal dream.” He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.

In
Invitation to a Beheading,
on the wall of Cincinnatus C.'s jail, which is decorated like a third-rate hotel, there are certain instructions for the prisoners, such as: “A prisoner's meekness is a prison's pride.” Rule number six, one that lies at the heart of the novel, is: “It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape.”

In the daytime it was better. I felt brave. I answered the Revolutionary Guards, I argued with them, I was not afraid of following them to the Revolutionary Committees. I did not have time to think about all the dead relatives and friends, about our own narrow and lucky escapes. I paid for it at night, always at night, when I returned. What will happen now? Who will be killed? When will they come? I had internalized the fear, so that I did not think of it always consciously, but I had insomnia; I roamed the house and I read and fell asleep with my glasses on, often holding on to my book. With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem, as Nassrin had painfully reminded us.