One of the most heartening things about reading Professor Nafisi's memoir is the clear sense that both the reading and teaching of stories really does matter, that literature itself—however one defines it—matters. Nafisi is not so much of a theorist herself that she lets secondary criticism take the place of the stories themselves, as often seems to happen in graduate schools, where the workings of ideas about the workings of literature take precedent over the literature itself. The evidence for the importance of literature is not so much in the students themselves, but in the reactions of the regime Nafisi is teaching in, and in similar regimes around the world. This is not to say that theory isn't useful for getting at the meat of a piece of literature, but that it often becomes not a lens through which to view it but a scrim between the reader and the story or poem. Rather than illuminating or spotlighting, it obscures. And it is seldom the theory or theorists who stir up such trouble in the world outside the academy. (Personally, I think this is because politicians are not, by and large, bright enough to understand most literary theory or philosophy.)
There is a sense throughout Nafisi's memoir that her clandestine meetings with the young women in her living room are dangerous. Not just the fact that they as women whose lives are restricted are meeting together outside the purview of men, but that the books she and her students are reading and discussing are antithetical to the well-being of the Islamic Republic, like little grenades upsetting the illusion of unity. This was no doubt Nafisi's intention in organizing the meetings, whether she says so or not. Of Jane Austen's novels, Nafisi writes,
. . . 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 and incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection, and empathy.
This description of negative qualities in Austen's characters is clearly meant to be a criticism of her own country's regime. The capacity for true dialogue and diversity of opinion are what she finds lacking in the world of the Islamic Republic. Ranting, lecturing, and scolding, however, abound.
One of the first actions any new repressive regime takes is to suppress information. Government papers are classified, newspapers and other media outlets are shut down or taken over. The truly repressive also ban certain types of literature. All over the world, writers have been exiled, executed, jailed, tortured, not just for speaking out plainly against their particular government or oppression in general, but for merely writing works deemed incendiary by someone else in the government. Salman Rushdie is probably the most notorious contemporary example, and he was not even living in the country which passed the death sentence on him. This sort of thing happens frequently enough that the PEN American Center maintains a Rapid Action Network to come to the aid of threatened writers. The current crop encompasses countries as diverse as Iran, Vietnam, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Mexico. Both China and the countries of the former Soviet Union have long histories of persecuting writers. Even in the U.S., the list of banned authors is not a small one. Keep in mind that banned books are not necessarily contemporary books, written by living authors and recently published. Often, they're a hundred or more years old. Some are already in the public domain, copyright-wise.
Banning a book, like banning sex on Sunday, gives it an immediate allure it may not have had before. Humans seem to love forbidden fruit and this is something that censors have never figured out. Why go to all the bother of banning, confiscating, and often, burning books, fiction and poetry especially? It's just fiction. It's just poetry. Which by implication means it's not true, is it? Many of the authors are dead and beyond punishment. Why is literature considered so dangerous then?
I've had both teaching colleagues and friends dismiss the idea that the study of literature can make one a better person, that that might be the whole point of studying fiction and poetry (and I include history in this group too). This isn't a particularly fashionable view, although it used to be the rationale behind the Liberal Arts education. The argument against it now is that society is high technical and specialized, which is true. But this isn't necessarily a good thing. As Lindsay Waters, editor at Harvard University Press, writes (mirror) in The Village Voice: "The blinkered professional who has become the norm is not an intellectual who reads promiscuously in the hope he or she might come upon a book that will change his or her life." There is of course, implicit in these words, the belief that books can change one's life, and the belief that being an intellectual is a worthwhile profession itself—an assumption few people in this country share.
Instead, we elevate the "blinkered professionals" because they are precisely the kind of people who don't rock the boat. They are, instead, closely focused on their own realms, with no interest in or time for the larger world around them. This kind of attention vacuum is dangerous. As one of Spider Robinson's characters says in explaining to another why he watches TV: "It's like China, Eddie. If you don't keep an eye on it, it only gets worse." Or, as singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn observed "The trouble with normal is it only gets worse."
Waters further adds that "Humanists study books and artifacts in order to find traces of our common humanity." And what's the point of this? What does studying those traces of humanity result in? A friend of mine just came back from her first trip abroad at age 40 and exclaimed, "no wonder people used to send their kids off to see the world after college! It's such a broadening experience." The operative word is "common." Culture to culture, language to language, geographic region to geographic region, we are all human. The point of that study is to remind us as individuals of not just our own humanity but our common humanity. It's harder to fear people if you realize how much they have in common with you, despite outward appearances. Need I say that this realization makes us more compassionate, more self-reflective, more empathetic—in short, better people.
The traces of our common humanity in literature are not always the admirable qualities, either. but this is just as instructive. Think of Shakespeare's characters, who run the gamut from admirable to abominable, from loving Cordelia to the evil Iago. Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times uses one of these characters to great effect in a column called "Crowning Prince George," describing George W. Bush's attitude as president. "The paramount lesson in Shakespeare's plays is that the world is full of nuances and uncertainties, and that leaders self-destruct when they are too rigid, too sure of themselves or—Mr. President, lend me your ears—too intoxicated by moral clarity." Kristoff also draws a strong parallel between Prince Hal's and W's "wars of choice:
. . . [B]eginning in the 20th century, critics began to see another subtext in "Henry V": an unblinking examination of the brutality and inevitable excesses of war, even depicting the Abu Ghraib scandal of the 15th century: Henry's order to murder French prisoners at Agincourt. Shakespeare's play can be seen as scorning the empty-headed jingoism that inflicts so much suffering as the ruler wraps himself in the flag. As Shakespeare writes in "Henry V" about wars of choice:
"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such and such a place,' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared there are few die well that die in a battle."
This is not a flattering comparison, and the words, as Kristof points out, are just as applicable today as they were when first written. Imagine: damned by an author 400 years dead.
Shakespeare, as a member of one of "The Lord Chamberlain's Men," (putting aside questions of his identity and authorship) had his patron's own contemporary political considerations to worry about when he was writing, but managed to interweave a complex political philosophy into his work, nevertheless. It's difficult to write anything and not betray some part of yourself in it, especially when writing about highly charged events, even fictional ones. Complete neutrality in any issue is not only nearly impossible without being a complete hermit, it's also tantamount to amorality. If you are writing about human beings or human behavior, whether disguised as animals as in George Orwell's Animal Farm, or aliens as in Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, you are writing about morality. It may be political morality or personal morality or that grey area where they are often indistinguishable, but it is still morality. Whether constrained from or disinclined to voting or political activism, some political actions beg for an articulate voice, among them war and governmental brutality because they have less to do with politics than with moral actions.
Even those who don't write about overtly political subjects have something to say about the human condition that politicians often find offensive. I'm thinking particularly of Vietnamese poet Hô Xuân Hu’o’ng, an 18th century concubine who “used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and political commentary.” Sneaky, that: here you think you're reading smut and you're getting an op-ed instead. Unless you're not clever enough to see what's going on in the poems, which are also puzzles. The poet must have assumed that only the most clever of her audience would get the joke.
Sadly, this is often the case. Back to Nafisi. In an interview on Bill Moyer's program "NOW," she says,
I remember once I gave a talk on Madame Bovary and of course it was standing room only. I mean, whenever you gave talks on literature it would be almost a riot. People would just come from all over. And it became [a] very heated discussion because some people were making the point that you made. That Madame Bovary is all about adultery, you know?
How could [I] justify—and, of course, there were—critiques written of MADAME BOVARY as an adulterous book that should be banned. And that was our discussion. That you don't read books to be morally led towards the right path. Madame Bovary is not about adultery.
And if I read Madame Bovary I don't become an adulteress. It's like saying that reading Moby Dick would [make you] want you to go whaling, you know? People read in order to look at the world differently.
But aren't books supposed to change one? Yes, but not in a simplistic way. If Madame Bovary makes you want to commit adultery, or think that it's acceptable behavior, you're not paying attention. Literature is not math; the equations aren't simple. This is why books often repay a leisured rereading. This is why literature requires thought and analysis and the time for both.
For years, I was completely mystified by and dismissive of Cubism. As far as I was concerned, it was weird and ugly and a waste of paint and canvas. Picasso had played a colossal joke on the art world. Then I spent some time working with artist Rhonda Roland Shearer, who was writing about the simultaneous revolutions in physics and art at the turn of the 20th century. I was transcribing her the portion of her dictation where she talked about Cubism as an exploration of the discovery of new dimensions. The weird distortions of Picasso's and Duchamp's portraits were two-dimensional (height and width) attempts to illustrate dimensions beyond the third (depth), where the objects would not appear distorted. Ping! After years of mystery, it finally made sense.
Sometimes illumination just requires the right teacher, or the right analogy, or a good, long, heated discussion, an exchange of viewpoints. Sometimes all it takes is receptiveness to a new idea. A change of lighting. Age. Experience.
The willingness to change, to be changed by art or literature.
This is the aim of propaganda, to mold the thinking of those exposed to it. Governments are certainly not above using their own propagandists to further their interests and mold their constituents. Few politicians will say anything in public anymore without a speechwriter, a publicist and a spin doctor ready to hand to reinterpret them if necessary. Think of literature as propaganda for the human race. It might someday come to that.
The phrase "churches should stay out of politics or be taxed" always makes me want to defend against anti-Christian bigotry. But after reading this article I guess we could rephrase it as "churches should stay out of that grey area where political morality and personal morality are often indistinguishable, unless they want to conform to the political morality of being taxed." That's still unsatisfactory.
Posted by: dbabbitt | September 18, 2004 at 06:20 PM
The question is, too, when is personal morality the same as political morality? What happens when, as practiciing religious politician, what your constituents want conflicts with your personal morality, your conscience, e.g., if you're an anti-abortionist and your constituents are not? This is the grey area I was referring to. It's tricky, but not necessarily anti-Christian. I look at it as more anti-political. Historically, the two have never mixed well.
Posted by: Lee | September 18, 2004 at 08:54 PM