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Reading Lolita in Tehran in a new light
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EDNOTE. Sandy Klein forwards a link to a politically provocative analysis of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. I have excerpted the parts of this very lengthy essay which deal most explicitly with Nafisi's book, Nabokov's novel, and the baggage carried by the name "Lolita." Interested subscribers may wish to read the essay in its entirety, which includes images of Nafisi's cover and the news photo and paintings discussed. See link below. -- SES]
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm
Native informers and the making of the American empire
Al-Ahram Weekly - Cairo,Egypt
Hamid Dabashi
[. . .] ONE MAY ALSO ARGUE that this act of collective amnesia accompanies a strategy of selective memory -- two pathological cases that in fact augment and corroborate each other. A particularly powerful case of such selective memories is now fully evident in an increasing body of mémoire by people from an Islamic background that has over the last half a decade, ever since the commencement of its "War on Terrorism," flooded the US market. This body of literature, perhaps best represented by Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), ordinarily points to legitimate concerns about the plight of Muslim women in the Islamic world and yet put that predicament squarely at the service of the US ideological psy-op, militarily stipulated in the US global warmongering. As President Bush has repeatedly indicated, the US is now engaged in a prolonged and open-ended war with terrorism. This terrorism has an ostensibly "Islamic" disposition and provenance. "Islam" in this particular
reading is vile, violent, and above all abusive of women--and thus fighting against Islamic terrorism, ipso facto, is also to save Muslim women from the evil of their men. "White men saving brown women from brown men," as the distinguished postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak puts it in her seminal essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" [. . .]
[ . . .] As all other acts of propaganda and disinformation, Reading Lolita in Tehran is predicated on an element of truth. The Islamic Republic of Iran has an atrocious record of stifling, silencing, and outright murdering secular intellectuals, while systematically and legally creating a state of gender apartheid. But the function of the comprador intellectual is not to expose and confront such atrocities; instead, it is to take that element of truth and package it in a manner that serves the belligerent empire best: in the disguise of a legitimate critic of localised tyranny facilitating the operation of a far more insidious global domination--effectively perpetuating (indeed aggravating) the domestic terror they purport to expose.
BECAUSE THE NATURAL domain for the operation of comprador intellectuals, true to the origin of the term in facilitating commercial transactions, is the middle class morality of their host country (now mutated into an empire), innuendo and insinuation are among the principal tropes of their operations. By far the most immediate and intriguing aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran is its cover, which shows two female teenagers bending their heads forward in an obvious gesture of reading something. What exactly is it they are reading, we do not see or know. Over their heads we read "Reading Lolita in Tehran." The immediate suggestion is very simple. The subject of the book purports to be reading Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" in Tehran, and here are two Iranian-looking teenagers in their headscarves reading (one thing or another). The two young women appear happily engaged with what they are reading, and they do so in such an endearing way that solicits sympathy, and even evokes
complicity. What better picture to represent the idea--leaving it to the imagination of the observer that they are indeed reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita ? Right? Wrong.
A moment of pause on this cover begins to reveal something entirely different. Under the banner of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the image and the caption put together--in a classical case best read and analysed by Roland Barthes in his magnificent essay on "The Photographic Message"--suggest the tantalising addition of an Oriental twist to the most notorious case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Both as social sign and as literary signifier, the term "Lolita" invokes illicit sex with teenagers. The covered heads of these two Iranian teenagers thus suggestively borrows and insidiously unleashes a phantasmagoric Oriental fantasy and lends it to the most lurid case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Under the rubric that he called a photographic paradox, Barthes gave a brilliant diagnosis of how such imitative arts as photography "comprises two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the matter in which the society to a certain
extent communicates what it thinks of it." (Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," in A Barthes Reader. Hills and Wang, 1982: 195-198).
The denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are reading "Lolita" in Tehran--they are reading ("Lolita"), and they are in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that--illicit sex with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran ? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of the suggestion--as with astonishment asking, "can you even imagine reading that novel in that country?"--competes with its overtly Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged against a phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just castrated the two totem poles of the US empire in New York.
One of the most common clichés of the desirable Orient is the under-aged men and women, staged in numerous Orientalist paintings . Sir Frank Dicksee's "Leila" (1892) and William Clarke Wontner, "Safie, One of the Three Ladies of Baghdad" (undated) are among the most immediate archeological traces of the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran, itself a photographic updating of a long tradition in Orientalist painting.
Equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture postcards of young Algerian women--staged, produced and bought by the French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in The Colonial Harem (1995). In his study of these colonially manufactured photographs, Malek Alloula has demonstrated how the pathological colonial phantasm generated and sustained what Barthes has called "the degree zero" of photographic evidence to represent and own the colonised body. I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage "girls" and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.
The evident act of provoking this colonial trait on the cover of Azar Nafisi's book is not the end of what this cover does. There is more, much more, to it. In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing twist on Roland Barthes' binary opposition between the denoted and connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into
a colonial harem. [. . .]
IN PROVIDING HER SERVICES to the predatory empire, the comprador intellectual does her or his share to normalise the imperial centre and cast its peripheral boundaries as odd, abnormal, and grotesque. Nafisi writes about the oddity of reading "Lolita" in Tehran as if its reception in the United States or Europe has been a piece of the proverbial cake. The book and both its film adaptations have been systematically banned or boycotted since its original publication in France in 1955. Nabokov could not even find a US publisher willing to take a risk with "Lolita." By 1954, at least four publishers had turned Nabokov down. He finally took his book to Europe and consented to Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press--the publisher of such pornographic titles as "White Thighs," "With Open Mouth," and "The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe"--to publish only 5,000 copies of "Lolita."
Until Graham Greene took "Lolita" seriously and published an interview with Nabokov, no one in Europe or the US was willing to review the book. Greene's endorsement outraged the British public. John Gordon, editor of Sunday Express, called "Lolita" "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." The British Home Office ordered the UK customs to confiscate all copies entering the United Kingdom and pressured the French Minister of the Interior to ban the book. In 1962, when Stanley Kubrick released his adaptation of "Lolita" he faced the censorial policies of the Production (censorship) Code of Hollywood and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency. Years later, in 1998, when Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" was released he was skewered by the conservatives in both the US and Europe. The 1994 Megan's Law in New Jersey, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1995, and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in 1996 were all back in public debate casting the odds against
Lyne's "Lolita."
As a literary work of art, Nabokov's Lolita has endured much praise and condemnation, uses and abuses the world over--and casting the evident oddity of reading it in Tehran is nothing but exoticising an otherwise perfectly cosmopolitan literary scene--a scene consistently distorted and ridiculed by Azar Nafisi. [. . .]
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm
Native informers and the making of the American empire
Al-Ahram Weekly - Cairo,Egypt
Hamid Dabashi
[. . .] ONE MAY ALSO ARGUE that this act of collective amnesia accompanies a strategy of selective memory -- two pathological cases that in fact augment and corroborate each other. A particularly powerful case of such selective memories is now fully evident in an increasing body of mémoire by people from an Islamic background that has over the last half a decade, ever since the commencement of its "War on Terrorism," flooded the US market. This body of literature, perhaps best represented by Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), ordinarily points to legitimate concerns about the plight of Muslim women in the Islamic world and yet put that predicament squarely at the service of the US ideological psy-op, militarily stipulated in the US global warmongering. As President Bush has repeatedly indicated, the US is now engaged in a prolonged and open-ended war with terrorism. This terrorism has an ostensibly "Islamic" disposition and provenance. "Islam" in this particular
reading is vile, violent, and above all abusive of women--and thus fighting against Islamic terrorism, ipso facto, is also to save Muslim women from the evil of their men. "White men saving brown women from brown men," as the distinguished postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak puts it in her seminal essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" [. . .]
[ . . .] As all other acts of propaganda and disinformation, Reading Lolita in Tehran is predicated on an element of truth. The Islamic Republic of Iran has an atrocious record of stifling, silencing, and outright murdering secular intellectuals, while systematically and legally creating a state of gender apartheid. But the function of the comprador intellectual is not to expose and confront such atrocities; instead, it is to take that element of truth and package it in a manner that serves the belligerent empire best: in the disguise of a legitimate critic of localised tyranny facilitating the operation of a far more insidious global domination--effectively perpetuating (indeed aggravating) the domestic terror they purport to expose.
BECAUSE THE NATURAL domain for the operation of comprador intellectuals, true to the origin of the term in facilitating commercial transactions, is the middle class morality of their host country (now mutated into an empire), innuendo and insinuation are among the principal tropes of their operations. By far the most immediate and intriguing aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran is its cover, which shows two female teenagers bending their heads forward in an obvious gesture of reading something. What exactly is it they are reading, we do not see or know. Over their heads we read "Reading Lolita in Tehran." The immediate suggestion is very simple. The subject of the book purports to be reading Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" in Tehran, and here are two Iranian-looking teenagers in their headscarves reading (one thing or another). The two young women appear happily engaged with what they are reading, and they do so in such an endearing way that solicits sympathy, and even evokes
complicity. What better picture to represent the idea--leaving it to the imagination of the observer that they are indeed reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita ? Right? Wrong.
A moment of pause on this cover begins to reveal something entirely different. Under the banner of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the image and the caption put together--in a classical case best read and analysed by Roland Barthes in his magnificent essay on "The Photographic Message"--suggest the tantalising addition of an Oriental twist to the most notorious case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Both as social sign and as literary signifier, the term "Lolita" invokes illicit sex with teenagers. The covered heads of these two Iranian teenagers thus suggestively borrows and insidiously unleashes a phantasmagoric Oriental fantasy and lends it to the most lurid case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Under the rubric that he called a photographic paradox, Barthes gave a brilliant diagnosis of how such imitative arts as photography "comprises two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the matter in which the society to a certain
extent communicates what it thinks of it." (Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," in A Barthes Reader. Hills and Wang, 1982: 195-198).
The denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are reading "Lolita" in Tehran--they are reading ("Lolita"), and they are in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that--illicit sex with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran ? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of the suggestion--as with astonishment asking, "can you even imagine reading that novel in that country?"--competes with its overtly Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged against a phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just castrated the two totem poles of the US empire in New York.
One of the most common clichés of the desirable Orient is the under-aged men and women, staged in numerous Orientalist paintings . Sir Frank Dicksee's "Leila" (1892) and William Clarke Wontner, "Safie, One of the Three Ladies of Baghdad" (undated) are among the most immediate archeological traces of the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran, itself a photographic updating of a long tradition in Orientalist painting.
Equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture postcards of young Algerian women--staged, produced and bought by the French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in The Colonial Harem (1995). In his study of these colonially manufactured photographs, Malek Alloula has demonstrated how the pathological colonial phantasm generated and sustained what Barthes has called "the degree zero" of photographic evidence to represent and own the colonised body. I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage "girls" and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.
The evident act of provoking this colonial trait on the cover of Azar Nafisi's book is not the end of what this cover does. There is more, much more, to it. In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing twist on Roland Barthes' binary opposition between the denoted and connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into
a colonial harem. [. . .]
IN PROVIDING HER SERVICES to the predatory empire, the comprador intellectual does her or his share to normalise the imperial centre and cast its peripheral boundaries as odd, abnormal, and grotesque. Nafisi writes about the oddity of reading "Lolita" in Tehran as if its reception in the United States or Europe has been a piece of the proverbial cake. The book and both its film adaptations have been systematically banned or boycotted since its original publication in France in 1955. Nabokov could not even find a US publisher willing to take a risk with "Lolita." By 1954, at least four publishers had turned Nabokov down. He finally took his book to Europe and consented to Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press--the publisher of such pornographic titles as "White Thighs," "With Open Mouth," and "The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe"--to publish only 5,000 copies of "Lolita."
Until Graham Greene took "Lolita" seriously and published an interview with Nabokov, no one in Europe or the US was willing to review the book. Greene's endorsement outraged the British public. John Gordon, editor of Sunday Express, called "Lolita" "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." The British Home Office ordered the UK customs to confiscate all copies entering the United Kingdom and pressured the French Minister of the Interior to ban the book. In 1962, when Stanley Kubrick released his adaptation of "Lolita" he faced the censorial policies of the Production (censorship) Code of Hollywood and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency. Years later, in 1998, when Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" was released he was skewered by the conservatives in both the US and Europe. The 1994 Megan's Law in New Jersey, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1995, and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in 1996 were all back in public debate casting the odds against
Lyne's "Lolita."
As a literary work of art, Nabokov's Lolita has endured much praise and condemnation, uses and abuses the world over--and casting the evident oddity of reading it in Tehran is nothing but exoticising an otherwise perfectly cosmopolitan literary scene--a scene consistently distorted and ridiculed by Azar Nafisi. [. . .]
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm