The Wall and the Books

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library
Jorge Luis Borges

I read Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran in its entirety on a flight back to New York a couple months ago. Nabokov—he of the strong opinions—said that “only the individual reader is important to me, I don’t give a damn for the group” and insisted that he had never “belonged to any literary coterie” and, perhaps for similar reasons, I have always regarded the idea of the reading group with some trepidation. But something about this tale of a secret Iranian book club where Nafisi and seven of her best students meet to read Austen and Nabokov—the students arriving at Nafisi’s home in black chadors at pain of punishment—was both unputdownable and poignant.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a gabbeh of sorts—cobbled together are tales of the reading group, Nafisi’s life, her students’ lives, the novels they read, Nafisi’s meditations on the novels and their writers—the personal against the backdrop of the political in Iran. Nafisi's “magician” is a recurring presence who adds a strange rhythmic note to the book and plays the role of confidant and mentor. When she tells him that she was afraid that she had created a parallel fantasy, perhaps even an “uncritical, glowing picture of the West” with her reading group, one that countered the fantasy that the Islamic Republic had made of their lives, her magician says to her: “Well, first of all, it’s not all your fault. None of us can live in and survive this fantasy world - we all need to create a paradise to escape into. Besides,” he said, “there is something you can do about it.”
“There is?” I said eagerly, still dejected and dying for once to be told what to do. “Yes, there is, and you are in fact doing it in this class, if you don't spoil it. Do what all poets do with their philosopher-kings. You don't need to create a parallel fantasy of the West. Give them the best of what that other world can offer: give them pure fiction—give them back their imagination!” he ended triumphantly, and looked at me as if he expected hurrahs and the clapping of hands for his wise advice.

This story of a secret book club is almost as old as the oldest stories in the world. As long as there have been books, there have been those who have tried to burn them, ban them and censor them.

The cycle loops backwards. Hard to believe now, but Lolita itself is a book that was banned in earlier times in a less progressive Western world. Nabokov had been unable to find an American publisher and Lolita was first published, in France, by the infamous Olympia Press (named for Manet's painting of his mistress, or, as one critic put it, a “yellow-bellied odalisque”; Olympia creating an enormous scandal when shown in the Paris Salon of 1865 with its nakedness of gaze and the refusal to cast the nude in classical or mythological form. If Olympia were a book it would surely have been burned or banned or both.) This initial publishing of Lolita went relatively unnoticed until Graham Greene praised it in the London Times. A literary brouhaha over the book ensued, the book then banned in both the UK and France and all copies entering the U.S. confiscated. Eventually things quietened down, but the fracas over the book would ensure magnificent sales—Lolita was published in the U.S. by Putnam in 1958 and the book sold more than a 100,000 copies in its first three weeks, staying at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for a year and selling out on the day it was published in London.

My first and only direct brush with censorship occurred when I was ten— I had pulled down a volume of Guy de Maupassant stories and begun to read, only to be told that I was too young (a parental allusion to the moderately racy content) to read Maupassant. I distinctly recall both my sense of affront and the synchronous piquing of interest. Of course, I did as Nafisi's book club did—I read in secret—Maupassant, and also Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The works of Ovid were themselves thrown to the flames in Savonarola’s 1497 ‘bonfire of the vanities’ where pornography and cosmetics were burned along with the paintings of Botticelli and the works of Boccaccio and Dante; Dante, who said: We must recall that the basic principle of liberty is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.

In the third century B.C., Shih Huang-ti, the soi-disant First Emperor of China, burned all the books that pre-dated his rule (except for those on agriculture, medicine and divination)—he was also the first to join together older fortifications to create the Great Wall of China. Borges, one of Nabokov’s favorite writers, found this fact of much interest, and says in his essay, The Wall and the Books, that “burning books and building fortifications are occupations common among princes; what is singular in the case of Shih Huang-ti was the scale on which he operated.” Today China has erected a massive internet firewall—it practices internet filtering and the blocking of sites and aggressively polices online usage.

Before the printing press was invented, burning books was an efficient means of censorship; books were published in limited numbers and were expensive and labor-intensive to produce. But, as Victor Hugo said, the invention of the printing press was ‘the mother revolution’. Ceci tuera cela he proclaimed—this will kill that—the book will kill the forces of tradition, religion and obscurantism.

Book-burning is mentioned in the Bible in Acts 19:19: Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. The Nazis in Germany burned the works of Jewish writers; Heinrich Heine presciently said, “Where they have burned books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” Copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses were burned by Muslims in England and the book was banned in India and several other countries, with the Ayatollah Khomeini, in a fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s death. The fatwa has been revoked, but the book remains unavailable in India.

The recent burning of Harry Potter books by American Christians antedates an earlier era of Comstockery (George Bernard Shaw coined the epithet after his play Mrs. Warren’s Profession was attacked; Mrs. Warren practiced, you see, the oldest profession!) in the U.S., when the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock was responsible for getting Congress to pass the “Comstock Law” in 1873 that suppressed, among others, the works of D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, and censored literature in the U.S. for decades, well into the 1950s.

Galileo is said to have mumbled “Eppur si muove!” even as he was found guilty of the publication of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican in which he alludes to his belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which was contrary to the teachings of the church. And it does move, in the end. History has not been on the side of the censor. Lolita is now freely available, and we have even had two movie versions. Reading Lolita in Tehran resides in turn on the New York Times bestseller list, and one can only wonder at the number of secret book clubs in Iran reading copies of Nafisi. Manet's Olympia now has a home in the Louvre, is establishment itself.

The earlier era of Comstockery in the U.S. may be over we are now in a post-Patriot Act world as the government has built new walls in attempted self-defense after 9/11, walls which include the data-mining of information and the ability to access library records. The important thing now is to ensure that an effective system of checks and balances is put in place to safeguard those personal liberties we cherish so greatly.

15^th September, 2004.

Each quarter, Anita Itty writes on topics of leadership, identity, business & culture for SAWLF. Ms. Itty received an MBA from Columbia University and is the 2003-2004 winner of the First Words South Asian Literary Prize. Ms. Itty lives in New York City where she is currently working on a novel.

To contact Anita Itty, email: aiaddress-sawlf@yahoo.com

Recent contributions from Anita Itty: 

Pattern on Pattern, in Red, September 15, 2005
La Vita Nuova, April 15, 2005
The Elephant in the Room, January 15, 2005
On the Shoulders of Giants, June 15, 2004