Master Magician

“Who is he?” is probably the first question your mind formulates upon reading the subject title. The referenced magician is so spell-weavingly adept that not once does she claim to be a magician, yet she has masterfully cast a spell of illusion upon the world’s literary community.

She is Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. I offer these comments about her book not as a review so much as “Cliff Notes” for those who have read the book in its one-dimensional, literal presentation and found the topic interesting, while simultaneously finding it written and organized at a level non-representative of an acclaimed university professor of literature. One reviewer bluntly called it “surprisingly, disappointingly, dull.”

(As an aside -- for those of you wondering how discussion of this book fits into any of the “metamagical themas” this site represents – I submit that the book is all about illusion. What could be more magical than illusion?)

Back to Nafisi: I won’t belabor what most reviewers think the book is about (see http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/n... to get an idea) because each of those reviewers completely missed the book’s depth and compelling theme. Granted, the theme was well camouflaged, as befitting a master illusionist. Despite the lengthy trail of clues Nafisi left so readers could find “her,” no reviewer deduced that Nafisi was the book’s magician character. The book is a memoir, you say, she wouldn’t just invent a character! What if the character was real to her? What if the magician was one aspect, one face or personality of the many (read split) personalities she affected behind the veil, and who presented himself publicly via the safest way she could muster -- in book form?

With introduction of the magician (Part I, Chapter 9) she advances the theme: everything is illusion. Nothing is as it seems. With one swoosh of her veil, she makes him appear or vanish from the page (which causes some of the fragmentation consternation). She develops the theme blandly, almost muffledly -- as if she were speaking through the voice of one suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and living amongst millions of countrymen also suffering from PTSD. Or is it an illusion that only the ‘good guys’ get PTSD and should receive empathy accordingly? As typical of PTSD sufferers, she invented a fictional world to help her cope with the harshness, arbitrariness, and vagaries of ‘reality’. To protect her fragmented inner self, she can only describe the horrors of surviving eight years of bombings on her city of Tehran -- sometimes listening to and feeling the shock waves of 14 bombs a day while sheltering her two young children in the hallway -- by speaking through the neutral voice of a reporter. You notice a more animated voice when she describes her teaching experiences – her first love.

This is where her allegory gets dicey. Once we ascertain that Nafisi is the magician, we have no recourse but to question all the other characters in her book, especially her cast of book club participants. Although any psychoanalyst worth his/her salt would have figured it out immediately, Nafisi’s book club women could easily be aspects of herself – just as the magician is the self she brings to the front when needing guidance. Nassrin, the emotionally strong person of the reading group, could have been the foundation of Nafisi’s Sibyl-like personality. Azin may represent the wounded Nafisi who hid from the world the beatings she suffered from her previous husband(s).

Nafisi had to reinvent herself as a veritable troop commander in order to orchestrate an eventual escape from the mental and physical imprisonment her government had imposed. The veil became the symbol, the flag, around which she would rally her troops, her sanity. She often said she was made to feel irrelevant by her government, so she built her armor and defense mechanisms by modeling her commander after one of her hero Nabokov’s characters who said, “I want to be forgotten; I am not a member of this club.”

If in fact her book club students existed, it is probable that these former students of Nafisi’s gathered together independently of her and fabricated the ruse of the book club because they knew it would help Nafisi survive her bout with insanity. These former students would have loved and respected her, and wanted very much to repay her for all she did for them as their instructor.

With this new multi-level perspective, you begin to see a closer parallel to her acting as the character of ‘the book’ in “The Great Gatsby” trial, to her very acting as the character of the book in her own book. Fiction takes on an entirely new ‘reality’ – reality takes on an entirely new fictionality.

In essence, this is a tale about how the horrors of war made a very intelligent woman half crazy, and how she coped by developing the strategy of her ‘heroes’ -- the great writers she so loved -- of turning her arbitrary world into a world she could control via fiction. As they say during times of stress, “Whatever gets you through the night.” For her, survival came down to feeling. She turns to her hero Henry James for guidance: “Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and inspiration.” She knew on some level that feeling would stir up empathy and would remind her that life was worth living.

With this new perspective, I no longer judge the book on its less-than-painterly writing, I evaluate it as I would “The Diary of Anne Frank” or Sibyl, or any memoirs of an “alternatively sane” person. Nafisi had similar coping mechanisms to Anne Frank – she wrote letters to friends and never sent them, wrote out “two quotations about James’ wartime experiences for Nassrin, but I never showed them to her.” Why? Were these people even ‘real’? That becomes irrelevant under the book’s theme.

Even though the Iranian expatriate is now a professor at John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, Nafisi continues to wear a veil – the veil/mask of arrogance (see her photo at http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews...). But perhaps now we can be more understanding of her continued need for the defensive posture, as well as her Scheherazade-like weaving of tales intended “to break the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement.”