In both Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran there is a general overriding conflict. That is the clash between the world one creates in her own head and the real world of actual things and events that never ceases to intrude upon the private world that one creates for herself.
Literature and reading enable one to both know more about the actual world and to build upon one's own private world through the use of fiction. In Lolita Humbert is constantly alluding to the world of mythology when discussing his desire for young girls. Humbert also displays an extensive knowledge of actual past societies when he describes common sexual practices between adults and children in times past. In Reading Lolita in Tehran Nafisi's girls use the fiction of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and Henry James to try to create worlds within their minds that are ameliorative to the everyday indignities and cruelties they live through as women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. These fictitious worlds, however, are constantly being intruded upon by the actual world and so a blend of the ordinary and the cruel world is created. This is referred to as "posh-lust" by Nabokov. The Islamic Republic also builds its own fantasy world through the use of popaganda and ideology in order to justify its seduction and rape of Iranian society. The Islamic Republic uses ideology to shape its own version of the actual past in which the government of the Shah was entirely Evil and so the structure of society must be torn away.
In the same way, Humbert often uses references to mythology when attempting to explain or justify his lust foir and rape of underage girls. Humbert uses his concept of the "nymphet", a clear reference to mythology. Humbert describes nymphets as maidens between the ages of 9 and 14. The nymphets, in the warped world of Humbert's mind, live on "an enchanted Island....surrounded by a vast misty sea." This clearly is a reference to the mythical Sirens who tempted sailors at sea with song. Humbert depicts the nymphets as non-humans there to simply serve blind lust and satiate his "super voluptuous flame permantly aglow." If a nymphet is simply a myth and not a person, then to have sex with her is not the vile act of rape and the theft of a young girl's future, but the playful act of a carefree Pan or Puck, dancing through the forest having his little mymphs as it pleases him. Afterall, a myth has no past, no future and therefore no present meaning, no reality. In myth one is free to play and act upon impulse.
Humbert not only uses mythology to justify his actions but also references to the past and present real worlds. He states Virgil, "probably preferred a lad's perineum", referring to the Greco-Roman world's instances of man-boy sensual relationships, although more common among the Greeks than the Romans. From the relative present, Humbert mentions the Young Person's Act of 1933 in England where the term "girld-child" is defined as a girl beteen the ages of 9 and 14. Here we see Humbert cloking the outrageous action of the rape of a young child in the respected cloak of English Common Law!! It is the combination of the horrific and the banal, posh-lust to the extreme.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran Nafisi's girls use fiction, especially that of Nabokov's Lolita to try to build a private world that explains the public hell they live in the Islamic Republic. Nafisi states that her girls (her students) discussed Lolita and the "discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys." The girls, as stated by Nafisi, had not LOST a normal life, they ALWAYS lacked a normal life. The girls had never lived before the Islamic Republic. Therefore, they lacked any real-life reference points to the make-believe reality portrayed in Lolita and the other novels they read. The world they read about in the novels, "would turn into something more pure and golden than it ever was or will be." This is the reason that Nafisi is quite adamant that her girls are not like Lolita. These girls could never imagine living life in the consumerized nation that the USA had become even by 1947 (the year Lolita is set).
So, the reality of the Islamic Republic is never separate from the world of the novels that the girls read. To fully place themselves in the world of the novel, as the reader can do in a sane nation not driven by ideological fantasies, is impossible for the girls. The pervasive nature of the regime makes this impossible. This is shown when one of the girls goes on a Caspian Sea trip with her girlfriends. She is castigated by her own family for doing this. The regime has so embedded in the peoples' reality that they become its willing enforcers and executioners. A simple road-trip to a beach, part of a normal life that one might see in a novel, is not possible. The regime, through its lack of respect for the Rights of its citizens, has invaded not only the girls' real lives but also any world of the imagination they had created for themselves through fiction. The ideologically horrific mixes with the normal and Nabokov's posh-lust oozes forth. As John Stewart Mill understood, societal conformity is a stronger and more pernicious force than legal conformity. The State could wither away but the People would still chain themselves to its corpse.
The Islamic Republic busies itself creating its own myths to justify its subjugation of the Iranian people. The myth of the Islamic Republic is best represented in the mind of Mr. Bahri, a radical Islamic student leader. In the Islamic Republic, "a philosopher-King ...had decided to impose his dream on a country....to re-create us...." Mr. Bahri has completely bought into that vision, even though he is intelligent and young. He tries to shape Nafisi into the kind of person he thinks an "Islamic teacher" should be. In the person of Mr. Bahri we see how not only the ignorant are influenced by ideological myths, but the intelligent as well.
The Islamic Republic uses old-fashioned real-world ideological propaganda in addition to its dreams and myths. When the Iran-Iraq War began the Ayatollah Khomeini state, "this war is a blessing for us." "War" and "blessing" being related to each other only makes sense in an atmosphere where ideas have become ideologies. The idea of war is its reality: killing and human suffering. The ideology of war is the advancement of the Islamic Revolution. The killing and suffering is but a means to an end. War is the health of a State in permanent revolution.
We can thus see clearly the difference between ideas and ideologies. The former is promoted through the normal institutions of a free country designed to separate the world of the mind and fantasy from the world of reality. In such a country fiction is possible. Living in one's own mind is possible and therefore Art is possible. This writer can think of no better definition than this of a "free" society. In a totalitarian society, like the Islamic Republic, ideas become solidified into ideologies, the Tyranny of the Idea. The great flowing river of conversation that has a past, future and therefore a present is dried up in the mass chant of the unquestionable "truth": the ideology.
It is Lolita who desperately seeks to maintain the idea of herself and not to succumb to Humbert's ideological notion of her as the nymphet chained to his loins. It is Nafisi's girls who vainly to maintain the idea of themselves as independent women as more of their fellow Iranians fall to the ideology of the Islamic State.
Ideas are the great product of the power of the human mind. Ideologies are the great perversion of that power. It is this notion of the perversion of power through the seduction of ideology that is the common thread of Nabokov's Lolita and Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. It is this perversion that twists the individual person into a category, ready to be counted, collated, questioned, and if necessary destroyed all "for the greater good." Perhaps this is the common thread that in many ways renders our modern world so tragic.
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