Reading Lolita in China

I can't help but follow the last post with a brief reflection on two recent reads, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. So skip this post if you're looking to read about anything that has to do with China! :P

"It is only through these empty rituals that brutality becomes possible," Nafisi writes in her memoir on her time in the Islamic Republic of Iran, lived and witnessed through the wide imaginative lenses of literature's finest. Habits, at least those that are hollowly performed, are fatal - in killing the mind, they obliterate reflection and creativity. What then, she seems to be asking, is to stop us from killing? Nabokov's term for this, Nafisi notes, is "poshlust." It denotes the "close relationship between banality and brutality."

An active mind requires much energy, and hegemony's poison, especially when offered in the form of convenience, is awfully tempting for lazy Wikipedia-reliant kids like me. Life would be much too rigorous if each experience was entirely void of familiarity, and certainly there is "good" to be found in tradition. But "good" rituals should be able to withstand our interrogation - they should not collapse from the mere puff of a question.

Nafisi exhibits yet another gem of Nabokov's: "curiosity is insubordination in its purest form." To wonder is to resist.

Later she backs this assertion, which I take to be the underlying "moral of the story," with a quip from Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home."

Fiction opens for us a book-sized window to morality because it "question[s] traditions and expectations when they seem too immutable." And what lies at the heart of morality? Empathy. Empathy allows us to live as someone else - not completely, but enough to make us uncomfortable, enough to provoke curiosity.

Strange how, while reading Nabokov's Lolita, I found myself empathizing with the narrator, a pedophile who lives entirely to rape his 12-year-old step-daughter. To my horror, there I was, internalizing the turmoil of the very character who epitomizes immorality. But this is merely a symptom of Nabokov's brilliance - in revealing the complexity of his characters, his words restore humanity, not only to the non-human Lolita, in her role as an object of perverted pleasure, but also to the inhuman Humbert.

As my students have the habit of saying, "in a word," Lolita is for me an extreme example of the power of the imagination.