Azar Nafisi on Literature and the West

The Financial Times has a pay-per-view interview of Ms. Nafisi, whose book Reading Lolita in Tehran is an NYT bestseller in one of my favorite restaurants, the Tabard Inn in downtown DC.

Ms. Nafisi says it all in the following sentence: "In Iran, the regime sees western literature as decadent and morally corrupting --- it cannot see literature for what it is." Then she described her amazement when she found people in America parroting the same Edward Said propaganda which says that western writers are "unconscious agents of an imperial project that sought to portray eastern cultures as natural subjects of the west."

Nafisi notes: "What some of these liberal American critics have in common with the mullahs is that they only see the writer and not the writing. They do not understand that great literature transcends time and place. We do not read Jane Austen to find out about the French Revolution. We read her to gain insights into the petty jealousies and vanities of humanity."

Nafisi is amazed also at the culture of celebrity and the worship of sound bites that attest to the staccato ADD-nature of American pop political culture. Nafisi quotes Saul Bellow:

"in totalitarian cultures moral choice is easier in a perverse sort of way. You see the repression and the torture and you know what you feel. But in a democracy there is an atrophy of feeling.....We have to fight against it. It is in many ways just as difficult."

Edward Luce sums up the interview:

"...in a city that occasionally appears to forget there is a world out there that exists independently of America's view of it, the opinions of people such as Nafisi should be heard more often. They should also be listened to without presupposition."