Saturday, December 08, 2012

Freudian overkill...

...The Iranian unconscious
In the event, Homayounpour’s title echoes that of a decade-old book by another returnee from the US – Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. An Iranian-American academic, Nafisi wrote Lolita about a private English literature class she had taught for women in the early days of the revolution. The book flattered American readers because it suggested that Iranian women have a great affinity to the American novel and long, like Nafisi’s characters, to live in the West. It was hugely successful.
Homayounpour’s view is more complicated. She is good at describing the distance between the exile and the country to which she returns. In America she had drifted around in a penumbra of exoticism. Now, with her francophone painter, she discusses “the loneliness, the individualism, the lack of human relationships” in Western society and the horrendous fantasy of dying and rotting unnoticed behind the doors of a Paris apartment.
Firstly, Reading Lolita in Teheran was successful not because Iranian women were shown to have "a great affinity for the American novel," but because it showed the power of literature to act as a rebellious force in a totalitarian setup. (I reviewed Nafisi's other book, Things I Have Been Silent About here -- and it takes forward from her first.) Second, if indeed Nafisi's book was guilty of caricaturising Iran to the extent that its elite bow to the West, does the critic here not fall for the same trap by reducing the West to an abyss of "loneliness, individualism, lack of human relationships"? Advice to critic: Be wary of vanilla ideology, lest it shows you the other cheek.

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