'What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth'. Discuss.

Between the ages of about 13 and 15 I was unhappy. Before then I enjoyed primary school or was managing OK with the senior school transition. After that I was busy working on my GCSEs before escaping to sixth form. The reason I was unhappy wasn’t anything particular, it’s just I was a teenager. I was also not very popular, difficult to get along with and acted like I was superior to everyone else. In any case, books were my escape. I think it was in this period that I would read almost one book per day. I remember coming home feeling miserable and lying on my bed with yet another book, escaping.

Books help us deal with reality. Or at least, they seem to give us the impression that there is shape to our lives, that one day we will get to the end of whatever thing is troubling us and move on, in the same way that we know the hero or heroine will win through in the end. I suppose when I was reading fantasy novels I was, in my imagination, also adventuring in ways I never would in real life. My own quest was to finish my five years in secondary school intact.

I’m fairly sure that if I were to read back over some of those novels – mostly a mixture of fantasy novels and novels about children in various wars and conflicts – they would evoke that part of my life. It’s this layering of reality and fiction that I’m finding while reading Reading Lolita in Tehran (Aza Nafisi, 2003). I must have picked it up a few years ago but never got round to reading it until a friend told me how much she’d enjoyed it. I’m about three quarters of the way through and am indeed finding it very interesting, although it’s difficult to know how much of it is fact and how much (especially conversation) is fabrication. It’s about the author’s career teaching English Literature at various universities (and a book group) in Tehran, Iran, during the 1980s and 1990s and is stimulating and heartbreaking at the same time. It did remind me, oddly, of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (2006). This is the story of a young girl, Matilda, who lives on a tropical island where the only white man becomes the teacher and uses Dickens’ Great Expectations as his main teaching aid. Considering Mister Pip was so highly acclaimed (and was nominated for the 2007 Man Booker prize) I was underwhelmed, but I have a feeling that if I had more affection for Great Expectations (my least favourite Dickens) I might have enjoyed it more.

My overall impression is that in Reading Lolita in Tehran it seems that the novels and writers under discussion are being read into the Iranian society of the 1980s and 1990s, whereas with Mister Pip the emphasis seems to be to be on the utter foreignness of the text. It’s completely out of place on the island, and wondering about this other world – Pip’s world in unknown England – is what helps Matilda to escape what is happening in reality. For Azar Nafisi and her students, every novel becomes a starting point for political debate and to illustrate what is happening in Iranian society. Lolita, a young girl whose life and textual voice has been taken away from her, seems to embody the position of Iranian women, with so many rights and freedoms taken away from them. Yet literature is for these women an immense escape. Nafisi describes how, racked with insomnia during night attacks at the time of the Iraqi-Iranian war, she would read. Yet she describes herself as being capable of greater concentration than usual under these straitened circumstances.

Right at the beginning of Reading Lolita Nafisi tells us she warned her students: ‘...do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.’ Yet she admits that “It is of Lolita that I want to write, but right now there is no way I can write about that novel without also writing about Tehran. This, then, is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov’s novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.”

Perhaps C.S.Lewis was right to say that ‘Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it’ after all. Because in the end what we bring to our reading of any text – our beliefs, prejudices, experiences – shapes how we view it and how we remember it, as well as how we experience life itself.

On a lighter note... Literary highlights on stage and screen recently for me have been:

BBC’s new adaptation of Emma. Light and delightful, although everyone is far too beautiful! (Oddly enough I quite enjoy adaptations of Emma although I heartily dislike the book itself and only got through the whole thing with much will-power and at least three false starts)

RSC’s production of Hamlet as shown on Boxing Day in the UK. David Tennant impressed me greatly, particularly by the fact that he genuinely made me laugh. There was something particularly memorable about the grave scenes (the digging of Ophelia’s grave and her burial) for me, although I’m not enough of a Hamlet buff to know why. Of course, when you sit through three hours of something like that, it does make it slightly (and accidentally) amusing to see the majority of the cast die in the last 5 minutes!

A stage production of Flat Stanley (original book by Jeff Brown, 1964) which I went to see this very afternoon with my mum and two of my young cousins. Anyone else remember the story about the boy whose notice board fell on him in the night and made him flat? It was excellently staged and lots of fun, although the fake American accents were a little grating.

"Encore une fois, les photographies de Valérie Jouve ne se contentent pas de répéter l’expérience de l’aliénation urbaine car ce qui fait retour en elle, au titre de « tout juste passé », ce n’est pas seulement la perte de capacité de la photographie à véhiculer le sens, mais celle de l’espace urbain lui-même. Tentatives de se réveiller dans la pénombre de l’instant vécu, elles nous font ressentir la difficulté qu’il y a à appréhender le fait que le domaine urbain ne porte plus, aujourd’hui, d’aspirations à l’expérience individuelle et collective comme il a pu le faire auparavant. Ces aspirations auront finalement été absorbées par la dématérialisation croissante de l’espace dominant des réseaux électroniques, de la technologie des médias et du marketing global."

"Yet again Valérie Jouve’s works do not merely reiterate the experience of urban alienation, for what inheres within them, in the sense of the “just-passed” or the “recently forgotten”, is not only the capacity of the photographic image to convey meaning, but urban space itself. Like trying to awaken to the blindness of the lived moment, one senses in these works the difficulty of grasping the fact that the urban realm no longer carries with it all those prior aspirations of individual and collective experience it once did. For those aspirations have finally been absorbed in the increasing dematerialization of the dominant spaces of electronic networks, media technology, and global marketing.”


OK, so is it just me or does this make no sense? I've just been exploring this artist's work (along with Mohamed Bourouissa and Denis Darzacq, who are great - especially Darzacq's La Chute, if you like photography check it out) for a French module I've been taking and had an exam on, mainly focussing on how contemporary French artists look at la banlieue (French inner cities is the closest I can get to describing it, but they tend to be on the edges of the city) which actually turned out to be pretty interesting. However, I don't think I'd be alone in saying that jargon such as the above (quoted from the 'blurb' in the sleeve of a book of Jouve's work I borrowed from the library) is really offputting and unhelpful for those of us not well-versed in art and photography.

I read an article in The Independent the other week which was really interesting (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/days-like-these-to-like-a-work-of-art-you-have-to-know-something-about-it-this-worries-me-1419196.html) about the appreciation of art. The columnist has gone to the Tate Modern in London to see the Mark Rothko exhibition with an intelligent friend and, after considering the colours of the works, 'I remembered reading a quotation from Rothko himself, which added to my discomfort: "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point."I didn't like the feeling that I was being judged on my reactions by the artist himself. My educational background is in literature where, by and large, once they've published a thing, authors leave you to your own devices. It's up to you what you get out of it. And yet here was an artist from beyond the grave telling me that even though I liked his paintings, the way I liked them was wrong.'

Blurbs like this in art books have the same impression on me. It's not just that they make no sense (if anyone manages to work out what's actually being said in the quote above, please let me know!), it's that there's supposedly a particular way to interpret them. While I was complaining about this the other day, a friend pointed out that poetry is exactly the same - only interesting and meaningful for the initiated. I think I've tried to show before that this needn't be the case. I believe that good poetry should have something about it that goes beyond metaphor and form, that touches people's hearts and minds because the words themselves connect with the memories and experiences of the reader. I think this was William Wordsworth's aim, expressed in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798). His idea was to take his experiences and emotions and put them into poetry in such a way that any person could read it and relive what he had experienced. I don't know how successful he was in this but I like to think that everyone can find a poem that tugs at something within them.

This has been quite long, but I leave you with an example of a poem that many people who have been in love for a long time find it fairly easy to relate to, Shakespeare's sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.