READING RORTY IN TEHRAN: Finished Azar Nafisi’s new autobiography, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Highly recommended. Nafisi was a professor of English literature in Iran, who grew up before the Revolution; lived through the Ayatollah’s rise to power, the Iran/Iraq War, and the aftermath; taught an underground literature class for women; and recently immigrated to the US. The book would be fascinating for her life story alone. Her eye for detail and her sense of pacing (especially noticeable in the first sections of the book) only add to the attraction. She occasionally overwrites, like many of her favorite novelists (paging Mr. Henry James, Mr. James, please meet your party at the information desk), but generally she keeps the ol’ lush rhetoric and abstraction-mongering in check.

My larger problem with the book was a philosophical one. Nafisi comes pretty close to endorsing the view of literature that Richard Rorty espoused in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Nafisi makes her case much better than Rorty did, in large part because she’s a more careful reader (please don’t get me started on CI&S;’s bizarre attempt to draft Philip Larkin into Rorty’s sweetness-and-light-brigade). But the basic stance is the same, and while its attractions are obvious it’s got several huge problems.

The basic idea is that literature gains much of its value from the way it enlarges our sphere of sympathies. We learn to really listen to people who are very different from us; we learn to eschew cruelty by thinking, not of “how would it feel if Billy did it to you?”, but of “how did it feel when they did it to your favorite character?” Reading fiction enlarges our imaginations; specifically, it makes us imagine the inner lives of other people, and so it makes us more reluctant to hurt them, more willing to allow them space in which to carve out their own lives.

Nafisi often puts this in terms of dreams: The Islamic Republic imposed its own, utopian-totalitarian dream upon its subjects, just as Humbert Humbert imposes his dream of Lolita on Dolores Haze. Both, by imposing their dreams by force, act with great cruelty. Eventually the victims’ own dreams are all but replaced by the dreams of the oppressors; there is some space for the victim to maintain some selfhood, but not much. Nafisi often talks about the way her students could barely imagine themselves outside the hated constraints of the Islamic Republic–the ayatollahs left their fingerprints all over her students’ imaginations.

It’s obvious that this insight is true. My trouble is that it is only part of the truth. Here are four reasons to be wary of the Nafisi-, and especially of the Rorty-, view of literature’s role in our lives:

1) Literature is a complex beast that can have all kinds of effects on its readers, some less savory and less gentle than the ones Rorty and Nafisi describe. For example, many people who love literature retreat into it for an escape from the world; such people have a very hard time forgiving the actual, everyday people around them for not being as deep and meaningful as the characters in books. Reading fiction can be a means of shutting oneself away from other people, retreating into dreams that destroy the possibility of full connection and sympathy with others.

2) If you turn to literature to enhance your empathy, you are very likely to find that your empathy is only enhanced toward the kind of people who are empathetic in literature! In other words, your empathy and your desire to provide help will be most fully engaged for articulate, insightful, writerly, or intriguing people–and none of those characteristics, I note, is a moral characteristic. The most articulate and interesting person in a dispute is not guaranteed to be right. Moreover, these people already have natural advantages–after all, they’re articulate and interesting! Do they really need you to work hard at engaging your sympathy on their behalf? What about the unpleasant, the dull, the puritanical, the narrow-minded? Should the world really be organized to promote the comfort of the articulate at their expense? (Anyone who has known lots of avid readers can probably tell you that this is a real temptation–the temptation to favor Our Kind Of People and to reject charity and mercy toward anyone else.)

3) Rorty and Nafisi get around this difficulty in part due to the particular writers they champion. For example, by making Humbert Humbert an articulate and writerly type, Nabokov heads us off at the pass and makes us reconsider our instinctive readers’ empathy for the eloquent artist type. But even at its best, when the sphere of empathy is most expanded, Rorty’s position becomes a matter of reducing the suffering of all those vast hordes with whom we now empathize. Because there is no guiding standard of value, no overarching telos, our only empathetic response to others must be a desire to reduce their suffering. When two empathized-with beings conflict, again, we have no standard by which we could side with one over the other except which action will provoke the least suffering.

But that is just utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is one of my recurring nemeses on this blog–here, you can read about it in the context of fighting terrorism with torture. Here it is w/r/t Peter Singer. We need some way of justifying the many honorable acts that can lead to suffering; and we need some way of knowing what it means to do right by someone, not merely to do what will be least painful to him, or what he wants.

4) That brings me to the final problem–the idea of the individual dream. Nafisi, yet again, is careful here–check out her section on The Great Gatsby for a nuanced treatment. You can feel her desire to affirm the sanctity of the dream and the romantic individualist, as well as her deep concerns and uneasiness with that affirmation. But in the end, the frequent references to dreams in the memoir make me pretty sure that she does end up affirming individuals’ self-contained (i.e. not imposed on others) dreams and acts of self-creation.

And that’s hugely problematic, since so many of our dreams are self-destructive or self-deluding. It’s not enough to just refrain from cruelly imposing our visions on someone else; what if someone we love is trapped in a self-destructive or self-deluding dream? Is there any standard by which we can say which dreams are genuinely self-destructive? Is seeking to free him from a self-destructive or self-deluding dream an imposition on his individuality? If so, is that acceptable? If it is not acceptable, then I don’t really see how love–or even friendship–can be acceptable, since lovers and close friends seek to do what’s best for one another, not merely whatever the other person wants. Lovers and close friends necessarily leave their fingerprints all over each other’s imaginations, and interfere with each other’s dreams, though they do so for motives far removed from the motives of the ayatollahs. Acting with love toward another person requires a standard that goes beyond individual perversities of desire and dream.

So. Philosophically, Nafisi’s book is flawed. But as a memoir of a literary life, and as a memoir of life in revolutionary Iran, it is hard to imagine how it could be better.