Reading Lolita in China

"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-eyed imaginations of literature's finest. Habits, particularly 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 picked out yet another gem from Nabokov: "curiosity is insubordination in its purest form." To wonder is to resist.

Somewhere in the middle of her memoir she backs this assertion, also what 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.

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 - his words are laden with magic - they restore humanity, not only to the non-human Lolita, in her role as an object of perverted pleasure, but also to the inhuman Humbert. Lolita, is an extreme example of the power of the imagination.