Why Literature?

Why do we read literature?

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am currently reading Reading Lolita in Tehran and a question Azar Nafisi addresses in the book is the question: what does literature offer us? Throughout the book she extols the power of literature mainly as the ability to offer empathy, both to train you to empathize and to understand the world and issues through different lenses. She writes,

A novel...is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience.

So, is that why we read literature, and should it be the only vessel we have to understand the experiences of someone else; not only the writer but the oppressed when reading Invitation to a Beheading or the American Dream when reading The Great Gatsby? And what should we do when confronted with conflicting ideas of what is reality as perceived by two different sources?

An article written by the Washington Post called Sorry, Wrong Chador examines Iranian views of Reading Lolita in Tehran (the few that have had the ability to read it). Many do not agree with Nafisi's take, or think that it deserves updating. It is a powerful book, no one argues that, but if the basic facts are not universal, or even widespread, what do we take from it? There is a endless call for the 'right' story, so how do we choose?

It seems to me though, that more than one story can be correct. Throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran, and many of the books they read, there is a sense that somehow fiction and reality have combined to make something that is true in meaning but perhaps not exactly true in happening. An event, seen from four different sides does not have a right story, it has many different perceived stories. So, the power of literature comes from the ability to communicate those stories, together or separately, and the power for us to understand them. But in order to avoid a story that is one sided, we must take other stories into account, and remember that the true power of literature comes from the words and meanings embedded in them, so that perhaps a spoken version is just as powerful.

We must remind ourselves that a word once spoken, or written, it cannot be taken back, only built upon.

A Conflict of Identity

I have recently been reading Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and a large theme in the book is the ability of someone to have an identity, and to what extent that identity is influenced by those around us. In the book, Nafisi explains that the totalitarian regime of Iran controls so much of the lives of her students and the people she knows that they struggle to form their own identity separate from how they are defined by the government and the world they have created. On page 76, Nafisi writes:

Implicit in almost all their descriptions was the way they saw themselves in the context of an outside reality that prevented them from defining themselves clearly and separately… my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had.

To what extent is our identity based on others in the first place? Psychology has many different answers to this question in the form of different theories, like Erik Erickson’s theory of development and James Marcia’s Identity Statuses (and of course many others). However, the many different parts of a person’s identity (social, political, sexual, religious, vocation identities) each depend on different factors, and some do depend on different people. I think, at least in some ways, other people do help define almost all areas of your identity. However, I think the difference in developing your identity with other people around you, and developing your identity in a country where your actions are controlled by someone else, is the freedom to choose. I have the ability to choose who I know and speak with, what I learn, read, and how I act (up to a certain extreme), but the girls in Nafisi’s Iran do not have that choice. Their every public action is controlled by what other people think they should be, so they cannot act out things the way they want to, and they cannot discover themselves through their decisions. So they are caught in this in-between place where they know what they are not, but do not know what they are. They are caught in this prison, this conflict of identity, and I really do not know how they will escape it. It is a tragedy that people are caught in this kind of situation, and that once they are caught it is very hard to escape.
What do you think?