Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi

Narrator

What is it about television that so numbs the mind and robs the person of life experience and true knowledge, when a book, also ‘accomplished’ by laying on the couch is not detrimental, but in fact one of the best things you could do?

The author makes the point that what Fiction gives us is imagination—the ability to imagine a world better than we currently have. An imagination that can step outside of our current circumstances and judge… Only literature can give the person the ability to truly see other worlds. These other possibilities can only be explored in their requisite depth in the written word. Only through reading can one learn.

At the risk of repeating what has often been said by better writers is that the reason television cannot provide the same depth of content as in a book is the aspect of engagement. When one is reading a book (truly reading, not merely letting the words gloss your eyes) you are engaged in the book. The reader is intellectually, emotionally, and physically engaged. This engagement is figurative and actual. To read is to be exercising discipline on a host of levels, not a few of which are physical. Yet while watching television or a film, the stimulation is almost completely external. The viewer is a passive spectator allowing the images and sounds in front of them to dictate the direction and speed of the drama.

In a book the reader reads at his own pace. The reader is able to pause on a paragraph, a sentence, a word even, and just let it be absorbed. The reader can think for whole hours on a single line (as many often do when reading Dostoyevsky or some other great author), while when watching television, the program zooms ahead at breakneck pace. After all, they need to fit the entire episode (introduction, body and conclusion) into thirty or sixty minutes (a period of time, mind you that is greatly reduced by commercials). There is no time to pause, no time to think things over, and no time to be critical at any substantial level, other than perhaps reflecting on your feelings after the show is over on how it made you ‘feel’. But even this cursory reflection is quite rare. The entire television edifice is built on speed to foster continued and recurrent viewing: as soon as one show ends DON”T TURN OFF YOUR TV cuz we have another easy and carefree program cocked and ready for easy digestion.

This lack of requisite ‘engagement’ is the flag of warning echoed in each of the famous social prophecies, 1984, Brave New World, and most poignantly Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

So what are we to say to the respondents who claim, “tv makes me think”, and “well, what about documentaries and movies like Schindler’s List or Born Into Brothels?” My response to “tv makes me think” is rudely simple. Anyone who makes the claim tv makes me think is not thinking enough.

My response is three-fold in reference to the Schindler’s List crowd. First, the percentage of films that achieve the depth and importance of SL is dismally small. Second, my point by this is not to defame any and all film viewing or even television watching. To do almost anything once in a while (once a week, or something of the sort) is likely part of a healthy lifestyle. But the reality is that most people who this essay is directed at watch far more television than they are even likely to admit to themselves. Third, as important and dynamic as SL and BIB are to cinema there are whole slews of books on the same topics that will arguably inform and emotionally move the reader even more than both movies combined. SL was a book before it was a film in the same way that the Nazi “final solution” was the systematic destruction of millions of Jewish families before it was a historic “lesson” studied in history class under the title of Holocaust.