I've often said I collect experiences. I think that a person's life is made of the stories they have to tell. The tongue-in-cheek saying is, "he who dies with the most toys wins," but I think it's more accurate to replace "toys" with "stories."
The tagline in my blog says, "Stories only happen to people who can tell them." This is a quote from a novel by Allan Gurganus, entitled
The Oldest Living Civil War Widow Tells All, and I drew a bit of fire when I first posted it. What, said a friend, so if we're not storytellers, nothing interesting ever happens to us? No, I said, I think it means that story-worthy things happen to everyone, but only story-tellers notice and do something about it, which is the only way other people know they're stories.
A favorite author of mine, Lois McMaster Bujold, calls her readers her "invisible partners," and talks about her books being "a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours...The book, therefore, is only finished when somebody
reads it."
Between these two ideas about stories fall Bell's and Pavlenko's observations on the importance of narrative in discovering how individuals create and re-create their personal and cultural identities. By becoming storytellers, we can explore ourselves and reflect on our experiences. By sharing our stories with an audience, we can co-construct a shared narrative of culture. A story is only a story if it's told, and it's only complete when it's shared.
As it happens, I read
Reading Lolita in Tehran last year, knowing nothing of either Nabokov or the Iranian Revolution. Aside from the literary and historical gleanings, my chief recollection of the book is that I found it hard to tell the characters apart. At first I attributed this to not being used to the Iranian names--but I read fantasy fiction, where people are named things like Belgarion and Anduriel. Then I thought perhaps it had to do with Nafisi's writing style, and the shifts in the timeline, since the middle two sections are flashbacks to the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. As I kept reading, however, I started to wonder, if Nafisi was deliberately blurring the lines between her female characters in order to make a statement about the oppression of Iranian women during this period: that, perhaps, the donning of the veil, whether voluntary or not, made them all outwardly alike, and likely to blend together in the eyes of outsiders.
If my surmise is true (though I suspect I'm reading too much into what was merely lazy reading on my part), I can certainly see why Fatemeh Keshavarz would take exception to the idea that people like me might take Nafisi's book as the gospel and only truth of Iran the 80s and 90s. She is correct that it "does not demand that [its] reader know know a lot of information about the context." However, I don't think she's just in claiming Nafisi's experience to be inauthentic or misprepresentational. Nafisi experienced what she experienced, and felt what she felt about it, and reported her experiences and feelings as accurately as she could, in a style and manner that seemed appropriate to her. Keshavarz complains that books like Nafisi's are eyewitness accounts, but the interviewer notes that in
Jasmine and Stars we meet members of Keshavarz's family, which sounds as if she also is giving an eyewitness account. I'd have to read the book to determine how her eyewitness account differs from Nafisi's.