Reading Lolita in Tel Aviv: terrorism, fundamentalism and the novel

Abstract

This article commences with a reading of the Iranian academic Azar Nafisi's ‘memoir in books’ Reading Lolita in Tehran. The book is an appealing defence of the critical and ‘democratic’ aptitudes instilled by canonical Western literature. It shows how the ironical and dialogic forms of the novels of, for example, Jane Austen and F Scott Fitzgerald succeed in reproving the Islamic Republic's hostility to dissent and ambiguity. But Nafisi has little sense of how the democratic form of the novel might also censure the similarly unbending and even fundamentalist certainties of Western power, which escape censure in her book. Indeed, one of the article's principal aims is to explore the radical implications of Nafisi's thesis about the democratic and undiscriminatingly critical nature of the novel form. The Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra's The Attack (L'Attentat) does not stop at assailing the inflexible dogmas of the West's approved enemies, in this case Palestinian terrorists, but also accentuates and deplores the no less terroristic violence of the Israeli state. The result is not a novel that encourages sympathy for those who commit acts of non-state terror, let alone one that seeks to justify their crimes, but a work that, to the contrary, adds a political and historical context to terrorism's affective impact precisely in order to create a space for comprehensive moral and political judgements. The formulation of universalist judgements is presented as the raison d'etre of postcolonial criticism, the remit of which can be clarified by paying close attention to the forms of those novels that contest the violent self-certainty and identity-thinking of both state and non-state terrorism.