Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The ayatollahs are

In its insistence that art can offer both a courageous alternative to and escape from ideological tyranny, Nafisi's work recalls that of Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie -- for whom the conflict between fiction and Iran's religious fascism is far more than theoretical. Her understanding of fiction as both a set of values and a rejection of all ideology echoes a passage from Kundera's book-length essay "Testaments Betrayed." He writes, "[F]or me being a novelist was more than just working in one 'literary genre,' rather than another; it was an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion." Nafisi shares with Kundera and other cynical humanists the belief that literature contains too many multitudes to fit within any political absolutes.

So these two authors, Satrapi and Nafisi, have different sets of peers, and different influences. Yet it's inescapable that the one influence they share -- the influence of the secret Tehran that rebels against religious despotism -- binds them together.

Neither book says how widespread this rebellion is, or to what extent it extends outside the intellectual circles in Tehran. Still, both books give hints that a defiant mood is spreading in that city. Nafisi writes of the growing obsession with Western culture in Tehran in the 1990s -- "James, Nabokov, Woolf, Bellow, Austen and Joyce were revered names, emissaries of that forbidden world which we would turn into something more pure and golden that it ever was or will be ... I would like to believe that all this eagerness meant something, that there was in the air, in Tehran, something not quite like spring but a breeze, an aura that promised spring was on its way ..." "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and "Persepolis" might be augurs, then, of a larger social current.

Because of the intertwining themes of the two books, reading them together enriches the experience of each. In fact, they share more than just ideas: Both stories pivot on some of the same public incidents, so that similar scenes appear in each, told from different angles and in different styles, revealing different facets of a shared history.

In each book, being forced to wear the veil comes to symbolize all that women have lost in post-revolutionary Iran, so that in protests against the veil, the characters' very souls seem to be at stake. Nafisi writes, "Publicly, I was involved in what I considered to be a defense of myself as a person. This was very different from my political activities during my student days, made in behalf of an unknown entity called the 'oppressed masses.' This was more personal."

The scene recalls a stark frame in "Persepolis" in which four women in chadors face off against four women in modern dress. The women wearing chadors have their eyes shut and noses smugly upturned, and they chant, "The veil! The veil! The veil!" Their opponents, brows set angrily, retort with "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" Later, rereading "Persepolis," Nafisi's words about the emotional difference between fighting for ideals vs. fighting for your life helps explain Satrapi's mother's determination when, after keeping her daughter away from the demonstrations against the shah, she brings her to the equally dangerous protests against the veil. When her husband objects, she says, "She should start learning to defend her rights as a woman right now!"

In each book, defiance is expressed through art. For Nafisi, of course, that rebellion is literary. It's shared by the diverse group of women she teaches at her private, secret seminars, some of whom are quite religious but sickened by the regime. It's one of the devout girls who parodies the famous opening sentence of "Pride and Prejudice": "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife."

Satrapi, meanwhile, finds rebellion in new wave music -- a rebellion encouraged by her mother, who knits her a sweater full of holes and makes her a necklace of chains and nails. In one scene, after she's nearly imprisoned for wearing "punk" shoes, she dances in her room to a bootleg Kim Wilde tape, singing along to the lyrics "We're the kids in America," which is, needless to say, not the anthem the ayatollahs imagined for the children of the revolution.

Then again, it's not the anthem Satrapi's family would have imagined, either. Of all the melancholy themes that intertwine "Persepolis" and "Reading Lolita in Tehran," a sense of revolutionary betrayal is perhaps the strongest. After all, the revolution didn't simply descend on these families. Idealistic leftists, they struggled for it, joining with the Islamic fundamentalists in the name of anti-imperialism. There's an adorable frame in "Persepolis" in which Satrapi and two friends, pretending to be Fidel, Che and Trotsky, denounce the monarchy at a demonstration in the garden in front of her house. It was supposed to be their revolution.

Next Page: "The ease with which the far left shades into the far right"

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