Instead of finding another current debate in the news, I decided to focus in this post on a fictional debate we've been reading about and discussing in class. In Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author stages a trial for the book The Great Gatsby in her college literature course, hoping to demonstrate the book's merit to students who have reacted to it with hostility.
The prosecution is led by Mr. Nyazi, a student who staunchly supports the Islamic regime in Iran. Nyazi has several objections to Gatsby: first, that it promotes decadent western values in what he sees as a "cultural rape" of the Islamic Republic. Nyazi is particularly offended by what he sees as the book's promotion of adultery. Nyazi also abhors Gatsby's character, portraying his attempts to "earn money by illegal means and...buy the love of a married woman" as the embodiment of an immoral American dream.
Zarrin, a moderate student not associated with any of the class's political factions, leads the defense of Gatsby. Zarrin turns Nyazi's critique of the book on its head, contending that, far from promoting the decadent lifestyle that horrified Nyazi, Fitzgerald's novel is a crushing condemnation of the dishonesty and carelessness of America's rich.
Of the two sides, I found Zarrin's more compelling - we read Gatsby last year, and it certainly did not portray the rich favorably. But Nafisi's point - when briefly given the chance to comment - changed the way I thought about the Gatsby debate: "You don't read Gatsby to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are." For Nafisi, the whole question of Fitzgerald's agenda and the "moral of the story" is beside the point - the goal of literature is not to provide a powerful argument in favor of a particular agenda, but to force readers to think about and deepen their understanding of the issues discussed.
This is obviously a criticism of Nyazi's search for western decadence in Gatsby, but I think it undermines Zarrin's argument as well: the question of whether the book is pro- or anti-rich is more or less irrelevant. The book's merit is not based on whether it took the right stance on important issues, but whether it provided a powerful and insightful exploration of those issues.
