_____________________ The Rule of the Bus by
Cynthia Ozick [excerpt]
In her covert seminar, Nafisi's retort to these
depredations was literary generalship. Her allies were Nabokov, Fitzgerald,
James, and Austen--each of whom yields a powerful refraction of internal freedom
and cultural despotism, of autonomy and usurpation. "The desperate truth of
Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man," Nafisi
argues, "but the confiscation of one individual's life by another.... Nabokov,
through his portrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other
people's lives." __________