The Ethics of Speaking about Pain: A Dialogue between Azar Nafisi and Henry James

Abstract This article offers some thoughts on the ethical manifold in speaking about others’ stories and pain, where there is an inevitable tension between the need to narrate a traumatic situation and the impossibility of narration. In Reading Lolita in Tehran; A Memoir on Books (2003), Azar Nafisi bears witness to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and its effect on people’s lives, while keeping a close eye on Henry James’s personal life and works. Facing difficulties in narrating suffering in the said period, Nafisi brings Henry James to the scene not merely because of his position as an author, but because, like herself, his life collapses in the face of, and due to, war in his narrations. This essay is a parallel analysis of speakability and unspeakability, thus staking out the framework within which both Nafisi and James unfold their ethical position in speaking about pain in the “other.”