cultural impoverishment and war

For some reason, reading a throwaway sentence in Janet Maslin’s NYT review of Gore Vidal’s new memoir [emphasis mine],

Among the many photographs included in “Point to Point Navigation” is a flattering (but of course) picture of Mr. Vidal, in his dashing mid-30s, hovering over “Claire Luce,” as the caption misspells her first name. (It was Clare.)

I was reminded of a passage in Azar Nafisi’s haunting memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Nafisi is describing the period right before the final totalitarian clampdown on Iran by Khomeini’s theocratic revolution [emphasis mine]:

…I walked for about forty-five minutes and stopped by my favorite English bookstore. I went in there on a sudden inspiration, fearful that I might not have the opportunity to do so in the near future. And I was right: only a few months later, the Revolutionary Guards raided the bookstore and closed it down. …
I started picking books up with a greedy urgency. I went after the paperbacks, collecting almost all the Jameses and all six novels by Austen. I picked up Howards End and A Room with a View. Then I went after ones I had not read, four novels by Heinrich Boll, and some I had read a long time ago—Vanity Fair and The Adventures of Roderick Random, Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King. I picked up a bilingual selection of Rilke’s poems and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I even lingered for a while debating over an unexpurgated copy of Fanny Hill. Then I went after the mysteries. I picked up some Dorothy Sayers and, to my utter delight, found Trent’s Last Case, two or three new Agatha Christies, a selection of Ross Macdonalds, all of Raymond Chandler and two Dashiell Hammetts.

I didn’t have enough money to pay for them all. [The bookstore owner said:] Don’t worry; no one is going to take these away from you. No one knows who they are anymore.
Besides, who wants to read them now, at this time?

Why does Janet Malcolm’s scolding about a typo remind me of Azar Nafisi’s realization that her world will come crashing down?

Because a typo ["Claire" instead of "Clare"] isn’t always a typo (as in careless mistake). Sometimes it is the result of the cultural illiteracy, as the Bookseller of Tehran told Nafisi: no one knows who they are anymore.

(Those who forget the past, Santayana famously said, are doomed to repeat it.)

Nafisi continues:

Who indeed [wants to read these authors now]? People like me seemed as irrelevant as Fitzgerald was to Mike Gold, or Nabokov to Stalin’s Soviet Union, or James to the Fabian Society, or Austen to the revolutionaries of her time. In the taxi, I took out the few books I had paid for and surveyed their covers, caressing their glossy surfaces, so giving to the touch.

The curators of the Met show Glitter and Doom know that people like Azar Nafisi and, say, George Grosz, who bravely fought the good fight, are definitely not irrelevant—perhaps especially in times when they are made to feel the most irrelevant.