The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  I won’t be able to get out of this myself. I’m sending you my manuscript. You can finish the work however you’d like. Stick to what you know. As for me, I will return to playing in verse. I would have liked to deliver it to you in person as I’d originally planned, especially since I could have told you more about it. There are still so many things that I couldn’t squeeze in anywhere or introduce any kind of inner logic to without upsetting the rules and standards. But it’s precisely these rules and standards that refuse to accept all those other things that happen to form them. So many precious fragments of life are lost when you try to turn reality into art.

  Yes, I’m sure you would have been happier—I know I would have been—if I had brought the manuscript myself. Three years have passed since that evening when you took me to the train station. I miss the old days when we used to sit in the cafés on La Canebière until late at night. Needless to say, I miss my family, too. Whenever I think of my mother, my heart aches, but there is also a sense of fear when I think that in that city is a hidden force that can render me powerless. I packed my bag and was about to leave, but I felt I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave without at least seeing Nicole once more. I’m going to stay here. As soon as I leave work, it would be enough to spend entire days in the Jardin du Luxembourg waiting to meet her. I’ve been going for eight days, but so far there has been no sign of Nicole. I wonder if this is the reason why I unknowingly packed the events into the last pages of my manuscript, bringing everything to a neat ending. Is it possible to imagine the fateful convergence of all the characters in my manuscript happening in one day, having them reach a conclusion one after the other—like a group unexpectedly rising up to topple a tyrant—had it not been for my own exhaustion? Don’t you think that literary work is like a tyrant? That it constrains us and takes us prisoner? Now I understand. So that’s how it is. Who could have imagined? Do you see what can happen downstairs when you’re busy upstairs? Look how it happened. At the last minute, intent on freeing himself from the tyrant, the prisoner hastily organized everything, brought it to a close, giving each one its share, and came here to the Jardin du Luxembourg to wait and dream of Nicole, who seems to be my freedom. I’m breathing. I’m breathing now and yet I feel a new weight on me, some kind of yoke that might disturb my peace. Don’t disturb me while I wait for Nicole! I’m afraid that I’ve inherited the inclination to wait from Vahakn, too. When you read my manuscript, you might wonder how that kind of inheritance could have such an ending. Maybe it’s not the same, but it’s close. Do you see the mess your friend has fallen into? Of course, reason tries to save the day and shine light through the haze, to think about the part imagination was able to play in the most recent events. What? Is all of this imagined? What about Arshalouys? At least Arshalouys! How can we believe that she is anything but the product of my overactive imagination? If you had been here, you could have gone to my room and seen for yourself that Arshalouys actually existed. There is no doubt in my mind, even though I escaped like someone fleeing a bad dream. But she is in front of me at this very moment: alive, real, about medium height with a dark complexion, as thin as the flame of a candle with fiery black eyes that consumed my own as she said, “Ah, you’ve forgotten. My God, how quickly you’ve forgotten!” There’s still more. If words can trick us, then how can we deny my seeing the unusually strained tendons on her long neck? As I was about to leave, Arshalouys, visibly upset, yelled after me, “Don’t leave me alone! Please, I beg you.” I left nevertheless. I left like a coward. I know, what use is regret when the fact is that I fled like someone running from a house in flames? Before leaving, I told the concierge that my sister would be staying in my room until I came back from my trip. No, what I said wasn’t a lie. Isn’t my quest to find love a kind of trip? The roads I’ll take are the most unfamiliar and the most mysterious. All the countries of the world seem familiar when compared to the country of love, where we walk through memories left over from books and school desks, whereas with love, “Who knows how to read the heart?”22

  I was at the entrance of the Jardin du Luxembourg about to go in with Arshalouys’s plea still ringing in my ears, when I turned around. Do you think I went back to Arshalouys? No, I didn’t want to be rude to Hortense and leave without a proper goodbye. And besides, I had another reason to see her.

  Fortunately she agreed, perhaps figuring that she would be leaving a door open. I told her that I was going to visit my mother. Arshalouys would replace me until I came back. I didn’t keep my plan from her. By having Arshalouys work with Apkar, who knows, maybe the two of them would one day . . . ?

  From Hortense’s apartment, I went to Arshalouys to tell her the news. It was quite late. I knocked on the door gently with the knuckle of my middle finger. My heart was trembling. If I tell you my hand was trembling too as I knocked on the door, don’t doubt it. A few hours before, I had rushed out of that door like a coward. It’s hard to come back to a place where you know you have done wrong, especially knowing that I would find Arshalouys, overcome with grief and miserable because of me. I couldn’t arrange the words in my mind, not knowing if they should be used to repent or console. I ultimately didn’t know what I should say. The door opened right away. The key was in the lock where I had left it. It seemed that Arshalouys was waiting for me.

  “I was sure you’d come back,” she called out, clapping and throwing her arms in the air.

  Of course I was happy. I was happy that Arshalouys wasn’t overcome with grief or miserable. But I hoped from the bottom of my heart to see her eyes flood with tears. I wanted to be moved by her sobs, so that I could break through the regret accumulating in my heart by lavishing kind words on her, exhausting my reserves in search of words that would bring a smile to her face, while all that was left to hear was a parched reality: an overjoyed Arshalouys.

  “Arshalouys,” I said. “Tomorrow morning I’ll come to take you to where you’ll be working. I’ll be here at five-thirty.”

  The following day, I brought her to the hotel. True to his misogyny, Apkar welcomed her with his usual crudeness, but still eagerly took charge of helping her adjust to the job.

  If you want, you can find a place for this somewhere. At any rate, the truth is that both Apkar and Arshalouys were happy: one to be of use and the other for having gotten a job the very day she arrived in Paris.

  Yours,

  Minas Yerazian

  Summer 1965

  [END]

  * As he was writing these lines, Minas didn’t know what he would learn and write down later. See the section on the Cercle National des Armées. That day, Vahakn was completely broke.

  Afterword

  Zareh Vorpouni’s The Candidate

  Testimony, Sacrifice, and Forgiveness

  MARC NICHANIAN

  Translated from the French by Jennifer Manoukian and Marc Nichanian

  Forgiveness and Testimony

  Published in 1967, The Candidate (T’eknatsun) is one of the most representative novels of the Armenian diaspora and allows for the greatest understanding of the singular figure of the survivor, who never ceases to haunt imaginations in the endless aftermath of the genocidal event. The novel is forthright and impressive, the product of the blood, sweat, and tears of its author, Zareh Vorpouni, who spent nearly forty years writing it—forty years of silence, and therefore powerlessness, after the publication of the first volume in his projected series of novels, The Persecuted (Halatsuatsnerë). The first volume, The Attempt (Pordzë), was published in Marseille in 1929.1

  In the interim, Vorpouni published And There Was Man (Yev Yeghev Mard) in Paris in 1964 to break the silence between novels as well as the silence of mourning that he carried despite himself. And There Was Man was praised by its few readers, who saw it as signifying a shift in how the genre of the novel had been practiced by the Armenian-speaking diaspora, which was essentially limited to the Armenian communities of the Middle East. With And There Was Man, Vorpouni had finally mustered the strength to put the Arm
enian mother and the French woman side by side in a cemetery—a crude juxtaposition whose charm has never dissipated in the minds and culture of the survivors of the Catastrophe. He laid bare the mathematical law for their shared, reciprocal dominance over the Armenian psyche and heralded the arrival of a new diasporic man, cleansed of his contradictions and indulgences, released from the indelible mark of the recent past, and prepared to accept the foreign in him.

  The series of novels, however, was put on hold. Vorpouni needed to return to his first project to finally confront the obstacle he had continued to face during all those years of silence. In the end, why had he decided to embark on a series of novels as a young man? He certainly had Marcel Proust in mind, a legendary example for a burgeoning novelist, but there is very little in common between Vorpouni and the author of In Search of Lost Time. Vorpouni’s novels have a strong psychoanalytic dimension and their relationship with time is entirely determined by the nature of the catastrophic event. They complete the difficult, if not readily apparent, task of demonstrating that the temporality of the catastrophic event is situated beyond the historical understanding of time and, therefore, naturally beyond the grasp of historians. The catastrophic event is independent of or seeks to free itself from their grasp. But these two observations about the psychoanalytic dimension of Vorpouni’s work and the temporality of the event do not argue in favor of Proust’s influence. So why did Vorpouni begin this project as a young man? The question can easily be reversed. How could we have known that the time of mourning and the time of forgiveness had been pulled out from under us forever? How could we have known if that collapse had not been recorded in a piece of writing or in a body of work? In order for it to be recorded, the long gestation period of a series of novels was required.

  The “time of mourning” is a familiar concept. Through reading the work of Zabel Essayan and a few others, we might even understand that the genocidal violence of the perpetrator begins with a persistent yet implicit will to forbid mourning in the victim, and that, in more peaceful times, once the moment for reconciliation has come, it also continues, in a way that is not any less persistent, through a general manipulation of mourning.2 The process undertaken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the state of exception that has reigned for several decades in Turkish Kurdistan have given us good examples of this kind of manipulation.3 The same cannot be said about the time of forgiveness. We know nothing about it and do not concern ourselves with it very much. In an excerpt from 1921, Walter Benjamin describes this time of forgiveness as a “tempestuous storm . . . that precedes the onrush of the Last Judgment against which [it] cannot advance. This storm is not only the voice in which the evildoer’s cry of terror is drowned; it is also the hand that obliterates the traces of his misdeeds, even if it must lay waste to the world in the process.”4 Forgiveness, then, is superhuman. But without the time of forgiveness, no matter how inhuman or superhuman, and no matter how destructive, there would be no humanity. The victims and the survivors of genocidal will may have been deprived of this human superhumanity. It is true that we have been deprived of the time of mourning. But maybe we have also been deprived of the time of forgiveness, or at least of the capacity to forgive. In this way, the genocidal will of the perpetrator has been transformed into a catastrophe for the victims and for the survivors, which explains why “Catastrophe” (in Armenian, Աղէտ [Aghet]) is the only proper name that suits the event. But it is a name suited for the future. It will return at the end of the time of forgiveness, even if the entire universe must be laid to waste in the process. The Catastrophe has not yet reached us. Consequently, Vorpouni’s plan for a series of novels assumed a private agreement with time in hopes that one day everything would make sense and with the expectation that the turn and return of the Catastrophe would coincide with the time of forgiveness.

  The following analysis of Vorpouni’s work will resemble what I have called elsewhere a “phenomenology of the survivor.” Vorpouni could not have known from the beginning that the phenomenology of the survivor was at the heart of his undertaking, that it was what he was expecting from himself as a novelist, that it was where the novel would lead him, or that it was what the novel was expecting from him. The survivor was demanding a series of novels. I examine how this idea operates by focusing on this particular novel in the series, The Candidate, which restarted the machine in 1967. Who, then, is the survivor? The survivor must first be understood as the dead witness. But he can also be understood as the one who has been deprived of the time of forgiveness. In any case, forgiveness would require the acknowledgment of what there is to forgive. As a dead witness, the survivor is perfectly incapable of this acknowledgment. By killing the witness in the victim and rendering him incapable of mourning, the genocidal perpetrator has also rendered him incapable of forgiveness. Here the perpetrator has stripped the victim of his humanity once and for all. How can I forgive the very act that has rendered me incapable of forgiveness?

  In this strange phenomenology of the survivor, the one who speaks, writes, describes, and dictates what is to be written is the dead witness. Because all of these elements will occur in a novel, it is the dead witness who will justify the novel as a framework, as an echo chamber, and as an instrument of reception. He will be the candidate of the novel and for the novel. The injunction to write—which is not quite an injunction to tell—will come from the dead witness and will form his legacy, the only legacy that he can leave. Because there is a survivor testimony in the middle of The Candidate, it is the very act of bearing witness that will become an object of examination, forcing us to repeat a question that we have asked on many other occasions: What do all “real” narratives—those that are not literary testimonies—bear witness to? What do all the narratives that we call testimonies, in which survivors recount their journeys, their odysseys, their suffering, the death of their relatives, and their painful returns, bear witness to? Since they claim to bear witness, they do not originate from the dead witness. Should we infer from them that it is possible to bear witness? What are they bearing witness to, exactly? What are they really doing? What purpose are they serving? What hidden injunction are they responding to? By putting a survivor testimony in the middle of a novel, Vorpouni examines, for the first time, the intimate, conflicting relationship between novelistic and testimonial narratives. He examines this relationship from within literature and therefore without unnecessary questions. As the heirs to his work, we are now the ones asking the questions.

  A Three-Tier Structure

  The Candidate is written largely in the third person and its narrator is the same Minas who appears in the other volumes of The Persecuted series. At the end of The Attempt, Minas had fled Marseille, leaving his mother’s corpse on the floor of their kitchen. In a fragmentary way, with constant temporal cracks within the narrative, the new novel recounts Minas’s encounter with Vahakn, another young Armenian, in 1927 on the streets of Paris; the friendship that unites them; the life they share for five months in a musty hotel room; their conversations with Ziya, a young Turkish student who came to study in Paris; Ziya’s murder at Vahakn’s hands; and Vahakn’s suicide one month later. The novel begins immediately after the suicide with a letter from Minas to Vahakn’s supposed fiancée Arshalouys to inform her of Vahakn’s death. As a secondary theme, the novel also describes Minas’s sexual awakening through his boss, Hortense. In the middle of the novel is a letter from Vahakn to Minas explaining the reasons for the murder he committed and for his suicide. The letter forms the core of the novel because it sets the narrative in motion. It can be read as a survivor narrative—one among thousands of others—but it is the only survivor narrative situated at the center of a novel.

  First, we must discuss the status of the narrative within the novel, that is, within the other narrative that Minas offers about the production of Vahakn’s “original” narrative. But the explicit structure of the novel forces us, at the same time, to examine the status of tes
timony in general, not only within the novel. This call for examination is unique in Armenian literature and perhaps beyond it.

  As previously mentioned, the external narrative of The Candidate was written almost entirely in the third person, seemingly by Minas, the narrator. In contrast, Vorpouni wrote The Attempt entirely in first person. In The Candidate, the few shifts from the third person to the first person are explained in a passage toward the end of the novel: “The main problem was not having a plan. For eight days, I’ve been trying to make my pen dance across the page. I shouldn’t rush, but how can I not? From the day I conceived of the idea, I’ve had no rest. . . . It had never crossed my mind that I could one day express myself in prose,” says Minas. He decided to write Vahakn’s story. Minas is a poet and readers are led to believe that he has never written prose before. This revelation indicates that Minas did not write his story in the first person in The Attempt. Someone wrote it for him and turned his story into a novel. This seemingly anodyne remark is essential, and we will discuss its importance later on.