Minas is writing because he is obeying Vahakn’s injunction, which drives him. The first time we encounter this injunction, Minas is sitting at an outdoor café, the same café where he used to sit with Vahakn: “It was at a moment like that when he was forced on me. Just like that, with no warning. From outside, he was thrown inside and stayed there, expanding, imposing himself, and my will became his will. He said, ‘Write!’” From this moment on, Minas begins doing two things at once: he resists Vahakn’s will and obeys it. That said, he is astonished by his actions and questions himself. Why write, he says, “a personal issue [that could not] possibly interest others.” He is looking for reasons and excuses. It is not as if he is refusing to write. On the contrary, he wants to write, but he wants to write independently of Vahakn’s will. He wants to write by evading the injunction to write. He says, for example, that people cannot keep their thoughts to themselves without going crazy. In this idea, he has found what allows him to justify writing: “The meteoric rise of thought in solitude is exactly how people give themselves over to madness. But I don’t have any intention of going mad. This is why I want to write. Not because it was Vahakn’s wish, but because when I turn to him sitting outside at the Billard and look at his demanding eyes, they tell me, ‘Write!’” He even finds a number of other reasons to write: to get the reader on his side, to go beyond the subjective point of view, to universalize, to create interest, to give purpose to the written word, or even to give it meaning, “But not Vahakn’s message—no.” He resists and justifies the act of writing to himself. He does not want to obey the injunction, but he eventually yields. It is then that he records in his notes the project he has in mind and the apparent structure of the entire book: “Here is Vahakn’s letter. It will be the axis of the piece, around which the characters in the story must be gathered, because what is being told is, after all, a story.”
Let’s suppose that we are reading Minas’s notes in the first person—his reflections, his doubts, his decisions—and that they naturally find their place in the remarks and narratives that revolve around the central element. But this simple structure is complicated and faces an added twist when Minas suddenly mentions “Zareh,” seemingly Zareh Vorpouni, who has become a character in his own novel. He could be the author of The Attempt, in which he told Minas’s story but added absurd and outlandish incidents, which leads us to a reflection on the art of the novel. “Zareh’s mistake shouldn’t be made. Those arbitrary, contrived notations must be avoided. I had an argument with him about it back then. He knows just as well as I do that he did it deliberately. The incident under the bridge was made up. Nothing like that ever happened, since he was the one who paid my travel expenses and the only one who knew about my escape.”
Minas broke free from the writer who created him, mustered the courage to confront him, criticized his literary choices, and corrected them, if necessary. The final episodes in The Attempt—all of which relate to Minas’s escape and form a strange ballet of mourning, writing, and sex—are declared fictional by the fictional character of Minas. “How could it be that after having naïvely squandered the money I got from selling my books on prostitutes I didn’t even sleep with, I shamelessly used that beggar to satisfy my lust and then steal her modest savings?”
But when Minas discusses and corrects Zareh’s writings, which deal with his own character’s biography in the novel, it is certainly Vorpouni who is correcting what he had written forty years earlier. And if this structure were not complex enough, it is complicated even more in the final pages of the novel in which Minas writes a letter to Zareh asking him to put his notes in order and, accordingly, to become the editor and the publisher of the book. Once again, the letter deals with the art of the novel and with the need to go beyond banal, conventional methods of novel-writing. These are Minas’s concerns and there is every reason to believe that they were Vorpouni’s concerns as well: “What interests me is the story of Vahakn’s inner world, but what do I see? I see that what I’ve written is something else entirely, if it isn’t just ‘La Marquise sortit à cinq heures.’ Everyone thinks they know why the marquise leaves. This failure saddens me, but also gives me the chance to reconcile with you. It was precisely because of that failure that I didn’t like the first book in your The Persecuted series. . . . 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.”
We now clearly have a three-tier structure. Vahakn kills himself but leaves a testimony that explains his act. Minas inherits the manuscript letter from Vahakn as well as a pressing need to save the testimony from oblivion and give it a semiliterary existence, which means that, by itself, the testimony would not have had an audience. It could not play its role as testimony. It would cancel itself out. Together with the manuscript, Vahakn’s experiences have to be saved and emphasized. The survivor is not enough in and of himself. Minas not only receives the letter that will function as testimony; he also clearly receives the injunction to complete it by adding a truthful narrative and providing context. Minas completes his task conscientiously, but it is Zareh’s responsibility to have these notes organized and published. With the help of this three-part structure and the transformation of author into character, Vorpouni writes into the novel not only his idea of writing as a constant process of retouching, but also the very injunction that originates from the survivor.
Vahakn, Minas, and Zareh: aren’t all three survivors? Why arrange this complex interplay of transmissions, injunctions, and orders to render the testimony of a survivor readable? Let’s suppose for a moment that Minas’s notes had to be stamped as art to create an audience for them. Without this stamp, they would have been abandoned. But such an explanation seems rather simple to clarify the passages between Vahakn, the murderer/survivor whose suicide coincides with the murder he commits; Minas, the amanuensis of the survivor who receives the injunction to write; and Zareh, the actual novelist who organizes the notes and signs his name to the book. It is implicit that the role and function of testimony are at play here. Secondarily, but logically, literature itself is at play as a form that shelters testimony within itself, whether it is hidden or obvious. Readers are caught in the back and forth between them, in the double and reciprocal questioning of testimony and literature.
The Issue of the Signatures
What would have happened if Vorpouni had been satisfied with a two-tier structure, if he had only kept the pair of friends, Vahakn and Minas, and eliminated any reference to Zareh? The heir to the survivor would have kept the testimony in his notes and talked about himself in the first or third person. In using the first person, he would have taken on the role of narrator in the conventional novel. Readers would not have necessarily understood that even the pages written in the third person were his own. The story would have coincided with the story they were reading. The novel itself would have been the heir to the dead witness. The reader, not Zareh, would have been the third tier in the three-tier structure. And since Vorpouni did not entirely master his own novelistic invention, at times he gives the impression that Minas is addressing the reader without Zareh as the intermediary—the final signatory, the one called “the author.” In these passages, the book takes on the structure of a conventional novel; for example, when Minas reflects on the difference between life and the novel by criticizing novelists who do not respect the incomplete nature of life as Zareh does and by recognizing that the narrative has to stop at some point. Here he addresses the reader, saying: “How do we reconcile these two conflicting stances, dear reader—my friend and enemy?” In this instance, Minas is the writer and the author of his work. But we know that this is not the case. When Vahakn tasks Minas with writing, he certainly does not want to make Minas into a novelist. He wants to make him into the heir to his testimony. In fact, he does not want anything at all. It is the testimony that transforms Minas into its heir and keeps him under its yoke. Before the suicide, he and Vahakn were joined by friendship. After th
e suicide, they are joined by testimony, by the strange necessity of bearing witness. After Minas collects his notes, he does not work on them as a writer or an artist. He works on them as an heir and as a subject: an heir to a testimony and a subject to its injunctions.
It is true that Minas is a poet in the novel, but he is a poet independent of the function assigned to him by the survivor. This is why, in the letter he writes to Zareh at the end of the novel, he adds: “As for me, I will return to playing in verse.” Minas is not going to sign his work with his own name. He sends it to a third person to sign it: Zareh. Indeed if it is true that Minas is writing to Zareh, “[You can] organize [this work] as you please,” in the novel, Zareh does not come to the fore in his own name. We do not know if he has done anything more than sign it. We do not know and have no way of knowing how he has changed Minas’s writing and rearranged it to his liking. The assumption is that he did not change it at all, that he published it just as he received it. All he had to do was sign it. Of course, this issue of the signature is quite central. And to make the ambiguity or uncertainty surrounding the signature more apparent, Vorpouni ended the novel with a letter from Minas to Zareh. Minas’s signature—“Yours, Minas Yerazian”—is followed by “Summer 1965” and then “End” in brackets. We can assume that Vorpouni himself put the finishing touches on the novel in the summer of 1965. But the final signature of the novel is Minas’s signature. We can always read the pages we are given as if Minas himself were their author. In fact, he is the author. This approach might be seen as formalistic, but it touches on what is at stake at the heart of the novel. Behind the interplay of signatures is the status of this testimony and of testimony in general. Behind the status of testimony are the nature of the catastrophic event and the terrifying question of forgiveness, implicitly lingering, forever awaiting our attention. The three-tier structure and the interplay of signatures force us to ask ourselves: Who is the author of a testimony? As suspected, it is what we assign the strange name testimony that is at play here. The purpose of this mise-en-scène is for us to ask ourselves: What is a testimony? How does it function? How is it structured? How does it come into being? What does it require to exist in general as testimony? What does it require of us? The novel is the beginning of a perfectly unexpected response to these questions. In one way, it says that what we call testimony demands and supposes a link—both as an injunction and as a legacy—with the suicide of a survivor, then with a dead witness. In another way, it says that testimony comes into being through an odd exchange of signatures and that it presumes this exchange in all cases, even in the most ordinary testimonies or in those written by the highly literate, who sign their work with their own name without any ambivalence, murder, or suicide. There are many conclusions to be drawn from this state of affairs regarding the reflection on forgiveness. But neither the link to the dead witness nor the issue of the signatures would have appeared, been recorded, or invited reflection without the three-tier structure.
Two transmissions, two dispatches, and two injunctions are henceforth needed to create a testimony. The second dispatch, from Minas to Zareh, highlights the issue of the signatures, but we must begin by examining the first dispatch, the one sent by Vahakn and received by Minas. We have already said that Minas is an heir to Vahakn, that he is his legatee. He inherits the testimony and the will (or the necessity) to write. The word “legacy” appears for the first time when Minas sees his boss, Hortense, staring at him at the hotel where he works. “‘Vahakn’s legacy,’ he muttered under his breath.” The reflections that follow highlight how Minas and Vahakn are interchangeable. It is the necessity of the dispatch that differentiates them in the same way that Minas and Zareh are only differentiated within the three-tier structure by the necessity of another dispatch. The day Apkar came into the Billard and announced that the hotel needed someone, Minas came forward: “He had even been afraid that he might have lost the job to Vahakn if he hadn’t been fast enough.” Driven to act by “a hostile urge,” Minas takes a position intended for Vahakn, condemning Vahakn to his parasitic fate. If Vahakn had begun working at the hotel instead, he would have effectively been saved. Hortense would have taken charge of him, she would have turned him into a man, and “because only Hortense knew how to turn a boy into a man, Vahakn had remained a boy.” This is what Minas thinks. “If he hadn’t acted so imprudently that day, Vahakn would still be alive because of Hortense and her ways of preserving a man’s dignity. He was the one responsible for Vahakn’s death. . . . Here he was, upstairs in the big hall on the first floor where Vahakn should have been.” It is clearly a question of exchange and interchangeability—one instead of the other. Here the idea of legacy appears for the second time in an overwhelming way: “This is how he became the heir to the poorest Armenian on earth, who left him an immeasurable legacy.” For the moment, the inestimable legacy is life and the chance to become a man by taking possession of Hortense. But it is already clear that Vahakn is Minas’s perfect inverse. He is the one who dies so that Minas can live. In the part of the novel after Vahakn’s letter, we see in Minas’s notes and comments (which may have been reworked by Zareh) that he is trying to think in a new way about his relationship with Vahakn. His thoughts emerge out of immense weakness—not Vahakn’s weakness as we might think, but his own weakness. The weakness forms the core of their friendship and relationship. In a certain way, Vahakn took pity on him. He wanted to protect him and take him under his wing. It was “a sense of fatherly affection [that stirred] in Vahakn’s heart.” In short, Vahakn sacrificed himself for Minas. He suppressed himself to help his “child” become a man, so that Minas could become what he himself could not. The son inherits his father’s disappearance. But he must also rid himself of that encumbering legacy, which is the most difficult task of all. Minas begins by denying it and accepts, triumphantly, his own denial. “Every rejection is an act of construction.” Fathers never understand why children “suddenly flee their dedication,” says Minas (or Vorpouni). Or perhaps fathers know the reason all too well and offer the possibility of escape and denial. They quietly offer the strength to part with them.
All of this certainly occurs in Minas. Vahakn must die in him so that he can become the heir who denies his legacy. And the identity between them is clearly stated in a passage written by Minas about Vahakn, where he himself appears in the third person (although it is possible that this passage and other similar passages have been edited and rearranged by “Zareh”): “Now he tried to look, through his imagination, into the eyes of the absent Minas, but he only saw himself, as though he were standing in front of a mirror.” And conversely, Minas “still saw [people] through Vahakn’s eyes,” but because of the denied legacy, he could become another man. He managed to make Vahakn fade. The Vahakn hidden in him is a survivor incapable of adapting to life—a survivor who is always waiting, who cannot erase the stain that has tarnished him, who continuously flees, who becomes a murderer, who is forced to suppress himself to suppress the dirty feeling that haunts him, and who will forever be a stranger. By inheriting Vahakn and his death, Minas can say the following about himself: “The foreigner had left him.” It is certainly a dangerous legacy that Vahakn leaves. At the end of the novel, Minas returns to the idea one last time in his letter to Zareh. The immediate purpose was to discuss the idea of waiting, specifically waiting for Nicole, who would become his wife in the following volume and die in the throes of childbirth. “I’ve inherited the inclination to wait from Vahakn.” Because he inherited everything from Vahakn and his essence, his very identity, is to be Vahakn’s heir, he could have inherited that last habit as well. This observation, albeit written ironically, will prove dangerous: “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.” It could end with another suicide or culminate in a murder, be it direct or indirect, which is how Minas’s love for Nicole ends in the next volume in the series.
The Author
of a Testimony
In all regards, Minas is an heir par excellence. He is the heir to Vahakn’s death and to the murder Vahakn commits, but he is also the heir to Vahakn’s miserable life and his parasitic philosophy. The murder and suicide are precisely what will allow Minas to cope with the ordeal of life. He also inherits the testimony of the survivor and makes it into a book, or at least sends it to Zareh with all the necessary paraphernalia to make it into a book. Of course, everything said about Minas as an heir will remain incomplete as long as Vahakn’s testimony is not examined (the topic of the next paragraph). In the meantime, if we still believe that the three-tier structure of transmission is inspired by formalism, we must recall The Agony of a People (Zhoghovurdi më hogevark’ë), the first extensive testimony based on the hell of the deportations. Zabel Essayan gathered the testimony from a survivor named Hayg Toroyan and signed it with her own name.5 This testimony is written entirely in the first person in the voice of the survivor. Essayan, who was living in Baku at the time, had met Toroyan in the summer of 1916. Toroyan had already published narratives in the Armenian press in Baku that were based on his own ordeal. Buoyed by her skills as a writer, Essayan transcribed the story of this young Armenian who had traveled down the Euphrates with a German officer between November 1915 and January 1916 and had seen the concentration camps begin to form along the river. She conveyed his story in flawless Western Armenian and transformed it into a readable narrative, sprinkled with engaging scenes to sensitize others to the misery of the victims. The testimony ends with the suicide of the German officer, who could not bear to live with what he saw along the deportation route. Essayan’s work was published in the February and March issues of the newspaper Գործ (Gorts) in Baku with her name in the byline—not Toroyan’s name.
The Candidate Page 20