The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  Essayan’s work has the same structure as The Candidate. The survivor tells the story and the amanuensis collects the testimony. In The Agony of a People, the survivor’s amanuensis signs the testimony, even though the narrative itself is entirely in the first person and only conveys the voice of the survivor (apart from the short preface in which Essayan explains her task). The act of signing is certainly justified: as the writer, she is the one who gives the narrative its style and, therefore, ultimately considers herself its author. But because there is reason to examine the author of a testimony, the act of signing is anything but insignificant. It puts the status, function, and meaning of testimony back into play all at once. There is “real” testimony in The Agony of a People, whereas Vahakn’s testimony in The Candidate is “literary.” However, it is only the novel that emphasizes the three-tier structure of testimony, of every testimony, as it is collected and as it is transmitted, and henceforth as it comes into being through the interplay between the spoken and the written. The Agony of a People does not problematize its own structure within itself and does not reflect on the interplay between the signatures that the very structure entails. It nevertheless recreates the three-tier structure in its own way, by producing a suicide scene. We can even go so far as to think that it is the German officer’s suicide that gives meaning to the entire narrative and endows it with a distinctive literary quality. In this way, the three stages of testimony are recreated in secret, as it is spoken, collected, and conveyed.

  The reader’s hesitation is most pronounced when discussing the genre of this publication. Is it testimony or is it literature? The fact that Essayan signs the text seems to transform it into literature, but it obviously presents itself as testimony. The ambiguity regarding the nature of the object is part of the very issue. An important side note is that the German officer in The Agony of a People took photographs. If these photographs had been developed at the time, Essayan would have brought them to Paris and entrusted them to one of the two Armenian delegations at the Peace Conference in 1919. But the photos remained silent and the officer succumbed to suicide.

  Here as well as in the novel, the injunction to write came out of the officer’s suicide, but we see that the positions are not the same in real testimony and literary testimony. The injunction circulates differently. When Essayan signs The Agony of a People, is she in the position of the author (like Zareh in Vorpouni’s novel) or in the position of the friend who receives the injunction (like Minas)? Two signatures are still required to make a testimony: one to validate the truth of the facts and the other to validate the truth of the transcription. The two signatures have two entirely different functions and are distinct from the author’s signature. By presenting itself as a testimony, hiding the interplay between the signatures and not explicitly recording the injunction that stems from the officer’s suicide, The Agony of a People does not state what makes it possible as a testimony. It does not lay bare the structure of testimony, leaving it to the readers to decipher. But Vorpouni deciphered it for us in The Candidate. In his hands, the novel became a tool to uncover what remains hidden in all testimonies.

  We have only done half the work, however, without discussing the source of the injunction. It is written into Vahakn’s testimony and, therefore, from the beginning, we know that here lays the essential difference between the “fictional” testimony and the “real” testimony. In the latter, the dead witness no longer speaks. His words and images are lost forever. His madness has been entirely erased, whereas in the novel, it is the dead witness who speaks. He is already dead as he speaks. As a dead witness, he has already written the injunction that his friend—his amanuensis and heir—will violently receive and internalize forever. This is what we are left to understand. This is where literature begins. It begins with the witness. It tells the truth of testimony. It says that we must be dead to bear witness—always. There is no exception. But if we are dead, dead as a witness, how can we bear witness? A similar question will arise with regard to forgiveness.

  The Collapse

  The temporality of writing is not the same as the temporality of events. Minas began to put Vahakn’s notes, perhaps reviewed and corrected by Zareh, down on paper after Vahakn’s suicide and after having read his letter. But since the letter does not appear until the middle of the novel, we know about Ziya’s murder well before Vahakn explains his act. In fact, we know about the murder even before meeting Ziya and gaining insight into his ties to Vahakn. The murder is mentioned very early in the novel in a scene where Vahakn is sitting at an outdoor café and trying to make passersby stop to pay his bill:

  This bizarre pastime was not a sign of boredom in the least, nor was it a means of deception, as many supposed, even if he did rely on these games to make a living to a certain extent. Afterward he, like the others, was convinced that this way of life was a kind of obligation, dictated by some dark, internal forces that were suddenly revealed right after Ziya’s murder, because at the very moment they were revealed, Vahakn retired from his pastime, despite the high cost of giving up his livelihood. In fact, he had already stopped thinking about living. He stopped caring altogether as soon as he escaped those dark, internal forces, as he called them, that mental state that he carried around—unpredictable, stubborn and obscure—until the moment that Vahakn vanished once and for all, surrendering his entire being to the anarchy of fate.

  When this passage appears in the novel, the reader has no way of understanding it. Vahakn’s mental organization collapses all at once as his wait comes to an end and his expectations of life suddenly become clear in the form of a revelation. He did not need to wait for the moment he committed murder to have this revelation. At the very moment he is face to face with Ziya, the Turkish student who becomes his friend, he knows that this will be his fate: to die by making another die. But then why call it a “collapse” or a “destruction”? Because it was Vahakn’s pathological state—let’s call it a schizophrenic state—that allowed him to resist and it is that very same state that shatters all at once when he meets Ziya. His own secret is suddenly revealed before his eyes. Later in the novel, in the pages of his testimony, Vahakn will describe with remarkable clarity the circumstances that created his terrifying mental state. These pages have no rival in Armenian literature or perhaps in any other literature. From this point, it becomes clear that “killing” is synonymous with “killing oneself” and that Vahakn is already a dead man when, after Ziya’s murder, he starts writing his “testimony.” And yet, until the very end of the novel, the equating of murder and suicide will remain an enigma.

  The Gift of Death: Friendship and Redemption

  Before examining the testimony, it is worthwhile to review a passage in which Vahakn’s collapse already seems to be explained and the enigma solved. It happens when Vahakn utters a sentence in which “Minas suddenly discovered the secret of Vahakn’s demise”: “No, brother. It’s impossible to separate ourselves from being Armenian. Even if we try, it won’t let go of our collar. Being Armenian is a sickness, a sickness rooted in revenge, and the horrible thing is that it’s revenge without hatred. We Armenians genuinely don’t know how to hate.” In Minas’s eyes, the enigma of the suicide is fully explained by this strange comment. His notes will support this hypothesis and highlight the fact that Vahakn was not motivated by hatred: “Vahakn died because he couldn’t hate. He couldn’t hate Ziya. On the contrary, he loved him and killed him out of love.” And when Vahakn is drawn to Ziya’s neck, seemingly noticing a stain on his tie, Minas simply remarks that “Ziya couldn’t possibly have sensed the hidden, stubborn, insidious chase inside him that would cost him his life.” It is not clear in this remark if it was Vahakn or Ziya who was to pay with his life. In any case, Vahakn’s obsession consumes him entirely. This is how the enigma of the simultaneity of murder and suicide is presented to the reader, who has no other way to solve it. But one more step is needed. For Vahakn, to write and to die are equivalent. He says it succinctly—and, once
again, strangely—in the very beginning of his testimony: “So I decided to write this while I was standing in front of his body. If they hadn’t called us in, I wouldn’t have written anything, because I’d already decided to kill myself that day.”

  It is a strange comment because the two sentences seem to contradict each other. If he had decided to kill himself that day, how could he have written anything? He decided to write. He decided to get it over with. There is no space between writing and death; they are the same. And yet a space that enables testimony is created entirely by chance when Minas and Vahakn are called into the police station as Ziya’s friends. From that point on, writing the testimony takes place in an eerie space in which Vahakn lives as his own ghost, existing beyond life like a dead person who continues to speak and move but is already a corpse, already his own image. And he writes to save Minas from the same fate and to make him the heir to his ghost: “For a month now, I’ve been struggling to decide whether or not to write. But I’ll do it. Not for my sake, Minas, but for yours. Pay close attention to the words of this dead man. Yes, these are the words of a dead man, words from the dead. I was already dead when I stood in front of Ziya’s body.”

  In this passage, the survivor is speaking, but the meaning of the word “survivor” has changed slightly. In this case, the survivor should not be understood in the ordinary sense as someone who has escaped certain death, who will always bear the mark of genocidal violence, or who has survived while everyone around him has died. Here Vahakn is speaking from beyond the dead. For the first time, we hear the voice of the dead witness. He is grateful to Minas for having known what friendship is and for having “lived with [him] for a month after [he] was already dead inside.” The idea of legacy resonates even stronger once Vahakn addresses Minas as the poet he is supposed to be. He gives him a poetry lesson; he teaches him the nature of poetry. Minas would only have known it from afar, abstractly, had he not inherited Vahakn’s legacy. In the case of Vahakn, the event that turns him into a survivor is the murder of his Turkish friend. The murder sends him directly to the realm of the dead, beyond the mirror; it turns him into a corpse while he is still alive. Relative to the current state of survival in which Vahakn is now situated, another theme—subtle, emotional, and hidden—develops over the course of the letter: friendship.

  In the last section of The Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida comments on Maurice Blanchot’s various formulations of friendship. Derrida cites lines dedicated to Michel Foucault after his death,6 commenting on the moment when Blanchot himself recalls a phrase traditionally attributed to Diogenes Laertius—“Oh my friends, there is no friend”—and adding: “It is thanks to death that friendship can be declared. Never before, never otherwise. And never if not in recalling (while thanks to death, the friend recalls that there are no friends). And when friendship is declared during the lifetime of friends, it avows, fundamentally, the same thing: it avows the death thanks to which the chance to declare itself comes at last, never failing to come.”7

  Death is what a friend offers to a friend. But if the old tradition of friendship is best expressed in the genre of the eulogy, the opposite occurs in Vahakn’s letter. The dead man writes his own eulogy and addresses it to his friend. In this way, he also describes the secret of friendship. A friend always speaks from beyond the dead. The experience of friendship is one of survival. It is an offering of one’s death to a friend in one’s lifetime. Friendship and survival are one and the same. This is why Vahakn writes, “our friendship over these past two years . . . has brought me to this point.” It brought him to this “bliss.” If they had not been friends, Vahakn would not have met Ziya; he would not have died through the murder he committed; and he would not have become the survivor that he is now. Beyond his name and his letter, he would not have been able to offer his death to his friend. His happiness is in his ability to express his friendship.

  Reaching “this point,” where friendship and survival can be said in the same breath, where he can give death as an offering and transmit it as his legacy, Vahakn can also save his friend, toss him into the ring of life, and make him a poet. Vahakn saves Minas from the need to take his own life through killing, from the necessity of the double gift of death. It has already been done. Here emerges the central moment in Vahakn’s letter and testimony. To understand this moment is to delve deep into the experience of the survivor, where “a Turcocidal impulse has been planted in each one of us. A killer plotting in the dungeon of our souls is waiting for the chance to leap out of his hiding place.” If a Turcocidal impulse has truly been planted in every Armenian, if it secretly commands, and if each one of us feeds a murderer deep within ourselves, then we are all unknowing murderers. Even if we have not committed any crime, we are potential murderers. The crime that we are prepared to commit will ultimately coincide with our own death. There is no escape. “And look, this is what happens. Murder, then suicide.”8 Sparing his friend from this fate is the most precious gift Vahakn could give: “If the same opportunity arises one day, I don’t want you to go the way I have.”

  The Poison

  On January 19, 2007, the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated in front of the headquarters of Agos, the newspaper he founded and edited. The terrible paradox of the assassination was that Hrant Dink represented forgiveness and reconciliation par excellence. Throughout his life he worked for a rapprochement between the two peoples, for the word “Armenian” to cease to be used as an insult in Turkish, and for the presence of his community to be recognized and accepted in Turkey, but also for Armenians—in Turkey and abroad—to finally rid themselves of the poison that has been eating away at them, of that type of resentment that the victim feels when justice has not been served. The word “poison” prompted his assassination. The perpetrator lives in the victim like an eternal poison. But it so happens that the perpetrator does have a name for the victim. Hrant Dink had worked to free the word “Turk”—the name of the perpetrator—of its weight in the minds of victims and survivors. He considered this freedom the cost of reconciliation, but he was understood by extremists in Turkey and by the official government in exactly the opposite way he had intended. He was heard as having equated them with the perpetrator. He was dragged before the courts until his assassination, which he had practically foreseen. We must, therefore, endlessly restart the work of forgiveness and reconciliation.

  In 2009, I gave a series of public lectures in Istanbul to reflect on the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation with my audience, who were also my interlocutors. These lectures were held precisely in the name of friendship. They were translated into Turkish and published in one volume.9 My examination of Vorpouni’s novels is a continuation of that project. Vorpouni’s novels can be read as the novels of the survivor. In particular, we see in this extraordinary novel, The Candidate, how the survivor speaks as the living dead. He bequeaths his death to his friend while he is still alive. He bequeaths his death so that others can live. It is a novel about friendship, but it is also a novel about forgiveness and reconciliation. The act of bequeathing one’s death to a friend is the act through which the friend will find an antidote to the poison of hatred and resentment. It is the act through which the word “Turk” will no longer be associated with the perpetrator in the minds of the descendants. Vorpouni has left his novel behind as his legacy to subsequent generations. Frankly, subsequent generations have not paid much attention. Perhaps they will pay more attention to the novel’s lessons about friendship and forgiveness now that the book exists in translation.

  My work on the connection between art and testimony asks for two things. First, it asks for sustained attention to be paid to what happens at the boundary between “literature” and that which we call “testimony.” That boundary is recorded within literature. Today, it is the task of literature to explore and test the boundary, which is quite porous. We are either on one side or the other and sometimes we do not know which side we are on. This is an entirely contempo
rary phenomenon that did not exist a quarter century ago and should be studied in its own right. I have been devoted to this topic not only in my Writers of Disaster series, but also in more specific work on texts presented as testimonies.10 In 2007, I edited Setrak Baghdoyan’s testimony on his years of deportation and survival (one of the longest testimonies in Armenian), which he spent his entire life writing and rewriting.11 It was in the same spirit that I published the French translation of The Agony of the People. In the afterword of that book, I reflected on the aporia of testimony, prompted by the uncertainty of the boundary that separates testimony from literature. In contrast, Zabel Essayan strove for “universal consciousness” and did not concern herself with the aporia that her literary endeavor laid bare. In all of these works, the intention was to make testimony speak against itself, to show how it can fold in on itself, and to describe how it can contradict itself in its aim and conclusions. Regardless, we continue to publish testimonies as texts and not as documents intended to shape history or enhance universal memory.

  To understand what Vorpouni means, we must be aware of a second parallel in real life. Besides the parallel with real testimony, there is the parallel with real murder: the terrorist attacks against Turkish diplomats in the 1970s. These attacks and murders illustrate the climate and provide a powerful counterexample to Vorpouni’s intentions with his novels. They were the result of several decades of poisoned education that Armenian youth received around the world, particularly in the Middle East. They were initiated and encouraged by the pseudopolitical Armenian organizations of the diaspora, and they constitute a moment of pure shame in the recent history of the Armenian diaspora. Was the denialist Turkish state not complicit and not an heir to the crime committed in 1915–16? Certainly. From then on, were the officers and state officials not figuratively complicit in the same crime? Without a doubt. Nolens volens. What can we conclude? That these attacks, hostage-takings, and murders were acts of justice? What justice is there in killing? No, they were murders motivated by logical yet monstrous resentment, gross political powerlessness, and a vile drive for publicity. The instigators of these murders were criminals, and not the least of their misdeeds is the harm they have done to Armenians themselves, which to this day does not prevent them from sleeping at night, confident in the righteousness of their actions. “I don’t want you to go the way I have,” Vahakn said in the letter to Minas and, beyond Minas, to all those he hoped would listen. Clearly those who sent young men to kill themselves and others in Turkish embassies and elsewhere did not risk ending up like him: dying to offer their death to a friend.