The primary objection we can make against Vahakn’s reasoning (which perhaps is Vorpouni’s reasoning as well) is that it conflates the annihilation project with the unspoken violence that circulates in the system of the empire of sacrifice—the violence that deprives the victim of all ability to mourn, to forgive, and, above all, to sacrifice. In the process of sacrifice, if the murderer and the victim are as close as they can possibly be, their relationship is still not reciprocal. Sacrifice is what forbids any kind of reciprocity. Yet these two examples of violence—annihilation and sacrifice—are not only distinct a priori, they are also conflicting. One is the opposite of the other, since the annihilation of an oppressed people brings the sacrificial system to an end once and for all. As long as the sacrificial system is perpetuated, there clearly cannot be any question of annihilation. By putting an end to the empire of sacrifice, annihilation also deprives the victim of all possible reflection on his own situation and how to overcome it.16 As a result, only the absolute victim can bear witness to it, and only within the confines of a novel. In this sense, the rape scenes that Vahakn describes are also scenes of sacrificial violence: “In those moments, I felt as if I were a lamb about to be slaughtered, as I had seen her do, holding the animal’s snout in her left hand and slitting its throat with her right.”
The murder in the novel thus appears in the context of this logic of sacrifice. By committing murder, the subject never stops submitting to this logic and obviously never comes close to sacrificial jouissance. He simply lays bare for himself that he was exploited to the core and that he was the passive object of jouissance for the dominant group. It is this link that he wants to sever. But because he is one passive end of this link, he can only suppress himself. Yet Vahakn cannot stop seeing a redemptive dimension in his act, and he expresses the dimension in religious terms: purification, cleansing, and redemption, if not of the self than of others. Someone must die after committing murder before people can find the ability to forgive and before they can be freed from the presence of the Turcocidal impulse in themselves, i.e., from the potential murderer living inside them. This is the most developed aspect of Vahakn’s rhetoric. In this aspect, the time of forgiveness depends entirely on the logic of sacrifice. But there is another aspect to his rhetoric, a much cruder, more primitive, more outrageous, and even more ridiculous aspect: the “three million” argument. There are supposedly three million Armenians in the world. If each one followed his hidden compulsion to kill and thereby kill himself (this is a secondary but enigmatic premise of his reasoning: for the absolute victim, to kill and to kill oneself are equivalent), there would be no Armenians left on the face of the Earth. The argument was already crude and vulgar when Vahakn reasoned that murder and suicide were equivalent and simultaneous because Armenians do not know how to hate. If they knew how to hate, murder would not be equated with suicide. The argument becomes even cruder with the realization that killing the perpetrator harbored inside of oneself does not change the state of being an absolute victim. In that case, there is no sacrifice. The sacrificial offering of death is only beneficial to someone in a position to benefit from it. Every other supposedly sacrificial act is nothing but self-destruction. Yet don’t these crude arguments demonstrate the opposite of what was previously mentioned? Vahakn strives forcefully to give an antisacrificial meaning to his act. To do so, he needs a friend to whom he can transmit the meaning of his act. He needs to make his insane and irrational act sane and rational through a friend.
All of Vahakn’s madness—the madness of a murderer driven to suicide—comes from the fact that he was an instrument of jouissance. Originally, he was an instrument of jouissance for Fatma. The descriptions of rape serve no other purpose. He then became an instrument of a symbolic and abstract, but all the more telling, kind of jouissance for Ziya, which explains why he sees Fatma in Ziya’s gaze. The distinct identities of the gazes, the fading of one into the other, and their sudden conflation in Vahakn’s disturbed mind are the expression of sacrificial jouissance. They constitute the external dimension of the feeling of having been exploited to the core: “It was there whenever I looked sharply and intently, whenever it was supposed to be there, because the fluttering of his gaze suddenly seemed close and similar—not similar but identical—to Fatma’s gaze, whenever we used to quietly sit cross-legged around the low, round, wooden table to eat. Fatma’s eyes would be staring at me and watching me, transfixed. . . . I would contract and tighten to become smaller and more distant.”
Do you understand now why Vahakn wanted to strangle Ziya to death? Here is the answer. Apparently, it was a direct consequence of the sacrificial murder. It was a reaction to sacrificial jouissance and a way to oppose it. Behind all real testimonies lies the impossible testimony of the absolute victim, who has been the passive object of sacrificial jouissance. In the madness of murder, the absolute witness bears witness to that disavowed jouissance and to the fact that he had once been its passive object. No real testimony can bear witness to it. It must be the testimony of the living dead, the absolute victim, who is now also the absolute survivor, situated in that improbable—and purely novelistic—space between murder and suicide. Although this space is novelistic, it is not imaginary or fictional—quite the contrary. It is novelistic because in reality, or in what we call reality, the world outside of the novel, there is no space or distance between killing and dying. Why not? Because this space supposes one specific condition. It supposes that the person who kills the perpetrator in himself, and thus destroys the unbreakable bond formed with the perpetrator, has already understood that he was and still is a passive object of sacrificial jouissance. Yet in so-called real life, this is utterly impossible.
I suggested earlier that the absolute victim, or the absolute survivor, is also the absolute witness. The absolute witness is the one who awakens, but he awakens in death. The absolute witness is the dead witness, which explains why real testimonies never speak of what has really happened. They describe murders, barbaric acts, massacres, rapes, and infinite misery, but they cannot speak in the voice of the dead witness. In the same way, there can never be a testimony of torture. And yet, we must bear witness to what cannot be witnessed. No real survivor has ever been able to do such a thing. No real survivor has ever been able to say: “I have awakened in death.” No one has ever been able to say: “I am killing myself because I am already dead, and I am already dead because what drives me is the will of the perpetrator, his will to make him feel jouissance. This will annihilates me entirely. It kills all possibility in me to speak, to bear witness, and to forgive.” Of course, it is not from the outside that the perpetrator speaks: Vahakn hears the injunction; he does not hear anything else. And he kills. Once the injunction appears to him clearly, intensely, and inevitably, he responds to it with murder. There is no escape. At the moment he commits the murder, Fatma appears in front of him: “Yes, Minas, Fatma was there, on the knot of [Ziya’s] tie.” The strength he uses to kill is “the very same clenched force that [he] once used to resist Fatma.”
In this chapter we have undone the threads of testimony, forgiveness, and sacrifice that make up the The Candidate, and we have tried to weave them back together in our own way. However, it seems that something is missing in the reconstruction. Equating murder and suicide remains what it was: an enigma. Let us repeat, in question form, everything that has been said. 1) Vahakn’s madness is a sacrificial madness. Let us admit that this is the survivor’s madness. Here not only is the survivor the product of a system of sacrifice, and therefore without any form of reciprocity, and not only is the murder/suicide explained by the system of sacrifice to which he was subjected, but Vahakn himself interprets his double act in sacrificial terms, as if redemption were possible or even real. How can we understand this? Should we take his sacrificial interpretation seriously? Should we understand that Vahakn, with his only gesture, managed to destroy the entire sacrificial structure that establishes him as insane? And finally, is it this destruction t
hat he bequeaths to his friend through his testimony and through his death? 2) Vorpouni (the author of the novel, not his characters, Vahakn, Minas, or “Zareh”) wrote a novel in which he thoroughly questioned what we call testimony and at the same time showed, described, and denounced the sacrificial obsession of the survivor. For as long as we do not grasp the inner workings of testimony or participate in our own way in the destruction of the sacrificial structure, the time of forgiveness will not begin for us. That much is clear, at least. But in the end, what is it that will be forgiven? What is there to forgive? The fact that we have been forever caught in a vicious system of sacrifice? Or the final annihilation without recourse, which was also the annihilation of this sacrificial system? 3) The novel creates an unlikely space between murder and suicide. It widens the gap between them. It is this space, this gap, which seemingly makes writing about the event possible by bequeathing death to the amanuensis. The end of sacrifice is needed for writing to be possible. But writing the event is the end of sacrifice, and it will happen only if it has been written. One supposes the other. What should be done with this circularity? It is as if the event is always in the future as a past event. Perhaps with the past event—in a time to come, in which the event will truly belong to the past and will arrive as a past event—will also come the possibility for forgiveness. Will it really come? Forgiveness, says Walter Benjamin, but never reconciliation.
Major Works by Zareh Vorpouni
Notes
Biographical Notes
Major Works by Zareh Vorpouni
Փորձը (The Attempt).* Marseille: Takvor Khatchiguian, 1929
Վարձու սենեակ (Room for Rent). Paris: Atmadjian, 19391
Դէպի երկիր (Ճամբորդութեան յուշեր) (Toward the Country: Travel Notes). Paris: Araxe, 1948
Անձրեւոտ օրեր (Rainy Days). Paris: Amsoreag, 1958
Եւ եղեւ մարդ (And There Was Man). Paris: Unknown publisher, 1964
Գոհարիկ եւ ուրիշ պատմուածքներ (Koharig and Other Stories). Beirut: Sevan, 1966
Թեկնածուն (The Candidate).* Beirut: Sevan, 1967
Ասֆալթը (The Asphalt).* Istanbul: Marmara, 1972
Սովորական օր մը (A Regular Day).* Beirut: Sevan, 1974
Մահազդ (Death Notice).* Կամ (Gam) 1 (1980): 15–74
Զի քո է կարողութիւն (For Thine Is the Power).* Կամ (Gam) 6 (1982): 41–81
Վարձու սենեակ (Room for Rent).* Կայք (Gayk) 5 (1993): 45–61 (excerpts)
*indicates that the novel is part of the Հալածուածները (The Persecuted) series.2
Notes
Translator’s Introduction
1. For a detailed study of Armenian diaspora literature in France, see Krikor Beledian, Cinquante ans de littérature arménienne en France: du même à l’autre, 1922–1972 (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 2001), and Talar Chahinian, “The Paris Attempt: Rearticulation of (National) Belonging and the Inscription of Aftermath Experience in French Armenian Literature between the Wars” (PhD dissertation, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 2008).
2. In contrast to Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian was the standardized language of the Armenians of the Russian Empire (later the Soviet Union and the Republic of Armenia) and the Persian Empire (later Iran).
3. Only two book-length works from this period have been published in English translation: Nigoghos Sarafian, The Bois de Vincennes, trans. Christopher Atamian (Dearborn, MI: Armenian Research Center, 2011), and Shahan Shahnour, Retreat without Song, trans. Mischa Kudian (London: Mashtots Press, 1982).
4. Krikor Beledian and Haroutiun Kurkjian, “Avec ‘un habitant de la diaspora’: Zareh Vorpouni, écrivain,” Hayasdan Monthly 388 (1978): 13.
The Candidate
1. In Armenian, աղուոր (aghvor) and աղուորիկ (aghvorig) mean pretty or nice. The latter is the diminutive.
2. “Les bourgeois, on les pendra” (We will hang the bourgeois) is one of the refrains of “Ah, ça ira ! Ça ira !” an anthem of the French Revolution.
3. In September 1922, the majority of the Greeks and Armenians of Smyrna fled the city after the burning and pillaging of their neighborhoods by Turkish nationalist forces.
4. This is the first line of the song Անդրանիկի քայլերգը (The March of Antranig), an Armenian revolutionary song. The Tashnagtsioutioun, or the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, is an Armenian political party that formed in the late nineteenth century to achieve national liberation for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Sassoun, a town in Eastern Anatolia, was the site of two uprisings against the Ottoman authorities in 1894 and 1904.
5. Հեթանոս երգեր (Pagan Songs) is a collection of poems published in 1912 by Ottoman Armenian poet Taniel Varoujan.
6. Vahan Tekeyan (1878–1945) is a celebrated Armenian poet. He was one of the few intellectuals to survive the Armenian genocide and continue to write in the diaspora.
7. Fasouliayi pilaki is a cold white bean dish made with carrots and tomatoes. In the text, Vorpouni uses the Turkish name of the recipe, more familiar to Ottoman Armenians.
8. La Source was a café on Boulevard Saint-Michel frequented by Armenian writers and intellectuals in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
9. Ծնծղայ (dzndzgha) are cymbals used during the Divine Liturgy of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
10. Turkish: “my son, my son.”
11. In the years following the Armenian genocide, Armenian organizations, with the help of the Allied powers, organized missions to recover Armenian orphans who had been living in Turkish homes and to reintegrate them into the Armenian community.
12. Harpagon is the title character in the play L’Avare (The Miser) by Molière. His name is associated with stinginess and selfishness.
13. From 1894 to 1936, Les Halles received nightly deliveries between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. on a special railway called l’Arpajonnais, which brought merchandise from Arpajon, a town south of Paris.
14. François Villon (1431–63?) was a poet who lived in Paris and was accused of killing a priest and stealing money from the chapel of the Collège de Navarre. He was banished from Paris for his crimes and disappeared after 1463.
15. The “horned” church refers to L’Église Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, also known as Église des Réformés, in Marseille. Its nickname alludes to its two spires.
16. “Cry, my son. Cry so you may grow up” is an adaptation of the last line of Vahan Tekeyan’s poem Կ՚անձրեւէ, տղաս (It’s Raining, My Son).
17. Բամբ Որոտան (Pamp Vorodan) is an Armenian national march, considered the unofficial anthem of the Armenian diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s.
18. Monsieur Jourdain is the title character in the play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman) by Molière. The character is known for his affectations and pretensions.
19. In this passage, Vorpouni plays with the word ապրիլ (abril), which means both “April” and “to live.”
20. “La Marquise sortit à cinq heures” (The marquise left at five o’clock) is a phrase first coined by Paul Valéry to describe the potential for banality in the novel.
21. Marquise de Sévigné is a chocolate shop in Paris.
22. “Who knows how to read the heart” is the last line of Vahan Tekeyan’s poem Ես սիրեցի (I Loved).
Afterword
1. The other published volumes in the series include Ասֆալթը (Asfaltë) and Սովորական օր մը (Sovorakan or më). The fifth volume remains to be published and the sixth volume was published in the second issue of the periodical Կամ (Gam) in 1982. Very little has been written about Vorpouni: a few articles after his first novel was published in 1929; an article by Haroutiun Kurkjian in the periodical Բագին (Pagin) in 1966 about Vorpouni’s rediscovery after the publication of And There Was Man; and sections by Krikor Beledian in Armenian in Մարտ (Mart; Beirut: Catholicosate of the Holy See
of Cilicia, 1998) and in French in Cinquante ans de littérature arménienne en France: du même à l’autre, 1922–1972 (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 2001). The newspaper Հորիզոն (Horizon) in Montreal also devoted a special issue to Vorpouni in its literary supplement in December 1985.
2. Zabel Essayan (1879–1943) was the most distinguished Armenian novelist at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was also the only woman on the black list of Armenian intellectuals rounded up on April 24, 1915. One of her greatest achievements, Աւերակներուն մէջ (Averaknerun mej), her testimony about the anti-Armenian pogroms in Adana and the surrounding region in 1909, was first published in 1911 and translated into English in 2015. See Zabel Yessayan (sic), In the Ruins, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Boston: Armenian International Women’s Association Press, 2015).
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