By Khachig Tololyan
(Source: Ararat Magazine (Autumn, 198 8):8O)
As feminist literary criticism has
developed over the past two decades, it has made readers aware of the extent to
which the forms of woman’s desire are not natural and unchanging givens, but
rather are constructed differently in every society. This shaping of desire is
achieved by the combined force of social relations (for example the
institutions of courtship and marriage) and verbal representations (for
example, fictions which depict and evaluate various manifestations of desire).
Much of Armenian fiction and criticism,
like Armenian society itself, remains slow to acknowledge and explore feminine
desire. Indeed, even male desire, a less taboo topic, is actually rarely
rendered directly; its occasional representations remain highly
conventionalization have affected two dominant misconception which persist in
all but a fraction of the considerable output of critical essays and commentary
which Soviet Armenia and the Diaspora produce. The first is the conclusion that
the massive problems created by the trauma of genocide and the urgencies of
maintaining collective identity rightly overshadow the problems of sexuality
and the construction of gendered subjectivity, both in the real world and in
narrative. This view follows in part from an Armenian conception of narrative art,
which demands that it contribute to the fulfillment of the social agenda. The
second misconception is expressed by the degree to which the problematic status
of desire, when recognized, is framed by the concept of intermarriage, by the
act that brings the odar, the
stranger, the seductive other into the bosom of the Armenian family. In other
words, when it is acknowledged to exist, desire is conceptualized as one of
those problems threatening the nation; it is displaced and misrecognized as an
aspect of the problem of assimilation.
What is astonishing about the avoidance of
the issue of desire is that it persists despite the existence of several
eloquent novels and stories, which, since the 1920’s, have addressed the
problem openly and in a complex fashion. In France and to a very small extent
in Lebanon, critics writing in Armenian but familiar with Western critical
terms and traditions (Marc Nichanian, Krikor Beledian, Harout Kurkjian, Jeanine
Altounian) have called attention to the representation of desire in the work of
Zareh Vorpouni, Shahan Shahnour, Vazken Shoushanian and a few others. In
virtually all these cases, the writers are men, characters and subjectivities
which are depicted and explored are men’s, and the critics are men familiar
with Continental criticism and psychoanalysis but not with feminist literary
criticism. My own effort here is directed towards the work of a woman, Zabel
Yesayan, and one of the female protagonists she created, and seeks to put into
practice some of the insights of American feminist criticism.
Zabel Yesayan was born in 1878, in a
prosperous family living in Istanbul, and died of starvation and exhaustion in
1943, somewhere in Stalin’s gulag. She published her first work when she was
seventeen, and from 1895 until the early purges of 1935, for exactly forty
years, she wrote in a variety of forms and genres; her nonfictional prose is as
interesting and almost as influential as her fiction, as is the case with
prominent Western women writers like Virginia Woolf. Living in the Ottoman
Turkish Empire, in France and the Soviet Union, Yesayan experimented with many
ideologies, commitments and what we can call life-styles; she was a nationalist
first, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and finally a
Marxist. She was entrusted with challenging tasks that required both diplomacy
and fortitude. Her commissioned report on the massacre of Armenians in Adana in
1909 is still read and cited today, and its effect is due not only to its
documentary acumen but also to its stylistic power. By 1907, when she was less
than thirty years old, Yesayan was already recognized as an exceptional writer
and as an exceptional woman writer by both the male and female factions of the
literary elite of Istanbul. Mrs Hyganoush Mark, the feminist reformer who wrote
countless essays and reviews, referred to her as the “black diamond” among the
writers of her time, and even Ardashess Haroutunian, the most consistent and
demanding of male critics of the era, saw in her an originality which, he
announced, all other contemporary women writers lacked (1).
This critical reputation has remained high.
Hagop Oshagan wrote in 1942 that “Yesayan is one of the greatest figures of
Armenian narrative, if not the greatest,” and if on occasion this accolade has
been slightly qualified, it has never been rejected. Yesayan’s
autobiographical, somewhat fictionalized memoir, The Gardens of Silihdar, is nowadays among the most frequently
reread of Armenian classics, and critics educated in Europe, like Seta Kapoyan
and Shoushig Dasnabedian, have published half a dozen skilled readings of her
oeuvre in recent years. Even in these cases, however, the absence of a feminist
perspective in Armenian criticism makes the repetition of the clumsiest clichés
inevitable. Male admirers of Yesayan’s work, like her Soviet Armenin
biographer, Sevag Arzoomanyan, have written that “her voice rang masculine and
impressive” and even a woman like Dasnabedian can still write of Yesayan’s
“masculine power and feminine warmth”, in 1987(2). In other words, the
recognition of Yesayan’s talent, of the formal, structural and rhetorical
properties of her work has been achieved (as used to be the case with Western
writiers like Jane Austen) at the cost of a persistent oversight where the
feminist qualities of her work are concerned. Critics have failed to recognize
that her best work, and especially the novella Verchin Pazhag’eh, challenges the categories of “masculine” and
“feminine” in general, and the conventional Armenian conceptions of masculine
and feminine desire, in particular. The purpose of my essay is not to attempt a
full reading of the novella but to test a modest hypothesis, namely that a
major concern of her work is to represent, to question, and finally to subvert,
the prevailing Armenian representation of woman’s desire.
Verchin
Pazhag’eh is an 87-page novella published in 1924(3).
Its title can be rendered literally as “The Last Cup”; its connotations are
complex. In English, the words “glass” and “cup” can refer to similar objects,
but “cup” is the more resonant word, hinting at phrases like “my cup runneth
over”, at the discourse of religion and celebration. The semantic domain shared
by these two words in English exists also in the Western Armenian dialect in
which Yesayan writes, where the words kavat
and pazhag divide the field more
radically than in English. The heightened diction of the title signals the
intense literariness of the work, which is maintained throughout, as the
first-person narrator, an Armenian wife and mother named Adrine, tells a story
of desire without fulfilment in tones of alternating detachment and intensity,
but always with a complex, one is tempted to say theoretical, self-awareness.
Adrine is
attractive, from a prosperous family, and is therefore accustomed to courting
by men. When she decides to overlook other suitors and marry the “ugly, dour”
Michael, she stresses that her decision has less to do with desire or love for
him than with respect for the unadorned, vulnerable but unslavish devotion with
which he courts her, and for the equally direct way in which he faces a world
preoccupied with bourgeois hypocrisy, material comforts and social niceties.
“He was a real man, and only women know what a rare thing a true man is” writes
Adrine. The mention of women’s knowledge justifies the assumption that we are
correct in interpreting her use of the word “men” to specify males. But on the
very page where this statement is made, Yesayan’s vocabulary begins to create a
calculated blurring of the categories of male and female. The Armenian word I
have translated as “man” in the sentence above is mart in the original. In ordinary Western Armenian, it means
“man/male”, but in fact it can also mean “human”, and Yesayan quickly signals
that she wants us to keep both possibilities in mind by explicitly saying that
the word mart can mean “both man and
woman”. She underscores this by adding that “people [martik] rarely present themselves for what they are,” as Michael
does. The sentence, and the passage in which it occurs, performs a double
function. It establishes the character of the unloved, undesired but
nevertheless respected husband who is the appropriate spouse for a woman who
has seen precious little evidence of either desire or respect in the marriages
of the upper bourgeoisie of Istanbul in the immediate pre-War period, when the
story takes place. But it also marks a tendency that will continue throughout,
a movement from the gender-marked word or comment to the generalizing phrase
that extends the judgement to all people, males and females both. Furthermore,
it hints at the possibility that gender, which presents itself as the key to what
people really are, may distort and conceal as much as it reveals.
It is necessary
to contextualize this tendency of her work, which it shares with much of
Western feminism. It has probably always been the case that women have silently
flinched at the easy separation of the sexes by the attribution of different
qualities to each, but discontent about the untruth and unfairness of such stereotyping
has been most forcefully articulated fairly recently, in the literature and
theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s worth noting that
Yesayan, a contemporary of both Colette and Virgina Woolf, wrote the
above-quoted lines four years before Woolf discussed a related matter in her
long essay, A Room Of One’s Own (1929)(4).
There, Woolf argued against the notion that maleness and femaleness are
radically opposed categories, each untinged by the features of the other. She
wrote, for example, that “perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot
create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine.” Yesayan’s argument is
not specifically about creativity or androgyny, which are Woolf’s specific
concerns in this passage; it is more general and “existential”, part of
sweeping claim that men and women must always appear in masks and “false
clothing” which simplifies their complexity, hiding it even from themselves.
The claim can appear banal, but not when Yesayan applies it to matters of
gender, when she is concerned to show that gender is a category used in
Armenian society and fiction to hide the coexistence in men and women of
aspects of desire attributed only to one sex.
This questioning of
the categories of gender is, as I have claimed, a feature of feminism early and
late. In The Color Purple(5), Alice
Walker provides examples of the same approach when she has a man say of a
woman: “Shug act more manly than most men…[She] is not like men…but…not like
women, either.” Later, the same man confesses: “I use to try to sew along with
mama cause that’s what she was always doing. But everybody laughed at me.”
Walker, like Woolf and Yesayan, articulates doubt about gender stereotyping,
and gives voice to the unease which the characters feel when they repress an
interest in sewing, for example, because of the demands imposed by the
patriarchal organization of sexual difference into the rigid opposition of the
masculine and the feminine.
However, if
Yesayan’s fiction worked at this level only, it would not deserve all the
claims I am making for it, though the date and the Middle Eastern social
context in which she worked is one index of what remarkable writer she was. At
another level of complexity, Yesayan questions certain assumptions about the
subjectivity assigned to Armenian women by traditional representations. Adrine
blames herself, calling herself “a bad woman”. This puzzles us, because at this
point in the narrative, which has the shape of a memoir, we know only that she
did not marry for love. We find that she is guilt-ridden because she is unhappy
despite the fact that Michael provides her with all the trappings of the good
life. She describes herself “in despair, weeping for hours, sorry for myself”,
unable or unwilling to identify the cause and do what is necessary to “free
[herself] from the bonds that constrained” her. She rightly refuses to identify
her husband as responsible for her malaise; he loves her and is devoted to her
and to their children, who are like “lion cubs”, handsome and happy. She loves
them, and has nannies who care for them, easing the burden of child-rearing. It
may be that Yesayan made a wise tactical decision here, creating a woman who
does “have everything”. As such, the combination of security and continuing
unhappiness in her life allows her to question the causes of the latter in a
way that women in less secure conditions might not, because they might have
more mundane reasons to be unhappy.
Eventually,
Adrine wonders whether her unhappiness is not due to lies she has told herself
all along, lies which her social situation make easy, perhaps equating them
with common sense. “Is it possible to lie”, she asks herself, “to lie to
oneself, to say that temptation, love and even other desires have never
disturbed me?” As a respectable Armenian wife and mother, she is not expected
to have, or at least to articulate such desires. Soon after admitting that her
situation is one of not just generalized hypocrisy but of lying even to
herself, she admits that there was someone she had found very attractive,
someone whose existence the memoir has repressed until this point. “He was
brave, fearless; the beauty of a knight stamped his face…HE rode his black
horse on the hills of Skudar, sitting at ease on that steed whose mouth was
flecked with foam, from whose hoofs sparks flashed.” The description is
consciously literary and erotic guises. But this knight, the memoir tells us,
was a Turkish military officer, who desired Adrine and was desired by her. She
admits that she resisted desire and temptation, but tells us, specifically,
that her reason was not that she was a woman, a wife and mother who accepted
culture’s refusal to admit the legitimacy of such desire; rather, she refuses
him because they meet so soon after the massacres of Cilicia in 1909, the very
massacres about which Yesayan wrote a documentary account. It is not as woman,
wife and mother that Adrine refuses, but as an Armenian: “Pitiless events
divided us, there were pools and floods and seas of blood dilling the space
between us,” she writes.
Adrine then goes
on to admit that her desire was never unproblematic for her. She felt guilt,
she says, during and after a tense, erotically charged encounter on the fabled
hills above the Bosphorus, during which the Turkish officer was always a
gentleman and nothing improper actually happened. Nevertheless, she adds, two
further events or stages were necessary before she could confront the full
extent of her illegitimate desire. First, the Turkish officer is killed in the
Balkan Wars of 1912, and second, she begins to write. It is this act, she
emphasizes repeatedly, that enables her to face her culturaly illegitimate
desire. And like many Western feminists, such as Peggy Kamuf(6), she raises the
question of the extent to which writing creates desire, instead of merely
recording the ghost of a past desire. I will not focus on this aspect of
Yesayan’s work here, except to say that it indicates a surprising degree of
theoretical sophistication concerning the extent to which the act of
representation helps construct rather than passively reflecting reality. Such
sophistication, in a milieu where realism was still the dominant mode of
narrative, is yet another indication of Yesayan’s insight.
Later in the
narrative, Adrine is present at a conversation to which people respond
variously, and which affects her a great deal. The guests at her house discuss
the scandal of the moment, the story of an Armenian wife and mother who has
left both husband and children to go away with her lover. The man who first
brings up the story praises the woman, but he does so because, unusually, he
attributes to her gender characteristics not commonly associated with women.
Using the word jeshmarid, the same
Armenian word with which Adrine earlier describes her husband Michael as a real
and true man, he says: “She is a real woman,
faithful to her vocation. Instead of lying and disguising [her feelings], she trampled
over assumptions and prejudices and went to live according to the dictates of
her heart” (my emphasis). The diction of the passage is such that one can
interpret it as expressing a sneaking admiration for “real” women, who unlike
most women and all men, live according to the dictates of the heart. Michael,
Adrine’s husband, angrily rejects this, invoking other “virtues specific to women” (g’noch hadoug arakinootyounner). Adrine recalls that she disagreed
with her husband, but said nothing at the time.
This story
prefigures the predicament which eventually confronts Adrine as hse begins to
admit desire, and falls in love with an Armenian man who reciprocates her
feelings, so that leaving her husband becomes a distinct possibility. In the
society of Ottoman Turkey, such an act would inevitably mean that she would
lose custody of her children. Adrine contemplates the problem, but not in
conventional terms and ways. She decides
against leaving, but not in the name of marriage, motherhood or Armenian family
values. “Armenian” identity, so powerful as a barrier to the fulfillment of her
desire for the Turk, is irrelevant to her behaviour as a mother. More
surprisingly, Adrine argues that even maternal attachment to and love of her children
is not her decisive motive. Instead, she argues that his motive, so routinely
invoked in both Armenian and Western fiction, and previously eloquently
acknowledged by her as an emotion she feels intensely, operates only in
conjunction with another factor, a moral principle, in determining her decision
to remain with her husband. In providing an additional motive, Yesayan once
again shifts the ground from a gender-marked characteristic (mother-love) to
one which is potentially characteristic of both sexes.
The core of
Adrine’s argument is that “it is impossible to buy [one’s] happiness by
inflicting unhappiness on others” for whom one cares. Remarkably, her children
become exemplars of “others”, and she acts as she does not because she thinks
“I could never be happy without my children” but rather because she believes
they could never be happy without her. Thinking back to the anonymous woman who
did leave her children to live with her lover, Adrine is in a position to blame
her, not as a woman and mother but as a person who obtains her happiness at the
cost of others”. Yet Adrine is hesitant to go even this far. “One must not
blame her,” she muses, “but one must feel sorry for her inability” to act
according to the highest standards of morality proper to both sexes, as far as
Adrine is concerned.
Interestingly, at
the end of the novella Adrine returns to this issue and to this moment,
revising her own estimation of what the properly moral act is, and of what she
should have done. Having narrated the feverish, painful scene of her final
separation from her beloved, during which both he and she assert the moral
principles already discussed, Adrine’s prose breaks, on the penultimate page,
into a renewed celebration of the claims of love and desire, and into an
assertion that perhaps the unfulfilled, specifically erotic love should have
triumphed, and indeed would have
triumphed if her lover had acted otherwise, giving her the courage to do so.
“At that moment”, she writes of the final farewell, “something plunged and
shattered in me, and if you had taken me with you just then, I would have
followed you, blindly and heedlessly”.
There are no
apologies or retractions in Yesayan’s text. Even today, in an Armenian and
Western climate in which stereotyping is more often questioned than it was in
1924 and the claims of love and erotic desire are more frequently weighed along
with others, her novella is astonishing in its steady refusal to defer to the
usual categories and in its equally relentless, conscious interrogation of
them. It is an index of the strength of Armenian resistance to such claims, and
to the feminism which makes them, that Yesayan continues to be read without the
acknowledgement of this aspect of her work.
Notes:
1- Both comments were originally made in Puzantyon (Byzantium), a
periodical published in Constantinople, in 1907. Both are quoted from Sevag
Arzoomanyan, Zabel Yesayan: Gyankeh Yev
Kordzeh [Her life and Work], Yerevan, Armenian SSR: Academy of Sciences
Press, 1965, p.82
2- Verloodzagan Echer [Analytical Pages], a collection of critical
essays, Beirut: Erebuni Press, 1987, p.36
3- The edition available to me provides no place of publication, but
its physical similarity to certain other books makes it quite likely that it
was published in Istanbul. Further references to this work will be given in
parentheses in the text.
4- New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, rpt. 1979
5- New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982
6- Fictions of Feminine desire,
Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1982
No comments:
Post a Comment