- 1 «Բայց մանաւանդ ուր որ երթայի, եւ որուն հետ որ խօսէի, մէջը ըլլալով Զապէլ Եսայանը, սա խնդիրը կը լսէի. (...)
“(W)herever I would go, and with whomever I spoke, and that including Zabel Yesayan, I kept hearing the same issue: before Retreat Without Song and after Retreat Without Song.”1
1Thus notes the writer Mannig Berberian in her review of Shahnur Kerestejian’s (1903-1974, better known by his penname Shahan Shahnur) oeuvre.2 Shahnur’s first and only novel, Retreat Without Song (hereafter Retreat), which established his reputation as a writer, is certainly worthy of its landmark status in the literature of the Armenian dispersion due to the manner in which it deals with the afterlife of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Through the story of Bedros, the novel’s protagonist, Shahnur prefers to tell the story of post-1915 displacement and remaining, of continuing to live on. Choosing to engage with the (im)possibility of remaking a new parallel self he thus opens a new chapter of life in Paris, one of the new homelands of the Armenian dispersion during the 1920s. Yet in Shahnur’s writing, the new chapter in a post-genocide world lacks an urge for reclaiming a past. Rather, the novel singles itself out in the aesthetic and discursive turn by adopting a narrative that stays far away from reiterating the established nationalist discourse of an eventual return to a homeland. In Retreat, Shahnur dismantles all that represented the old order and legitimacy of the Armenian reality of the past, from the Armenian Church to the canonical “fathers” of Western Armenian literature.
- 3 For Armenian communities in dispersion, the experience of forced exile in the post-genocide world w (...)
2Albeit seen today as the foremost representative of the literature of the Armenian Diaspora,3 Retreat was considered “unacceptable” by conservatives and nationalists in the recently dispersed Armenian communities for its rejection of a number of established stances that the newly emerging cultural narrative of the time held sacred and fundamental. From its provocative opening statement juxtaposing God with prostitution, Shahnur strives to construct a work of art that captures and phenomenologizes the experience of retreat after the loss of everything that belonged to the Armenian, whether as individual or as nation. Invested in the reality of “deterritorialization” (which differs fundamentally from a spatial break), Retreat is able to mark the experience of separation from one’s identity and language as well as home(land) and replacing (or reterritorializing) these with a complex sense of otherness which blends in itself the common markers of uncanniness: both familiar but not-so-familiar and strange but not-so-strange.
- 4 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, 1986, pp. 16-27.
3The present article moves to examine the question of de/re-territorialization of self in Retreat that operates through the markers of loss. Borrowing “deterritorialization”, a literary-philosophical term, from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,4 I examine the way Shahnur puts his native language, – itself intrinsically linked with concepts such as home and subjectivity – at stake. Towards this end, the central focus is given to two main sites of “untranslatables” that govern Shahnur’s textual engagement with the state of homelessness: auditory elements and the haunting presence of Turkish that together constitute an underlying substructure in the novel. Shahnur imbues his novel with the noises of a wide range of auditory elements in contradiction with its own title. So far these remain neglected by scholars, and yet they play a pivotal role in pointing to the deterritorializing effect of remaining alien. Similarly, the incorporation of Turkish and French interjections and songs into the dialogues within the novel leads to a shift from the familiar to a particular mode of foreignness that would essentially be part of the exilic experience. However, the effect and role of these languages differ from one another fundamentally. While the use of French words and phrases in the novel simply points to the advent of the foreign Western world and its ways into the Armenian individual’s life or the whole community in dispersion, the presence of Turkish carries about a certain tension with political stakes involved in Armenians’ relationship to their mother tongue(s). Blending his narrative with French and Turkish expressions, Shahnur seems to mirror the present and past sources of assimilation. Yet the Turkish language that was part of his own environment (geographical, social or cultural) in the past also brings along historical trauma. Given that Turkish stands on the paradox of signifying the source for loss as well as the home(land) itself, Shahnur’s preference to “contaminate” his mother tongue (Western-Armenian) with Turkish, the language of the perpetrator, gets even more meaningful in terms of displaying the fundamental (and impossible) question of reconstructing a self that is “at-home with oneself”. The homeless new subject of the dispersion can only secure a sense of home and therefore a self only by the paradox of introducing those “untranslatables” into the narrative.
- 5 K. Beledian, 2016, pp. 75-268.
- 6 On minor/minority literature see G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, 1986, pp. 16-27.
4The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, it is to provide an overall analysis of the literary scene and context of the formative years (the 1920s) within which the Menk Generation5 and Shahnur’s Retreat hold a particular place. This unique place in the literature of the dispersion is discussed via its potential that rejects and retreats from the cultural narrative which they believed enslaved the newly developing subjectivity and emerging identity into the unproductive and aggressive narratives of nationalism and victimhood. By adapting Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature to the context of the Menk Generation, the very same potential in the novel will be examined through the way it presents a “retreatment” in the form of rebuilding a self within the boundaries of this “new” literature. The healing process that this new literature claimed to generate will then be addressed as the ultimate moment of minor literature within the minority status of Western Armenian literature.6
- 7 Foreign or foreigner, usually a non-Armenian; the term also denotes the sense of a strange, foreign (...)
- 8 There are five translations including a Soviet edition. These are: Նահանջը առանց երգի, (Yerevan: Ha (...)
- 9 L. Venuti, 2000, pp. 468-488.
- 10 Shahnur’s Retreat comes to a deadlock in terms of fully realizing Venuti’s aim of creating a commun (...)
5Secondly, to offer a reading of the novel after considering the views of two leading critical thinkers – the literary critics, writers and philosophers Marc Nichanian and Krikor Beledian – as part of the existing critical scholarship on Shahnur that specifically draws on the question of the Other. The essay thus carves out a care-ful frame for Shahnur/Bedros’ ambiguous story of self-making (and unmaking) experience through the traces of the odar (օտար)7 effect of sounds and interjections that always arrive via Turkish. These traces, which I treat as “untranslatables”, will be taken as pointers that help to expand on the idea of homeland conceptualized on the basis of two realms: the auditory and the language. This is aimed at forging an understanding for the notion of homelessness in the specific state of odar(utyun). Within the frame of ethico-politics of hearing the other, this trajectory also leads to the employment of a limited comparative translation approach regarding the critique of the role of Turkish in the original text and titular translations.8 In doing so I secure an ethical premise of hearing the Self as Other in translation as well as in the source text. By this initial step, the objective of building a community in translation, as Lawrence Venuti argues,9 is realized to some extent.10
6Upon the abandonment of territories under Allied Occupation since the end of World War I, the fear of violence and further atrocities forced the remainder of the Ottoman Armenian population (by then mainly assembled in Istanbul) into another wave of mass exile. On the eve of the emergence of the Turkish Republic in 1923 Shahnur became one of the thousands who fled the country in search of a new permanent home elsewhere.
- 11 Despite their significant contribution, these authors were either absent and excluded from antholog (...)
- 12 Khachig Tölölyan observes that it is only after 1965 that the pairing of “genocide-diaspora” entere (...)
- 13 K. Beledian, 2016, p. 147.
7The early and formative years of the dispersion resulting from this final large-scale exodus gave birth to a transient moment in the form of a radical literary movement known as the Menk Generation. Through their literary production, this new generation of writers cared to problematize the afterlife of the loss rather than adhere to the endless confrontation with the banality of genocidal violence.11 This was in contrast to the post-World War II period when the idea of a Turkish Armenian dispersion was determinedly replaced by the term Armenian “diaspora”,12 and which saw an ultimate homogenization at all levels of discourse which assimilated a nationalist agenda. Yet surpassing the limits of the brief, almost two decade-long, history of the formative years, Shahnur’s novel proved to be the “exemplary novel of the diaspora.”13 Based on the story of Bedros, mirroring that of the author himself, who leaves his native Istanbul for Paris shortly before the founding of the Turkish Republic, the novel remains silent about the trauma of the forced exile and past violence.
- 14 Sh. Shahnur, 1982, p. 9.
- 15 Haratch (forward, progress) newspaper made a major contribution to the establishment of the social (...)
- 16 K. Chahinian, 1981, p. 29.
- 17 In contrast, in a comprehensive and more to the point analysis Beledian argues that “the other youn (...)
- 18 Tenth century Armenian mystic monk and theologian (also known as Gregory of Narek) Naregatsi was mo (...)
8Despite all the uproar and controversy caused by the novel’s opening sentence – “He was no more than a mature youth, as was evidenced by his inability to define the words ‘prostitute’ and ‘God’”14 –, and the many more “profanities” popping out later in the text, it would not be an overstatement to characterize Shahnur’s Retreat as the song of the dispersed Armenians. Since it was first serialized in Shavarsh Missakian’s popular Armenian daily and leading organ of the French Armenian community, Haratch15 in Paris in 1929, the editor resisted the harsh criticism levelled against the work and made it possible for the novel to appear in his newspaper between May and September of 1929 without any interruptions.16 Retreat’s detractors mostly found fault with its content, whilst overlooking its potential as a literary work. The novel was interpreted through oversimplifications, such as the criticism levelled against the character of Suren (equated with that of Shahnur) who was considered as the mouthpiece for the author’s views and the approaches at large of the Menk Generation.17 The main trigger for indignation on the part of many readers and critics mostly lay on Suren’s infamous speech during which he accuses Armenians to have adopted passivity and submissiveness as a national characteristic and attacks Krikor Naregatsi’s18 Book of Lamentations (Narek), a sacred book of poetry that holds a key place in Armenian culture and the canon of the Armenian Church. Beyond the offensive language that attacked religion and perceived core national values, the pornography and raw sexuality (as opposed to love) presented another problematic for the novel’s detractors. These attacks constituted Shahnur’s way of pulling down every pillar that upheld Armenian culture and identity, before rebuilding an Armenian self in this new environment. Thereby, just as the rejection and degrading of national and cultural values, love was to be strongly repudiated and reformulated within the reality of a state of foreignness.
9Beginning the novel by pairing the sacred (“God”) with the profane (“prostitute”) not only proves to be shocking and unexpected, but also makes clear from the first instant that the novel is heavily invested in the question of re-defining, re-positioning, carving up a place or dwelling, all over again. After all, the fundamental and definitive roots of Armenians (i.e. their Christian faith) have to be pulled down in the most profane and abject manner before a new meaning can be constructed. This earliest declaration for opening up room (always synonymous with opening up new meaning) is followed by a vivid description by the protagonist Bedros, who departs from his hometown of Istanbul on a ship for good. From this point onwards, the novel seems to replace its focus from the traumatic wound to the ability of remaining in a place that is not the central character’s home(land).
- 19 M. Nichanian, 1988-1989, pp. 53-75.
- 20 K. Beledian, 1980, pp. 319-356.
- 21 T. Chahinian, 2008.
- 22 For a discussion of the dichotomy between genocide and catastrophe so as to probe the question of r (...)
- 23 Another article on Shahnur’s Retreat and its translations will deal with the French words with resp (...)
10The scholarship on Shahnur and the literature of the Menk Generation already includes a number of insightful critical readings thanks to which we are already able to peruse the novel: these include the untranslatable question of the Odar and the play of images that dominate the novelistic discourse and reflect Shahnur’s critical approach,19 the fact of alienation that brings forth three categories of otherness in the case of Diasporan Armenian’s self-making process;20 and the “indexical representation” employed in the narrative,21 which marks the experience of the Catastrophe without narrating it explicitly.22 In dialogue with all three critical approaches, my reading focuses on the realm of sounds and Turkish words23 so as to expand on the odar effect and trace it through a network of further untranslatables that capture the experience of deterritorialization. That experience is primarily the state of homelessness that mandates a state of remaining in-between languages.
- 24 See S. Değirmenciyan, 2014, pp. 25-30.
- 25 H. Oshagan, 1968, p. 15.
- 26 K. Beledian, 1980, p. 503.
11The tangled rift characterizing Western Armenian literature that deserves probing is that of the interchangeable use of “Istanbul” and “Western Armenian” in the designation of literature produced within the borders of the Ottoman Empire and later in the Diaspora. Whilst that remains outside the scope of this essay,24 this article shall glance over the Western Armenian literature that emerged in the early dispersion. In his well-known ten-volume literary anthology A Panorama of Western Armenian Literature, Hagop Oshagan argues that the writers of the dispersion were clearly preoccupied with the transference of a spirit that essentially belonged to Istanbul with its rich cultural backdrop.25 In order to create a collective identity and consciousness for the now “rootless” Armenian community in dispersion, the post-genocidal cultural narrative devised a bridge between the new and old homelands. The attempt of re-construction of these ties was problematic enough as the emphasis was on the, albeit blurry, image of a homeland which comprised of the combination of the historic Armenian that now lay within the borders of the new Turkish and the Soviet Armenian Republics. The idea of return and the promise of re-claiming those lands were subsequent sub-narratives that heavily shaped and secured an identity for the Armenians in the dispersion. Underlining the pathology behind this national construction that produced a literature of its own, Beledian writes: “Today Istanbul, after its historic fall, is still perpetuated with its myths, literary discourses and mythologization of nationalism within the borders of the Diaspora (Սփիւռք) where an artless, schemeless and superficial literature possible has been produced.”26
- 27 K. Beledian, 2016, pp. 14-15.
- 28 Ibid., p. 17.
- 29 An epithet of Vahakn, one of the gods in Armenian mythology.
- 30 Examples include A. Tchobanian Mer kraganoutiune [Our Literature], V. Gakavian Boghbade sermer [Gra (...)
12However, a parallel literary life that had begun to flourish especially in the Armenian community in Paris of the 1920s, proved more complex and nuanced than that account allows. With the help and active involvement of the press (newspapers, journals and organizations), the frenzy of literary activity that occupied and shaped the cultural and intellectual life of the dispersion manifested itself through “diverse tendencies, tastes and ideological positions”.27 Haratch played a significant role in publishing new writers and cultivating the idea of national identity on the grounds that the spirit of nationalism had to be preserved until the return to the homeland.28 Following the fall and Sovietization of the independent Republic of Armenia, two distinct approaches dominated the literary and intellectual landscape of the dispersion. If the approach of a literary organization called Hartkogh [Straw thief29] and a number of journals – with objectives more or less similar to those of Haratch –, was to prioritize the production of an original art aimed towards the preservation of national identity, other periodicals (e.g. Tsolk [Reflection], Arshav [Race], and Tarpnots [Forge]) and writers (i.e. Arshag Tchobanian) placed an emphasis on disseminating socialist ideology and introducing Soviet art production from Yerevan. Some in the latter group went as far as in pinning down the purpose of cultural and literary production to the discussion of the “great crime” in their works.30
- 31 The reference is to Slavoj Zizek’s allusion to Deleuze’s notion of “body without organs”. My refere (...)
- 32 Menk, 1931, vol. 1, p. 3.
- 33 For prescriptive remarks pertaining to the new literature they were to initiate, see N. Sarafian, 1 (...)
13While the overall diasporic viewpoint developed just like “an organ without body”31 with its embodiment built upon archival works of testimonials, memoirs and letters, the orphans of 1915 who gathered around Menk in the early 1930s took quite a different path: they resisted the common urge to re-legitimize a series of issues – from the presence of the survivors to the search for cultural and literary resurrection. This involved keeping a distance from anything that was tainted with the post-genocidal urge for mawkish nostalgia. That theirs was acknowledged as the first wave of literature on the French Armenian literary scene stemmed from their determination to retreat in the mode of rejection of the old times. With this determination, declared in the manifesto published in the first issue of their short-lived journal (published between 1931 and 1933),32 they also happened to become the first group that showed a collective understanding for the need of an alternative way of healing and re-treating33 in such a way as to establish a self and a subjectivity expressed within the very borders of the new life in dispersion. Even though their ways of “retreatment” and textual care did not go as far as forging subjects who suffered from speaking the truth, the wound and beyond, they revealed a sophisticated artistic quality with keen determination to define and produce “new” literature.
- 34 Sh. Nartuni, 1931, pp. 37-40.
- 35 Ibid.
14The whole Menk project worked on the basis of producing “new” literature representing the present reality of the dispersion in their new home(land)s. These writers clearly meant to be different and detached from a once flourishing literary tradition and its present ruinous state.34 The reason behind this decisive act was twofold: firstly, they wanted their literature to represent the reality of dispersion, its formation and consciousness, rather than continue the literary tradition of their predecessors in the old homeland, which they found highly artificial and preoccupied with a Eurocentric approach;35 secondly, and in connection to this rejection, they aimed to produce a borderless and nationless literature which would instead place the emphasis upon the people and their new lives in the dispersion. With the shift from the nation/state to the people that would define the discourse of this new literature, the Menk Generation wanted to distance themselves from engaging with the post-1915 cultural narrative which they saw as nothing but pumped-up rhetoric of victimhood promoting the false promise of a return to an idealized and imagined homeland (which would be constituted by combining the lands of historic and Soviet Armenia).
- 36 Sh. Nartuni, 1931, p. 39.
- 37 Vahé Oshagan characterises these as “tales of suffering full of agonizing pathos”. V. Oshagan, 1985 (...)
15On the opening page of their journal’s first issue, where they declared the main principles of their literary movement, the objective of “the free development and flourishing of a new Armenian literature” was juxtaposed with the maintenance of the individuality of every one of the group’s fifteen writers, whose signatures can be found at the end of the declarative document of the group. Likewise, Shavarsh Nartuni, one of Shahnur’s contemporaries and another of those “Paris boys” as most later critics would call them, accuses previous writers of having false literary orientation, exporting from the West, which resulted in the political failures and eventually the ruination of our home(land).36 While members of the group adopted such accusative tones in their writings published in Menk, in an effort to explain and project the significance and role of their own literature, they also criticized the “mainstream” narrative of the dispersion which fueled the glorification of so-called national values of the past which they consolidated with the idea of nostalgia for the lost homeland. In its general overview the cultural narrative of the dispersion was inclined to adopt themes that would highlight victimhood, trauma and vengeance.37
- 38 T. Chahinian, 2008, p. 85.
16The Menk Generation either remained unacknowledged within the literary canon or their legacy was confronted with reservation in the post-World War II era due to their non-compliance with this view. However, this does not mean that they had denied and disregarded the trauma itself. Instead, their literature presented a different way of engagement with trauma and its aftereffects. Rather than focusing on the Catastrophe explicitly, the Menk Generation was distinguished by its engagement with the traumatic events in the past through narratives that pointed to them only implicitly. Featuring as the most significant characteristic of their aesthetics, the decision to produce with an indirect form of representation, which the literary historian Talar Chahinian terms “indexical representation”, was also in conjunction with the paradox of the necessity and impossibility to confront the past’s trauma.38 In doing so, they were able to cut off their ties with the past, released themselves from the vicious circle of trauma and the understanding that treats literature as its by-product, and cultivated a new present and consciousness for the subject in dispersion.
- 39 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, 1986, pp. 16-17.
- 40 Ibid., p. 16.
17As the overall Diasporan cultural narrative evolved prosthetically – which is to say the urge of the dispersed community to recreate what is lost under the shadow of the Western Armenian literary legacy –, the exclusion of the Menk Generation from this tradition also marks a peculiar case of “minor literature” within the minority state of Western Armenian literature and history. “Minor literature” marks a constructive opening into the interrogation for diverse marginal groups in literature. The term refers to a literary production by a minority group or community that uses a “major” language in writing rather than their own language. For any writing to be considered as minor literature, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue, the following characteristics need to exist: language in writing should be “affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization”, “everything in them is political”, and “everything takes on a collective value”.39 Among the three key elements, it is the “deterritorialization”, that holds a key role in regulating the phenomenon and needs some more clarification. Deleuze and Guattari explicate it as “the impossible of not writing” in their analysis of Kafka’s case, by which they problematize the paradox of writing in German for the Jews of Warsaw and Prague.40 The impasse, between writing in German and its impossibility for a Jew, results in the emergence of a language that is simultaneously German and not, both alien and familiar, a language that is not theirs (but the foreigner’s) and their own at the same time. Referring more than to its definitive borders of writing in a minor language, minor(ity) literature always marks its ontological dimension based on cultural, political and ethical faultlines.
- 41 Given the fact that Shahnur’s Retreat offers a reading of minor literature theory of its own, the w (...)
- 42 As it is never easy for an Armenian to identify Turkish as another mother tongue, its status is loc (...)
18A similar paradoxical opening shows itself especially in the literary production of the Menk Generation, including Shahnur. Shahnur preferred to scatter linguistic traces (such as Turkish songs, words and phrases and so on) in Retreat. The preference on his part to bring in those “foreign” elements into the narrative that is written in his native Armenian ultimately generates a moment of “deterritorialization” of its own. Such a textual treatment exemplifies the phenomenon of “minor literature” within the minority status of the Menk Generation.41 Having said that, it is worth expanding the definitive limits of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature”, though precarious as this task may be, by proposing that Shahnur’s Retreat is emblematic in presenting the story of the Armenian dispersion as this sort of deterritorialization. Similar to what they formulated around Kafka, reading Retreat as the story of deterritorialization leads us to track down the traces for “impossibility of not writing”. By dwelling time to time on Turkish, Shahnur/Bedros reconfigures his Western Armenian in its previous intercultural and bilingual context, the result of which shows itself through his “voice” simultaneously sounding his own and not his own. Ironically, Shahnur/Bedros brings forth the coexistence of odar/familiar in his “self” only when he contaminates or taints the homogeneity of Western Armenian with Turkish interjections. Turkish as the host language42 where Shahnur once found himself in the past now marks itself up as the language that puts his exilic state in action permanently. Every time Turkish is invoked, Shahnur/Bedros aims at revealing an instant of otherness in his “self” and this uncanny coexistence of the familiar/foreign proves to provide moments for feeling at home. Simultaneously, these moments that come to the fore through the “untranslatables” continuously attest to the experience of retreating and detachment from everything that previously constituted the self. The new self that is characteristically identified in the act of retreating is rendered possible only with the “impossibility of not writing”. More on that paradox, the fact that the enunciation of deterritorialization establishes “reterritorialization” after itself makes this vicious circle work perfectly. Consequently, the retreat, in every voice that belongs to the language of the perpetrator, becomes the affirmation of homelessness as the only possible form of home for the new Diasporan subject. This is the starting point of my reading and I will approach this “enigmatic” state in Shahnur/Bedros’s Retreat step by step.
- 43 K. Beledian, 1980, p. 331.
- 44 K. Beledian, 2016, p. 144.
- 45 M. Nichanian, 1988-1989, pp. 53-75.
19But first I take a necessary step back to two important critics, Krikor Beledian and Marc Nichanian, whose views have already led us to interpret the “new literature” through the question of the Other. In his comparative reading of the post-Catastrophic literature by Shahnur, Hratch Zartaryan, Zareh Vorpuni and others, Beledian explicates that the notions of inside and outside, as categories closely linked with the issues of home, identity, exclusion and alienation, have now been complicated as a result of the rupture between the survivor generation and any form of belonging (home(land), family, literary fathers, the Church) that remained in the past. The break that created a void also generated new understandings of inside and outside which would previously have been connotated with the ideas of familiarity and alienation (օտարութիւն). Instead, Beledian writes, “there is no alienation of the outside and ‘intact’ familiarity of the inside. There is the alienation of the outside and familiar-alienation of the inside”.43 However, the rupture over the spatial order of the post-catastrophic life was not the only conundrum that they had to confront. As the experience of the void and the feeling of emptiness both came forward as ultimate new concerns, most writers of Menk Generation treated the novel, as Beledian argues elsewhere, “as document, testimonial or historiography” and utilized the genre so as to capture and document their experiences.44 The novels that stood as “testimonials” for their “new lives” authenticated and legitimized these “aliens” that were simultaneously not-so-alien. The issue of foreignness or alienation, with their “untranslatable” form in Armenian, becomes a central problem for the literary critic and philosopher Nichanian as well. In his reading of Retreat he correlates the analyses of various enigmas, their revelations and the consistent play of images dominating the novel with the inevitable question of the Odar and the “insoluble problem” of its translation to English.45 Just like the entire Menk Generation of writers, Shahnur aimed his gaze onto the question of self-image of the Armenian whose stateless and nationless state of being dominated everything. The satirical subheading of the novel, “An Illustrated History of the Armenians” (Պատկերազարդ պատմութիւն հայոց) therefore mocks the grand narratives of the past which are now replaced, as the playful implication displays, by an obsession with the process of self-image for the subject in dispersion. Nichanian’s careful probing of every level of the relationship between image and truth, seeing and self-making, reveals that the novel is layered by discoveries, revelations, and disillusionments Unsurprisingly, this whole new and fragmented story of the Armenian “self” begins in a photographic studio from where onwards the readers become occupied with various façades of the fact that what you see is not necessarily about what you know.
20In Part One, Shahnur’s depiction of Bedros’s departure is almost photographic: his statement of “a life ended here” sounds like the unclenching of the shooter that freezes the picture of his hometown. He then photo-graphs (or writes through with visual images) his city for the first and last time in the novel, by transcribing the reflection of an Armenian as he looks, as much as the cityscape, at the political and social façades for the last time. He writes:
- 46 Sh. Shahnur, 1982, p. 16.
A government ended here and the paw of the nation to whom the departing young man belonged definitively weakened. He carried in his veins a pure and healthy blood, like the sky under which his first cycle had begun. The only son of a modest and diligent couple, he spent his childhood years in that semi-Europeanized quarter of Istanbul. Here was their wooden house left to them by his grandfather; the garden, at the bottom of which was the hen-house: as was his fountain-pen at the bottom of the well; the neighbors, with the hanoums and aghas, the quince and mulberry trees. There was the Armenian school, then the French one, with their shows and prize-givings. Then there were minor loves magnified by reading and moonlight; there was hatred, revenge, and the general drunkenness of the armistice.46
21By leaving Istanbul, Bedros is trying to get away from the “paw” of the newly emerging state and avoid the imminent hatred and further revenge from the Turks, especially after the attack he had suffered at the photographer’s studio where he worked (“Then again, it was at that photographer’s that he had received the blow from the Turk’s jackboot that had hurled him to Paris.”)47
22The separation from his homeland is further weaved through a number of images such as that of the tasseled fez, or the name of the ship that he had embarked upon (Kırlangıç, meaning swallow in Turkish) and which would take him to Marseilles. Yet a swallow connotes more than a name in Armenian (ծիծեռնակ) being the very same migratory bird which symbolizes the exilic soul of the Armenians after the genocide. And on the very moment of departure, Istanbul is left behind to vanish as if it were a coin disappearing “under the conjuror’s handkerchief”.48 After an opening with such symbolism, Shahnur then turns his attention from his roots onto a completely different realm: that of his permanent new home-country which is imbued with a long and rich list of images for the reader to follow whether on surface or more latent and deeper levels.
23Yet other than this image-ridden structure, there is also another, somehow tacit realm where the question of Odar gives way to a series of “unfamiliar” instances in the novel. These are the persistent “sound-scape” and the use of Turkish interjections that respectively remain in their haunting and untranslatable states. The seeming familiarity of sounds, repeated melodies and Turkish words scattered within the narrative bring out a particular state of “strangeness”. The employment of Turkish interjections, as part of a “major” language, meets the need to confront with the distance taken away from one’s “own” language and identity. It is just then that a particular moment of homelessness shows itself as the subject realizes his own deterritorialization from family, home and birthplace. In doing so, Shahnur shifts the flow of “minor literature” only to make the experience of deterritorialization more radical and singular. By the decision to produce in his “minority language” (Western Armenian) rather than the major languages he dwelled in (first Turkish and then French), Shahnur more efficiently achieves the display of the experience as that of an irretrievable deterritorialization rather than of detachment from everything he had identified with.
24If the dominance of visual effects and images in the novel is foreshadowed by the satirical subheading of the novel, “The Illustrated History of Armenians”, the titular emphasis on retreating without song finds an echo on the audial effects dispersed throughout the narrative. Should anyone care to hear, the very same Part One opens up with the rifle in the hands of a standing guard, “some notes exploded from a brass instrument”, which put into silence the sound of porters’ running, soldiers’ clamor, and of those blue boys who were shouting the names of their friends on the ship.49 This is followed by the hoot of the ship, “a low, deep hoot, which caused a shudder”, the sound of the steam raining all over the waiting crowd and the absence of a final word or two that Bedros had hoped to hear from his parents’ mouth. The other half of the first part consists of Bedros’ arrival and the chaos surrounding his entrance. The bewilderment that is painted with deafening as much as dazzling images are spiced with French words in juxtaposition to the Western Armenian language. And this is just a beginning; the novel, as the final part of the essay aims to show, is based on various sounds and fragmented musical traces that conjure up as a parallel latent structure for the novel.
25Even though the central focus of the novel is always on the relationship between seeing and the truth, Retreat is as importantly bound up with the idea of song. To begin with a question, one might ask as to why Shahnur felt the necessity to entitle his work “Retreat Without Song” and not for example “Silent Retreat”, “Retreat Without Much Ado” or “Just a Retreat”, etc.? In addition, we sense a clear insistence on characterizing the retreat as being without song rather than in “silence”. It is true that the novel is structured to unfold the experience of dissolution through Bedros’ story (i.e. of becoming Pierre and falling in and out of love). And it is as soon as we realize not the silence but the emphasized presence of the absence of song – rather than the silence – in his retreating that we spot each and every sound in the novel; the twitters, murmurs, chants, recitations, anthems, croonings, love songs. The sonic structure seems to map a latent pattern for reading (and hearing) the sense of retreat on a different level. By delving more into this network of sounds, we discover the fact that each musical instance points to a particular mood or feeling.
26Such instances abound throughout the novel. One of the most striking tuneful instances is through the sound of a violin that appears like a pattern several times:
From a nearby courtyard, there came the sounds of a violin: it was an old, a very old and well-known melody, which climbed up with uneven waves, fluctuating and dawdling between the floors, a melody which aimed to move those on the second floor rather than the ones on the fourth, but growing weary, clung to the water pipes and managed to climb up here – that old, very old melody, known to all.50
27In the second part, immediately after a romantic scene, the sound of the same violin is audible and repeated almost with the same lines we read before:
It was his first beautiful spring in Paris. The room was filled with ecstasy, love, enjoyment, and happiness. And there was the day when Nenette had hiccups. She said that it had bothered her all day: Pierre kissed her vigorously: he sucked her mouth with such force that the hiccups were transferred to him – they really did! At his usual hour, the beggar would come to the adjacent courtyard and the sounds of the violin would again climb up the water pipes, wavering between the floors, and they would listen to that old, very old melody, known to all…51
28And after tracing it for the third time, it appears for a fourth time only to end the novel by evoking an illusory atmosphere:
Among the tangled inner noises, transporter by the endless buzzing in his ears, he suddenly seemed to hear the sounds of a violin from a nearby courtyard: it was an old, a very old and well known melody, which climbed up with uneven waves, fluctuating and dawdling between floors a melody which aimed to move those on the second floor rather than the ones on the fourth, but growing weary, clung to the water pipes and managed to climb up here –that old, very old melody, known to all.52
29The repetitive paragraph almost functions in the narrative as a fugue, a musical term that describes a short melody that begins as a simple tune and is repeated for a number of times in a musical work. Just as a fugue, the melody, in the absence of a full song, keeps appearing in a fragmented ghostly manner and haunts the novel several times. However, it loses its substantiality as the novel reaches to its end. Though the melody reaches its climactic moment it also loses its ties with reality, just as losing its body and form, and ends as an empty echo skipping, instead, frantically in Bedros’s mind.
- 53 Ibid., p. 17.
- 54 Ibid., p. 25.
- 55 Ibid., p. 32.
30In Chapter Two, the reader comes across a brief excerpt from a popular Armenian song («Պատէն կախուած իմ ջութակը ինկաւ փշռուեց» / “My violin hanging on the wall fell down and was smashed”) right in the middle of a chaotic scene.53 Likewise, in Chapter Three, Bedros/Pierre meets the young Canadian who lives in next door and keeps everyone awake at night with his poems that he writes on his typewriter. Invited to his room, Bedros listens to the Canadian man’s poems without understanding a word and yet contemplates on the musicality of the English language and poetry: “he listened to the language – English – which is so suitable for poetry with its music and, surrendering himself to the hammock of emotions, he let his soul be swayed back and forth with the harmony of that music…”54 It occurs at a time when Bedros is carried away by a dreamy atmosphere in which he can openly manifest his desire for Nenette. As these instances reveal, every time Bedros’ feelings overflow, there appears an interrupting moment of a musical nature in the narrative. Soon after the above-mentioned daydreaming scene, we hear the protagonist murmur a song while entering his room at a moment when he is particularly happy with his nascent love affair with Nenette (or Madam Jeanne). He starts singing under his breath: “I have loved a pair of eyes like the bright stars”. When pulling out the bottom drawer of the wardrobe he sees that, “they were as deep as ether and like the troubled waters…”55 Here the musical moment gets another significant turn in bringing Turkish to the centre of discussion. In order to express his joy and high spirits, Shahnur makes Bedros sing a well-known Turkish song; but why? Why not an Armenian song? The answer to this question shows itself more clearly in yet another scene when Turkish haunts the narrative in the form of a song on Hratch’s lips.
31The abovementioned musical moments and acts of singing as well as those musical moments interrupting or backdropping the narrative at various times evoke more than states of happiness, desire and love. The trace of a melody or a song more importantly inscribes a body, a bodily presence for the one who retreats. The relation between having a body and having a song to sing clearly repeats itself as a phenomenon that Shahnur likes to play with for the purpose of characterizing the retreat or his deterritorialization from his own language and home. An incident described in Chapter Six perhaps best captures the homelessness that is also within the language, as Bedros invests the untranslatability of feeling his self as well as at home in Turkish rather than in his own mother tongue. In what is an intimate scene, Bedros/Pierre and Nenette are lying snuggled up to each other when he speaks out some Turkish words in order to show his love for her. The passage is as follows:
- 56 “You are şirin, you are iki kavurmuş, mısır buğday – as they say in Turkish – no, it doesn’t matter (...)
- 57 Sh. Shahnur, 1982, p. 38.
You are my cheerful and vivacious Nenette, my warm soul! You are loving, you are iki kavourmoush, missir bouyda -as they say in Turkish- no, it doesn’t matter, you are missir bouyda, missir bouyda…56 no I won’t translate it… I can’t translate it… Oh how do you want me to explain it to you…? Ouch my nose! Ow my mouth let me speak…! I’ll try and explain: now missir bouyda is something you eat […] in Istanbul, when they get together during the long, winter evenings, they roast maize on the stove, especially to amuse the children, and they eat it while it’s still hot. No, it isn’t the way you know it. […]57
32This scene presents one of the few moments that leads the reader to the source of the question of deterritorialization in Shahnur’s literature. Why does Bedros/Pierre need Turkish, rather than Armenian, in order to show his sincerest feelings for the Frenchwoman? Would not be the same if he could have used Armenian for opening his soul in a genuine way? Before any answer to this, to make things even more complicated, the narrative third voice implicitly attributes the status of a mother tongue to Turkish: “It is in this way that there comes a time when we say that which is in our blood and our bones, and which cannot be translated: because it only a mother tongue which can give to words those sincere and simple stress which do not demand any thinking. That was why Pierre, in a soft voice as if only to himself, said in Armenian with the appropriate stresses, ‘Let me eat you, my Nenette, let me nibble you.’”58 Clearly, the juxtaposition of Turkish as a mother tongue, next to Armenian, at first sight seems like a slip of the mind.
- 59 For the relationship between house and the uncanny, and the limits of the word unheimlich, see: J. (...)
33However, it is not only the “uncanny” presence of Turkish within the familiarity of Armenian that makes the novel as belonging to a minor literature. Shahnur must have had a subtle twist in his decision, which is to say the decision to “dwell” in Turkish in certain moments within the narrative, just to be able to give the untranslatable feeling of home as well as of Odar (and odarutyun). Yet this decision reveals an even stranger and more unfamiliar truth about the dimension of his retreat. Just as the feeling of homelessness of Shahnur/Bedros, Western Armenian, the language which represented home itself, is defamiliarized and turned into a strange, uncanny body.59 Certainly, for the Menk Generation the decision to write in the mother tongue is nothing more than to preserve their “home” which is no longer the same home with the same familiarity.
- 60 Penname of Taniel Chibukiarian (1844-1915), poet and luminary of the early 20th century Istanbul Ar (...)
- 61 Sh. Shahnur, 1982, p. 152.
34Shahnur puts a dual challenge before us: the untranslatability of words of endearment in Turkish and the untranslatability of the confrontation with the home that is no longer a home. The deterritorialization of Armenian as the supposed home is further consolidated with a pastiche on a well-known Taniel Varujan60 poem. From several of his writings published in the journal Menk, we know that Shahnur had already destroyed all the ties with the “fathers” among whom Varujan played his part. By altering the poem and reciting it to Nenette, Bedros ultimately does more than mocking it. The Armenian poem, now distorted, remains unrelational to everyone. It is of no surprise that the novel ends with the same mark of unrelationality (with regard to faith, language and home) when Bedros/Pierre, unable to say the Lord’s prayer in his native language or in French, parrots after Gosdan the Frenchman.61
35Chapter Six offers subsequent moments that perplex us even more. While still in bed, the couple are suddenly disturbed by Pierre/Bedros’s Armenian friends who come to his door to collect him on their way for a fun outing. With nobody answering, and assuming that Bedros/Pierre is out and might return in a short while, they decide to settle in front of the door. While waiting, Hratch starts singing a well-known Turkish song, which Nenette, once again, not only does not understand but misinterprets the singing as crying and shedding of tears. The scene unfolds as follows:
- 62 “Are you happy, I wonder, have you any worries? / I am in so much trouble, do you ever know? / Is t (...)
Fortunately the creaking of the bed was lost in the laughter. They were very animated: Hratch started singing a popular song: “Are you happy, I wonder, or have you any worries…?” “He’s crying”, said Nenette. “Quiet, he’s not crying!” “If I fall asleep, will you have any room on your bosom: do you know how tired I am…?” sang Hratch.62
36The above scene, with the song as its backdrop, holds too many subtleties: the ambiguity of the reference, Nenette’s amusing misinterpretation, the untranslatability of the significance of the singing of a Turkish song, if not the song itself… Describing Nenette with the Turkish word kaymak, Hratch addresses the song to the Frenchwoman or the odar woman in general. To some extent the song might perhaps be said to reflect Bedros’ feelings for Nenette. But eventually it is related to the homeland. As in the previous scene where Bedros/Pierre had taken refuge in Turkish in his oscillation between being himself (as Bedros) and loving a Frenchwoman, the moment when Hratch calls for the help of a Turkish song represents another instance of the deterritorialized Other. In a perfect symbolic moment, standing on either side of the threshold, – one inside and the other outside –, Hratch and Bedros/Pierre articulate their own experiences of in-betweenness. Just like many other examples in the novel, this too provides a subtle portrait of the impossibility for the making of room for one’s self and for a new meaning.
37 Whilst the question of Retreat’s translations remains outside the scope of this article, given that the interpretive scope presented here is invested only with the attempt to read the soundscape and the interjections in Turkish in close connection to (re-making) self and home, it is necessary to state that the question of translating Retreat is closely tied to the ethical and political stakes involved in our common objective to create a community based on preserving the difference. Nevertheless, translations are singled out with a number of decisions made by translators whose primary concerns have been either to censor controversial sections (i.e. the Soviet republication or Kudian’s translation into English) or to domesticate the rendering in the target language (such as in the Turkish title). In this regard, one final task will be to provide an overview of titular choice for the Turkish translation. In its English, French and German renderings, the title Նահանջը Առանց Երգի is translated to Retreat Without Song, Retraite sans fanfare and Der rückzug ohne lied respectively. Unfortunately, the decision to employ a literal translation for the Turkish title fell on deaf ears, so to speak. Hence Sessiz Ricat63 (Silent Retreat) was preferred over the literal translation of the original title (Şarkısız Ricat) ironically for aesthetic concerns that favored the domesticated “sound” of the title. There is no doubt that the preference in favor of “silent” (sessiz) must have sounded more aesthetically pleasing. However, as argued above, the word “song” plays a very significant role in the novel as well as in the title to the point that impacts our reading. Without the emphasis on the “song”, the novel loses its ground of implying a hidden map of sounds and foreign words that sing and mark the song of homelessness. Without stressing the absence of song, the “ear of the Other”, be it French, English, Turkish, and especially Armenian-odar, the reader would be unlikely to hear the pangs of deterritorialized existence and to trace the layers of strangeness and foreignness embedded within the familiarity of the mother tongue. This is the greatest enigma that the novel holds in check. Shahnur’s retreat, or that of Bedros/Pierre, is the retreat of all the Armenians who had to leave their homelands in their own language.
- 64 One such example is a non-scholarly review for the Turkish translation of the novel, in which the r (...)
38Obviously, of all the Armenians forced to live in dispersion, Haratch’s Western Armenian readership as intended audience for the novel, would have read their own life stories with similar enigmas and more importantly with the same paradox of making (remaking and unmaking) themselves and their homes in and out of Turkish. Yet what about the Turkish readership who, unlike other non-Armenians, will dodge the tedious urge to go to the footnotes in order to at least get an idea about the Turkish songs and interjections in the novel. One wonders how the Turkish reader is supposed to manage the experience of hearing out an Armenian character in an Armenian novel sing an old Turkish song in Paris. Instead of preserving its “elegiac” undertone, the novel in translation sits on the precarity of turning into an “ode”. Instead of hearing the homelessness of an Armenian in the Diaspora, the non-Armenian reader in Turkish either celebrates the “familiarity” to be found with the italicized Turkish interjections, or reduces the experience into an ordinary exilic state.64 The emergence of a quasi-shared common ground between Armenians and Turks is one of the futile arguments beyond any dimension of mistranslation. Perhaps, ironically, the Turkish rendering of the novel is the hardest in which hearing the odar/Other turns into a real challenge for an objective reading: one that prioritizes the recognition of ethical and political limits between these two languages and cultures.
*
39As contribution to existing scholarship on Shahnur’s Retreat the essay offers an alternative reading of the novel, focusing on two realms that have thus far been overlooked. Neglected even by critics such as Marc Nichanian and Krikor Beledian (whose readings focus on the Other with a special attention on the visual analysis) these realms consist of the work’s auditory elements and the haunting presence of Turkish interjections. These allow us to examine the fundamental ethical question of hearing the Other and reinterpret the concept of odar/Other in close connection to the experience of homelessness of the Armenian during the early years in dispersion.
40Unlike the general tendency to overload literary productions with a nationalist discourse and assertions, the essay argues that the Menk Generation had created a resisting, self-healing new understanding of literature, which exclusively prioritized the question of reconstructing a self for the Armenian in dispersion. Meanwhile there has always been a tendency toward excluding the literature of the Menk Generation from the literary canon of the diaspora. This is due to their refusal to represent the genocide, but also the new art that they introduced did not meet the main expectations of the community, which, thus, caused disappointment and frustration. However, what remains of this literary movement and their short-lived journal, provides one of the rare moments of a “modern” turn in Western Armenian literature. Within the minority status of Western Armenian literature, the creative turn launched by the Menk Generation writers generated a moment of Minor literature in Armenian literary history. Shahnur’s Retreat, best exemplifying the case of Minor literature within Western Armenian literature, comes to the fore as the story of de/re-territorialization of the self, retold with the aid of myriad of auditory elements and haunting appearance of Turkish. Following these operating tools that serve the attempt of remaking (also simultaneously an act of unmaking) the self constitutes the initial step of hearing the Self as Other. As part of the audial analysis, the article also refers to issues emanating from the translation of the novel. Of all translations of the novel, it problematizes the Turkish translation due to its choice of title that misrecognizes the key role of songs, albeit their absences.
41In the final analysis, Shahnur/Bedros’s (and others’) retreat without a song is a gesture of mourning which should be sung for the loss of homeland, of one’s roots, identity, and selfhood. And what about the course of our literature after Retreat? As Mannig Berberian observes in the very review which opened the essay, “[a]fter Retreat Without Song, just as before, Armenian literature continued its desperate and lamenting course […].” So true. Yet against the distant murmur, Shahnur’s novel, unlike its title, remains a wild cry of un-becoming that we are fundamentally burdened to hear.