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What is Armenia to Me? Diasporicity in the Works of William Saroyan

Qu’est-ce que l’Arménie pour moi ? Le fait diasporique dans l’œuvre de William Saroyan
Aram Ghoogasian
p. 183-205

Résumés

Par une relecture de l’œuvre de William Saroyan, cet article interroge la manière dont l’écrivain arméno-américain appréhende l’existence en diaspora et, dans ce cadre, son recours aux notions de home et homeland. Loin d’idéaliser à la condition diasporique, ses écrits montrent une réelle réflexion sur les limites et les contradictions qui la caractérisent.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Saroyan won a Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Award in 1940 for his play The Time of You (...)
  • 2 On the critical reception of Saroyan’s work during his lifetime, see A. Barter 1995, pp. 1-31.
  • 3 Even scholars of Armenian heritage have characterized Saroyan’s work, or at least his early writing (...)
  • 4 In her study of Armenian-American literature, Margaret Bedrosian branded his worldview “facile”, ad (...)
  • 5 Studies of Armenian-American literature dealing with the genocide’s aftermath, as Saroyan’s fiction (...)
  • 6 On this phenomenon, see M. Mamigonian, 2017.
  • 7 Bedrosian argued that some of Saroyan’s work can be understood as a stemming from the experience of (...)

1William Saroyan (1908-1981) was the most recognizable Armenian name in twentieth-century American letters. The child of migrants from Bitlis, he reached the peak of his popularity in the first fifteen or so years of his half-century-long career, falling into relative obscurity after World War II.1 Since his death, Saroyan has been more or less ignored by the academy with the exception of a somewhat small number of studies written in large part by scholars of Armenian heritage. Often charged by contemporary critics with being overly saccharine,2 his work has not been taken seriously outside of this contingent of Armenian scholars.3 Saroyan’s imaginativeness in his treatment of his subject matter have been mistaken for naiveté, and his writings on Armenian life have been studied as though they were one-dimensional representations of diasporic life devoid of critical thought.4 On the one hand, these writings are read as celebrations of some resilient, unbreakable Armenian spirit.5 This is the dominant reading among Saroyan’s Armenian audience, as evinced by the frequent invocation of uncontextualized - or even, as we will see, fabricated - excerpts of his writing by diaspora nationalists.6 In other cases, scholars have argued against the characterization of Saroyan as a writer who favors an unsophisticated optimism, pointing to his Armenianness as the principal source of his pessimism.7 By flattening Armenianness as either a purely positive or negative influence on his outlook as expressed through his fiction, Saroyan’s critical engagement with Armenianness itself is left underappreciated or unrecognized. Far from taking diasporicity for granted, he struggled with its multiplicity of meanings, potentials, and limitations.

  • 8 This tendency has been identified by at least one scholar. See H. Veeser, 1995, p. 163.
  • 9 See A. Barter, 1995, pp. 1-2.
  • 10 J. Leggett, 2002, p. 44.
  • 11 H. Floan, 1966, p. 22. Alice Barter identifies Howard Floan’s book as the first such study. See A.  (...)
  • 12 Keyishian writes that, though Saroyan’s Armenian descent is important in interpreting his work, the (...)
  • 13 E. Foster, 1991, pp. 4-5. Keyishian points out the obvious: the story has “no Armenian roots at all (...)

2Saroyan’s Armenianness was often seen as a defining characteristic, the one that set him apart from his American contemporaries. In many instances this categorization was closely linked to an orientalizing tendency on the part of his critics, which manifested itself in their not uncommon accusations of irrationality and emotional excess.8 Among the monikers bestowed upon him were “The Whirling Dervish of Fresno”, “The Armenian Wunderkind”, and “The Armenian Orson Welles”.9 Ernest Hemingway believed being Armenian was the sole thing that set Saroyan apart from other writers.10 The first full-length critical study of Saroyan, published in 1966, attributed Saroyan’s overall outlook to his upbringing among “emigrants from a country that had many times faced extinction and had known almost endless hardships”.11 This overemphasis on his works’ Armenian qualities have obscured a better understanding of both art and artist.12 The author of a book-length study of Saroyan’s short fiction, for example, saw in his breakout story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” an “Armenian sensibility” that can be felt “everywhere” in the text despite it not containing any references to Armenians, arguing for a baseless reading of the story as a “parable of Armenia and its survival through centuries of oppression”. Beyond that story, he claimed that Saroyan’s narrators “almost always” spoke with an “identifiably Armenian” sensibility.13 The failure of many scholars to see beyond Saroyan as a mere reflection or product of Armenian-American diasporic experience and culture has precluded a clearer view of Saroyan as someone who thought about and grappled with diasporicity through his fiction.

  • 14 Bedrosian has acknowledged that Saroyan was more complex than he seemed, but restricted this evalua (...)
  • 15 Saroyan features heavily in Khachig Tölölyan’s chapter on Armenian-American literature in a volume (...)
  • 16 “Ethnic writing” is a phrase used by Shear. See W. Shear, 1986, p. 45.
  • 17 See C. Cullen, 1925, p. 36-41.
  • 18 See C. Phillips, 2015, pp. 10-11.

3Given these misreadings of his work, Saroyan has been in desperate need of reevaluation, one that treats him not as a complex “personality”14 or a token representative of the Armenian subgroup of “minority” or “immigrant literature”15 who produces “ethnic writing”16 but rather as a scrupulous thinker whose fiction has the potential to unsettle and disorient notions of home and geography within the discourse of diaspora. Living in the United States puts his American- and Ottoman-born Armenian characters in a position where they cannot reclaim a former way of life or “return” – whether physically or affectively – to the irreversibly altered homeland, which for Saroyan is most often Bitlis specifically. At the same time, they are rendered unable to successfully recreate the conditions of the homeland in the diaspora or fully integrate into the host society. Consequently, the signifiers “home” and “homeland” do not, or rather cannot, represent stable signifieds situated in time or space, creating a crisis of representation that Saroyan navigated continually. Much like when the poet Countee Cullen asked in 1925 “What is Africa to me?”17 – an open-ended question birthed of a broader early twentieth-century African-American artistic tradition18 – Saroyan worked through the problem of representing a homeland characterized by historical rupture.

  • 19 See Y. Goyal, 2014, p. vii-viii. The vocabulary of diaspora is widespread in the Armenian community (...)

4The three literary works under discussion here – “The Armenian & the Armenian”, “The Pomegranate Trees”, and Bitlis – address different conceptualizations of home and homeland, proving useful representatives of the varying modes and frames of analysis Saroyan applies to his explorations of diasporicity. Published decades apart, they carry with them the added benefit of establishing Saroyan as a writer who remained committed to interrogating the diasporic condition throughout his career, even when such efforts consistently yielded uneasy, sometimes tortuous conclusions. Taken together, these three works and the paradoxes they probe perform the internal contradictions of diasporic life, long before a critical language of diaspora emerged in the Anglo-American academy in the late twentieth century.19

Transcendence

  • 20 B. Darwent, 1984, p. ix; J. Leggett, 2002, p. 347.
  • 21 See S. Rushdie, 1991, p. 10.

5The attempt to recreate what was left behind in Asia Minor in the diaspora is central to many of Saroyan’s Armenian-oriented works. As the only member of his immediate family born outside the Ottoman Empire, Saroyan himself had no memories of Bitlis nor did he have any direct experience of it until his first visit in the spring of 1964.20 In other words, he had no firsthand experience on which to base his fictional, imaginary homelands.21 With the homeland irrevocably altered by the almost total exodus of Armenians from the Ottoman East, the exiles had to establish new centers in their host countries without a clear understanding of what these new centers would look like. Saroyan’s texts grapple with this problem, contemplating alternative futures.

  • 22 Saroyan visited the city while on his first trip to Soviet Armenia in 1935. See J. Leggett, 2002, p (...)
  • 23 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 437.
  • 24 For a critique of the supposed exclusivity of diaspora and nation, see Y. Goyal, 2010, p. 16. On th (...)
  • 25 L. Hamalian, 1981, p. 171.
  • 26 P. Gilroy, 1993, p. 111.
  • 27 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 437.
  • 28 K. Tölölyan, 1996a, p. 29.
  • 29 J. Derrida, 1995, p. 30.

6The final piece in Saroyan’s second collection of short stories concerns the state of a global vagabond Armenian community after the war. “The Armenian & the Armenian” (1936) takes place in Rostov-on-Don while the narrator is on his way to Soviet Armenia.22 He claims that, although “there is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia”, Armenia is nowhere.23 In other words, continuing to call the point in space “Armenia” does not change the fact that the homeland has been irreversibly transformed. For the narrator, what replaces the fixed geographical space that is called Armenia is the Armenian community, a community of people who inhabit the earth and take advantage of the permeability of political borders to transcend them. (That diaspora can overcome the limitations of nation and nation-state, however, is dubious.)24 The narrator’s belief that Armenians are global citizens rather than people who occupy a specific space, which is how they are often depicted in fiction,25 is a way of repossessing and appropriating what Paul Gilroy has called the “curse of homelessness”.26 The world, in this perspective, is not made up of nations and nation-states – “there is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy”27 – but is united by the oneness of humankind. Such a utopic vision is not something Saroyan is observing, but something he is producing through the text by creating an abstraction. Khachig Tölölyan explains that this sentence is a performative disguised as a constative.28 In other words, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s phrasing, the author “would like to make happen” what he claims to describe “in all neutrality”.29 This is crucial for the production of the myth of the transcendent potential of diaspora that some of Saroyan’s other texts critique.

  • 30 K. Tölölyan, 2007, p. 649.
  • 31 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 437.

7Even within the logic of the story, however, global citizenship – despite this seemingly positive outlook – is mournful rather than liberating. While this romantic alternative to national belonging can be viewed as a sort of emancipation from the artificial constraints posed by borders, it serves only as a reminder of the Ottoman-Armenian community’s recent exile. This injury to the collective shapes the kind of cultural production Saroyan is participating in, the kind in which mourning is central.30 But despite the centrality of mourning, the narrator’s woefulness is remedied upon hearing an Armenian waiter at a bar in Rostov exclaim vay with that “deliberate intonation of surprise” that makes Armenian “so full of comedy”.31 Both characters, the only two present in the story, recognize each other’s Armenianness. The narrator does not know how he could tell the waiter was an Armenian and the latter speaks to him in Armenian despite the lack of any indication that his interlocutor, a stranger, would understand him. External cues do not betray either character’s heritage; the waiter’s dark complexion, curved nose, and thick hair do not distinguish him from those with similar features. It is not only the characters’ shared language – or rather the intonation of the exclamation vay – that is comedic, but also the realization that their seemingly groundless suspicions that the other is Armenian were correct.

  • 32 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 438.
  • 33 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 438.

8The shift away from mournfulness continues throughout the rest of the story, culminating with the narrator’s famous challenge to any power of the world to destroy the Armenian people, a people “whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, [and] whose literature is unread”.32 Overcoming the forces that “ended” Armenian history is made possible through the interaction between two Armenians. Regardless of past sorrows, there is a sort of triumph in the creation of a microcosmic Armenian community made possible by “a couple of Armenians talking in the world”.33

  • 34 See T. Shinn, 1972, p. 185.
  • 35 S. Hall, 1990, p. 235.

9While Saroyan explores differing stances between works, this two-page-long story is full of its own fluctuations. The narrator at once rejects the distinctions between nation-states, but does not go so far as to eschew nationalism altogether despite the undercurrent of a humanistic sense of world citizenship that is present throughout the story. He celebrates the resilience of the Armenian people in particular, reasserting that the community is a distinct group rather than a part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. When he dares the target of his speech to try and destroy Armenia, he seems to retreat from the prior claim that there is no Armenia. “Armenia” could either refer to the nation or to a national territory, but there is no indication either way. This shift could be dismissed as characteristic of Saroyan’s particular philosophy, one that recognizes and accepts contradictions instead of attempting to resolve them,34 but such a reading divorces Saroyan’s equivocations from their diasporic context. To be in diaspora is to embody an identity that is always in flux, one that is, as Stuart Hall pointed out, “constantly producing and reproducing [itself] anew, through transformation and difference”.35 In this case, multiple transformations occur within a single text rather than across texts, but the same can be said for the ways the assumptions of “The Armenian & the Armenian” are challenged and reconstituted elsewhere.

  • 36 L. Shirinian, 2000, p. 85.
  • 37 See C. K. Garabed, 2009; and M. Mamigonian, 2017. Zaven Khanjian, the creator of one of the posters (...)
  • 38 See E. Said, 1984, p. 49.
  • 39 Edward Said has made a similar assessment of Palestinian identity after the Nakba, writing in 1980 (...)

10This oft-quoted – and misquoted – short story is on its surface a celebration of the Armenian nation’s ability to overcome any form of potential destruction no matter how large in scale, explaining why it has become one of his most well-known works among Armenians.36 That altered versions of the final passage, all of which are misquotations, have been printed onto posters and sold as wall décor is a testament to how large a space it has occupied in the Armenian-American imagination.37 These misquotations – in each case the phrase “see if they will not create a new Armenia” has been tacked on at the very end – have helped imbue “The Armenian & the Armenian” with a life of its own, granting it somewhat privileged status in the realm of Armenian-American cultural production. This (mis)reading of the story’s concluding paragraph paints diaspora as a temporary condition, one whose teleological end is the creation of an Armenia nation-state. The reader, not necessarily Saroyan himself, promotes this idea and entrenches it in Armenian diasporic discourse, a move that necessitates a flattening of the author’s explorations of diasporicity. The story indeed does romanticize this moment of encounter in an effort to overcome the insurmountable sorrow of estrangement, as exilic literature is wont to do.38 But in doing so, it embraces diaspora as a permanent condition, not one that is to be overthrown or negated. Placelessness is in fact the defining characteristic of the post-exilic Armenian community.39 “The Armenian & the Armenian” celebrates this condition, masking harsher realities Saroyan would explore elsewhere.

Integration

  • 40 Garoghlanian was Saroyan’s maternal grandmother’s surname. See W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 95. In Bitlis, (...)
  • 41 W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. vii. Saroyan also wrote that he “cannot very well say” as to whether the titu (...)
  • 42 W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. x.
  • 43 W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. ix-x.

11Some of Saroyan’s stories present a bleaker image of diasporic life and undermine ostensibly stable modes of identification. “The Pomegranate Trees” (1940), a story published in My Name Is Aram less than five years after “The Armenian & the Armenian”, is one such example. The collection follows the life of Fresno native Aram Garoghlanian,40 a character who shares Saroyan’s birth year, from 1915 to 1925.41 In the note that appears before the text, Saroyan describes the book as the story of an American boy.42 Aram’s Americanness lies primarily in his place of birth, but, as a bilingual member of an immigrant family, his identity is not purely American. Saroyan in fact obeyed an editor who told him to “write more about the Armenians”.43

  • 44 M. Bedrosian, 1989, p. 202; A. Minasian, 1972, p. 37; B. Darwent, 1984, p. ix.
  • 45 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 44.
  • 46 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 35.
  • 47 Aram’s realism is likely informed by Saroyan’s own experiences growing up in Fresno, where a nativi (...)

12The story focuses on Aram’s uncle Melik and his attempt to plant pomegranate trees on a plot of land in California’s Central Valley, a place that many Armenian immigrants viewed as geographically similar to the homeland.44 The land itself rejects Melik’s attempt to make it his own – a grim omen of the prospects of building a new life or rebuilding an old one in America – and plant pomegranates, a fruit that, like the Armenians themselves, is “practically unknown” in the United States.45 Like Aram, who serves as the narrator, Melik recognizes that the land is not ideal for planting pomegranate trees, but retains an optimistic outlook that his nephew does not. Aram’s pessimism allows him to see that successfully bearing fruit in the United States, both in the figurative and literal sense, can come only through the passage of time if at all, a sentiment echoed by a specialist that comes to inspect the land. The American-born title character assumes they would not be getting any pomegranates to speak of for two or three years at least, but opts not to tell his uncle, “just about the worst farmer that ever lived”,46 to shield him from the harsh reality of attempted integration into the American mainstream. Integration efforts require both the passage of time and a good deal of struggle, without either guaranteeing their success.47

  • 48 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 54.

13Melik’s trees, however, prove resilient and rebel against Aram’s pessimism and the – literally and figuratively – hostile land. They do, in fact, wind up bearing fruit, an apparent validation of Melik’s naïve idealism. But a devastating problem soon presents itself, as there is no market for the pomegranates. The produce man rejects them, saying he does not see “anything so wonderful about them”.48 Although Aram’s uncle sings their praises, the pomegranates cannot find a market because no one knows what they are. It is the pomegranates’ foreignness, not some inherent objectionable quality, that leads to the consumer public’s rejection of them.

  • 49 W. Shear, 1986, p. 51.
  • 50 The “Saroyanesque” was characterized by optimism and sentimentally, as well as by the author’s “fre (...)

14As a result of the botched investment, Melik must give up the land after failing to make the payments on it. He asks the unsympathetic American man who sold him the land to let him take care of the trees, a proposal that is declined. Three years after this episode, Aram and Melik return to the site to find the trees all dead. While at least one critic does not see the pessimism in such an ending and instead claims that Melik’s failure is irrelevant because the experience has a value of its own,49 it is this very failure that defines “The Pomegranate Trees”. The rejection of the Armenians and their pomegranates by both natural and social forces is brought into focus, rather than obscured, when the story is read independent of preconceived notions of what a Saroyanesque text should look like.50

  • 51 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 55.
  • 52 See W. Saroyan, 1956, p. 147-152.
  • 53 Assimilation is a major theme in Armenian-American literature. See D. Kherdian, 2008, p. xi. On dia (...)

15These forces are not as easily overcome as they are in “The Armenian & the Armenian”. While that story emphasizes the ability of an Armenian nation to live on after a tragedy of monumental proportions, “The Pomegranate Trees” presents a more realist image, one of a struggling migrant community. Melik’s romanticism, unlike that of the narrator in “The Armenian & the Armenian”, is directly challenged by his material reality within the story and is ultimately defeated. As if the finality of returning to the arid plot of land were not enough, the final sentence of the story manages to provide an even bleaker outlook. Upon seeing the dead trees, Melik and Aram remain silent. They do not “say anything because there [is] such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in”.51 The two are bilingual, but cannot express any of their thoughts or feelings in either Armenian or English. They are struck dumb upon witnessing the failure of the grand project of transplanting a remnant of Armenian life to the United States, a failure that Saroyan reaffirms in “The Return to the Pomegranate Trees” (1956).52 They are, by the end of the story, firmly between Armenianness and Americanness with no real grounding in either. The curse of the itinerant generation is that its constituents know where and when home was but cannot return to it; for the American-born generation, it is the state of lacking both firsthand experience of the homeland and a sense of fully belonging in the place of birth. Becoming American seems an impossible task while remaining Armenian becomes increasingly difficult in a foreign land.53

  • 54 L. Shirinian, 1992, p. 57.

16While both “The Armenian & the Armenian” and “The Pomegranate Trees” are concerned with the reconceptualization and transplantation of Armenia in the diaspora, they present vastly different explorations of the subject. Placelessness is viewed as essentially positive in the former, a condition that frees the diasporic subject from the bonds of territoriality and allows for the creation of a new kind of community, one that is created in a chance sharing of language and through human connection rather than one that is firmly tethered to a location in space.54 Belonging nowhere means one can be at home anywhere as long as an interpersonal relationship between two Armenians is established. But in the latter work, belonging nowhere has disastrous implications. Physical estrangement from the homeland makes the characters foreigners in their host country; rather than belonging anywhere and everywhere, Aram and Melik are robbed of any sense of belonging in a host country that rejects them based on their otherness. The encounter in “The Armenian & the Armenian” is just as fleeting as the jouissance it produces. The reality of permanent settlement in diaspora has the ability to transform a common language from a source of joy to one of anxiety that draws attention to the disorientation associated with this sort of liminality.

  • 55 See L. Shirinian, 1992, p. 64.

17That these two works, published in separate collections a few years apart, provide opposing answers to the same question could be attributed to inconsistency on Saroyan’s part. But their apparent inconsistences are integral parts of Saroyan’s meaning-making, which reflects the ontological slipperiness that constitutes one of the defining characteristics of the diasporic condition. Diaspora Armenians may be able to reformulate “traditional Armenianness”,55 but these new conceptions, and even the traditional ones, are fluid and endlessly mutable. In stories such as “The Pomegranate Trees”, the possibility of defining a new kind of identity becomes the source of crisis when characters are faced with the harsh reality of living in exile. The speaker in “The Armenian & the Armenian”, on the other hand, detaches himself from such conditions while formulating idealistic conceptions of a reinvented identity. Such optimism may be possible during a chance meeting with a fellow countryman in a bar, but when the euphoric scene is over and one must face the material conditions of being a foreigner no matter where one goes, even in the longed-for homeland as we will see in the posthumously published play Bitlis, anxieties about the complexities of diasporicity dominate.

Return

  • 56 According to Tölölyan, “the desire to return to the homeland is considered a necessary part of the (...)
  • 57 Written in 1975, Bitlis was first published as part of a trilogy five years after Saroyan’s death. (...)

18Although many of Saroyan’s Armenian-centered works deal primarily with the experiences of Armenian immigrants and their descendants living in the United States and their attempts to find their place in American society as Armenian Americans, some also explore the tenability of return to the homeland as well.56 When return is the main focus of a given Saroyan text, the project often fails to move beyond mere desire. In these works, Armenian immigrants often have trouble getting accustomed to life in the United States, even when surrounded by other Armenians. These exiles’ estrangement from the homeland often results in alienation not only from the group but from the self as well. Despite their best efforts, these characters find it impossible to live comfortably in a foreign land and instead look longingly and hopelessly to another place and time. The (im)possibility of return receives more rigorous treatment in other works, however, most notably and directly in Bitlis (1986).57 After realizing that the Armenian community does not have a clear spatial orientation, the diasporic subject is unable to ascertain whether home is the place that was left behind or the place of residence. The self is split between two places, the United States and Western Armenia, resulting in an unclear vision of where Armenian Americans truly belong, if such a place even exists at all.

  • 58 On the impossibility of return despite the ability to visit the site, see A. Brah, 1996, p. 192.
  • 59 In most of the later typescripts of his plays, Saroyan made no indication of the division of the wo (...)
  • 60 J. Leggett 2002, p. 347.
  • 61 Saroyan’s father Armenak arrived in Ellis Island in 1905, followed two years later by his wife Tako (...)
  • 62 On this sort of nostalgia, see P. Bos, 2007, p. 99; and L. Shirinian, 1990, p. 61.
  • 63 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 100.
  • 64 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 100.

19This problem is only exacerbated by the face-to-face encounter with the homeland by an Armenian born in the United States to an immigrant family. In Bitlis the protagonist Bill, Saroyan’s literary stand-in, is forced to acknowledge that return in the fullest sense is not possible, even if visiting the homeland is.58 The one-act play, devoid of scene divisions and stage directions,59 is an autobiographical account of Saroyan’s aforementioned 1964 visit to Bitlis,60 the city his family emigrated from in 1905-1907.61 The action of the play takes place after Bill has toured the city and reflects on his “return” to a place he has never seen before – he is nevertheless overcome by nostalgia62 – with two Armenian traveling companions, Ara and Bedros. Throughout the work, the men converse about the global Armenian community’s relationship with Western Armenia and whether or not Armenians can still stake a claim to Bitlis. After Ara states that Bitlis was, yet no longer is, “one of the main cities of Armenia”, Bill counters that it still is.63 But, as Ara mentions, there were no Armenians in the crowd that greeted him with a warm reception despite his being a gâvur (infidel). Bill does not respond to the idea that, despite being a “son of Bitlis”, he is still just a gâvur, a designation he earns, and cannot shake, by virtue of his descent.64 The moment he sets foot in his ancestral home, there are social and historical forces undercutting the possibility of return, even if Bill does not – or chooses not to – recognize their power. Later on, this idealism, which is founded upon a willful ignorance of the reality on the ground in Bitlis, begins to erode as the infeasibility of return becomes increasingly apparent.

  • 65 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 101.
  • 66 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 101.
  • 67 See A. Stefansson, 2004, p. 9.

20At last in the city of Bitlis, Bill eats the same bread his mother and grandmothers have “always” baked and the same cheese his family has “always” enjoyed, but he does not know what to make of it.65 He has difficulty assimilating this experience, because leaving Bitlis meant the discontinuation of “always” for Bill’s family. Bill does not know how to experience Bitlis because it is no longer possible for him to live the same sort of life his family “always” did in the city.66 Upon discovering that the homeland, the one his ancestors lived in and experienced firsthand, does not resemble his imagined homeland, he becomes alienated from it.67 The migration out of Western Armenia has made it foreign to the man who, as seen through much of his writing on the Armenian community, feels a profound connection, imagined or otherwise, to the city in particular and the region more broadly.

  • 68 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.
  • 69 See M. Hirsch and N. Miller, 2011, p. 10; and M. Hirsch and L. Spitzer, 2010, p. 145.
  • 70 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.
  • 71 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.
  • 72 See P. Bos, 2007, p. 98; and M. Hirsch, 1997, p. 244.
  • 73 G. Basmadjian, 1984, p. 36.

21The physical evidence of this severed connection is everywhere in the city. The gravestones of an Armenian cemetery have been removed and used to repair old houses or fashioned into pavement. Pieces of stone with Armenian words and names are visible, but the inscriptions are unintelligible. The image of the pulverized gravestones is only eclipsed in symbolic magnitude by the desecrated churches, the most beautiful of which houses cattle. The structure acts as a visible link between the city and the culture of its Armenian inhabitants, but with its conversion into a pen for livestock it is divorced from this meaning. Just as the removal of Armenian names from the gravestones and the destruction of the churches make the project of identification with the past nearly impossible for the returnee, so too does the destruction of Armenian dwellings. Bill attempts to find the “eight Saroyan houses”68 to anchor his connection with his familial past in a concrete, physical way.69 While being in the city itself accomplishes some of this, not knowing the exact location and being denied the ability to come into physical contact with his ancestors’ houses “makes a difference” to Bill’s “whole connection with Bitlis”.70 It is imperative that he find the actual structures themselves to ensure that his connection is not “false, or at any rate not too false”.71 But, since the remnants of the city’s past – and therefore Bill’s ancestral past – lie in ruins, he cannot have any true connection to Bitlis. The past becomes a foreign country that cannot be visited, not even as a tourist.72 As Saroyan himself said in an interview, Bitlis is a kind of monument of loss rather than a place of belonging.73

  • 74 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.

22The demographic shift Bitlis underwent during World War I contributes to this foreignness. As alluded to above, only one “known Armenian” remains in Bitlis: a ninety-year-old man nicknamed Moughsi Baba, the last of the “original” Armenians of Bitlis.74 Bill’s sentimental connection with the city is not shared by the old man, whose last hope is to move to Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon, so that he can die among Armenians. Moughsi Baba’s search for home is a search for solace in the Armenian community, wherever he may find it. In other words, he does not want to live and die in Bourj Hammoud in particular, but rather wants to die among Armenians in general. The Armenian enclave is a place to end life, not begin it anew. The euphoria associated with the diasporic condition in “The Armenian & the Armenian” is thus turned on its head.

  • 75 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 105.
  • 76 See J. Clifford, 1997, p. 251.
  • 77 On the “ongoing fabrication” of permanence in diaspora discourse, see R. Chow, 1993, p. 15.
  • 78 See M. Hirsch, 2012, p. 213.

23This contradiction begins to reveal the tension at the core of Bill’s idealism. Bill was born in California but still views Bitlis as his home, a place that he thinks belongs to him and his people. Upon arrival, however, he discovers that a man who has lived there for ninety years, a man who can claim Bitlis as his home without resorting to abstractions as Bill does, no longer views it as a viable home. It is Bill’s detachment from the realities of contemporary Bitlis that make him believe return is possible in the first place. Moughsi Baba “must go to another place to believe he has reached home”, since he is “homesick for what Bitlis was” despite still residing there.75 In other words, he is not homesick for a place, but a place at a specific time. The temporal gap that divides Bill and his ancestral home is the most substantial obstacle to a successful homecoming, which would by definition be the negation of diaspora.76 Bitlis has undergone an irrevocable change, meaning that the diasporic condition, at least for someone who views Bitlis and Bitlis alone as the site of hypothetical return, is permanent and cannot be negated.77 Bill’s idealism notwithstanding, his homeland can never be his home, a reality that is made plain by his visitation and the firsthand knowledge of the conditions of the home of his ancestors.78

  • 79 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 105.
  • 80 D. Kouymjian, 1986, p. 14.

24To counter the reality of Moughsi Baba’s perpetual melancholia, Bill finds relief in the idea that “the old man will go home to a strange city which will instantly be home to him because there are Armenians there”.79 Bill’s philosophy of diaspora brings Saroyan full circle in this moment as it echoes “The Armenian & the Armenian”, published roughly forty years before he wrote Bitlis on seven successive mornings in 1975.80 Even if the children of the exilic generation are able to establish comfortable lives in America, as Bill says he has done, the Armenian born in diaspora suffers from a kind of incurable homesickness; the journey to the ruins of Armenian Bitlis only confirms that it is in fact irremediable. Diasporicity does not, in this case, provide a path toward global citizenship. On the contrary, rather than being at home everywhere, the diasporic subject is, as in “The Pomegranate Trees”, at home nowhere.

*

  • 81 Harry Keyishian has suggested such a reading. See H. Keyishian, 1984, p. 49. However, his prescript (...)
  • 82 See J. Ramazani, 2009, p. 37.
  • 83 Keyishian suggests that Saroyan must be understood through the dialectical oppositions present in h (...)

25Saroyan’s work contains multitudes, and his thought vis-à-vis the diasporic condition is elusive. These are not problems to be solved but defining features of the sort of texts analyzed here. A clearer understanding of his thought is gleaned through a treatment that embraces the dynamic interplay between opposing forces present in his literary corpus.81 The paradoxes explored in these works display the instability of diasporic life, especially for the American-born Armenian characters Saroyan so often wrote about. Whether they are born into Americanness, attempt to achieve it, or have it thrust upon them,82 they are nevertheless left in this liminal space, at once longing for another place and attempting to articulate deterritorial modes of identification. Saroyan explores differing subject positions both within and between his works dialectically, ultimately leaving them unresolved.83 The attempts at transcending the nation, integrating into the host society, or even return by Saroyan’s characters leave them in a state of disorientation and geographic dislocation. These works tell the story of diaspora through these very tensions.

26Saroyan has been done a disservice by his contemporary critics, scholars studying his work, and his readers in their intentional and unintentional attempts to codify him. Critics too often saw an “ethnic writer”, one who was intellectually lazy and unworthy of serious analysis. The secondary literature, in most cases, has placed him into a priori categories in attempts to make sense of his works, particularly when it came to those dealing with Armenian life. Finally, his status as a towering cultural figure in Armenian-American history has led to a dissonance between his writing and its reception among his Armenian readers, who often gloss over a great deal of complexity and diversity of thought in favor of nationalistic modes of interpretation. There is no single authoritative reading of Saroyan’s diasporic work because it does not provide clear answers to the questions it poses. The vacillating process by which he sought to make sense of diasporicity, even if it never reached its end, is the end in itself.

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Note de fin

1 Saroyan won a Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Award in 1940 for his play The Time of Your Life, but rejected the former along with its prize money, “denying the right of commerce to stamp its approval on art”. See R. L. Friedman, 2010, p. 136; D. Kouymjian, 1992, pp. 20-21; B. Secter, 1981; J. Whitmore, 1994, p. 2; and H. Keyishian, 1995, p. xii. He earned an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1943 film The Human Comedy, which he adapted into a critically acclaimed novel of the same name. See J. Leggett 2002, p. 99.

2 On the critical reception of Saroyan’s work during his lifetime, see A. Barter 1995, pp. 1-31.

3 Even scholars of Armenian heritage have characterized Saroyan’s work, or at least his early writing, as being “filled with a naïve innocence and optimism”. See B. Der Mugrdechian, 2016, p. 278.

4 In her study of Armenian-American literature, Margaret Bedrosian branded his worldview “facile”, adding that it was one of the excesses he used to mask a wariness about anchoring art in “disciplined thought”. See M. Bedrosian, 1991, p. 158. Saroyan has been frequently criticized for his supposed lack of critical insight. See A. Barter 1995, p. 1. Whether they concern Armenians or not, many of his works are described as sentimental, lighthearted celebrations of life and humanity. See D. Calonne, 1983, p. 4; B. Secter, 1981; and L. Shirinian, 2000, p. 81.

5 Studies of Armenian-American literature dealing with the genocide’s aftermath, as Saroyan’s fiction often does, tend to emphasize “resilience”, “vibrancy”, “creativity”, and the like. See, for example, B. Der Mugrdechian, 2007, pp. 65-80.

6 On this phenomenon, see M. Mamigonian, 2017.

7 Bedrosian argued that some of Saroyan’s work can be understood as a stemming from the experience of belonging to a “dying race”. See M. Bedrosian, 1982, pp. 13-14; and Id., 1991, p. 158. Dickran Kouymjian saw a separation between his “American romantic sensibility” and his Armenian experience, which tinged the former with sorrow. See D. Kouymjian, 1992, p. 21. Walter Shear wrote that his later fiction tended to regard “ethnic existence” as a “problem”. See W. Shear, 1986, p. 45. Greg Levonian attributed his turn toward darker material to his tumultuous relationship with Carol Marcus. See G. Levonian, 2012, p. 383. Harry Keyishian takes note of a pessimistic streak present in Saroyan’s work from the beginning of his career, but does not tie it to his ancestry. See H. Keyishian, 1984, p. 47.

8 This tendency has been identified by at least one scholar. See H. Veeser, 1995, p. 163.

9 See A. Barter, 1995, pp. 1-2.

10 J. Leggett, 2002, p. 44.

11 H. Floan, 1966, p. 22. Alice Barter identifies Howard Floan’s book as the first such study. See A. Barter, p. 2.

12 Keyishian writes that, though Saroyan’s Armenian descent is important in interpreting his work, the danger of stressing it too much can isolate him from the context of American literary culture. See H. Keyishian, 1995, p. xiii. Kouymjian has also argued against the classification of Saroyan as an “ethnic writer”. See D. Kouymjian, 1992, p. 22. At the same time, it is likely misguided to take Saroyan at his word when he writes in one of his memoirs that being Armenian does not have “any particular significance”. See W. Saroyan, 1961, p. 177. The Turkish-Armenian poet Zahrad argued that Saroyan should be considered an American, not an Armenian, writer given that his work was strictly Anglophone. See E. Foster, 1991, p. 26. Saroyan did not have any knowledge of written Armenian. See N. Balakian, 1998, p. 46.

13 E. Foster, 1991, pp. 4-5. Keyishian points out the obvious: the story has “no Armenian roots at all”. See H. Keyishian, 2012.

14 Bedrosian has acknowledged that Saroyan was more complex than he seemed, but restricted this evaluation to his personality and family life without expanding it to include his thought. See M. Bedrosian, 1982, p. 21. She relies heavily on intimate biographical details to explain his art. See M. Bedrosian, 1991, pp. 142-159.

15 Saroyan features heavily in Khachig Tölölyan’s chapter on Armenian-American literature in a volume entitled New Immigrant Literature in the United States. See K. Tölölyan, 1996a, pp. 19-42.

16 “Ethnic writing” is a phrase used by Shear. See W. Shear, 1986, p. 45.

17 See C. Cullen, 1925, p. 36-41.

18 See C. Phillips, 2015, pp. 10-11.

19 See Y. Goyal, 2014, p. vii-viii. The vocabulary of diaspora is widespread in the Armenian community and is consequently reflected in Armenian-American literature. See K. Tölölyan, 1991, p. 7, n2.

20 B. Darwent, 1984, p. ix; J. Leggett, 2002, p. 347.

21 See S. Rushdie, 1991, p. 10.

22 Saroyan visited the city while on his first trip to Soviet Armenia in 1935. See J. Leggett, 2002, p. 42; and W. Saroyan, 1973, 2.2. It is home to an Armenian community that dates back to the eighteenth century. See K. Maksoudian, 1997, p. 59.

23 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 437.

24 For a critique of the supposed exclusivity of diaspora and nation, see Y. Goyal, 2010, p. 16. On their similarities, see I. Ang, 2003, p. 142-44. On the problems with overlooking locality in favor of diasporic categorizations, see T. Nalbantian, 2018.

25 L. Hamalian, 1981, p. 171.

26 P. Gilroy, 1993, p. 111.

27 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 437.

28 K. Tölölyan, 1996a, p. 29.

29 J. Derrida, 1995, p. 30.

30 K. Tölölyan, 2007, p. 649.

31 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 437.

32 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 438.

33 W. Saroyan, 1936, p. 438.

34 See T. Shinn, 1972, p. 185.

35 S. Hall, 1990, p. 235.

36 L. Shirinian, 2000, p. 85.

37 See C. K. Garabed, 2009; and M. Mamigonian, 2017. Zaven Khanjian, the creator of one of the posters, has written on the subject in English and Armenian. See Z. Khanjean, 2008; and Z. Khanjian, 2008.

38 See E. Said, 1984, p. 49.

39 Edward Said has made a similar assessment of Palestinian identity after the Nakba, writing in 1980 that, through Zionist colonial dispossession, the fact of banishment had become the “main defining characteristic of existence” for Palestinians. See E. Said, 1980, p. 174.

40 Garoghlanian was Saroyan’s maternal grandmother’s surname. See W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 95. In Bitlis, it is mentioned that she had a brother named Aram. See W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 106. Saroyan’s note to the 1940 edition claims that no character in the book is a portrait of any real person living or dead, though “neither are any of them a creation of fiction”. See W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. vii.

41 W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. vii. Saroyan also wrote that he “cannot very well say” as to whether the titular character is the author himself, adding that he is “not, certainly, not” Aram. See W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. x.

42 W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. x.

43 W. Saroyan, 1940a, p. ix-x.

44 M. Bedrosian, 1989, p. 202; A. Minasian, 1972, p. 37; B. Darwent, 1984, p. ix.

45 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 44.

46 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 35.

47 Aram’s realism is likely informed by Saroyan’s own experiences growing up in Fresno, where a nativist atmosphere had profound effects on the way Armenian migrants experienced their new home. Although the legal system awarded Armenians the right to citizenship through naturalization following a court ruling in 1909, their fellow Fresnans did not accept them into the fold. For an overview of this case and its consequences, see A. Ghoogasian, 2017. In addition to a good deal of racial hostility, Fresno Armenians had to deal with institutional modes of discrimination, such as restrictive housing covenants in the city that lasted until the mid-twentieth century. On anti-Armenian discrimination in Fresno – both institutional and interpersonal – see A. Avakian, 2010, p. 204; B. Bulbulian, 2000, pp. 106-117; R. LaPiere, 1930, p. 341; A. Minasian, 1972, pp. 84-85, 87, 93; and R. Mirak, 1997, p. 399.

48 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 54.

49 W. Shear, 1986, p. 51.

50 The “Saroyanesque” was characterized by optimism and sentimentally, as well as by the author’s “freewheeling” style of expression. See G. Levonian, 2012, p. 383; and H. Keyishian, 1984, p. 47. The term, originally intended as a pejorative, was coined very early in his career by a critic at The New Republic. See E. Beloin, 1934.

51 W. Saroyan, 1940b, p. 55.

52 See W. Saroyan, 1956, p. 147-152.

53 Assimilation is a major theme in Armenian-American literature. See D. Kherdian, 2008, p. xi. On diaspora Armenians and the threat of assimilation, see S. Pattie, 2005, p. 143; H. al-Rustom, 2003, p. 478; and S. Schwalgin, 2004, p. 72. On the Armenian-American case in particular, see A. Bakalian, 1993; and M. Jendian, 2008.

54 L. Shirinian, 1992, p. 57.

55 See L. Shirinian, 1992, p. 64.

56 According to Tölölyan, “the desire to return to the homeland is considered a necessary part of the definition of ‘diaspora’” in the strictest sense of the term. See K. Tölölyan, 1996b, p. 14. While this assessment may be a bit dated, maintaining at least a myth of return is often cited as a defining characteristic of diasporic communities throughout the canonical literature on the subject. See R. Brubaker, 2005, p. 4; J. Clifford, 1994, p. 305; R. Cohen, 1996, p. 515; W. Safran, 1991, p. 83.

57 Written in 1975, Bitlis was first published as part of a trilogy five years after Saroyan’s death. See D. Kouymjian, 1986, p. 14.

58 On the impossibility of return despite the ability to visit the site, see A. Brah, 1996, p. 192.

59 In most of the later typescripts of his plays, Saroyan made no indication of the division of the works into acts and scenes and rarely left stage directions. See D. Kouymjian, 1991, p. 6. These absences were due in part to the fact that he “attached great importance to the role of the director”. See D. Kouymjian, 1987, p. 127.

60 J. Leggett 2002, p. 347.

61 Saroyan’s father Armenak arrived in Ellis Island in 1905, followed two years later by his wife Takoohi and their three children. See J. Stevens, 2008, p. 2-3.

62 On this sort of nostalgia, see P. Bos, 2007, p. 99; and L. Shirinian, 1990, p. 61.

63 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 100.

64 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 100.

65 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 101.

66 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 101.

67 See A. Stefansson, 2004, p. 9.

68 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.

69 See M. Hirsch and N. Miller, 2011, p. 10; and M. Hirsch and L. Spitzer, 2010, p. 145.

70 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.

71 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.

72 See P. Bos, 2007, p. 98; and M. Hirsch, 1997, p. 244.

73 G. Basmadjian, 1984, p. 36.

74 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 104.

75 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 105.

76 See J. Clifford, 1997, p. 251.

77 On the “ongoing fabrication” of permanence in diaspora discourse, see R. Chow, 1993, p. 15.

78 See M. Hirsch, 2012, p. 213.

79 W. Saroyan, 1986, p. 105.

80 D. Kouymjian, 1986, p. 14.

81 Harry Keyishian has suggested such a reading. See H. Keyishian, 1984, p. 49. However, his prescription has rarely been put into practice, and even then only in very limited ways.

82 See J. Ramazani, 2009, p. 37.

83 Keyishian suggests that Saroyan must be understood through the dialectical oppositions present in his work. His optimism existed in constant tension with his darker side, and it is in the very oscillation between hope and despair where his essence as an artist lies. See H. Keyishian, 1984, p. 47.

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Aram Ghoogasian, « What is Armenia to Me? Diasporicity in the Works of William Saroyan »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 13 | 2021, 183-205.

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Aram Ghoogasian, « What is Armenia to Me? Diasporicity in the Works of William Saroyan »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 13 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2021, consulté le 08 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/2615 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.2615

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Aram Ghoogasian

Princeton University

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