Remembering the Armenian Genocide in Varujan Vosganian's
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SLOVO, VOL. 29, NO. 2 (SUMMER 2017), 20-39. DOI: 10.14324/111. 0954-6839.064 Quiet Voices, Faded Photographs: Remembering the Armenian Genocide in Varujan Vosganian’s ‘The Book of Whispers’ ANDREEA MIRONESCU ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iasi, Department of Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences and Humanities ABSTRACT Drawing on concepts such as post-genocide literature, postmemory (Marianne Hirsch), and resonance (Aleida Assmann), this paper discusses a third-generation narrative of the Armenian genocide, namely Varujan Vosganian’s novel The Book of Whispers, originally published in Romania in 2009. The first section of the paper examines whether the concepts of post-genocide literature and diasporic literature (Peeromian) can be applied to authors of Armenian origins writing inside the literary traditions of East-Central European national cultures. The second section analyses the literary techniques of inter-generational memory transmission in Vosganian’s novel. Particular attention is paid to the way in which family and documentary photos are employed in the novel, and three functions of photographs are discussed in relation with autobiographical memory, historical representation, and literary aesthetics. The third part of the paper uses Assmann’s concept of resonance to investigate how the Armenian genocide narratives are linked with other traumatic events such as the Holocaust, the mass deportations in the Soviet Gulag, or the political repression in Romanian totalitarianism, thus reshaping the European memory of violence. INTRODUCTION One hundred years after its unfolding on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian genocide still is a sensitive geopolitical matter and a complicated social and cultural issue, due to Turkey’s refusal to affront the events of 1915-1916. The Turkish government pursued a series of actions during the First World War aimed at the Armenian minority, which included mass arrests of the Armenian elites in Constantinople, the attack, pillage, and devastation of villages, followed by the deportation of the civil population through forced marches and transit camps, leading, according to official estimates, to the death of one and a half million of approximately two © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2017. 21 MIRONESCU – QUIET VOICES, FADED PHOTOGRAPHS: REMEMBERING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN VARUJAN VOSGANIAN’S ‘THE BOOK OF WHISPERS’ million Armenians residing in the Empire.1 Although not all scholars agree on the use of the term ‘genocide’ for the 1915 events, most of them do, invoking Raphael Lemkin, who first paralleled the mass crimes against the Armenians to the Nazi genocide against the Jews.2 Following Lemkin, Adam Muller remarks that, besides the ‘physical’ and the ‘biological’ dimensions (deportations, executions, etc.), there is also a cultural component of the genocide, involving the ‘destruction of Armenian churches, artworks, artists, intellectuals and so on’3. All of these extreme measures heavily impacted the Armenians’ individual and collective identities, leading to the formation of diasporas on various continents and affecting families for several generations. Like the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide is ‘an impact event’ (Anne Fuchs), namely a historical event, which ‘produce[s] a collective trauma that intercepts the access to conventional social resources of perception, interpretation and communication’.4 The traumatic interruption affects the representation of the event, its integration in the identity narrative of the group and its future remembrance. Unlike the memory of Holocaust, which relies on a global network of remembrance (Aleida Assmann),5 the memory of the Armenian genocide is more fluid and transmitted in a mainly communal, ethnic and familial environment. It is unusual that an event which took place more than a hundred years ago continues to be passed on orally, as part of the ‘communicative memory’ (Jan Assmann),6 in the Armenian diasporas scattered all over the globe. Following the period of silence induced by the traumatic event to the first generation survivors, these family narratives came out into the public sphere in the 1980s and 1990s, when the second generation published their parents’, often posthumous, memoirs.7 Nevertheless, there are frequent cases when the members of the third generation became carriers of their grandparents’ life stories. This is how the Italian Antonia Arslan and the Romanian Varujan Vosganian first 1 A detailed chronology and statistics of the Armenian genocide can be consulted on the webpage of The Armenian Genocide Museum Institute, part of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/chronology.php . 2 A critical discussion on the reverberations of the Armenian Genocide in different Jewish environments prior and after the Holocaust can be found in Auron, Yair, The Banality of Indiference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide, transl. by Maggie Bar-Tura, 4th edition (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 3 Adam Muller, ‘Genocide and the Arts: Creativity, Morality and the Representation of Traumatic Experience’, in Mass Media and the Genocide of the Armenians: One Hundred Years of Uncertain Representation, ed. by Joceline Chabot, Richard Godin, Stefanie Kappler and Sylvia Kasparian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 16-35 (p. 22). 4 Anne Fuchs, After the Dresden Bombing, quoted in Aleida Assmann, ‘Impact and Resonance: Towards a Theory of Emotions in Cultural Memory’, in The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future: Collective Remembering and Identity Formation, ed. by Terje Stordalen and Saphinaz Amal Naguib (Oslo: Novus Press, 2015), pp. 41-70 (p. 53). 5 Aleida, Assmann, ‘The Holocaust – a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community’, in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. by Aleida Assmann, Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 97-118. 6 Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, transl. by John Czaplicka, New German Critique, no. 65 (Spring-Summer 1995), pp. 125-133 (pp. 126-127). 7 See Sona Haroutyunian, ‘Narrating the Armenian Genocide: An Italian Perspective’, Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, no. 5 (2016), pp. 125-138. © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2017. 22 MIRONESCU – QUIET VOICES, FADED PHOTOGRAPHS: REMEMBERING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN VARUJAN VOSGANIAN’S ‘THE BOOK OF WHISPERS’ heard accounts of the genocide as children and later explored them in semi-fictional works such us Arslan’s Skylark Farm [La masseria delle allodole] (2004) and Vosganian’s The Book of Whispers [Cartea șoaptelor] (2009). The literary accounts of a collective trauma bring up several difficulties, among which are: representing trauma by linguistic means, speaking for the victim, constructing a coherent narrative of history, and adjusting the aesthetic parameters to an ethical commitment8. For the ‘secondary witnesses’ of trauma events (Geoffrey Hartman),9 such as the members of the second and third generation, family narratives of the genocide are also influenced by historical and media representations, and, in the case of fiction writers, by the literary traditions and cultural patterns. Since these family narratives often occur inside diasporic communities, they inevitably intersect with local culture and thus participate in the negotiation of regional and national memory. As a result, the literary works produced by third generation authors of Armenian origins can be seen as complex sites where traumatic familial memory on the 1915 events meets the local memory practices and symbols. My hypothesis in this article is that contemporary works on the Armenian 1915 tragedy written in the diaspora should be assessed not only thematically, with an emphasis on the genocide as a literary topic, but also as part of the various literary systems and cultural traditions in which they are produced. Drawing on concepts such as post-genocide literature, affiliative memory (Marianne Hirsch), and resonance (Aleida Assmann), my paper deals with the literary representation of the 1915 events, by focusing on a third generation literary narrative, namely The Book of Whispers, published in 2009 by Varujan Vosganian, a Romanian writer of Armenian origins. Vosganian’s book narrates the history of his family under Turkish rule at the beginning of the 19th century, its emigration to Romania, and its troubled fate in the second half of the 20th century, under the totalitarian regime in this country. Shortly after its publication, the book gained international recognition, due to translations in sixteen languages, European, but also Armenian, Hebrew and Persian. Yale University Press has also scheduled an American edition at the beginning of 2018. Vosganian’s novel is already part of the genocide’s cultural memory: in a commemorative worldwide event in 2015, fragments of The Book of Whispers, translated in twenty seven languages, 8 The ethical dimension strongly influences the deployment of literary techniques in postmodern memory narratives, engaging a ‘critically reflexive perspective on the functioning of memory’ in fictional texts. See Birgit, Neumann, ‘What Makes Literature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and the Ethics of Remembering’, in Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media, ed. by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,