Another spring, the Ararat valley’s stork came from distant Egypt and circled over the valley, but the poplar was gone, so it settled on a high-voltage power pole. Now the stork’s nest at Arax station is on that pole. At the same moment, beneath the same sky, a satellite floats and a donkey brays. A present-day spade, dusty with pesticides, enters thousand-year-old clay and meets Menua’s wine cup beneath the earth…
I deliberately offer so many examples to force myself, under their pressure, to share Vardges Petrosyan’s concern about creating an average national character, and seem to become concerned. Indeed, what must I do so the figure I outline contains this people’s pride in its antiquity, the anguish of the great genocide, its new socialist brightness towards the world, its attitude to world population growth, artificial caviar, theft of industrial alcohol from a polyvinyl-acetate factory, thousands of things? Events shape a person. Once, events within a limited area shaped them. Now information has reached furious speed; at that speed the world around a person has shrunk to a handful, and they are shaped within the chaos of world events. Petrosyan seems right when he writes: “How do I add together the physicist Alikhanyan, the miner Ashot Melkonyan, our villager Grandfather Atanes, the musician Arno Babajanyan, the pilot Edik Bakhshinyan, the writer Perch Zeytuntsyan, the writer Hrant Matevosyan? How do I add them, what do I divide by, to obtain today’s average Armenian national character in the quotient?” Is the question invented or real? Alikhanyan, Bakhshinyan, Zeytuntsyan, Grandfather Atanes and the others are not as opposite as Petrosyan thinks, and need not be added and divided to produce an average character. Alikhanyan already contains Grandfather Atanes, Perch Zeytuntsyan, Arno Babajanyan. Revealing Atanes reveals all the others too. If not, if beneath one sky the satellite flies and the donkey brays, and they must be added and divided, they already have been, in the experimental station called a writer. Its literary output is the answer to Petrosyan’s desired quotient. Reality already has a law of generalisation, and the writer’s reality even more so. The author of the song Krunk did not measure so many exiles’ longings and obtain their quotient, Krunk. He measured his own longing, the longing of all the world’s exiles.
Literature is the expression of the writer’s self. If you are human, a writer, an Armenian writer of the twentieth century’s second half, truly a writer, or your writings are sprinkled with the slightest sincerity, your created people cannot be seventeenth-century Swedes. If you are no writer, add and divide all the physicists, shepherds and miners, obtain a physicist-shepherd accurately reflecting Armenian reality in that half-century. But it will not be a person: it will be addition, division and the quotient’s answer.
Here is the non-literary answer to a non-literary question. Why invent it? As a counterweight to literature smelling of antiquity. Life, especially in the past fifty years, has advanced immensely: illiterate Armenia became an Armenia of poets and engineers, the backward peasant country a country of cities. The new young men do not eat kebabs but drink cocktails, do not tell tales but dance the shake; the new shepherds carry not goatskin coats but transistor radios. National characters must therefore have changed. Yet so-and-so’s writing smells of the village of Proshyan’s time; criticism praises that old smell rather than the new one of boys not eating kebabs. Fighting fur hats and kebabs, Petrosyan fights for new fur hats and kebabs: transistors and cocktails. Against old exoticism, for new exoticism. Against old philosophical poses, a pose of non-philosophy. Against advice-giving elders, child-elders giving none. Not “stretch your legs to your blanket’s length”, but existentialism. Not “striking now the horseshoe, now the nail”, but eclecticism. At funerals not traditional rain, but untraditional non-rain. Not kochari, but twist. Not wine, but coffee.
Thus, to spite old-fashioned literature’s shortcomings, new deficient literature and its theory are created. They feed on the “fur-hatted” father they supposedly dislike so much, not entirely innocently believe themselves wholly new, bid to enter literature’s centre and plead for praise because they are no landing party from foreign books and films but stand on Armenian reality’s pedestal. Invoking Armenian urban life as an argument, Arshakyan and Petrosyan forget something vital: every proper writer’s work realises that writer’s outlook and philosophy. The writer is no recounter of incidents, but someone explaining the world in their own way, or trying to. Remarque’s women rest on the common ground of his deep knowledge of Freud and Freudian worldview. Deficient or not, it is a whole world; events are branches of the same logical fabric, the principal figures give events meaning, and a whole life emerges, beautiful or not, viewed from a particular angle. What is living and convincing in Remarque becomes absurd, unconvincing, illogical, detached from life here. A Christian beginning and course demand a Christian ending, Gothic foundations and walls imply a Gothic dome; Petrosyan’s or Arshakyan’s intention and narrative demand their own sustained logic of narration and material selection. That is artistic conviction’s first necessary condition. Breaking it invites the not quite precise but generally correct accusation: “False, fake, nothing to do with life.”
Petrosyan writes: “This may even seem inhuman, but I must not curse civilisation for the loss of every fragment of folk colour. Ultimately life and time will do their work: vineyards may even be uprooted to build a radiophysics institute or an airport, and many national traditions erased and worn away. In this complex transition I want to see where my contemporary writer looks, what future he ultimately prefers for his people.”
The events of the Iliad and Odyssey belong half a millennium before those epics’ birth. David and Melik throw maces at each other in our epic no earlier than the invention of gunpowder and the gun, while its backbone belongs half a millennium before gunpowder. Hadji Murat became Hadji Murat fifty years after Shamil’s uprising; War and Peace was written fifty years after the war. And Quiet Flows the Don concerns fresh yesterday, yet an irreversible chasm separates today and yesterday, consigning the Cossacks to a thousand-year historical depth. Must I multiply examples a thousandfold to say that yesterday arouses feeling more strongly? Yesterday’s valley of memory contains desired or hated events and figures, memory’s golden sediment, which can become literature. In any case, now I await genuine works about the time before the genocide, Hovhannes Tumanyan, the genocide, revolution, collective-farm building, the Second World War. Events happen, become clear and only then are told with regret, anger, hatred, pride, an attitude. Clearly this is no longer a contemporary’s or village writer’s attitude, but the philosophical understanding of a backward glance.
What do Petrosyan and Arshakyan do? We have an immense rural literary tradition, so most contemporary writers write about villages; no urban tradition, so only a few write about cities. Village writers are imitators, city writers searching laureates. Which is harder, rural or urban writing, Petrosyan asks. Urban, because city writers seek while village writers imitate Proshyan and Bakunts.
Which is harder? Both are hard; writing itself is torment. But take the question naked: Armenian rural literature exists, urban literature does not. Today’s rural writer has the “support” of Armenian literary reality, the urban writer lacks it. Whose task is easier? The diagram’s downward arrow casts us into an abyss: rural writing is easier because it is “armed with previous rural writing’s experience”. Yet Tumanyan’s experience belongs to Tumanyan alone. If I create my Uncle Khechan not by my own means but, because he is the living version of Tumanyan’s Uncle Khechan, by Tumanyan’s means, will I have written a new story or copied Uncle Khechan? Copied it. If tomorrow I begin a novel about Khachatur Abovyan, how can Abovyan with his novel, Charents with Towards Mount Masis, Bakunts with Khachatur Abovyan help draw my Abovyan from me? Through a general beneficial influence, which rural literature can exert on urban writers too. Why? War and Peace is the war of 1812 plus Tolstoy, more exactly Tolstoy’s war of 1812. If someone writes about it again, Tolstoy cannot help, just as Martiros Saryan cannot help those painting Armenia anew. Who needs these familiar truths? Petrosyan and Arshakyan utterly ignore the writer’s style, turn the writer into documenter, reflector, reporter, performer, actor, foreman, restorer, but never organiser of events, composer, architect, painter. Hence the next false step: rural writers have helpers, urban writers none. The truth is that Armenia’s first scribe Mesrop Mashtots stood alone and unarmed before the unknown, and fifteen hundred years later Abovyan stood alone again. After them, despite Armenian culture’s vastness, every writer sits at the desk before white paper utterly alone. Every writer’s work is hard. Bakunts helps no writer; if he helps a rural writer, he can help an urban one. Village and city are not opposite social poles, peasant and townsman not opposite human qualities, nor do times empty of old substance and fill with new so fast that the next generation cannot understand the previous one. Literature still stands at its old calling’s height, writing humanity. Every writer stands in an empty plain and becomes its height. There is no need to pretend to lack a pedestal, or proclaim oneself a sacrifice and pedestal for some future genuine urban literature, as Petrosyan does.
In future literature Petrosyan indulgently allows rural writing a place too: “fur-hatted” literature will survive as an appendage to “fur-hatted” reality and vanish when it vanishes. “But sadly, writers who have appropriated traditional village writing’s principles… time will pronounce its sentence of oblivion,” G. Arshakyan adds. Is this agriculture-rural-literature sociologism or not? Four per cent of the United States population works in agriculture. Perhaps four per cent of writers practise rural writing too? Perhaps four per cent of literary output is rural? I lack exact figures: before our clever men, no one thought to divide literature into two wings with two foundations and report their correspondence or lack of it. For a thousand reasons it is unlikely.
In a new war five hundred million will be called up; computers will set the globe’s half-billion army in motion, marshals carry out their commands. Far away before our reckonings, a young commander of the great world of Babylon gathered donkey-mounted regiments, moved them towards the great world of Assyria, fought a great battle, captured fifty soldiers, a herd of donkeys, fifty cows and seven skins of grape wine, recording victory in stone. Every military map shows my village, our house, my apple tree, Dry Ravine with utmost precision. Military registers note my father’s partial fitness, mine, my twelve-year-old brother’s reserve fitness, our spades’ number, the dog chain’s length and thickness. Civilisation discovered these in uncertainty’s darkness and fed them to computers. Passionate anger arises, a wish to creep like a bat into an unlit hole in civilisation and shut the door. I do not want to be part of this civilisation, Charles Chaplin cries.
Despite not wishing to belong to it, Chaplin advances that civilisation. Life goes its own way, and literature’s inclination towards reverence for nature remains.
That reverence enters in rural writing’s clothes, because we cannot restore non-mythical Babylon’s mythical king, or shut our eyes to the atom’s discovery. Yet something of nature and village remains. Some still pity the bee, open the hive entrance late on long summer days so the bee will not work too much; cultivators still make places for seedlings with their fingers alone. Reverence for nature anchors itself in them.
Rural writing here and everywhere once described village darkness and misery, with an implicit or explicit demand for social change. In the countries of leading literatures, the question was removed from the agenda in different ways: transformations, their correct or mistaken underestimation, correct or mistaken awareness of the social question’s insolubility, attention to more important or seemingly important matters. Differently, but rural writing everywhere gained a new substance, reverence for nature. Our renewed gaze deprives old good works of their authors’ intended substance and gives them ours. Tumanyan’s Anush is no longer an “encyclopaedia of nineteenth-century Armenian life”, but our late-twentieth-century reverence for nature. This is not humanity’s escape from its tragic fate, but a search for one. If misguided, let it be: art’s errors do not start wars, because art is always rooted in humanity. If the search finds no great way out, let it not: the search is already art. Grigor Narekatsi sought God; did he find him? His search is today our Book of Lamentations. So now too: nobody here has seriously cursed civilisation, but if they do, it will benefit civilisation and enrich it.
There is no need to threaten rural writing in civilisation’s name. Rural writing is civilisation’s offspring, is civilisation. One may boldly say rural writing is urban writing; it cannot curse itself.
It has been said literature is longing. Longing for Stone Age caves, the future, freedom, nature, everything. For what existed and did not, what will be and is impossible, for the good. If good exists, for better. Literature opposes life, even good life, from its own position of good; otherwise it would lose its endlessly revolutionary nature, sever its tie to life and die. Now human reason has shed restraints and marches triumphantly, the world seeming to have reached literature’s dreamed-of distances, does literature praise life? Not at all. It seeks the monumental human being. Why?
A hundred million Red Guards with heads of their own wave Mao’s quotations above those heads, containing: “This bridge joins this bank of the river to the other.” Many will still burn the temple of Ephesus; the brilliant human skull conceived genocide only recently; the non-working, consuming bureaucracy swells hourly. Literature seeks God’s human being, humanity’s untainted state. A person is born natural, Martiros Saryan writes; then civilisation settles layer upon layer within them, distorting them.
Literature seeks undistorted people and relationships. On one side it exaggerates distortion to abstraction, on the other shows relationships untainted, pure, natural, even primal. This occurs throughout art: abstractionism versus primitivism and returns to prehistoric painting; modern symphonies versus the triumph of Black folk song; urbanism versus rural writing and evocation of fairy-tale and mythic forms, often their substance. Picasso’s Guernica does not deny the primitivist Pirosmani’s Fisherman: the first is painting’s disgust for fascist reality, the second the proposal of an equally antifascist dream. What did Kafka do? No guilt, no guilty party, no accusation, no accuser, only a defence lawyer, yet a person is accused and executed: The Trial. This is the twentieth century’s portrait. It must have another: monstrous crime, monstrous criminal and profound indifference to both. Our literature will also have given a counter-portrait with this plot: guilt, guilty party, accusation exist; a military-field tribunal of three uncovers guilt, finds the guilty and presents the charge in three minutes, and three minutes later the accused is a handful of ash.
The counter-portrait of currency, stock exchange, bankruptcy and bankruptcy suicides would be the story of taking wheat reaped by one’s own hands to exchange load for load with salt extracted by others. The counter-image of Auschwitz, Deir ez-Zor and a Japanese multistorey aluminium-and-glass graveyard would be “one village, one year, one dead person”. In any case the same root of discontent produced Kafka’s Metamorphosis, his disgust with conditions diminishing people and people diminishing, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, his admiration for a person growing godlike in suffering. Against the human bug, the human monument. The same root feeds Kafka’s The Trial and Hamo Sahyan’s Grandfather.
It is cramped here, hard to breathe, one part of literature says. The other says where a person can breathe freely: the discovery of Spanish soil through Hemingway’s work.
Must Armenian literature find a land called Spain to be called urban rather than rural literature?
They say, turn the flock around and the lame sheep lead. Our literature keeps pace with world literature otherwise. Philology is about to establish that the hayrens, those medieval songs of love and nature, were songs of Ani’s craftsmen. Already Varuzhan’s and Tumanyan’s work was steeped in conscious reverence for nature and profound longing for simplicity in people and relationships. Bakunts’s and Hamastegh’s prose sang that longing.
There is no rural or urban writing. There is only a human gaze upon nature and the world.
Grakan Tert, 13 September 1968.