HRANT MATEVOSSIAN — SERGEY SARINYAN
H. Matevossian. — One line of a story is worth more to me than a page of theory, but I came gladly to talk with you, first because an open conversation about our prose’s many concerns is worthwhile, and second because you would be my interlocutor. Whether your truths are arguable or indisputable, whether you deny or affirm, there is nevertheless something in your reviews and analyses I greatly respect: what I would call respect for the material being analysed, consideration and accounting for every line and mood of the work under review. This is an elementary demand upon a critic, but it seems to me the most important, not because a work cannot be assessed with a passing glance, “a leafing through”—our present literature, its enormous predominant part, can be assessed without reading—but from the standpoint of honour in one’s own craft.
S. Sarinyan. — Let us set criticism aside. If you present criticism with an elementary demand about whether one can or cannot “write out,” bring out, a work’s assessment by leafing through, then we critics must remind the writer of an equally “elementary demand”: can an assessment of reality be “written out” with a superficial glance?
H. Matevossian. — Such so-called literature does indeed exist: it is the literature of my generation, still called young. It is unpleasant, of course, to betray one’s generation like this “from within the home,” but in this case it failed to rise to its calling. It promised to create good literature in Armenian; a decade and a half has passed, yet what was promised is still absent. Why do you think it is absent?
S. Sarinyan. — That is a very complex, I would say philosophical, question, whose explanation can be sought within larger historical categories. Who knows, perhaps those theorists are right who find that artistic activity acquires an industrial character, bringing a universal standard. Perhaps that is what also transforms the temporal limit, so to speak, of artistic value. A dramatist puts a play onstage, and if it occupies the audience for two or five years, considers his creative purpose achieved. Perhaps the novelist too subjects his work’s value to the consumer to the same unit of time. I repeat, these are complex questions, not answered at once. Let us speak of this unit of time, try to find our principal failing, whose elimination would help extend artistic value’s temporal unit.
H. Matevossian. — Removing a failing, failings, is of course an honourable task, but those engaged in writing needed to be endowed with pride in the honour of their own craft. Then the failings would have been merely individual, personal. That is never reprehensible. These are a person’s capacities. He forges the same sword, but the hammer is light because his arm’s strength is less.
S. Sarinyan. — In short, you raise the question of the writer’s professional calling.
H. Matevossian. — I said honour in the craft. Suppose one of the old-time smiths still remains in a distant village. In the old days the sword he forged separated evil from good. That was how important that smith and his sword were. Now nothing is done with that sword, but the smith continues forging it as he did when his sword separated evil from good. Shall we not call this honour in one’s craft, the craft of writing, the writers’ guild, the maker’s name?
S. Sarinyan. — I want our conversation to be more concrete. Allow me to say that one line of critical analysis is worth more to me than a page of abstract theory.
H. Matevossian. — I am saying something very concrete. For future doctors there is the famous Hippocratic oath. Before entering the world of sick people with a surgical knife in their hands, young doctors swear never to abuse their right to enter the human body. Such an oath should exist for those who write too: I swear never to falsify my craft, and that means embracing the whole of life, or striving to embrace it. There. My generation of writers was once credited with a nonexistent advantage—we still hold that belief—that our collective handwriting had grown more beautiful compared with the previous generation’s. Minus three is of course higher than minus four, but both are below zero…
S. Sarinyan. — Apparently the cause of the doubts is that the coefficient of criteria is not correctly determined. Personally I do not think our prose’s coefficient of efficiency, as they say, has a minus sign before it, but neither am I inclined to accept that the coefficient is high.
H. Matevossian. — Yes, Sero Khanzadyan’s Chronicle of Events, Vigen Khechumyan’s Book of Being, Abig Avagyan’s Southern Fever, Baghish Hovsepyan’s The Sowers…, the entry into literature of Aghasi Ayvazyan, Perch Zeytuntsyan and Zorayr Khalapyan, Gurgen Mahari’s Burning Orchards—yes, only after closing one’s eyes to those works and authors can one speak of a negative coefficient. But see what Faulkner says: “I would give first place among my contemporaries to Wolfe; though all of us have failed, Wolfe’s failure was the best, because he attempted the hardest task, to say the most.” None of us had Thomas Wolfe’s magnificent failure; we are all successful, but that success comes through a stylisation arising from lifelessness.
S. Sarinyan. — That severe judgement of the previous decade’s fiction gives occasion for reflection. As a literary historian, in a certain sense I approach the course of literary development differently. Artistic value is artistic value, but there is also the general aspiration of the literary movement, within which accumulating material acquires meaning for the future. Ultimately one cannot insist that the prose of the sixties raised and resolved no problems, aesthetic or ethical. I repeat, the artistic criterion’s coefficient is one thing, the positive development of the historical course, even in quantitative accumulation, another.
H. Matevossian. — Applying that “principle of synthesising the whole,” one can be satisfied with every decade of Armenian literature. You are a literary historian, and through your calling and capacity to see the whole together, you should have been first to notice the principal failing common to us all.
S. Sarinyan. — What do you consider our prose’s principal failing? I am interested in your opinion as a writer.
H. Matevossian. — A lack of honour in the writer’s craft. Before serving a purpose, and in order to be able to serve it, literature must first consider its own health. Otherwise, having disintegrated, plundered and impoverished itself, it will be of use neither to itself nor to the purpose it was to serve. The only guarantee of healthy literature is embracing the whole of life, or attempting to, but… we do not embrace it, do not try… We take something lifelike, deprived of vital forces and resistance, which bends and curves as we wish… And now my generation’s handwriting has grown beautiful. It even goes beyond my generation’s literature. Not even our most living, most earthbound prose writer escaped it: I mean Sero Khanzadyan’s Chronicle of Events.
S. Sarinyan. — Your example does not convince me. More apt examples could be given which are not merely stylisation but false stylisation. Khanzadyan’s novella is a valuable literary work, imbued with knowledge of life; its author had no reason to embellish a realistic perception of reality with false stylisation.
H. Matevossian. — When it is a matter of extracting artistic value from reality’s mass, rather than returning to existing values, one cannot distinguish stylisation from false stylisation. You say false as though there could also be genuine, positive, correct stylisation. If it is stylised, what the style should have manifested has been deprived of resistance beforehand.
S. Sarinyan. — I certainly distinguish stylisation from false stylisation and believe there is genuine, positive, correct stylisation. When Isahakyan wrote Mher of Sassoun, he resorted to literary stylisation imposed by the poem’s epic landscape. Without it the poem would have been false, modernised. Many such examples can be cited from Armenian and world literature. I think you too distinguish those two principles, and your criticism’s arrow is aimed at false stylisation. As for that, the impulse towards it is inevitable where the writer’s limited inner capacity encounters life’s boundless complexity. False stylisation arises from dilettantism and imitation and always seeks to clothe itself in a claim to innovation. Indeed, some writers among us now are more occupied with “innovation” than literature. But the illness is not new. Let me recall names appearing in the sixties and seventies of the previous century: Hagop Hadjian, Nshan Mirza, Tiran Papazian, who brought sensational novels to the literary market, The Nights of Pera, The Secrets of Constantinople, The Sleepwalker of Hasköy. Those claiming the average philistine’s literary taste crowned the “Armenian Eugène Sue” with laurels. Paronian called such writers “literary monkeys,” and Leo “beggars of art.”
H. Matevossian. — Your calm disconcerts me. I do not know whether it comes from your knowledge of historical experience or from not truly knowing stylisation’s source, but I shall try to make you angry with it. So: where “the relation between the writer’s inner capacity and life breaks,” no urge towards stylisation appears; rather “Wolfe’s magnificent failure” is revealed. As for dilettantism, life is so powerful and ever-changing that even the most gifted, devoted writer finds himself a dilettante before it. Speaking against stylisation brought by imitation is doing nothing. Your word “urge” in connection with stylisation would lead us wrongly. Your “arises” is precise. Stylisation, yes, arises. That is, I am not speaking of false stylisation. As I understand it, stylisation is not something passive, not a “clothing,” but an inner property of the material being revealed. Perch Zeytuntsyan is no dilettante, still less an imitator; among my generation he is perhaps the prose writer most immersed in literature. But his Claude Robert Eatherly is stylisation for the simple reason that the reality taken presented itself to the author already deprived of vital resistance. It no longer contained that secondary yet necessary thing, that superfluous, out-of-place element which might not even enter the novel but should have been in the author’s marrow.
S. Sarinyan. — What danger of “stylisation” are we speaking of? It has never angered me and cannot, if only because, unlike you, I do not consider it our prose’s main failing. How can such importance be given to the exercises of some “experimentalists” on literature’s fringes? But your example and interpretation have another debatable side I would like to address. Your question may prompt a false generalisation if the assessment of a particular work is not distinguished from the phenomenon’s theoretical formulation. Perch Zeytuntsyan’s Claude Robert Eatherly can be debated separately, but I repeat, here I am interested in the general question, choosing a subject. It seems to me you exclude the principle of a subject’s non-locality, so to speak. But recall Armenian literature’s development, even at our century’s beginning. Was the comprehensive, worldwide scale of the plots used by Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Papazian and Shant accidental, as they created fairy tales, legends, tales, dramas and prose works that undoubtedly widened Armenian literature’s philosophical horizon?
H. Matevossian. — Yes, fairy tales, legends and tales, yes, dramas and prose works, but never a short story about today, never a novel. Those works by the named classics, and works of that kind generally, have neither aim nor ambition to be kneaded from today’s life; that is not those literary forms’ calling. They can and do manage with reflections of the philosophies from which they arise or to which they themselves become tributaries. Truly a tale, a legend, a fairy tale, a drama unfolding nowhere and at no time… And when Brave Nazar, a native of nowhere, becomes Agha Nazar and replaces his Esperanto with the Shirak speaker’s “ertham gy,” it becomes obvious that a fairy tale should have remained a fairy tale.
S. Sarinyan. — It seems to me, for example, that Eatherly’s problem is a worldwide problem, reflecting conscience’s clash with the twentieth century’s catastrophic events, so its ethical and philosophical starting point can occupy an Armenian writer too. I do not object that if the writer had mixed the work’s philosophical and psychological strata with the experience of the Armenian people’s historical fate, refracting the worldwide and universal through national psychology, perhaps there would not have been the rift between the form’s conventionality and the conception’s artistic resolution. But that is another question.
H. Matevossian. — Take Claude Robert Eatherly, an abstracted emperor, concrete Hiroshima, and “mix the work’s philosophical and psychological strata with the Armenian people’s historical experience”? It does not happen so, will not. The strata of a work about Eatherly must be mixed with the experience of Eatherly’s own fate, as Zeytuntsyan rightly did; and our own psychological and philosophical strata must unfold in our life’s spheres, be mixed with our fate’s experience. I do not understand how the worldwide and universal are refracted through national psychology, nor why the purely national is not worldwide and universal, nor which nation’s hidden folds are incomprehensible to other nations and peoples. But if Zeytuntsyan had constructed his work so that critics considered the universal refracted through national psychology, there would still be “that rift between the form’s conventionality and the conception’s artistic resolution.” I see no such rift in that work. More than that: Armenian literature has no other work with so unwavering a realisation of its conception. In that sense Eatherly is perfection, and strange as it seems, the “rift” is revealed precisely in that perfection. The author’s will flies through airless, lifeless space and lands exactly where the author had marked.
S. Sarinyan. — The formula “life and literature” has been and must remain literature’s eternal guide. But within that relationship the writer’s role differs from what literary mediocrities often imagine. Literary mediocrity resolves the knowledge of life through a direct relation. It never penetrates the mediated philosophical space called great life.
H. Matevossian. — One must have the documentarian’s reverent fear of meeting the living fact, the prototype, the original life face to face. What great life are you speaking of?
S. Sarinyan. — By great life I mean philosophical knowledge of that life, profound and, if you wish, scientific knowledge of the history of human and social development. That is what our prose lacks…
H. Matevossian. — Within that work, the author of Claude Robert Eatherly cannot be accused of poverty in scientific knowledge of society and humanity; on the contrary, it is a parade of knowledge growing into stylisation. The author continually brings what he knows. The author knows everything. He does not know only what he does not know, and what unknown thing he was to try to master, overcome and recognise. Zeytuntsyan and about a dozen prose writers more or less gifted in storytelling than he could, in the past ten years, have at least simply retold some hundred biographies, a hundred more or less acute situations, tragedies, comedies, a hundred facts of life, readable stories from this sea of life’s riches. That would already have been literature, even good literature.
S. Sarinyan. — The fact of life is the literary work’s material substance, upon which the artistic image’s concrete movement rests. But that is the outward manifestation of life’s movement, the apparent, the visible. Yet that movement also has the essential and invisible, its historical connections, inner logic, causality, philosophical meaning, which can be understood only through knowledge of the sciences of society. That is what our prose writers overlook in their creative work.
H. Matevossian. — One needed honour in the writer’s craft to describe “a real sea, a real fish and a real old man,” and then you would scarcely have occasion to demand the “essential-invisible,” because the fact of life is not only the literary work’s material substance but also the bearer of its spiritual charge.
S. Sarinyan. — That is the question’s second side. I do not deny its importance, and there is certainly truth in your argument, but I do not want to open a discussion of it. For me the essential thing is scientific knowledge of society and life.
H. Matevossian. — That is a very general truth. Its presence and absence can explain the reasons for a work’s success and failure, but that would amount to saying nothing. Art is a process of coming to know material, fact, object, life. I repeat, a process of discovery, not a beautiful execution of what is already familiar, already studied.
S. Sarinyan. — But what does a process of discovery mean? It is precisely knowledge of movement’s law and pattern, knowledge of an object’s many causal connections, from which the work’s inner energy arises. You read a story or novel, sometimes even with pleasure if the writer has the gift of storytelling. But when you try to account for what it has finally left within you, the answer meets doubt. The work exhausts itself at once, seems written for a moment. Why? Clearly it has no great inner energy, that richness of knowledge, psychology and feeling which should perhaps arise from a high philosophical synthesis of phenomena. The writer’s talent is measured precisely by that energy’s richness, which determines artistic value’s temporal unit. Again I affirm that this energy can arise only and exclusively through depth of intuition, the measure of intellectual capacity, that is, broad knowledge of the sciences of humanity, society and nature.
H. Matevossian. — Again you state a very general truth. That way one can explain a certain Karapet’s death by human mortality in general. That way all you critics can always accuse us writers of ignorance of the sciences of the world, and be continually right, because the world is so changeable that, despite certain knowledge, we find ourselves before it each time utterly unarmed, utterly empty-handed. But if I explain the difficulty through the world’s changeability, you will urge me to arm myself further, enrich my knowledge of nature and the world. I shall enrich it further and remain unarmed. Because before my Hadji Murad neither my knowledge of existentialism nor Buddhism nor biochemistry will serve me; I need the ism hidden within that material, to be revealed as the material is mastered. Working it, I may finally find myself within “Ah-Q-ism” or “Buddhism,” but it will not be the Buddhism I knew beforehand. If the author does not submit to the material’s logic but coerces it, you rightly accuse him of tendentiousness. I repeat: today’s literature’s failing is hunger for material, life and fact, an arbitrary attitude towards material, life and fact.
S. Sarinyan. — One Russian critic compares the writer’s intellectual capacity to an antenna, with which he catches unknown waves from life’s atmosphere, from the boundlessness of world and universe, perceives the seismic movements of the human inner world. I must say that the antenna atop our literature’s tower is still weak, and some writers create without an antenna at all. They see with the eye rather than the mind, describe rather than reflect.
H. Matevossian. — All you critics together cannot give an antenna even to our mildest writer, the one most neighbourly towards you. But perhaps you could direct the whole group gifted in storytelling towards literature that is merely narrative, merely descriptive, merely copies life. If you could, that would be your truly great contribution to creating our prose, because even a detailed description of what is seen with the eye, “not with the mind,” as you say, would grow into the high artistry of what is seen with the mind. In the hands of people able not to distort fact and material through their prejudices, the material reveals its own inner possibilities of being art.
S. Sarinyan. — You seem to assign an absolute meaning to the material’s own task, so to speak. It reminds me of your Hangover protagonist’s thought: “Does the sculptor take clay and solve the clay’s task, or solve his own task through clay?” I do not exclude the material’s imposing its own task, but do not reduce that to an absolute, as though the metal from which an aeroplane is made already carried within itself the capacity for flight. Clearly, metal turned into an aeroplane has fulfilled the designer’s task. The fact of life is similarly subordinate to the writer, and within that relation the writer’s task means precisely to discover, implying more than a “detailed description of what the eye sees.” The essential thing is not describing the phenomenon but knowing it as a historical course, the dialectic of its becoming, revealing its philosophical and psychological-emotional immanent essence.
H. Matevossian. — That “revelation of the immanent” will not happen if the description of what the eye sees is incomplete, if fact and facts are given so little importance, if the narrative does not include the whole of life with all its important and secondary components. Conversely, that “revelation of the immanent” beloved by you critics will happen if life, fact and material are taken in their fullness, even if the writer has no idea of the “immanent” and no intention of revealing it. It will happen even despite the writer. Of course metal already carries the capacity for flight; that capacity was revealed if not against the alchemists’ will, then independently of it. They assigned metal the task of becoming gold, while metal tended to reveal its capacity for flight. The history of alchemy growing into chemistry is nothing but the history of growing respect for material, accounting for its will, following that will.
S. Sarinyan. — I repeat, I do not exclude the imposition of the material’s own task, but to fulfil it the writer must be armed with deep knowledge of its internal laws. The fact that Anna throws herself beneath a train against Tolstoy’s will confirms once more that the writer correctly grasped the objective historical course of his heroine’s psychological movement: as a realist-researcher he discovered the law governing “the material’s own task.” I conclude our conversation with the same conviction that the writer’s calling demands above all high education, intellectual wealth, scientific knowledge of the history of society and humanity. A known truth? I do not object. But let us first attain that truth.
H. Matevossian. — I am not opposed; let us attain it, know architecture as well as Le Corbusier, the birth of stars as well as Hambardzumyan, be able to listen within ourselves like a yogi, be sensitive to all whispers and movements like a calf coming out of the barn for the first time… Let us attain it, especially if behind that call does not stand the conception, deeply mistaken in my view, that writers artistically execute some thought of theirs, and if your call does not arise from a desire to arm those supposed executors with “scientific knowledge.” But how can we explain the fact that an author’s autobiographical novel is good, at least tolerable—Armenian literature is full of them—while one based on someone else’s biography is bad, very bad—Armenian literature is more than full of those? Of course I have my explanation, but invoking those autobiographical novels’ success, here is what I would emphasise at our conversation’s end: we must approach every biography, fact and material with the reverent respect with which we approach our own biography, our father, our mother, our homeland.
Grakan Tert, 9 May 1974.