Leo Chaloukian: All the way to Tinseltown - Armenian Reporter

Mapping Armenian literature in the diaspora
n Continued from page C5
“It’s necessary to create a spiritual homeland and think like an ‘Armenian’ in all these foreign countries, which have served as our source of despair and great
opportunities at the same time.”
menian, on foreign soil? What does it
mean to live in the absence of the father,
the patria, and paternal law? Recognizing
their position as both witnesses and
survivors, the writers of Menk strive to
bring to language the destruction of order,
and, through that telling, seek to
gather, regroup, and thus repair the dispersion.
Bringing the Catastrophe and the subsequent
collapse of order to language means
launching a new literature that testifies to
the experience of the aftermath. And launching
a new literature means proclaiming the
old literary traditions dead.
As a result, the writers of Menk take a
confrontational stance against the writers
of the previous generation, accusing
them of showing a false closeness to
the cultures of the West. They blatantly
blame the pre-Genocide writers for
their present calamitous situation, believing
that they could have prevented
their current crisis of identity if they
had been armed with the awareness of
a genuinely Armenian literary tradition.
Nartuni writes, “We will once again
come forth in order to reveal the impoverishment
of those writers who came to
Europe and sold us imitation Western
goods. Our political failure is the result
of a false literary orientation. It was our
old literature, which came from Europe,
that ruined our home. Now we’re in Europe
and every day we see where those
goods came from.”
Here Nartuni presents his position
against the writers of the previous generations
as one of the foundational ideas
characterizing Menk, indicating that disrupting
the continuity of pre-war traditions
essentially gives way to the group’s
formation. In his article titled “Menk,”
Shahnur attempts to explain Menk’s
platform and echoes Nartuni’s aforementioned
criticism of the previous generation
by writing, “In their work, one
could find poor, miniature replicas of all
kinds of literary manifestos taken from
big nations.” Drafting this article in response
to some surviving critics of the
previous generation who claimed that
Menk had no clear platform, Shahnur
denounces the work produced by earlier
generations and claims them to be void
of originality.
So, what was to be the “new” literature’s
relationship with the West? During
the first decades of the 20th century,
Paris witnesses multiple artistic
and literary movements, which create a
certain lively and dynamic atmosphere
within social circles. Though familiar
with their contemporary literary trends,
Menk writers strive hard to reject these
influences on the form of their Armenian-language
prose. Simultaneously,
they make a conscious effort to distinguish
themselves from the previous
generation of writers, particularly by
holding a de-centered view of world literature.
Nartuni writes, “What a great
testament of the ignorance of our past
writers, who thought of French literature
as universal and instructed it to us
as such. No, we want to get to know
the literature of all nations…” Their displaced
and exilic condition emphasizes
the distance and alienation that exists
between Armenians and the French and
erases French literature’s appeal as universal,
creating a space for the literature
that they produce from the peripheries
of French culture.
Even in considering a comprehensive
view of world literature, one that accounts
for literary production of both
large and small nations and peoples, the
question of belonging remains a complicated
issue for French-Armenian writers.
Being a part of a dispersed people
and having lost the land that may justify
their existence as an independent nation,
the writers of Menk try to establish
their “new” literature on a symbolic soil.
Sarafian writes, “It’s necessary to create
a spiritual homeland and think like
an ‘Armenian’ in all these foreign countries,
which have served as our source of
despair and great opportunities at the
same time.”
According to Sarafian, literature will
be a means for the realization of a spiritual
homeland, which is situated on foreign
soil, yet simultaneously saves the
displaced Armenian culture from assimilating
into those very lands. Thus, for
the first time, Armenian literature gains
the function of ensuring the preservation,
or more precisely the perseverance,
of Armenian culture. Yet the establishment
of a spiritual homeland through
literature does not entail a return to the
past or a revival of notions of cultural
purity. Rather, the generation of Menk
turns its focus to the present.
For the Menk writers, Armenianness
comes to mean the current Armenian
immigrant condition. The “new” literature
serves a testimonial function and
strives to record the immigrant population’s
collective experience in face of
extinction, thus presenting a new kind
of writing that belongs to the stateless
realm of diaspora. Shahnur writes, “… I
jump from a social issue to a national
one, because for us today, at this moment
of crisis, there need not exist
anything aside from the preservation
of the Armenian people. For us, terms
like ‘pre-war bohemian’ have no significance.
Social issues, humanity, working
class… these, before all else, mean… all
eyes toward Armenians.” This means
giving literature an inward gaze: a role
of internal reflection, in order to begin
a period of self-awareness. For the writers
of Menk, literature offers a framework
within which it will be possible to
record the experience of the Catastrophe’s
aftermath and at the same time
forge a collective memory regarding
that experience.
Because Menk presents its goals as
delayed or postponed objectives that
would find definition in time, much of
the criticism by contemporaries focuses
on the group’s lack of a clear “platform”
or ideology. In reality, both the distant
objectives and the immediate goals of
the group are never realized. The call for
solidarity and cooperation as an immediately
attainable aim does not reach as
far as “all corners of the world.” It does
serve to group the most prominent of
the young, Parisian writers of the time,
allowing later critics to refer to the
group as “The Paris Boys.”
Having shared locality and a desire to
produce literature in the Armenian language
as their sole common traits, the
writers of Menk find it difficult to develop
a uniform group identity. The group does
not survive beyond its short-lived existence
of two years, during which time it
holds multiple informal meetings and
publishes five issues of its journal. Its
legacy, on the other hand, seems ever so
relevant to today’s questions regarding
the possibility of Armenian literature in
the diaspora.
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Ahead in this series from
Talar Chahinian:
Part 2: Beirut and the Middle East
as the post–World War II intellectual
center of the diaspora
Part 3: English-language genocide
and identity literature of North
America 1970s and onward
Part 4: Armenian language and
literature as it is represented in
American academia (the emergence
of Armenian studies programs)
Part 5: Archives and collections
Part 6: Publication and publishing
houses the current Los Angeles
scene
C8 Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture September 20, 2008