Contemporary Armenian Drama and World Literature

Abstract

Though they do so in the name of understanding literary culture as a universal, autonomous system, theories that develop models of world literature tend to center on the Euro-American canon. Because these models claim comprehensiveness, they eliminate the need for any meaningful engagement with languages and literatures outside their purview. Taking a contemporary Armenian play, Aghasi Ayvazyan’s Props (Dekorner), as a case in point, this chapter examines the ways in which an absurdist theatrical work produced for a small audience can undermine assertions made by critical discourses on world literature.

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World Literature Without the World

The title of this chapter, “Contemporary Armenian Drama and World Literature,” proposes an unusual coupling, perhaps even an impossible one. After all, Armenian literature has no place that we can speak of in theoretical discussions about world literature. That is to say, literary production in Armenia is quintessentially peripheral: not affecting the discourse on world literature, only affected by it. This indisputable fact inspires a set of disciplinary questions. How does one approach research on Armenian literature without simply taking the received knowledge about Euro-American or Russian trends and applying it to the Armenian canon? How can research on Armenian literature enter into a dialogue with global literary models, which completely ignore the smallest linguistic traditions? In order to propose some answers to these macrocosmic questions, I turn to a contemporary absurdist play, Aghasi Ayvazyan’s Props (Dekorner), as a site that exposes, through a theorization of its own marginal position, the methodological gaps in the discourse on world literature.¹ The play, I argue, demonstrates how individual texts and minor literary traditions might be deployed to critique the apolitical terms according to which the world literary order conceives of itself.

Before discussing Props at length, it is necessary to consider some of the models of world literature that scholarship has produced over the course of the last decade. While promising objectivity and comprehensiveness in their articulation of a more inclusive critical practice, well-packaged models of world literature, perhaps unwittingly, have necessitated the erasure of linguistic, political, and historical nuance. Two such studies , Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading and Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters,² draw upon world-systems theory in order to suggest that literary practice operates according to an independent set of rules—rules governed by the literary market and unequal flows of cultural capital. In Distant Reading, Moretti hypothesizes about the way in which the genre of the novel, bearing French or English formal influences, travels and emerges across the globe. Relying on what he knows about Western European narratives, he concludes: “Four continents, 200 years, over twenty independent critical studies, and they all agreed: when a culture starts moving towards the modern novel, it’s always as a compromise between foreign form and local materials.”³ He elaborates on the nature of this compromise by describing it as a triangle between “foreign plot, local characters, and local narrative voice.”⁴ By taking English and French literature as the origin of the novelistic form,⁵ Distant Reading establishes this body of literature as the source of the criteria for comparative projects. The assertion that all “consequential” forms originate in English and French literature results in the homogenization not only of all “first” novels written in the periphery, but also all of the studies on them.⁶

The framework of Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters relies on the role of literary consecration, which privileges the categories of “universal” and “autonomous” literature in opposition to “national” and “political” literature. “Universality,” according to this model, is reserved for the literary centers: Paris, Brussels, and New York. But are these capitals the richest spaces of literariness according to an objective and consistent means of evaluation? Casanova’s model evades this type of question, ultimately remapping the world according to denationalized lines that nonetheless reinforce existing geopolitical and socio-economic divides. In response to world literature’s impulse to recenter the world, Aamir Mufti has argued in his book Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures that the genealogy of world literature conceived as a singular, borderless phenomenon has a deep entanglement with Orientalist constructs—constructs invented in order to deal with and appropriate cultural worlds that are different from and not understood by the Occident. As he puts it, “World literature has always been a border regime, an implicit set of regulations governing the mobility of various national and local literatures across the world.”⁷ Mufti’s reintroduction of the combined influences of place and power in the worlds of literature and criticism reminds us that the circulation of ideas and cultural capital always involves a politically charged process—one that should not be treated as though it operates according to some neutral set of isolatable aesthetic principles.

The Politics of the Theater of the Absurd

A considerable number of absurdist plays were produced during the late Soviet period and throughout the entire first post-Soviet decade in Armenia.⁸ These plays have not received much in-depth critical attention in the field of Armenian studies, let alone beyond it: they have no place that can be spoken of in world literature. Some scholars have noted in passing that absurdist plays of the European tradition were not available in Armenia until the late 1970s, and, as a result, Armenian authors only had a real opportunity to experiment with this theatrical convention in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods.⁹ This type of literary history remains problematic in that it simplistically places Armenian cultural production in the position of catching up with the West.¹⁰ Orientalist presumptions, such as the idea that Armenian literature is belated, demonstrate the need for Mufti’s intervention, which, in conceptualizing world literature as a regulatory system of in/validation, exposes the unevenness in the critical approaches to literatures. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that freedom in the arts after the collapse of the Soviet Union finally allowed Armenian authors to produce antirealistic works in the form of absurdist antiplays. Certainly, these plays emphatically reject ideologically motivated art and, therefore, were more likely to thrive in the absence of censorship. There must be something about these plays, however, that specifically speaks to the post-Soviet era of independence. The plays do not merely offer an opposition to the formerly imposed Socialist Realist aesthetic; they also comment on contemporary realities. In doing so, they provoke a reconsideration of the existing conversation about the theater of the absurd, and, by extension, what that conversation suggests about the relationship between the local and the global in literary discourse.

Criticism of the absurd, beginning with Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd,¹¹ exhibits a fair amount of tension in its treatment of the political implications of this convention. The ambivalence probably stems from the lack of what we might call historical realia in the plays: oftentimes, the characters’ accidental circumstances of social position, historical context, and time become irrelevant and therefore non-existent.¹² At the same time, however, the absence of a concrete time and place makes various political, religious, and historical readings possible: the plays’ metaphorical content is relatable to a host of specific contexts . Paradoxically, the lack of specificity in terms of historical realia has made it possible for audiences and scholars to read the plays simultaneously as political and apolitical texts. Esslin’s description of Ionesco’s relationship to politics offers a telling example of this very dynamic:

All of Ionesco’s theatre contains two strands side by side—complete freedom in the exercise of his imagination and a strong element of the polemical. […] Ionesco’s plays are a complex mixture of poetry, fantasy, nightmare—and cultural and social criticism. In spite of the fact that Ionesco rejects and detests any openly didactic theater, […] he is convinced that any genuinely new and experimental writing is bound to contain a polemical element.¹³

In this reading, Ionesco’s rejection of a singular, definable meaning and the lack of social content in his plays do not preclude engagement with socio-political issues.

Despite his acknowledgement of the complex interrelation between socio-political critique and abstract or undecipherable references, throughout his book Esslin emphasizes the messages of absurdist plays that relate to “the human condition.” Sometimes he does so at the expense of the specific, however subtle, political content of the plays. For example, while the teacher-student relationship in Ionesco’s The Lesson has been read as a metaphor for dictatorship—a reading supported by the maid’s handing the professor a swastika armband at the end of the play—Esslin argues that this relationship represents “any manifestation of power.”¹⁴ Esslin’s emphasis shifts the focus from the more specific phenomenon of “dictatorship” to the broader notion of power dynamics, as it applies to all human relationships. Similarly , in his discussion of Genet, Esslin avoids committing to a political reading:

Genet’s theater is, profoundly, a theater of social protest. Yet, like that of Ionesco, and of Adamov before his conversion to epic realism, it resolutely rejects political commitment, political argument, didacticism, or propaganda. In dealing with the dream world of the outcast of society, it explores the human condition, the alienation of man, his solitude, his futile search for meaning and reality.¹⁵

According to this description of Genet’s work, “man” as an ambiguous individual takes precedence over man as a concretely social or political being. This broad terminology has a strong presence in Esslin’s scholarship on the West European theater of the absurd, so much so that it finds resonances in the thinking of many later critics, who reassert the primarily universal concerns of the theater of the absurd.¹⁶

Over time, Esslin’s assessment has become the basis for related readings that draw an artificial distinction between West and East European renditions of the absurd. According to this type of criticism, the plays of Beckett , Ionesco, and Pinter focus on metaphysical themes that represent the human condition, while those of Václav Havel and Slawomir Mrożek present political protests against totalitarian systems: “The Absurd of West European drama is the absurdity of existence. Socialist Absurd is the absurdity of the bureaucratic system, of the problems of daily life.”¹⁷ These claims link the global problems of existence to Western Europe and the local problems of daily life to Eastern Europe, strikingly and troublingly evoking the binary opposition between the autonomous literature of the center and the national literatures of the periphery in Casanova’s work.

Despite the prevalence of these assertions, shades of gray begin to appear in discussions that address audience expectations and cultural contexts. For example, East European audiences have produced political readings of Ionesco and Beckett’s plays: “To the Warsaw audience Ionesco and Beckett are felt to be political writers. Their characters, like Mrożek’s slogan-spouting little men, are seen as victims of a specific way of life forced upon them.”¹⁸ West European audiences have, in turn, produced metaphysical readings of East European plays. These examples suggest an inherent politics of the metaphysical in absurdist plays. In other words, the purportedly universal concerns of literature cannot be devoid of the political. Or universal literature, as Shu -mei Shih puts it, “was always a construct of power in the existential reality of differences.”¹⁹ Recognizing the tensions in interpretations of the plays of the theater of the absurd helps to do away with the already trite and embarrassingly elitist notion that “universality” in art lies in the West, while politically and historically grounded art is for the rest of the world.

Reading the Nation, Reading World Literature in Aghasi Ayvazyan’s Props

Considering contemporary Armenian drama in the context of the prevailing understanding of the theater of the absurd creates the impetus for a re-evaluation of the political engagement of this convention. In the most general terms, the plots of Armenian absurdist plays develop existential concerns, while focusing primarily on the problem of a power struggle.²⁰ On the one hand, they represent the “powerlessness of humanity,” and, specifically, allegorically,²¹ they relate this powerlessness to Armenia’s position on the global political stage. The anxiety-ridden preoccupations of the individual characters can be read as a reflection of Armenia’s status as a nation-state in the post-Soviet era, and, more liberally speaking, as meta-literary commentary on the place of Armenian letters in world literature.

Aghasi Ayvazyan’s Props (Dekorner) is one such play that necessitates inextricably linked existential, political, and meta-literary interpretations. The play is set in “emptiness,” where four unnamed men—the First Man, Second Man, Third Man, and Fourth Man—try to make sense of their location. Disconcerted by the impalpability of their surroundings, they call upon the Prop Manager offstage to help them “create a place.” After the Prop Manager brings in the furniture and walls that they request, the men find themselves dissatisfied with the result: the place does not turn out to be what they had envisioned; they feel entrapped by it. They ask for the furniture to be removed, and then they feel uncomfortable in emptiness once again. This pattern repeats four times: each time the men ask for different props to fill the emptiness, they dislike the outcome. In the end, the men decide that they need a ceiling in order to have a bona fide place. The Prop Manager has his stagehands lower a ceiling onto the set, but the ceiling never stops coming down and eventually crushes the men underneath it.

The plot of Props immediately highlights the play’s concern with the problems of being and dramatic performance. For this reason, during a question and answer session that followed the Los Angeles production of Props, a professor of comparative literature asked the play’s author about the influence of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco on his work.²² However, Ayvazyan responded by adamantly and somewhat angrily denying the possibility of any relationship between his play and the absurdist plays of these authors. An initial interpretation of Ayvazyan’s response might attribute this type of reaction to the author’s anxiety of influence. After all, as in the style of the theater of the absurd, Props has a cyclical, self-reflexive plot that repeatedly explores intensified variations of the same situation, and it portrays unnamed, nondescript characters who clownishly utter philosophical incoherencies. Props also resembles the plays of the theater of the absurd in that, in terms of both style and content, it conveys a sense of the absurdity of the characters’ plight, which represents the inexplicable and hopeless nature of the human condition. With virtually no references to Armenia or Armenians, the play can be read as an abstract meditation on the desire to create meaning in life by populating it with things, to look outside oneself for sources of self-validation. What, then, was the author’s basis for resisting the audience member’s evidently valid question? Ayvazyan’s response was not literally meant to dissociate Props from the plays of the theater of the absurd. Instead, the author insisted upon recognition of the play as a text that represents a specific situation—one unaddressed by the definitions of this type of drama as a category. By making a statement that rejects categorization, Ayvazyan prompted the audience to consider the unique qualities of this play: the historical contexts and linguistic details that inform it.

In a preface to the English translation of Props, Ayvazyan reveals an entirely singular, historically grounded inspiration for the play: “The earthquake created this play, but this play is not about the earthquake.”²³ Ayvazyan refers to the catastrophic earthquake that struck northwest Armenia in December 1988, taking the lives of 25,000 people and leaving 500,000 people homeless. Although the play’s plot does not directly deal with the earthquake, in the first few lines, the First Man conjectures that “Maybe this was a city…And then there was an earthquake,”²⁴ thereby suggesting that the action of the play represents the aftermath of this natural disaster.²⁵ In addition to death and destruction, the aftermath of the earthquake encompasses major watersheds in Armenian history: the continuation of Gorbachev’s reforms,²⁶ Karabakh’s movement for self-determination and unification with the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) (already underway in 1988),²⁷ Armenia’s eventual war with Azerbaijan, the independence movements in the republics of the USSR, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the relationship between the earthquake and ethnic strife remains salient in historical memory. At the time, during a visit to the towns devastated by the earthquake, Gorbachev expressed surprise at Armenians’ focus on Karabakh and national liberation to the extent that they “were agitated more about the politics of Karabagh than about the effects of the earthquake.”²⁸ Given this context, the four men’s syllabified chants for freedom and change evoke the mass demonstrations that took place in Yerevan and Stepanakert during the independence movement. Props draws the complex connections between the earthquake and Armenia’s progression toward independence early on in the script, when the Second Man describes the characters’ location: “a former place” (nakhkin tegh), metaphorically the former Armenian SSR. By refusing to commit to geographical specificity, while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of spatial dynamics—after all, the word “place” (tegh) and words with this root (“where, here” [ortegh, ēsdegh]) are repeated twenty-four times in the first twenty-three lines of the play—the play interweaves the characters’ struggle over their existence with the problem of nation building. The play’s focus on the relationship between individual identity and place allows it to broach the subject of national politics.²⁹

Props frequently connects its own setting to politics in ways as subtle as the play’s statement on its historical inspiration. The action of the play allegorically enacts the Great Game, the power play between the Russian and Euro-American powers for the Transcaucasus, and particularly big brother Russia’s maneuvers in the game.³⁰ Each scene represents the promise of a new order, but ultimately all changes bear the same futile results: the characters remain uncomfortable and subservient in their existence and repeatedly look to the figure of authority to help situate them on stage. The characters’ spatial positioning with respect to their all-powerful neighbor offstage enables both the continuity and eventual termination of their existence. That is to say, the Prop Manager plays a role that involves what Foucault describes as “structur[ing] the possible field of action” for the characters, giving them hope because of the changes he brings, while ensuring the failure of their attempts to establish themselves in a comfortable place.³¹ The four men strive to establish territorial legitimacy and sovereignty, but with each set change, the Prop Manager facilitates the creation of settings of confinement: a jail, a madhouse, and a couch with a domineering woman on it.³² Moreover, the stage directions confirm the Prop Manager’s complicity in crushing the four men with the ceiling in the play’s final scene; after explaining that the men attempt to establish a place in vain, he simply smiles to himself. In this way, the Prop Manager’s position embodies the dual nature of power; his role is at once productive and repressive.³³ And it is precisely through the characters’ relationship to the Prop Manager that the play depicts a literary-political struggle. By exploring the spatial dynamics of power and performance—the four men function like props on the stage, being moved around and manipulated—the play self-reflexively comments on its position on the world literary stage, a stage that relentlessly forges a system of granting or denying mobility and visibility to texts, cultures, and languages.³⁴ The fact of literariness, the play suggests, explains and is explained by global power politics.

At the same time that the action of the play links the problems of political and literary agency, it engages with metaphysical questions. Its introduction resembles the beginning of creation myths, like Genesis and Hesiod’s Theogony, that begin in nothingness; its conclusion bears a further connection with Genesis and the fall of man. After the ceiling has been installed, the four men begin to wax philosophical in a state of elation. The Fourth Man says, “Human thought consists of the meaning of life….”³⁵ The word he uses here, banakanut‘iwn, implies thought, mind, thinking and judgment. Significantly, as the Fourth Man expresses the idea that banakanut‘iwn is at the core of life, the ceiling starts to come down on the men unnoticed. Meanwhile, the men continue to utter their own renditions of lines from the Bible. Their lines include comically awkward portmanteau words with the root of banakanut‘iwn, ban (word or logos), suggesting that logos creates absurdity: chshmartaban (true thought), shitakabanut‘iwn (study of correct thought), and hamabanut‘iwn (harmony of thought). In his last utterance, the First Man says that if he were to write the Bible, the first line would be, “In the beginning there was righteousness.”³⁶ The First Man’s assertion, repeated by the other characters, revises the idea from the Book of John that “in the beginning was the word.” Taken together, the men’s statements suggest that the word (or ban and banakanut‘iwn) has failed the characters in their quest for a place, and perhaps it needs to be replaced by the more spiritual concept of righteousness. The men’s exclamations about the greatness of God at the end of the play might be read as an indication of the spiritual sustenance they lack, and Ayvazyan’s turn toward religion, especially in his later works, would bolster such a reading. However, the dialogue proceeds in an entirely absurd style: the characters’ statements are largely unrelated to each other, and the script flows like an endless train of illogical speech. It would, therefore, be rather difficult to prove that the play makes a clear statement about religiosity.

What, then, are we to make of the text’s play on religious language? The scene’s placement hints at some answers. Before turning to the rhetoric of religion, the characters cry for political reform. For example, the Fourth Man’s chants allude to the spirit of the Gorbachev era: “Freedom, free-speechness, open-speech, open-voice, freedom of thought, polyvocality, dialogic.”³⁷ The ideals of glasnost—roughly speaking, the late-Soviet equivalent of freedom of speech—are, like the references to God, rendered comical and useless. With the Fourth Man’s epiphany that “freedom is the meaning of place and existence,”³⁸ the play reiterates the parallel between the lack of place and the characters’ lack of agency, even as it simultaneously explores and rejects the existence of a higher spiritual order. This conclusion, while exposing language as the absurd instrument of religious and political ideologies, restates the idea that being is always defined by power and place. It thereby undermines the possibility of an apolitical or “universal” engagement with the metaphysical concerns of being.

Rethinking World Literature from the Periphery

Ayvazyan wrote Props between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. However, the play was neither published nor performed before 1999. When it came out in a collection of his plays, the author had been living in an independent Armenia for eight years. Despite this fact, his aesthetic vision neither finds hope in the prospect of independence nor offers an alternative. The dynamics of Soviet rule plague the characters as much as the prospect of independence. Because Ayvazyan’s play affirms that (Armenia’s) independence brings with it new forms or burdens of dependence, it can be a frustrating text for any critic interested in an empowering response to the workings of empire. The characters’ experience of the push and pull between dependence and independence leaves no room for an emancipatory message. However, such a message would run counter to the play’s fundamental premise, according to which “relations of power, not relations of meaning” determine history.³⁹ That is to say, the play conceptualizes the entanglement of freedom with the history of hegemony. Whereas a play like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros forebodingly warns against conformity and the spread of totalitarianism, Props suggests that independence and democratization are not benign processes. Mirroring its political skepticism, the play’s meta-literary critique rethinks the contemporary paradigms of world literature. While the dominant discourse on world literature promises a democratization of the literary field, Props articulates the impossibility of separating the histories of national literatures—belonging to “central” and “peripheral” nations alike—from the history of geopolitical power.

This brief reading of Props has sought to work through the multilayered concerns of the text in order to highlight the ways in which it facilitates a more complex understanding of the subgenre of the theater of the absurd. Arguments that insist on the privileging of universal literature as a depoliticized, denationalized category would undoubtedly label Armenian absurdist plays as national texts delimited by their politico-historical contexts and influenced by earlier European texts. Such readings perpetuate the placelessness of the Armenian canon in the context of world literature. However, the specifics of a play like Props can in fact challenge the binary opposition between the universal and the national (or local). The mapping of power onto (theatrical) space in Props blurs this opposition by linking the characters’ predicament, Armenia’s post-Soviet nation-building, and the practices of reading world literature.⁴⁰ The outcome is a text that embraces the liminality that characterizes the absurd—between tragedy and comedy, between existentialism and the spiritual, between hopelessness and potentiality, between aesthetics and politics, between national history and human history. This liminality, expressed by a peripheral text, reasserts the imperative to read world literature as a politically imbued construct, itself circumscribed by the workings of power.