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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Aghasi Ayvazyan, Dekorner [Props], in T‘atron. Piesner [Theater: Plays] (Yerevan: Nayiri, 1999), 3–26.
- 2.
Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
- 3.
Moretti, Distant Reading, 52.
- 4.
Moretti, Distant Reading, 57.
- 5.
Herein lies the fundamental problem in Moretti’s formulation: what is “foreign form” anyway? He takes it for granted that this concept has unambiguous meaning. It would serve us well to ask if there really exists a traceable native form.
- 6.
Interestingly, this hypothesis even dispossesses Don Quixote of its ability to influence the center.
- 7.
Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 9.
- 8.
While literary histories typically associate the designation Theater of the Absurd with post-World War II plays from Europe and North America, I use the terms absurdist and theater of the absurd more inclusively, thereby broadening this convention’s geographical and historical scope. Among the Armenian repertoire are works by Anahit Aghasaryan, Aghasi Ayvazyan, Perch Zeyt‘unts‘yan, and Gurgen Khanjyan.
- 9.
For example, see Nishan Parlakian and S. Peter Cowe, eds. Modern Armenian Drama: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 330; S. Peter Cowe, “Introduction,” in “Born and Died” and “The Saddest of Sad Men”: Two Plays by Perch Zeytuntsyan (Glendale, California: Abril Publishing Company, 2001), 1–26; Herand Markarian, ed., Contemporary Armenian Drama: Voices of Change (Yerevan: Writers Union of Armenia, 2006), 32; and Zhenia Kalantaryan, Urvagtser ardi hay grakanutʽyan [Survey of Contemporary Armenian Literature] (Yerevan: Zangak-97, 2006), 153–158. These publications offer broad surveys of literary trends; there is no in-depth study or analysis of Armenian absurdist plays to date.
- 10.
Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object demonstrates that anthropology as a discipline involves a politics of time. The book discusses the temporal and spatial distancing involved in the anthropologist’s discourse and treatment of the Other and concludes that “temporal concepts” have an “ideological nature.” Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), 60, 92. While Fabian engages with the politics of time in order to critique anthropologists’ biased and unequal treatment of their subjects, his conclusions should serve as an analogous corrective to literary histories that rely on notions of belatedness in order to describe the cultural production of Others.
- 11.
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1969). Esslin’s foundational book has, since its first publication in 1961, come out in three editions, with the last one published in 2001. The book focuses on post-World War II Western Europe with Paris at its literary capital; presumably unaware of the Russian absurdist plays of the 1920s and 1930s, Esslin does not mention this conspicuously similar body of drama that predates the European tradition by several decades. The literary-historical gap in his study enables the originary strain—arguably an antecedent of the contemporary discourse on world literature—in his work.
- 12.
Martin Esslin, “The Theatre of the Absurd,” The Tulane Drama Review 4, no. 4 (May 1960): 3. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124873. For example, Beckett expressed the belief that including actual geographical references in his work would be “unspeakably vulgar.” Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd, 92. Similarly, Ionesco made it clear that in his theater the “social content” is incidental or secondary. Walter Schamschula, “Václav Havel: Between the Theater of the Absurd and Engaged Theater,” in Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, ed. Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman, 337–348 (Los Angeles: Slavica Publishers, 1980), 339.
- 13.
Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 168–169.
- 14.
Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 147–148.
- 15.
Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 233.
- 16.
For example, Bert Cardullo articulates a definition attributable to Esslin: “Absurdist drama is ultimately conceptual, for in the end it too seeks to project an intellectualized perception—however oblique or abstruse—about the human condition.” Bert Cardullo, “The Avant-Garde, the Absurd and the Postmodern: Experimental Theater in the Twentieth Century,” Forum modernes Theater 17, no. 1 (2002): 13.
- 17.
Yana Hashamova, “The Socialist Absurd, the Absurd, and the Post-Absurd—A Syndrome of Contemporary Bulgarian Theatre,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 36, no. 3–4 (Sept.–Dec. 1994): 444. Even critics who try to refute the opposition between the plays of East and West inadvertently reinforce the notion that the level of political commitment distinguishes the two traditions: “The distinction between a theater of the absurd in the West and in the East, the presence or absence of a satiric or didactic component of any kind is unjustified. The only statement we can make is that the satiric component is more prominent in the East European theater of the absurd than it is in the West European.” Schamschula, “Václav Havel,” 340. Writing about a decade earlier, Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz presents a similar claim: “The recent wave of absurd plays in Eastern Europe is derived from a wholly different conception. Although here too we may talk about a ‘rediscovery of the human condition,’ it is a different, a specific condition—the context is not metaphysical but social” (190–191). Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz, “Slawomir Mrożek: Two Forms of the Absurd,” Contemporary Literature 12, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 190–191. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207736.
- 18.
Stankiewicz, “Slawomir Mrożek,” 189.
- 19.
Shu-mei Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,” PMLA 119, no. 1 (January 2004): 29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261482.
- 20.
This study cannot deal with the full range of Armenian absurdist plays produced in the post-Soviet era, but the plotlines of three plays not discussed here illustrate the primacy of a power struggle:
Anahit Aghasaryan’s Madmen of the World, Unite! (Khelagarnerě bolor erkrneri, miats‘ēk‘) draws parallels between the world of politics and the psychiatric ward in order to expose the problems in Armenia’s fledgling democratic system. The play presents the antics of a self-committed psychiatric patient, Mher Astvatsatryan, as he becomes involved in the corrupt dealings of five political party representatives who are contesting the results of the recent presidential election. Through the depiction of the insanity of politicians and the sanity of the insane patient, the play, like its title, points out the absurdity in political ideologies past and present. Anahit Aghasaryan, Madmen of the World, Unite!, trans. S. Peter Cowe and Nishan Parlakian, in Modern Armenian Drama: An Anthology, ed. Nishan Parlakian and S. Peter Cowe, 390–444. (New York: Columbia UP, 2001).
In Perch Zeyt‘unts‘yan’s Born and Died (Tsnuel ē u mahats‘el) the characters, the Actor and the Director, rehearse in preparation for the staging of Nikolai Gogol’s short story, “The Diary of a Madman.” Throughout the rehearsal, the plots of “The Diary of a Madman” and Born and Died intersect as the Actor and Director have conversations about the absurdist aesthetics of Zeyt‘unts‘yan’s play, the position of actors as the author’s mouthpiece, Gogol’s madman, and Armenia’s politics. Among the multiple narratives at play, the central question of the performance becomes one that deals with the Actor’s agency: can he ever speak lines that are his own? Perch Zeyt‘unts‘yan, Tsnuel ē u mahats‘el [Born and Died] (Yerevan: Azg, 1995).
Gurgen Khanjyan’s The Guards of Ruins (Averakneri bahaknerě) is set next to the ruins of an unidentified building, where three homeless characters, Sirak, Mats‘ik, and Luso, go about their daily routine: begging for money, smoking cigarettes, and arguing with one another. Suddenly, a self-proclaimed guard appears among them, forcing them to follow his lead in protecting the area of the ruins, to which they are now confined. The guard has Sirak, Mats‘ik, and Luso repeatedly take part in “military” exercises and clear the area until they are all exhausted. After he has gone for the night, the homeless trio attempts to escape, but they are unable to; they all willingly return to the guard post, because they have grown to like the guard and the authority that he represents. During the next day’s training, in a surprising turn of events, Sirak ousts the guard and takes his place as the leader of the guards of ruins. Gurgen Khanjyan, Averakneri bahaknerě [The Guards of Ruins], in Spannel p‘rkch‘in [To Kill the Savior], 273–316 (Yerevan: Nor Dar, 2001).
- 21.
Here, Esslin’s point about the connection between the plays of the theater of the absurd and the tradition of allegorical plays starting with those of the Italian Renaissance proves useful. Esslin, “The Theatre of the Absurd,” 15. Reading these plays allegorically and paying particular attention to historical details incorporated in their content reveals their connection to post-Soviet political realities.
- 22.
Arena Theatre Company produced my translation of the play, which ran from May through June of 2003 in Los Angeles and Burbank, California. The audience had a discussion with the author on May 30, 2003, after the performance at UCLA’s Northwest Campus Auditorium.
- 23.
Qtd. in Markarian, Contemporary Armenian Drama, 61.
- 24.
- 25.
All translations of the play are my own (edited from my published version in Markarian’s anthology).
- 26.
For a brief overview of the period of Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, including democratization, glasnost, and perestroika, see Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003).
- 27.
For a study of the Karabakh Independence Movement starting in 1988, see Mark Malkasian, “Gha-ra-bagh!”: The Emergence of the National Democratic Movement in Armenia (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996).
- 28.
Service, A History of Modern Russia, 469.
- 29.
Michael Urban has gone so far as to conclude: “Politics in post-communist societies is in large measure a politics of identity.” Michael Urban, “The Politics of Identity in Russia’s Postcommunist Transition: The Nation against Itself,” Slavic Review 53 (1994): 733.
- 30.
Indeed, Russia’s impact on and manipulation of Armenia’s post-communist nationhood is well documented. For example, Ian J. McGinnity notes: “The stark condition of the Armenian economy underscores the serious flaws in the Armenian government’s logic of making short-term concessions to Russia that curtail Armenia’s long term economic freedom. These concessions have occurred for several reasons, including the general lack of a foreign policy process, the consolidation of power at the top of the Armenian government, submission to substantial Russian pressure, and dismal domestic economic conditions. Since former president Robert Kocharyan took office in an election marred by fraud in 1998, large concessions have resulted in Russian dominance of the economy, placing Russian interests in control of Armenia’s transportation, telecommunication, banking, mining, and energy sectors.” Ian J. McGinnity, “Selling Its Future Short: Armenia’s Economic and Security Relations with Russia” (senior thesis, Claremont McKenna College, 2010). CMD Senior Theses. Paper 58. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/58. Similarly, Kim Iskyan concludes, “Russia is the gray cardinal of the Armenian political scene, in contrast to the meager influence it exerts on domestic politics in most other CIS countries, with the exception of Georgia, Moldova and Belarus.” Kim Iskyan, “Armenia in Russia’s Embrace,” StrategyPage, 24 March 2004, accessed 27 March 2013. For an historical study of Russia’s influence on Armenia’s affairs, particularly in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, see Kenneth Wayne Pope Jr., “Russian Imperialism: The Past That Haunts the Future” (master’s thesis, Webster University, 1995). For an autobiographical account that details Russia’s participation in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, see Sergey Ambartsumian, On the Brink: Three Years of Struggle for Armenian Independence, ed. Myrna Douzjian, trans. Tatevos Paskevichyan (Yerevan: National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, 2010).
- 31.
Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurly (New York: The New Press, 2000), 341.
- 32.
The play’s references to madness and confinement almost instantly conjure up the Soviet era, a time when state psychiatric oppression was institutionalized and implemented disproportionately in Soviet Armenia. Theresa C. Smith, No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 81. The scene with the woman on the couch is arguably completely unrelated to Soviet rule; however, the characters seriously consider the ways in which the couch and the woman might be “divided up” amongst the four of them, and the conversation reads like a parody on the logic of nationalization and collectivization. The Fourth Man’s plea, “We must reach the great future through sacrifice. We must begin with self-sacrifice,” cements the subtle connection between this scene and the Soviets’ treatment of property (18).
- 33.
Foucault, Power, 120.
- 34.
Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures, 9.
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
- 39.
Foucault, Power, 116.
- 40.
Jonathan Boyarin presents a related argument, according to which states construct history through a manipulation of space and time: “States may be said to map history onto territory.” Jonathan Boyarin, “Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory,” in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 15–16.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Douzjian, M. (2018). Contemporary Armenian Drama and World Literature. In: Babayan, K., Pifer, M. (eds) An Armenian Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72864-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72865-0
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)