Confronting the Impossibility of Representation: Literary Responses to the Armenian Genocide

Over the past century, generations of survivors have produced literary responses to the Armenian genocide in waves that are diverse in their time, place and language of publication, as well as their stylistic approach.  The genocide’s varied literary treatment, each distinct in its aesthetic representation of the trauma, makes it difficult to speak of this literary output as a coherent body of work belonging to a singular tradition.  My presentation will focus on the response of the generation of surviving orphans, who regroup in Paris in the 1920s and launch a short-lived, diasporan literary movement called Menk.  The works of these French-Armenian writers, though devoid of explicit memory of the catastrophic events of the past, characterize the crisis of survival in the aftermath of the genocide, both for the survivor living in exile and the displaced culture’s prospects of reproduction.  Through themes like incest and the figure of the failed witness, their literature addresses the paradox of representation inherent to the experience of catastrophe.  Menk’s literary archive is often overlooked as a viable response to the genocide, for unlike diaspora’s grand cultural narrative that emerged from the Middle East following WWII, it does not seek to historicize and contextualize the story of genocide and dispersion in a coherent, chronological fashion.  Subsequently, I will make a case for their approach and argue that the aesthetic representation of genocide’s trauma must be informed by notions of interrupted time, impossible testimony, and displaced loss.  Otherwise, rendering the realm of literature as a platform for reiterating the historical narrative to provide proof against genocide’s denial locks Armenian literature in a compulsion to prove its destruction, and thus can be detrimental to its continuity.