Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled
Dialogue of rebellious female Armenian writers.
Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled is a challenging composition of multiple parallel dialogues: explicit and implicit, real and imaginary, engaging the reader and occasionally berating them. Originally self-published as Girq-anvernagir in Armenia in 2006, it began two decades earlier as a diary whilst the ‘typist/writer’ of the book was translating the poetry of the Armenian writer, Shushanik Kurghinian. Her conversation with a fellow-researcher, Lara, whilst sat in a café in Yerevan, imagines the conversation that might have taken place in the same location in 1926 between Kurghinian and another Armenian poet, Zabel Yesayan. Kurghinian and Yesayan, feminists and rebels who never actually met, have subsequently been de-canonised. The typist/writer and Lara are anxious to restore them to the pantheon of Armenian literature, reconstructing their dialogue from censored, redacted and incomplete manuscripts that languish in the archives of the Armenian state museum of literature and arts.
The untitled book of the title is not a book in a conventional sense. The fragments of dialogue contrive to tell the story of how the book was written. But it is not a work of metafiction or autofiction; it is a work of autotheory, an act of ‘wordwork’, highlighting the unreliability of texts that are coerced, censored, translated, plagiarised and ideologically constrained in the context of patriarchal hierarchies and institutions.
Sentences from love postcards, marked in italics, that may or may not have reached their unidentified recipient, are strewn throughout the text. They stand in emotional contrast to the snippets of letters Yesayan sent to her daughter, Sophie, from prison and the diatribes of her interrogators. The typist/writer becomes complicit with an omniscient editor, censoring her own text to present a partial view of the book, challenging the reader to fill in the gaps and omissions that are marked with asterisks. Some of the omissions are unmarked, their absence highlighted later, taunting the reader to recover them and fill in the blanks as if exploring an archival manuscript, drawing attention to the way in which archiving – the decision as to what is included or excluded - is a further form of censorship.
The dialogues are indistinct, the voices are strong but deliberately ambiguous. According to the typist/writer they are monologues, ‘a thousand and one inner monologues’, that represent the thoughts of four individual people, the four authors. The book, 26.5 chapters, the titles of which are mostly taken from lines of Kurghinian’s poems, could have been titled ‘A Collection of Unpublished Monologues’, or one of many other provisional titles.
Sometimes the typist/writer identifies as the typist/writer/translator. Alongside the writers she herself translates, there are two further translators she sustains a dialogue with. The first is Marc Nichanian, who has provided commentary and critique of her initial translations of Kurghinian’s poetry. The middle chapter of the book is a letter from Nichanian in which he offers a literary biography focussing on Kurghinian’s ‘rebellious writing’. The second is Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, the translator of A Book, Untitled, who explicitly inserts herself into Avagyan’s text as a fifth voice, as well as providing an introduction, chapter guides to the cascade of literary and cultural references, and an afterword that addresses the fraught process of translation. In the afterword it becomes clear that A Book, Untitled is not the same book as Girq-anvernagir.
Three different versions of an extract from a rough draft of Yesayan’s autobiographical novel, tentatively titled Comedic Exile but published as The Gardens of Silihdar in 1935, are offered in one chapter. They describe a woman boarding a train, sitting by the window and reading. The typist/writer imagine herself taking the same journey, a journey to eternity, the woman’s newspaper now a sheaf of photocopied manuscripts, before further translating the passage to reveal the train was transporting political prisoners.
The typist/writer is conscious of form. Avagyan has previously translated work by the Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the Constructivist Boris Arvatov. She acknowledges the reader might think the book has no concrete title, no heroes, no structure or direction – that it is essentially form-less - that the author is struggling to finish the story she has begun. This is because the book has four authors (five according to its translator) that are as different as the seasons of the year. It doesn’t conform to a recognised literary genre in the same way that the collaboration of Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar, Passages, the mood music for her writing, borrows and reworks their diverse styles.
‘Only delusional poets try to escape the constraints of form and content’ the typist/writer observes whilst seeking inspiration from the music, before reminding herself that ‘the poet must remain true to the beat of her heart’. Her own wordwork is prose from which something has been subtracted in a mathematical expression of aesthetic and semantic diminution. The distinction between poetry and prose may have been something that she was taught but the difference is nonetheless elusive. Her experiments with form are not meant to confuse the reader but to implicate them, an invocation of the rebellious spirit of Kurghinian and Yesayan who were both poets and novelists. It is a challenge prefigured in another recovered dialogue, between Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam, as they contemplate the purpose of writing.
The questioning of authority, the truth of the poet’s story and how the author tells that story is reinforced by the seemingly casual lack of consistent marking of other texts.
Sometimes, reader, the typist/writer forgets to put quotation marks around cited words or sentences.
Does that mean she steals others’ words?
Which is worse: To let the living words of poets die in damp boxes in dark, treacherous rooms or to sow them like seeds, mixed with another’s words, to revive them and let them bloom in untitled fields?
Besides, quotation marks privatize words and make them someone else’s property.
The words belong to neither the typist/writer nor to you, reader.
They simply unite our past, present, and future.
The omission of quotation marks, the fact that the typist/writer, in another act of complicity with her editor, does not always name and reference others’ poetry and prose, is not an act of plagiarism but explained as one of socialist-feminist reappropriation. It is another challenge to the power structures that served to mute the voices of Kurghinian and Yesayan, voices that Avagyan amplifies.
A Book, Untitled is a book that requires and repays repeated reading. The intertwined dialogues obscure each other, speak over each other, come to prominence or fall away with each new reading. They also reinforce each other, constantly shifting between the poetic and prosaic, the style reflecting the concision that a postcard enforces on the writer, that the typist/writer tells us constitute the book. I wondered if the enigmatic love postcards, rather than being an unrequited monologue, were the collective declaration of all four (five?) authors to themselves; a totalising dialogue – to use the inevitable Bakhtinianism - in Avagyan’s profoundly polyphonic book.