Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan’s Stories From The Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry

Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan’s Stories From The Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry

-Dedicated to my grandmother who does not know her age and to Saroyan’s grandmother Oskan who was illiterate; i.e. to our gates to the Exotic East-

                                                              “One can not expect an Armenian to be an Englishman”-

                                                               William Saroyan (quoted in Floan, 1966, pp. 152-3).

 Ulaş Başar Gezgin

     The term ‘social representations’ corresponds to the representations of human world that are common (Durkin, 1997, p. 381). Ethnic stereotypes constitute a subtype of social representations. Human beings harbor social representations of –let’s say- madness, scholarship, suicide, aged people etc. Indeed, anything common has respective social representations. They are equivalent to myths of ancient societies in that sense. They are the major tools permitting human beings to communicate with each other. The literary universe that a story writer creates operates in mediation to these social representations too. This means Saroyan’s (1908-1981)  literary universe can be analyzed by unfolding these social representations.

     Saroyan’s stories are very rich in terms of Armenian characters he depicts and ethnicities he brings to the fore. In ‘War’, Karl -a five-year-old Prussian- and Josef -a six-year-old Slovenian- fight with each other while a nameless Jewish boy cries on watching their fight (War, p. 41). In ‘Seventy Thousand Assyrians’, the focus is an Assyrian barber, Theodore Badal (Seventy Thousand Assyrians). In ‘The Mexicans’, Saroyan’s uncle employs a Mexican who feeds thirteen mouths –he does not count himself (The Mexicans).

     In Saroyan’s stories, we see how Armenian people could not cope with their traumatic situations. They are poor immigrants. They have no land that they can call their own. Americans were not friendly to Armenian folks. Educated Armenians worked at the most lowly paid jobs. For example, Saroyan’s father Manak was a professor in Ottoman society, knowledgeable in many aspects of life, so that people call him ‘Agha’ in Bitlis. However, when he comes to U.S., he becomes a janitor (‘Madness in the Family’, p. 42; ‘Myself upon the Earth’, p. 214). This situation is not peculiar to Manak Saroyan. Many Armenians were farmers earning small amounts. We see that the way a given qualified immigrant transforms himself/herself into a citizen is not different across nearly 70 years. The wave of qualified immigrants still continues and expands as long as the economic gap between rich and poor countries enlargens more and more. But as we know, the reason of immigration for those Armenians was different. They were exiles. The motives underlying immigration were highly political –epitomized by Manak Saroyan’s portrait.

     Saroyan’s works can not be thought without the phenomenon of immigration. But one must add that it is also the byproduct of the separation from and loss of the ideal lands and of the unresolved trauma of Armenian immigrants. That Armenian literature –regardless of the country- has been obsessed with themes of loneliness and estrangement is not a mere coincidence. The socialization process of Armenian children mostly contributed to this literary obsession, since parents and grandparents transmitted the myth, memory and ideation of old country and old culture. Even Soviet Armenian writers revolve on similar themes (Bedrosian, 1991, p. 126). As Armenian barber Aram says in ‘The Barber Whose Uncle Had His Head Bitten off By a Circus Tiger’, for Armenians, there are “(...) streets and streets and houses and houses and people and people, but not one door (...), not one room, not one table, not one friend” (‘The Barber Whose Uncle Had His Head Bitten off By a Circus Tiger’, p. 97), and not “[g]one are the days of poverty for this tribe” (‘My Cousin Dikran, The Orator’, p. 292).

     In ‘The Living and the Dead’, he appears to be an autobiographer –as usual. The reader witnesses the dialogue between Saroyan, the grandson and Oskan, the grandmother. She narrates many things. Indeed, she is possibly the major fountain of Saroyan’s stories. She is the one who saw old country, who remembers Armenian old life at ‘Near East’. She recounts her husband Melik as a rider of a black horse. He makes Desert Kurds tremble when he comes. She has no trust in Russians, and a reader having a Turkish background will remember the word “Turk has no friend save him”, when Oskan says “[w]hich tribe of the earth was kind to our tribe?” (‘The Living and the Dead”, p. 43).

     Armenian children in Saroyan’s stories can provide answers to the possible questions posed by the discipline of developmental psychology. A second set of pairs of questions and answers comes from the theory of social representations. Furthermore, if one subscribes to a compromise between these two, a major question would be how collective representations of ethnic selves and others on the one hand and the differentiation of ingroups and outgroups on the other develop. In Saroyan’s story entitled ‘The Duel’, the protagonist is Trash <Artarash> Bashmanian. He is supposedly 12-13 years old. He has an interest in duels. He takes a sword and looks for enemies. But he has none. His friend –the story teller- asks whether he can find an enemy among Germans, Indians, Mexicans, Hindus, Japanese, Serbians, Chinese, Portuguese, ‘Negroes’, Spaniards, and secondly coming to Near East geographically, Assyrians, Syrians, Persians and Arabs. He doesn’t think so. He thinks he can find an enemy only among Turks to duel (The Duel, pp. 84-6). The ethnic others become Turks –due to the cultural content of Armenian child rearing practices. What will happen as this early adolescent grows older? Saroyan does not provide an answer for this. One should also keep in mind that most of the child rearing practices including Turkish one share the element of the goal of constructing ethnic identity at the expense of excluding some other ethnicities. Again in most of them, this goal and the way it is implemented are covert. It corresponds to the notion of hidden curriculum in the discipline of sociology of education. There are hidden elements in official curriculum. At least, the way the capture of a given city (occupation vs. conquest) is reframed linguistically inoculates a we-they distinction. The measures against the negative consequences of child rearing practices are provided by Saroyan –wittingly or unwittingly: Trash gives a public speech in which he proposes that all people including Turks are brethren. Indeed this is not his idea, but due to the situational factors he becomes a proponent of this idea. After his speech, he could not be in search of Turks to fight. To couch in social psychological terms, he has a commitment towards brotherhood of humanity now –Turks not excluded.

     Apart from the ethnic otherness of Turks for Armenians, Saroyan treats the issue in a gently philosophical manner. For him, there is nobody completely good or evil. He is not against people, but -as he puts it- he is against mobs (Floan, 1966, p. 125).

     Saroyan’s literary universe had been strictly determined by the space and time in which he lived. The cultural properties of American life had been reflected throughout the phenomenon of multiethnicity in this universe. This is too ordinary for story writers who do not view story writing as an intellectual endeavor (Gezgin, 2001). This kind of story tellers just writes what they heard from others. They do not fictionize, they just write. Saroyan falls under this category, but it is only by this way he has been considered to be sincere. Maybe the reasons for his popularity should be investigated, too. But this would not change the fact that he wrote as an Armenian telling stories from Near East and those tales were interesting for American public believing that the world consists of United States of America and that is all (See for instance, ‘The Shepherd’s Daughter’). The reasons for the popularity of contemporary writers in Western world are by no means different nowadays. But they lack the sincerity of this poor Armenian immigrant –who grew up at an orphanage, could not graduate from high school and had no means of subsistence save story writing. His life is open to psychoanalytic studies. However we know beforehand that he was the spokesman of the poor masses and his ingroup consisted of them. He will be read more and more till intrasocietal and intersocietal economic inequalities would have an end. There will be no need for Saroyan and his literary universe only in a classless world.

References

Bedrosyan, M. (1991). Expressions of cultural marginality in Armenian American literature. Journal of Society for Armenian Studies, 5, 125-137.

Durkin, K. (1997). Developmental social psychology: From infancy to old age. Massachusetts et Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Floan, H. R. (1966). William Saroyan. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.

Gezgin, U. B. (2001). Türk yazınında ‘budunsal (etnik) öteki’ imgesinin açımlanmasına giriş olarak Hüseyin Rahmi (H. R. ) yazını ve “Yankesiciler” adlı öykü üzerine [ The literature of Huseyin Rahmi (H. R. ) as an introduction to the exploration of the image of ‘ethnic other’ in Turkish literature and on the story entitled “Pickpockets”] . İmece, 23 (http://www.imece.org/dergi/nisanmayis2001/turkyazininda.html).

Saroyan, W. (1935). Myself upon the Earth. In The daring young man on the flying trapeze and other stories (pp. 206-220). London: Faber and Faber.

Saroyan, W. (1935). The shepherd’s daughter. In The daring young man on the flying trapeze and other stories (pp. 203-205). London: Faber and Faber.

Saroyan, W. (1936). The living and the dead. Three times three. California: The Conference Press.

Saroyan, W. (1942). My cousin Dikran, the orator. In Best stories of William Saroyan (pp. 7-18). London: Faber and Faber.

Saroyan, W. (1942). Seventy thousand Assyrians. In Best stories of William Saroyan (pp. 291-297). London: Faber and Faber.

Saroyan, W. (1942). The barber whose uncle had his head bitten off by a circus tiger. In Best stories of William Saroyan (pp. 92-99). London: Faber and Faber.

Saroyan, W. (1942). The Mexicans. In Best stories of William Saroyan (pp. 166-171). London: Faber and Faber.

Saroyan, W. (1942). War. In Best stories of William Saroyan (pp. 35-41). London: Faber and Faber.

Saroyan, W. (1998). Madness in the family. In Fresno stories (pp. 41-44). New York: A New Directions.

 Source: Gezgin, U. B. (2017). Cognition and Art: Essays on Cognitive Science and Art Narratives.

COGNITION AND ART: ESSAYS ON COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND ART NARRATIVES Prof.Dr. Ulaş Başar Gezgin COGNITIVE SCIENCE 1. The Embodied Cognition View 2. On Flanagan’s Ideas On Dreams and Ahead: An Attempt To Locate Dreaming Phenomenon Under The Superclass Of Consciousness 3. “The Pragmatics of Cartoons: The Interaction of Bystander Humorosity vs. Agent-Patient Humorosity.” 4. Integrationist School or on ‘Rethinking Language’. 5. On Steven Pinker’s ‘Language Instinct’ or Some Remarks on Evolutionary Psycholinguistics 6. On the (Im)Possibility of Psychotherapist Computer Programs: An Investigation within the Realm of Epistemology 7. Thai Language: A Brief Typology. ART NARRATIVES 8. Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan’s Stories from the Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry. 9. A Critique of The Stories By South East Asian Writing Awardees 10. Mulholland Drive: Another impasse for the American film industry. 11. On 'About Schmidt' 12. On Black spirituals. 13. The possibility of an African American poetry. Bio