• 1 Beast on the Moon was staged for the first time at the “Humana Festival of American Plays” in the U (...)

1Thus starts Beast on the Moon, American dramatist Richard Kalinoski’s 1995 play,1 which addresses the 1915 Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks through the central figure of Aram, the youngest son and sole survivor of his family’s massacre, and through the equally central visual and textual function of photography throughout the play. Indeed, the long introductory stage-directions emphasize right from the start the crucial importance of this medium through the presence of the “wooden camera”, “the easel”, and the “large framed photograph” with its cut-out heads that the “old Gentleman” shows to the audience before displaying on the easel (102). If the stage-directions serve as guidelines to the visual staging of the play, they also textually introduce its main dichotomies, such as past and present; life and death; presence and absence; destruction and survival; as well as the play’s main paradigms, that is to say trauma, memory, legacy, and transmission.

• 2 I am using here for the family portrait the same term “survive” as the one used by Georges Didi-Hub (...)

2Drawing from critics such as Jacques Derrida, Janine Altounian, and Melanie Klein, this essay examines the close links between photography, family, and traumatic suffering in their relation with the notions of “archive”, “survivance” (as opposed to “survival”), “reparation”, and “re-membrance”. As we find out in the course of the play, the heads in the central family photograph were actually cut out by 19-year-old Aram Tomasian himself after he witnessed the terrible massacre of his entire Armenian family and fled to America. Now an exiled photographer in Wisconsin, Aram is trying to reconstruct himself, a reconstruction that entails filling out the holes in the original family portrait by building his own family, together with his acquired “picture bride” Seta, another Armenian genocide survivor (104). Playing with the lethal power of photography as well as the inherent violence of the photographic act, but also with photography’s capacity to capture life – however falsified –, Beast on the Moon stages the difficulties experienced by these two “living dead” as they endeavour to come to terms with their tragic past and to re-inscribe themselves within time and history. Aram’s camera, which, along with the family picture, literally and figuratively occupies center stage in the play, is thus alternately seen as a cumbersome “third person” (132) in an awkward ménage à trois and the exciting catalyst of new beginnings. As to the family portrait, which in the course of the play suffers both a decapitation and an indirect crucifixion, but somehow manages to survive2 – even though in an altered and reduced form –, it becomes the repository not just of individual destinies – or of one individual’s destiny – but of the diasporic fate of a whole people, the Armenians.

• 3 Critics and photographers insist on the lethal and petrifying power of the photographic act, throug (...)

3From the outset, with the stage-direction “the heads have been cut out” (102) – or its visual counterpart in the display on stage of the family portrait with holes where the heads used to be –, photography in the play Beast on the Moon is associated with violence and destruction. What is at stake here is not so much the lethal and petrifying power of photography, leading to the subject’s disincarnation and reification, that numerous critics such as Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag have emphasized.3 What is at stake here is the literal violence that was exerted against the photograph itself – and of course, as a result, against its subject – through the physical cutting out of parts of it, namely the heads. This virtual or paper beheading acquires renewed, and much more horrific, significance when we find out later in the text that Aram’s entire family – his father, mother, brother, and sister – were themselves decapitated and left hanging from a clothesline in the garden of their house during the 1915 Armenian genocide. This traumatic scene was witnessed by young Aram, aged 13 at the time, who survived the massacre by hiding under a pile of clothes following his father’s earlier injunction, and later managed, as he puts it, to “bribe his way” (144) to America by selling old collector’s stamps that he had found, along with the family portrait, in the lining of his father’s coat, the very coat that had saved his life. When the photograph is the object, several years later, of a physical decapitation by Aram himself, his act, which echoes and duplicates the initial murders, takes on the added value of a combined symbolic parricide, matricide and fratricide. What is more, we have in fact a double parricide, as it were, since the beheading of the father by Aram is accompanied by a usurpation of his function as patriarch when Aram places his own photograph where his father’s head used to be, as indicated by the following stage-direction: “A discreet photo of the head of the youngest son (now 19) occupies the hole made from the cut-out head of the father” (102).

• 4 See Hirsch, Marianne, The Familial Gaze. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999.

4Photography is also further associated in the play with death and destruction when the “picture bride” from Armenia that Aram has chosen for himself and mail-ordered “from a total of 37 pictures” (104) turns out to be a fake, the original girl on the picture having died in the genocide. It is therefore by usurping the identity of a dead girl on a photograph sent in deliberately by the “myrigs” (or Armenian grandmothers) that fifteen-year-old Seta lands in America, having married Aram “by proxy” (105) three months earlier. This usurpation, which of course recalls Aram’s appropriation in the photograph of his father’s role as head of the family, is actually duplicated in the play by the fact that shortly after her arrival, Aram places the picture he has taken of her where his mother’s head used to be, thus further enhancing Seta’s status as “living dead” (as Seta herself puts it, “I am Armenian, I am a dead person living too”, 142). And it is precisely this picture-taking that Seta experiences as a lethal threat when her husband Aram attempts to take photographic records of her arrival, which for him heralds the impending consummation of their marriage and the Biblical “fruitfulness” and “multiplication” (121) that he longs for in order to fill out the holes in the photograph. While Aram insists that “pictures aren’t natural, pictures are posed” (107) – thus echoing Marianne Hirsh’s notion of “familial gaze”, the deliberate strategies of self-representation which are at the core of family portraits4 – Seta sees in the contrived photographic act, in which she is asked to pose as a smiling bride, a destruction of her real self, that of “a girl dying in an orphanage” (105), who still feels like a “child” (106) and thought that once in America “she would be safe” (113). Furthermore, as Aram becomes more and more insistent, trying to impose on her his patriarchal authority, and a few minutes later, sheer brutality, so as to force the marriage consummation upon her, she likens his coming after her to a rape, remembering the way her sister, who was raped in front of her by the Turks, sacrificed both her body and her life so that she, her little sister, would be saved. Just as in the 1966 film Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni, the camera is thus seen as both a potentially lethal shooting weapon and a menacing male organ threatening the integrity of the female self. It is interesting for that matter that later on in the play, shortly before the scene when Seta refuses to comply any longer with the photograph ritual, the very camera Aram uses should be described by him in gendered terms as “Mr Camera” (132), following her remark that the camera “gets just a little, in the way” (131), a comment that reinforces its sexual potential in what she perceives as an awkward and ultimately damaging ménage à trois.

• 5 As Freud describes it in his 1927 essay “Fetishism”, the fetish is the susbstitute for the mother’s (...)

6If the family portrait in its mutilation and reconstruction is so central to the play Beast on the Moon, it is because of its complex status as cenotaph, treasure, relic, fetish, talisman, and archive. Cenotaph or “empty tomb” because, as Linda Harvety Rugg explains, the photograph represents “a present that is no longer there”, “a memorial marker” (26), all the more so in the case of Aram’s family who was denied a burial; treasure because it was found by the boy inside the lining of his father’s coat, after the massacre; relic and fetish5 because, like this very coat which protected him against murder, the portrait that Aram cherishes is all he has left from a family who was sacrificed and for whom he now has feelings akin to saintly devotion; talisman because he is convinced that by filling out the holes in the picture, he will be able to move on and rebuild himself in this new country. As he confesses to Seta at the end of the play, in a very moving scene in which he finally breaks down and tells her what happened to his family, “I cut out the heads of my family. I thought I could replace them. I really thought that’s the way it would be. […] I thought… a wife… children… then I would forget. Completely. But I never forget. I never do” (145).

• 6 Translation mine. Original text: “écartelé entre ses ancêtres non inscrits dans l’histoire, éliminé (...)

7If Aram “never forgets”, as he puts it, it is because he is both the recipient of a terrifying and traumatising familial heritage, and the repository of a monstrous destiny, the extermination of an entire people. As such, he is caught between two conflicting positions, honoring his dead and keeping their memory alive, and leaving his past aside so he can survive and rebuild himself. As Freud describes in Moses or Monotheism, these two positions are the two opposite manifestations of what he calls “fixations to trauma”, that is to say, on the one hand, the attempt to revive the traumatic memory, or “repetitive automatism”, and on the other hand, the attempt to forget the traumatic memory, or “defence reaction”, which is part of a general strategy of “avoidance”. In La Survivance. Traduire le trauma collectif (Survivance, or how to translate collective trauma), Janine Altounian, herself the descendant of survivors of the Armenian genocide, explains the impossible “triangulation” in which Armenians now find themselves, “torn between ancestors who are not inscribed in history, eliminated by an exterminatory instance not recognized as such [she is referring here to Turkey, who has never acknowledged the genocide and never been taken to court for it], and the host land, in all appearances not to be held responsible, to which Armenians must adapt so as to be able to live, to mourn their dead ones, but also to restore their Names in the language of the country in which they now live”6 (66).

• 7 Translation mine. Original text: [d’un spectre, celui de son père, le patriarche, auquel il] “s’ide (...)

9On the other hand, Aram remains caught in his traumatic past, in the impossible mourning of his family, in the commerce of photographic ghosts or “specters”, as Derrida puts it in Archive Fever (Mal d’archive), and more particularly of one specter, that of his father, the patriarch, “to whom he identifies by integrating him like a ghost who speaks through him before him”7 (98), and who, like Hamlet’s father, dictates the law from beyond death. In that sense, the family portrait – as well as the old coat – works as a true “archive”, as Derrida defines it by referring to its Greek etymology arkhe, signifying both “commencement” (“where things commence”) and “commandement” (“where men and gods command”) (11). As Derrida explains further down, the Greek term for “archive”, arkeion, means “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (12). In the play, the family portrait and the coat become the symbols of the lost home and homeland as well as of the law of the father, the old patriarchal and archontic law, to which the surviving son is passionately attached (a passion that recalls the term “Mal” chosen by Derrida for his title, and aptly translated as “Fever”), but which he is also achingly and desperately searching (being “en mal de”, as in “en mal d’archive”, signifies in French that inability to retrieve what has been lost). For Derrida, this “irrepressible desire for a return to the origin” (142) that this “mal d’archive” or “archive fever” symbolises cannot exist without its counterpart, the “possibility of oblivion”, or what he calls “radical finitude” (38), two expressions unfortunately all too well-suited to the extermination of the Armenian people.

• 8 Translation mine. Original text: “se faire naître avec le texte du père” (Janine Altounian, Mémoire (...)
• 9 Translation mine. Original text: “la stratégie inconsciente que les survivants d’une catastrophe co (...)

10In this context, the only way for Aram to survive, as Janine Altounian explains, is “to be re-born with the father’s text”8 (Mémoires du génocide arménien, 181), in our case the family portrait, and to tame it through substitution and re-appropriate it so as to be able to achieve the process of “reterritorialization” necessary to his “survivance”, which she defines as “the unconscious strategy which the survivors of a collective catastrophe and their survivors put up so as to rebuild on stilts the precarious bases of a ‘normal’ life in the country where they have landed”9 (La Survivance, 1). Since we are talking about transmission and re-birth, it is interesting to notice that the very name “Aram” seems to be a fitting combination of “Abraham” or “Abram”, the father of multitudes, and “Adam”, the first man, while etymologically, ‘ham” in “Abraham” means “people” and “dam” in Adam refers to both “blood” and “earth” (“adama”).

• 10 The “Family Romance”, as Freud describes this myth in “The Family Romance of the Neurotic” in Neuro (...)

11This re-birth, initiated as we saw by the cutting out of the heads and the process of symbolic re-inscription in the portrait itself, is finally achieved in Act 2 through the character of Vincent, a young Italian orphan to whom Seta provides food and shelter – in particular thanks to the old coat whose symbolism as domestic roof is thus reactivated – and who happens to be the old Gentleman who has been telling the story of the family. Despite Aram’s initial resistance and sense of blasphemy, Vincent will eventually come to occupy the place of the son in the very last scene of the play in which, at Seta’s suggestion, a picture of all three of them is taken by Aram and a new family portrait therefore constituted. It is therefore through the unsaid of a tacit “photographic” adoption – for lack of a biological procreation made impossible by Seta’s damaged body – that the Name (with a capital “N”) is finally said, in other words that Aram can now fully assume the transmission of the Name-of-the-Father and therefore re-inscribe himself within his Law, the Law-of-the-Father. We can’t help seeing, in this completion of Aram’s initial project – though on a minor scale and with a major twist in terms of filiation – an annunciation of sorts in which, as in the New Testament, a son is suddenly and unexpectedly “born” to a couple without, in our case, any actual child-bearing on the mother’s part. And just as in the New Testament, this son, an interesting mixture of the Other (non Armenian) and the Same (an immigrant orphan) is both the catalyst and the promise of new beginnings. Through this kind of inverted “family romance”10 in the Freudian sense, in which the subject does not imagine for himself, in retrospect, different parents but actually creates the conditions for a new lineage or genealogy, the family can finally be “re-membered” in the double sense of the term (Althounian, Mémoires du génocide arménien, 218), and the “empty space” of traumatic suffering, metaphorically rendered throughout the play by the holes in the family portrait, finally “repaired” (Klein 215).