Mediated Mourning: Atom Egoyan’s Ararat
and the Rhetoric of Identification
Christopher Carter
Abstract
As rhetoric scholars have expressed interest in visual literacy over the past two
decades, they have devoted particular attention to the persuasive techniques of
filmmakers. David Blakesley’s The Terministic Screen, for example, features
numerous essays that theorize film literacy in relation to the works of Kenneth
Burke, laying recurrent emphasis on his idea of rhetorical ‘identification’. The
essays stress political or affective forms of identification among characters,
between audiences and onscreen constructs, and among viewers who share
expectations based on genre conventions. Such research provides an exacting lens
for studying the cinema of Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan, though
students of rhetoric have yet to undertake that investigation. My presentation
begins the process by focusing on Egoyan’s Ararat (2002), which dramatizes the
making of a film about the Armenian genocide while troubling the logic of
identification that many rhetoricians see as central to movie narrative. Both
Egoyan’s movie and its film-within-a-film figure motion pictures as means of
communion, or what Burke calls “consubstantiality,” among Armenian characters
—as well as between those characters and the films’ audiences. Egoyan’s
characters pursue consubstantiality with the diasporic collective by engaging in a
process of mediated mourning that counters Turkish state denial and the prospect
of historical erasure. That process is mediated insofar as it expresses itself through
production of (or engagement with) visual texts, and insofar as those texts
intervene between grieving subjects and the community they seek. The mediated
attempt at identification raises ethical problems insofar as its regard for unity
devalues cultural and experiential difference.
Key Words: Visual rhetoric, Atom Egoyan, Ararat, Armenian genocide,
consubstantiality, historical film
*****
Whether we define rhetoric as the art of persuasion, the practice of symbolic
inducement, or the relationship between strategies and circumstances of
communication, cinema provides a forum for studying rhetoric in action. While
describing various approaches to film as rhetoric, David Blakesley favors an
adaptable mode of analysis grounded in the writings of Kenneth Burke. 1
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Blakesley’s The Terministic Screen asks the Burkean question of how movies
foster audience identification with the motives, desires, and frustrations of
characters embedded within onscreen scenarios. The book demonstrates the
multilayered quality of the identification process, as films invite viewers to align
themselves with figures who identify with someone or something else in the miseen-scène, thus creating a vertiginous effect in which the object of psychological
investment refracts the gaze rather than yielding to it. In The Terministic Screen
and related work on Alfred Hitchcock, Blakesley insists that the logic of
identification can become obsessive, not only when it fails to satisfy the desire it
evokes but also when it leads audiences to share characters’ ethically suspect
fixations.2 While Blakesley represents the study of identification as a supple form
of rhetorical analysis, he hints that positing shared substance or ‘consubstantiality’,
either among characters or between audience and diegesis, may entail a kind of
violence—one that imposes the myth of identity where there is only difference. In
A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke describes the condition of difference as the necessary
precondition for identification, as no one need assert consubstantiality if
collectively shared substance were already a given. 3 Still, the effort to obscure
distinctions among subjects may unfold as an act of aggression, or to use Diana
Fuss’s formulation, ‘a detour through the other that defines a self’.4 To investigate
filmic identification may require assessing the ethics of that detour, considering
whether its purported aggression is justifiable, or whether it might counter violence
rather than persistently reproducing it.
The films of Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan indicate his
alertness to the violence of identification, throwing into question the forms of
consubstantiality they elicit. The early feature Next of Kin does so while depicting
a man who pretends to be the abandoned son of a poor Armenian family; the later
Exotica exhibits a similar pattern while depicting a father who fixates on a stripper
in the years after his daughter’s murder. Following up with The Sweet Hereafter,
Egoyan focuses on a lawyer who presses members of a mountain community
toward a class-action lawsuit after a bus crash claims their children; still later,
Egoyan’s Adoration portrays a boy who adopts the story of a Palestinian freedom
fighter as his own family history and then circulates the fabrication on the Internet.
Each movie fosters audience investment in the characters’ pursuits even while
casting doubt on their motivations. Among the most jarring instances of troubled
identification in Egoyan’s work occurs in Ararat (2002), which dramatizes the
making of a movie about the siege of Van in 1915, or what Marc Nichanian calls
the Armenian Catastrophe.5 Amid the varied strata of Egoyan’s metafilm exist
portraits of three Armenian post-exiles: the filmmaker Edward Saroyan, who
directs a movie about the Catastrophe to honor his mother; the art historian Ani,
whose lectures on Armenian painter Arshile Gorky earn her a job as Saroyan’s
consultant; and Ani’s son Raffi, whose father died attempting to kill a Turkish
diplomat. Each character engages in a process of mediated mourning, whether for
Christopher Carter
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lost loved ones or a decimated culture, which counters Turkish state denial and the
prospect of historical erasure. That process is mediated in two senses: first, it
expresses itself through production of (or interaction with) visual texts; second,
those texts interpose themselves between grieving subjects and the community
they revere. Both cinematic and painterly rhetorics concretize the post-exile’s
longing for consubstantiality with the Armenians of 1915 while simultaneously
embodying historical and experiential differences that cannot be elided.
Edward Saroyan’s film-within-the-film at once enacts mourning as visual
text and demonstrates the woeful inadequacy of the filmic signifier to its referent.
As an expression of grief, it preserves rhetorical agency from the crushing heft of
genocidal history, providing material resources for memory despite nearly a
century of efforts to block recollection.6 The movie catalyzes memory through
unbearably poignant objects—a pocket watch, a photograph, a missing button—as
much as through depictions of atrocity. In so doing, it coheres with William
Guynn’s sense that memory depends on the affect of tangibility: the narrative
summons identification by means of concreteness, which in its common
metaphorical senses intertwines physicality and specificity. 7 Such an invitation
nicely suits Debra Hawhee’s sense of how identification works, for she finds
Burke’s early idea of consubstantiality to be ‘as much postural and somatic as it is
psychological and social’.8 Saroyan’s Ararat triggers visceral revulsion in
deliberate opposition to state-sponsored niceties that would reduce genocide to an
exaggeration or a war-era pre-emptive strike. His production derives urgency from
an awareness that the Armenians who survived the siege are disappearing along
with the mother to whom he devotes his work. 9 What Mark Parker sees as
Egoyan’s insistence on ‘intergenerational embrace’ also suggests a way to interpret
the interior feature film, which dramatizes young people struggling to support
suffering parents as well as parents reaching helplessly toward lost children.10
But as Saroyan begins to view the grandness of his subject matter as
license for poetically charged inaccuracies, his medium starts to obstruct the very
identification it purportedly enables. Where Wilson admires the ‘rawness and
bluntness’ of Saroyan’s approach,11 Ewa Mazierska points out his reproduction of
Holocaust industry clichés, among which she includes its mainly English dialogue
accompanied by a sweeping orchestral score.12 To such patterns we might add
lavish stagings of the displacement and slaughter of whole populations, the slow
rendering of militarized rape, and brooding soliloquies by the film’s central villain.
While assessing the set design for such scenes, the art historian Ani notes the
prominence of Mt. Ararat in the background of Van, and insists that the mountain
would not be visible from the city. When the director explains that the image is
‘important’ nonetheless, Ani remains steadfast: ‘But it’s not true!’ With a
gentleness that works almost immediately to end debate, Saroyan answers, ‘It’s
true in spirit’. Holding to the affect of authenticity while admitting the spectral
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character of truth, the director allows himself the impossible privilege of moving a
mountain so long as the work of transhistorical identification gets done.
Ani typically yields to Saroyan’s entreaties not just because of the way he
mixes humility with a grand directorial reputation, but because she shares his
desire for connection to Van’s early twentieth-century population. She expresses
that desire through painstaking engagement with the work of Arshile Gorky,
lecturing at multiple points on his painting ‘The Artist and His Mother’. Reflecting
on the painting’s photographic origins and the many years he spent refining the
image, she suggests that it works both to save his mother from erasure and venerate
all those who died in the Catastrophe. Either Egoyan or Saroyan—and perhaps
both—accentuate Gorky’s yearning for familial and communal consubstantiality
by depicting him at work on the piece, forgoing brushes for a moment and laying
his paint-wet hands on those of his mother-image. The scene signifies with
profoundly tactile urgency the mediation of mourning. Ani reproduces the gesture
after one of her lectures, reaching up to touch the hand of Gorky’s mother as it
remains projected on the over-sized screen behind her. The action punctuates her
attribution of sacredness to the image, her sense that it defies the will of the
executioner while serving as ‘a repository of our history’.
But Ani’s reverence for the painting as a portal to the past develops
alongside Egoyan’s insistence that any artistic medium distorts the events it
purportedly renders accessible. At more than one lecture, her stepdaughter Celia
accuses her of filtering history through the narrative of a lost lover, establishing a
metonymic linkage between Gorky’s suicide and her first husband’s selfdestructive attempt to kill a Turkish emissary. As hostilities mount between Ani
and Celia, shots of Gorky’s studio become intermixed with Saroyan’s production,
and the collision of images subverts historical tangibility at the same time that it
stresses the affective resonance of touch. When Gorky lays his hands on his
mother’s he blurs and obscures them, enacting an identification that is ‘true in
spirit’ and thus, like the film-within-the-film, caught in the condition of erasure.
For Ani the terror of such erasure becomes unbearable when Celia,
believing her father killed himself to escape her stepmother’s intolerable standards,
tries to slash Gorky’s painting with a pocketknife. After Ani reflects on the
potential destruction of her favored repository, she decides to act on behalf of
historical authenticity by interrupting one of Saroyan’s enormous set pieces. Yet
his lead actor, who refuses to break character despite Ani’s intrusion on a scene-inprogress, recounts in gruesome detail the event she has entered. Shaming her for
presuming to judge their painstaking recreation, he frames the film in the same
reverent terms she reserves for the work of Gorky. Juxtaposing Ani’s denunciation
of Celia with the actor’s improvised soliloquy, Egoyan identifies Ani’s defense of
authenticity with her stepdaughter’s attempted act of vandalism.
Ani’s son Raffi also pursues historical authenticity, doing so not through
his mother’s interpretive practices or Saroyan’s epic narrative but the use of a
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small digital camera. Haunted by his father’s death, he sets off for Mt. Ararat in
hopes of discovering what motivated his assassination attempt while at the same
time obtaining hard evidence of the Armenian genocide. The rough footage of
Ararat, and of ruined churches in the region, suggests an effort to forge an identity
by documenting the antique unity of the now ruptured collective. Raffi’s sense of
purpose at least partly supports Tschofen and Burwell’s claim that when Egoyan’s
subjects ‘take up the means of production […] their conditions of uncertainty and
trauma are transmuted into mobility and flexibility’. 13 But the mobility the camera
makes possible exists within a tightly bounded framework, as the trip exemplifies
Raffi’s compulsive response to loss and thereby signals the ongoing effects of
trauma rather than a straightforward enactment of newfound agency. To use
Dominick LaCapra’s terms, it may be that Raffi does not wish to ‘work through’
such trauma, as achieving resolution may mean breaking faith with a past both
hallowed and disastrous.14 He reproduces what Egoyan calls the ‘national myth’
whereby ‘you can attach yourself to something to which you have no connection
other than your own conception of what that space and time might provide for
you’. ‘It’s a very clear way of organizing your life’, Egoyan claims, ‘And it’s also
how things are fetishized’.15 Raffi recognizes the fetishistic character of his project
even as he carries it out, acknowledging in voice-over that despite his determined
accumulation of images, ‘there is nothing here to prove that anything ever
happened’.
The presumed availability of proof nevertheless constitutes a necessary
condition for Raffi’s struggle to identify with the people of Van. Given the
intensity of that struggle, he reacts passionately when the language of ‘genocide’
undergoes critique. The half-Turkish actor Ali, who plays Saroyan’s villain Jevdet
Bey, suggests after the production that war necessitates strategic violence and that
stories of mass killings and deportations are probably hyperbole. When Raffi
explains that Turkey was not at war with Armenia in 1915, Ali asks that they each
embrace their current privileges in Canada, forgo their mutual suspicions, and most
pointedly, ‘drop the fucking history and get on with it’. Unimpressed by Ali’s
presentism, Raffi observes that Adolf Hitler persuaded his officers of the viability
of the ‘final solution’ by asking, ‘Who remembers the extermination of the
Armenians?’ ‘And nobody did’, Ali retorts. ‘Nobody does’. Such language
exemplifies Ali’s rhetorical approach, which merges a plea for forgetting with the
conviction that allegations of genocide require incontestable proof. Claiming never
to have heard of an Armenian genocide as a child, he suspects not systemic denial
but lack of historical validity. Raffi’s pursuit of tangible evidence, then, becomes
not only a vehicle of cultural identification and a way of coping with his father’s
death; it becomes a means of addressing Ali’s challenge.
Responding to that challenge, however, risks colluding with the repressive
practices that proceed in unbroken course from Van, 1915. Marc Nichanian argues
in The Historiographic Perversion that
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the planned murder [of the Armenians] did not consist in mere killing.
The planned murder consisted, however one understands this, in erasing
the death of the victims, in eradicating all traces of death and (accessorily)
of murder. It consisted in killing not life but in killing death.16
Ali’s accusations of exaggeration attest to the efficacy of such erasure, while his
invitation to avoid historical thinking helps perpetuate the problem. The invitation
leaves Raffi no good option for reply, for to accept it means undertaking the
impossible task of forgetting, while to attempt to prove the Catastrophe cedes
rhetorical advantage to the cultural heirs of those who engineered it. That Raffi
would need to substantiate the occurrence of mass murder only clarifies the extent
to which the Turkish authorities succeeded in ‘killing death’. Such substantiation
involves partaking, even if critically, in a discourse of negation that so thoroughly
naturalizes the strategy of disavowal that its strategic character disappears.
Nichanian therefore counsels a refusal to participate, echoing Maurice Blanchot’s
declaration that ‘[w]e will bring no proofs’.17
But an explicit refusal to participate may double as a refusal to
memorialize, which also suits the Turkish state logic of disavowal. Although the
confrontation between Ali and Raffi suggests that Egoyan resents being implicated
in the production of proof, the consequences of repression are at least as troubling.
Egoyan’s film contests the violence of repression while exemplifying the mediated
mourning it attributes to its major characters: it identifies itself with diasporic
collectivism while simultaneously expressing the elusive quality of that experience.
The admission of failed identification does not imply futility, however, as the
process of mourning contests the ongoing persecution that endeavors to erase its
own trail. Whatever the flaws of a memorializing effort that collapses space, time,
and geopolitical situation, they cannot compare with the violence of such erasure.
Nichanian suggests that Egoyan confers authority on the genocidal will by
dramatizing the frantic, recursive response to official denial. Yet we might also
interpret the film as explicating how the Catastrophe perpetuates itself through
state-sanctioned incredulity. Opening that disbelief to scrutiny, the film shares
Nichanian’s construction of the call to prove as brutal, death-killing mockery.
Egoyan’s Ararat both describes and enacts forms of mediated mourning that, while
they may be partly appropriated by the discourse of historical verification, cannot
be contained by that discourse. It invites audience affinity with characters whose
behaviors exhibit the cyclical patterns and irresolution of post-traumatic
subjectivity, but that signal at least as powerfully the maddening problem of ethical
representation.
Notes
1
David Blakesley, ed., The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2003), 3.
2
David Blakesley, ‘Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo’, in Defining Visual Rhetorics, Charles A.
Hill and Marguerite H. Helmers, eds., (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 131.
3
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 18-29.
4
Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.
5
Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 7.
6
Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell, eds. Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1997), 3.
7
William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006), 195.
8
Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press),
117.
9
Lisa Siraganian, ‘Telling a Horror Story, Conscientiously: Representing the Armenian Genocide in Atom Egoyan’s Films’,
in Image and Territory: New Essays on Atom Egoyan, Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell, eds. (Waterloo, Ontario:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 134.
10
Mark Parker, ‘Something to Declare: History in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 76 (2007):
1047.
11
Emma Wilson, Atom Egoyan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 118.
12
Ewa Mazierska, European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 43.
13
Tschofen, Image and Territory, 16.
14
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 22.
15
Wilson, Atom Egoyan, 144.
16
Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, 55.
17
Ibid., 10.
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Christopher Carter works at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches composition theory, social movement rhetoric,
and literacy studies. He is author of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton Press, 2008) and
Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in U. S. Social Documentary Photography (University of Alabama
Press, forthcoming 2014).