[In the following essay, Shear reflects on Saroyan's portrayal of the relationship between ethnicity and mainstream culture through an analysis of his short story collection My Name Is Aram.]

At one time William Saroyan was America's most famous ethnic writer—more famous than ethnic, perhaps. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Saroyan exploded onto the literary scene as a true wunderkind, the writer who was single-handedly revolutionizing the form of both the short story and the drama. He was the man who refused the Pulitzer Prize and argued with Louis B. Mayer over the issue of artistic integrity. As a literary personality, he had an instinctive desire to be a part of the American cultural scene, to feel that he counted on such a stage. Yet at the same time he felt apart from it, hating the entrepreneurs of culture and his writing rivals with such a passion he was often dismissive of the popular mainstream culture of his day. In these moods he was apparently satisfied with his own artistic ego and his quieter working out in his fiction of his own cultural dilemma.

Saroyan's ethnic writing, which is in essence his emotional record of what it means to be a member of the Armenian subculture, is scattered throughout the corpus of his work, appearing in almost every form his protean talent produced—short story, novel, novella, memoir, essay. While his later fictional works (especially his novels) tended to regard ethnic existence as a problem—sometimes as a state racked by irreconcilably conflicting values—his earlier work, while not always optimistic, tended to emphasize a seemingly immortal quality in his ethnic heritage and the capacity of recent immigrants for adjustments. In one of his earliest stories, the mother tells her family in Armenian, “It is no use to cry. We have always had our disappointments and hardships and we have always come out of them and always shall.”¹

The Saroyan book which investigates most intensively the relationship between the young ethnic and the mainstream culture is a collection of short stories written fairly early in his career, My Name Is Aram. Its analysis of the ethnic's position is deceptively elaborate and thus this aspect of the book has often been overlooked. The only two literary critics who have studied the book in detail stress its wavering between romantic allegiances and realistic constraints. Howard Floan points to “the conflicting claims of dream and reality” in the stories, while David Stephen Calonne believes the romantic elements dominate since the central character's “activities celebrate the triumph of freedom over restraint, of the intense over the quotidian.”² While not dismissing these considerations, I will concentrate on the book's analysis of the relationship between the ethnic community and the mainstream culture and its examination of the social interaction within each group. In his investigation Saroyan employs a second generation ethnic, the Armenian-American boy, Aram, as narrator and a schematic division of the arenas of social action into: 1. an official world of status and socially-defined relationships; and 2. a community evoked and defined by personal relationships. These two overriding frames are, in most stories, paralleled and given public enhancement by the social divisions between the American mainstream world and the Armenian ethnic world. To avoid rejecting the values of any group, Saroyan opens the plot form of these stories so that at the end of each there is a suggestion of continuance rather than conclusion. Saroyan dramatizes his ethnic society as a total system functioning according to particular principles, but he views it as depending on inconsistencies for its operation.

Saroyan's official world is partly defined by those Calonne refers to as “the mediocre instruments of society's institutions,” but in a broader sense it is that arena where one comes to terms with one's social role.³ The personal world is characterized by a free and innocently irresponsible activity of the human spirit, an expression which seems connected with the ethnic's desire to articulate another kind of community. In general the characters in the stories exhibit a persistent concern for one another's personhood, a caring that may be related to the social conditions of the 1930s, but which seems more particularly tied to the social uncertainties in the position of the American ethnic. Whatever the reason, the characters often respond to each other by developing and elaborating attitudes of seriousness and mock-seriousness which successfully avoid risking anyone's personhood. The stories show people taking care of one another in a psychological sense, a nurturing that is reflected figuratively in the concern for health and physical condition which is a pervasive motif for the stories.

As the official world and the personal community interact, what they demonstrate is the necessity for lying (or keeping silent)—that is, for temporarily suppressing the claims of one world so the other might occupy center stage. In this manner each world can proclaim its status without contradicting the other world. The first story of the collection, “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse,” directly confronts the problem of consistency and honesty. On seeing his cousin Mourad with a new white horse, Aram is dumbfounded because theirs is a proud and honest family and “I knew my cousin Mourad couldn't have bought the horse, and if he couldn't have bought it he must have stolen it, and I refused to believe he had stolen it.”⁴ As the quotation implies, logic is not much help. At first it seems to cancel itself out. Then it seems to conclude that Mourad and Aram must be in some jeopardy, for obviously the horse is stolen. But again worldly logic is suspended as the boys' enthusiasm for the horse is such that they avoid facing the legal (official) view. In the same spirit of suspension, John Byro, when he sees the situation, only hints at his own position as owner—to show his good will for the name of the family and to avoid a direct, official confrontation. This intermittent concern with consistency works. Finally it is personal concern—not any official logic of right and wrong—which unites Byro again with his horse.⁵ Later, in “Locomotive 38, the Ojibway,” the Indian title character also suppresses a fact, his ability to drive, in order for Aram to have the fun of actually experiencing some of his aspirations. Both the Indian and Byro, an Assyrian, seem to have an instinctive feeling for the world of these Armenian boys.

The world of personal relationships is invariably activated by a nonethnic official society, but it is also generated by structures in the ethnic group, where social relationships are, because of the eroding authority within the group's social structures, always contingent, always in need of some improvisation. For the ethnic, therefore, the personal seems to be inevitably effacing the official. While this can seem a natural condition to the children, it evokes pathos in the adults. Since it is only contingently official, the Armenian ethnic society seems in the American social order defined by the more personal interactions of an extended family, a group which in its affections and its tendency to accept people for what they want to be seems to imply a version of the family of humankind. It has in common with the personal world a feeling of being psychologically inside, at a remove from conventional American society.

The major family is the Garoughlanian because the main character—the first person narrator in all the stories—is Aram Garoughlanian. It is a family who, we are told, “come by all their wisdom naturally, from within” (80), a condition that accents the tie between family identity and personal idiosyncrasy. As a boy (in most of the stories he is between 10 and 14), Aram is still spontaneously a member of both Armenian and American societies and thus can function as a kind of understanding go-between. From his Armenian background, he has inherited a feeling for the personal world, for characters like his cousin Mourad who “enjoyed being alive more than anybody else who had ever fallen into the world by mistake” (10). But he also understands how the official world operates and its non-Armenian rationality. For example, he and Joey accept their strappings at school because they've broken the rules and they want to “be fair and square with the Board of Education” (102). Most often Aram is not a protagonist, but rather a witness to the drama of the fears, dreams, and inclinations of others.

Typically, the stories concern what doesn't happen—how Aram's uncle fails to raise pomegranates, how another uncle doesn't get a job, how his cousin doesn't get in trouble for stealing a horse, how two people don't fall in love, etc. What doesn't happen is not failure, however—the personal world, say, defeated by a more ruthless and indifferent official world. And it is in this respect that the forms of the stories can be considered open; that is, the narratives deliberately evade the kind of final closures implied by a triumph of personal desire or a rejection of an official sort. Further, the characters retain their role as agents even though their aims may not be achieved, for their agency consists chiefly in the improvising of relationships to the official world and thus guaranteeing the continuity of existence on a personal level.

Instead of hostilely confronting each other and concluding with someone's sense of failure, both the mainstream world and the Armenian world open with a feeling of multiplicity and freedom. Aram is not imprisoned by old country perspectives, but neither does he reject his heritage. Because of this, he comes to understand the necessity of some distance between the official world and the personal world, to see that an authentically-lived existence in one world creates more freedom in the other. When Aram humorously comes to the realization that he is losing the 50 yard dash and that his fellow racers are not simply there to contribute to his triumph, he is finally released from the bondage imposed by his egotistically subjective response to the I-must-triumph-over-my-competitors paradigm of the official world. At the end of “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse,” when the boys realize that John Byro is not going to press charges against them, all three come to share in the recognition that personal dreams can in the right human context become fundamental claims.

Within the context of the ethnic world, the figure of the family patriarch is used to dramatize an official force transformed into a purely personal effect. Uncle Khosrove, the most prominent of these types, is the loudest in a series of uncles and grandfathers who pour out their stylized version of a wisdom calculated to regulate family activities. Theirs, however, are no longer iron, absolute commands. In fact, the strength of the orator's insistence seems only to signify a corresponding fading of official status. Although these characters are overtly accepted and acknowledged as authority figures, no member of the family follows their advice completely.

Because of their diminished status, these characters bring out most strongly the juggling of logic, the social manipulation of what is recognized and what is not, that results from the interaction between external convention and internal evaluation. For example, Uncle Khosrove's publicly stated attitude toward games, that one should not take winning or losing too seriously, seems a recognition that personal attitudes should never be bound tightly to one's objective fate as a game player. But he pretends to a stoicism he does not possess: he is in fact the worst loser in the world. The fact that he “himself lost his life when he lost a game” demonstrates the lack of personal command which results from the precarious nature of his present social status (140). There is a kind of logic in the fact that this inconsistency between idea and behavior leads directly to Khosrove's most intensely personal relationship, that with the Arab, who comes to represent the loss of everything external. The narrator imagines that the Arab, by losing a game of tavli to his uncle (thus officially opening the possibility for a personal relationship), comes to a recognition of status: the Arab “understood who my uncle Khosrove was—without being told” (142).

The uncle and the Arab come to enjoy a silent communion. As Aram's mother explains, “They understand one another and don't need to open their mouths” (145). When Aram seeks an objective fact, the Arab's name, Khosrove screams as if he is being murdered, reacting as if the relationship to be preserved must remain totally private. What the two friends share is the old social world—literally, the old country—now gone but still alive personally, reduced to an unspoken understanding. When the Arab dies, Aram concludes, “He died an orphan in an alien world, six thousand miles from home” (147). As Calonne notes, the gap between their old world, personal, silent communion and Aram's leafing through American advertisements becomes a symbolic image for “the developing gulf between the two generations,” and thus, for a kind of pathetic failure of the personal in this version of the ethnic family (69).

The context of the old world and the new world is used more overtly in “Old Country Advice to the American Traveler,” where Uncle Garro gives advice to the younger Uncle Melik about the dangers of travel on a train.

“Several moments after the train begins to move … two men wearing uniforms will come down the aisle and ask you for a ticket. Ignore them. They will be imposters.”

“How will I know?”

“You will know. You are no longer a child.”

(135)

A man, Garro says, will offer a cigarette. Don't take it, he advises. “The cigarette will be doped” (135). He further envisions a young woman intentionally bumping into Melik. This woman will be a whore.

On the actual journey, Melik not only finds that none of this happens, he himself offers another young man a cigarette, goes out of his way to sit with a young lady, starts a poker game, and has a wonderful trip. Yet at the end of the story he tells Uncle Garro that he has followed his instructions. The story ends with Garro saying, “I am pleased that someone has profited by my experience” (137). There is an obvious irony in the events, and yet the reversing of much of the advice does not cancel it esthetically. It remains the embodiment of the old world of Garro, still his experience. In an important sense the difference in characters, and in their relationship to the new world, means that each has his own truth.

The personal comes to have several shades of meaning in this collection. Most of the patriarchs are smaller scale variants of Uncle Khosrove, “an enormous man with a powerful head of black hair and the largest mustache in the San Joaquin Valley, a man so furious in temper, so irritable, so impatient that he stopped anyone from talking by roaring, It is no harm; pay no attention to it” (12). With its massive, total dismissal of the external world, his seems the voice of pure psychic energy, the voice of completely internal power. However, the family reaction to Khosrove tends to imply that such articulation is really a kind of reaching after lost official power. The ranting intensity in his official role tends to seem that of an imprisoned voice, to become a personal comment on present status. In these stories, which are largely paced by dialogue, many of the characterizations are basically voices. All articulate a felt relationship to the ethos of their world, but while some convey a strong sense of active agency, others suggest an isolated self and like the silence of the “poor and burning Arab” convey the pathos of those deprived of or denied social status. They remind us that to come to the New World is to lose most of one's former social status.

Several of the stories are direct examinations of the community as the arena for weighing personal desire. Using Aram's low-keyed concern, the early stories of the volume analyze critically, but sympathetically, qualities of the dream of the self. In “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse” the typical (and typically impossible) boy's dream of riding a horse is permitted to happen through an almost miraculous suspension of feelings about property rights. John Byro, the owner of the horse, is an outsider to some extent (“an Assyrian who, out of loneliness, had learned to speak Armenian”) (16), but he comes to a kind of understanding as he looks at the returned horse. “I do not know what to think. … The horse is stronger than ever. Better tempered too” (19). Somehow the horse being stolen had been a good experience for all involved.

The following story, “The Journey to Hanford,” features a playful interaction between two comic extremes: 1. Aram's grandfather, who orates—in such a way, again, as to imply a diminished official force—the practical view of life; and 2. Uncle Jorgi, who is tolerated by the family but considered a fool because his only ambition is to play a zither. The prominent refrain in the story is the grandfather's complaint about unrealistic writers: “When you read in a book that a man who sits all day under a tree and plays a zither and sings is a great man, believe me, that writer is a liar”; “When you read in a book … that a woman is truly a creature of wonder, that writer has turned his face away from his wife and is dreaming. Let him go” (21). It is soon apparent that even though he may be articulating the truths of realism, his comments are essentially psychological declarations of his status.

There is little response to the statements and the story's plot also features an evasion of conflict. Uncle Jorgi is sent to Hanford to get a job, the journey here, like those in other stories, being the movement to the world beyond the ethnics. With little suspense, it transpires that Jorgi is saved from having to work, though it is Aram who has to explain to this naïve zither-player that the farmer has lied to him about all the watermelons being harvested: “He didn't want to hurt your feelings. He just said that because he knew your heart wouldn't be in your work” (28).

The story ends with the harmony of the family restored, the two philosophies reconciled because appearances indicate that at least Jorgi has tried to get work. Aram observes, “When I came back to the parlor the old man was stretched out on the couch, asleep and smiling, and his son Jorgi was singing hallelujah to the universe at the top of his beautiful, melancholy voice” (30).

In “The Pomegranate Trees” a foolish dream of Uncle Melik, to grow pomegranates in vast quantities and sell them to an eager public, comes, as one expects, to failure. And yet, through the casual dialogue between Aram and his uncle in which each comes to learn gradually, sympathetically about the other and about the world around them, the experience comes to have a value of its own. The marvelous quality of the story is its concealment of the exact time the uncle knows the dream is doomed and the underplaying of the moment, finally, when the two realized that in a crucial sense this failure doesn't matter.

Not simply a pretty lie, the personal dream evokes the psychological debt connected with social dignity or status. (One begins to owe a consistency of identity to others and to a degree their expectations become demands for some assimilation of their values.) “My Cousin Dikran, the Orator” concentrates on the uncertain mixture of the precious and the precarious in the ethic's movement into mainstream society. Here public speaking is the sign of the emergence from a more private tribal identity. Aram observes a farmer leap to his feet to make his pledge: “Gone are the days of poverty for this tribe from the lovely city of Dikranagert—the five Pampalonian brothers—twenty-five cents.” After having made this overt commitment to a common cause, the farmer goes home, “his head high, and his heart higher. Poor? In the old days, yes. But no more” (77). Though the amount is paltry by mainstream standards, the new-found pride in identity is the essential value. Although the actions here are restricted to the ethnic community, the people, by officially indicating what they feel they have become, are risking themselves in the movement from their old-country identity. A more public dream, life in a new society, can now be lived and shared.

As the story develops, the emphasis shifts to Dikran, a second generation figure, and the same kind of social movement is traced, this time one step closer to assimilation into the American mainstream. Here, however, the story is much more critical of the movement. Aram's family is pleased when the boy Dikran (aged 11) becomes adept at giving speeches. Nonetheless, the patriarch of the family is still dissatisfied, because all the boy's knowledge is from books, impersonal. Dikran's speech at the school program is “the best thing of its kind—the best of the worst kind of thing”—for the boy concludes that the World War, in which several million were killed, was a good thing for the world (83). In spite of his pride in the boy's achievement in an American ritual, the old man feels he must speak to the boy out of what he knows: “Continue your investigation of the world from books, and I am sure, if you are diligent and your eyes hold out, that by the time you are sixty-seven you will know the awful foolishness of that remark [about the war]—so innocently uttered by yourself tonight” (84). Certified social achievement is a good thing, but in this case the status of the elder in the ethnic community permits personal sensitivity to have the final word by articulating a truer wisdom.

The stories “A Nice Old-Fashioned Romance with Love Lyrics and Everything” and “The Circus” concentrate on characters working out the social fictions which their roles in the official world force upon them. Both utilize favorite materials of Saroyan's, the classroom and the confrontation between students and teachers. Here and elsewhere in Saroyan the American classroom is another arena where one's personal behavior can win a form of status, providing one can manipulate official structures. In “The Circus” the narrative is always uncomfortably on the verge of a serious confrontation as the boys openly challenge the rules by fleeing from school (instead of sneaking out). They imagine that their punishment this time may involve the removal to a more indifferent (more absolutely official) environment, the reform school. But at the end the institutional patriarch (the principal, old man Dawson) turns more personally understanding, whipping them with more blows, as required for such an offense, but with a gentler stroke. He also pays tribute to their bizarre concern for him: “I'm awfully grateful to you boys … for modulating your howls so nicely this time. I don't want people to think I'm killing you” (108).

In “A Nice Old-Fashioned Romance” Aram is accused, unjustly, of writing on the blackboard a poem, saying that his teacher, Miss Daffney, is in love with Mr. Derringer, the principal in this story. The fact that Aram is actually innocent means nothing because to both teacher and principal his past behavior in the classroom makes him guilty. His punishment, however, is not the issue; rather the question in the story is whether the two authority figures will be able to acknowledge that the poem in fact objectifies their secret feelings. The story ends with Miss Daffney's removing herself from the scene, apparently because of her inability to make what is an obvious truth into a sufficiently public feeling that it might form the basis for a positive bond.

One of the complications in the story occurs when Miss Daffney surprises Derringer beating a chair instead of Aram. As she suspects, a small deal between the principal and the boy has been negotiated. Derringer wants Aram to be more “gracious” about Miss Daffney's appearance in “his” poems. Aram, who has not written the poems, sees a chance to strike a personal bargain on the level of the official lie. “If you punish me,” he tells Derringer, “then I won't be gracious” (71). Derringer agrees not to punish him, but so that no one gets suspicious, he gets Aram to howl while he straps the chair. Miss Daffney, bursting in on this private scene, regards Derringer's action as a falsification of his school role (and perhaps as a personal betrayal of her as well). In this instance, however, as she might have figured out, turning the social ritual into a more personal relationship is not a bad idea, for it also opens the possibility for the surfacing of some feelings of affection in the sorting out of what is going on.

As is the case in several other stories, the movement around and about the official social situation creates the playfulness of a game situation. The advantage of turning a social situation into a kind of game is that all parties can see that the official rules and outcomes are not the absolutely confirming measurements they can seem. Characters involved are more apt to appreciate the ingenuity, the active intention, and the persistence of the other person. They are inevitably moved to an attempt at understanding. The great danger is the tendency of the ego to draw the official world into its private domain, as is the case with Uncle Khosrove's attitude toward the games. At one time Aram, encouraged by Lionel Strongfort's advertisements, imagines himself becoming the most powerful man in his neighborhood. Not until he has alarmed his relatives, irritated his neighbors, provoked advice from his Uncle Gyko and stories from his grandmother, and lost the key race to the other boys does he begin to understand that the dream in this case cannot be more. Sometimes the greater strength of external reality is simply in the fact that, while it cannot be exceeded, it can be naturally and democratically shared.

In this story Uncle Gyko is an adult mirror of Aram's ego dreams. Believing that the secret of greatness is “the releasing within one's self of those mysterious vital forces which are in all men” (54), Gyko deludes himself that he is getting wisdom from God. In fact, as Aram informs us, he gets all his ideas from “the theosophy-philosophy-astrology-and-miscellaneous shelf at the Public Library” (57). His concluding advice for Aram is the great secret of the private world—but also, as Aram eventually sees, its supreme delusion: “We are a great family. We can do anything” (62). In this story, and throughout the book, Saroyan's fascination with the desire to achieve is tempered by his witty awareness of the terms the world dictates to its social inhabitants.

Heinrich Straumann has remarked that a prominent and ultimately unfortunate strain in Saroyan's work is a tendency to try to escape from reality (200). It is perhaps the most formidable kind of negative criticism of Saroyan since it implies that his weakest work is his most characteristic. The argument of this paper is that Saroyan is essentially a modernist in that he regards his fictional reality as multifaceted and that his awareness of the claims of the ethnic community pushed him in this direction. His aim in My Name Is Aram is to show how his main character, possessed both of a heritage of values and an active imagination, senses himself moving psychologically between an old order and a new possibility. Much of the maneuvering is done through conversation, a crucial activity which keeps the characters alive to their environment as a community and invaluable to one another as individuals. And it is further enriched by humor, that detached awareness of the individual that both sets of ethos, ethnic and mainstream, are, as cultures, inherently peculiar.

Even though Saroyan has said that the characters are based on his own memories, their dialogue seems less remembered talk than improvisation, the sketching out in the writing process of an increasing communal awareness and an increasing communal crisis. The book seems based primarily on Saroyan's recollections of people's infinite capacities for manipulating their conventions. In it he creates, through a rhythmically comic interchange of internal values and social perspectives, a version of how culture might work. He ultimately suggests, through the narratives' postponing and suspending of judgements on people, that some measurement systems are valuable only when they function intermittently.

Notes

1. William Saroyan, My Name Is Saroyan: A Collection ed. James H. Tashjian (New York: Harcourt, 1983) 53.

2. Howard R. Floan, William Saroyan (New York: Twayne, 1966) 83; Heinrich Straumann, American Literature in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965) 200-02; David Sadkin, “William Saroyan,” Critical Survey of Short Fiction, ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs: Salem P, 1981) 2190.

3. William Saroyan, William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983) 65.

4. William Saroyan, My Name Is Aram, Rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1966) 11.

5. This tendency to handle controversy in an idiosyncratic fashion may have been a part of Saroyan's own temperament. Years later in Chance Meetings he tells a reader that “to this day I am very easily willing to keep silent and to walk around what looks like totally meaningless, useless, ridiculous trouble. Don't hate—ignore. Don't kill—live and let live.” Chance Meetings (New York: Norton, 1978) 86.