Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader by Alexandra Kurmann (review)

Intertextuality is particularly integral to Linda Lê's œuvre, and more studies exploring in detail the multidirectional web of influences operating in Lê's writing are long overdue. Alexandra Kurmann's contribution focuses closely on what she describes as the 'conspicuous discursive influence' (p. 2) or 'dialogism' (p. 3) in the intertextual relationship between Linda Lê, a Paris-based contemporary Vietnamese author writing in French, and Austrian post-war writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Kurmann's research reveals this sororal literary bond to date from as early as 1989, Lê's intertextual commitment to Bachmann spanning sixteen years in both her fiction and non-fiction. This revision of the timing of Bachmann's influence to a point when Lê famously rejected her first three texts, and experienced a literary rebirth, underpins Kurmann's argument for a Bachmann-inspired feminist ethics in Lê's writing since 1989, focalized around the figure of Antigone: 'an Antigonean rhetoric in Lê's œuvre is nourished by her readings of Bachmann's feminist fiction' (p. 2). Lê is seen as feeding her own self-creation project through Bachmann's Antigonean figures, thereby inscribing herself symbolically into Bachmann's literary community of exilic writers. The influence, however, is not unidirectional, and Kurmann posits that the purpose of Lê's essay, '"J'écris sur la nature du feu": Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, Requiem pour Fanny Goldman, Franza' (Critique, 47 (1991), 846–54), is to inhabit the same textual space as her predecessor: 'Indeed this transitional space of the text is where Lê [. . . and Bachmann [. . .] may for a short time remain in close contact with one another' (p. 60). Kurmann thus reveals how a web of women speak to each other through the text, or in the literary space: Antigone; Bachmann; Bachmann's self-destructive female protagonists; Lê; Lê's own self-destructive female protagonists; and the many women readers of these writers' texts. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theories of intertextuality, Kurmann argues for the reciprocal effect of this long-standing relationship. She uses Lê's critical essays on Bachmann in order to reread Bachmann's fiction, in particular her novel Malina (1971), and also to argue that Lê rereads (or perhaps rewrites) the Antigonean gesture of suicide to impute agency into this voluntary death that allows the woman to whisper truths from beyond the grave: 'the ancient voice of a universal female figure' (p. 69). The voice, as the bond, is one of sorority and resistance, which makes it a shame that Kurmann relies at all on Harold Bloom, given his focus on the Oedipal, as she herself points out, and her use of Kristeva is more convincing. For scholars drawn by the title's focus on Lê's work, there may be more (and less) than they bargained for, as the reading of Malina overshadows the analysis of Lê's fiction, and it is a pity to have foreclosed the parameters of the study at 2005, when texts such as In Memoriam (2007) and Cronos (2010) contain undeniable echoes of both Bachmann's and Antigone's voices. Nonetheless, well researched, intelligent, and at times elegant, this book enriches our understanding of these important writers, and takes Lê studies beyond familiar themes of exile, loss, and postcolonialism to a timely recognition of her implicit feminist ethics.