Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature by Leslie Barnes (review)

Though essentially a study of three individual authors (André Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Linda Lê), Leslie Barnes’s book does address the broad subject indicated by her title since she situates these authors within their colonial and postcolonial contexts. Barnes begins with a discussion of the factors that have contributed to making the French canon, the status of the term ‘francophone’, and some of the debates surrounding recent attempts to replace it with ‘littérature-monde’. This is not original, but it is clearly written, and helps situate Malraux and Duras within the canon but on its margins, as well as giving the context for Lê’s rejection of the term ‘francophone’. Barnes then sets out to do what she does best, which is the careful analysis of texts in relation to specific colonial contexts. Chapters on Malraux’s La Tentation de l’Occident (Paris: Grasset, 1926) and his better-known Asian trilogy show his debt to writers of the French exotic and colonial traditions. Barnes makes a strong case that we need to acknowledge this colonial context in order to understand Malraux’s work as step from the exotic to the existential novel. Malraux shows both Asian and European cultures seeking meaning outside themselves in response to a new conception of the absurd, but his ‘metaphysical adventurer’ heroes must also be understood in the context of the imperialist ideology of the 1920s and 1930s. We then move to the central chapter of the book, which situates Duras’s work in relation to her childhood in colonial Vietnam. Building on important earlier work on Duras from a postcolonial perspective by Jane Bradley Winston (Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France (New York: Palgrave, 2001)), and on her poetics of métissage by Catherine Bouthors-Paillart (Duras la métisse: métissage fantasmatique et linguistique dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Duras (Geneva: Droz, 2002)), the chapter makes an impressive case for reading Duras’s mature style as influenced by the linguistic impact of Vietnamese, the language of her early years. We are thus encouraged to rethink the syntactical patterns by which her experimental style diverges from standard French literary usage, such as the use of the present tense (Vietnamese has no tenses); reduplication of words; sentences without hierarchy of logical co-ordination or conjunctions; the separation of the subject and verb, which undermines the authority of the subject; and naming people according to their social status or role in the family rather than as individuals (for example, ‘le frère aîné’). Finally, two chapters are devoted to Linda Lê: one to her fiction and one to her critical essays. These chapters, rather than building on the context of the writing as with Malraux and Duras, approach Lê’s dark, challenging work via theory, notably Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity and Derrida’s aesthetics of the trace and hauntology. Barnes is perhaps less confident in dealing with Lê. Nevertheless, the final chapter suggestively sees Lê as a writer shaped by dislocation, who identifies with the figure of Caliban as both empowered and enslaved by borrowed language, and whose project of a littérature déplacée that finds its identity in illegitimacy is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ (p. 226).