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

Leslie Barnes’ Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature offers an important and innovative perspective on the role of Vietnamese language and culture in metropolitan French literary production. Rather than consider the representation of the French colonization of Indochina in French literature (and cinema), as in Panivong Norindr’s excellent work Phantasmatic Indochina (1997), Barnes looks at how authors’ engagement with Indochina and Vietnam, through travel or place of birth and residence, shapes “modern French literature.” Calling attention to the “colonial conditions” out of which the “literary projects” of certain canonical French writers emerged, Barnes makes her compelling case through rigorous analysis of literary works by Malraux, who traveled to Indochina; Duras, an “ethnically French” writer who was born and raised in Indochina, where she long lived; and “ethnically Vietnamese” author Linda Lê, the sole Asian writer among the three, who has lived in France since she was fourteen.

Bridging the divide between “francophone” and “French” literature, the book begins with a chapter on the French tradition of literary exoticism and Malraux’s experiences in colonial Indochina in his exotic, epistolary essay novel, La tentation de l’Occident. The strength of Barnes’s close analysis appears in her treatment of the ambiguous description of a Westerner arriving on “foreign shores” in boats “sans ailes et sans yeux” (49). Chapter 2 moves on to Malraux’s Asian trilogy (Les conquérants [1928], La voie royale [1930], and La condition humaine [1933]), examining them in relation to other “colonial-exotic novels” situated in Indochina in the 1920s and 1930s. Just as chapter 3, devoted to Duras, goes beyond the typical view of her writing as nouveau roman, chapter 2 not only considers Malraux’s trilogy in terms of existentialism but also shifts focus to the trilogy’s colonial-exoticism. Chapter 3 offers a fresh and compelling interpretation of both Duras and her work as métisse. Although Duras’s skin color crucially distinguishes her from “ethnic Vietnamese,” her upbringing and native Vietnamese language, along with her family’s marginalization from white colonial society due to their poverty, renders her métisse. After examining the political métissage of Un barrage contre le Pacifique, Barnes follows what she identifies as a shift to poetic métissage in L’Eden cinéma, L’amant and L’amant de la Chine du Nord. Barnes’s insightful linguistic analysis of the presence of Vietnamese language, and especially syntax, in Duras’s French in these works is astute and rigorous, supporting her claim about Durassian métissage with brio.

Barnes’s eloquent and important book concludes on a strong note with Part 3, devoted to Lê’s work which, given her Vietnamese origins, is “clearly conditioned by French colonialism in Southeast Asia,” although she “almost steadfastly refuses to write about Vietnam” (165). In chapter 4, which reflects the tendency to read Lê’s work “within the space of the hyphen” from the perspectives of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, Barnes uses Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity to analyze Lê’s traumatic texts. Through insightful close analysis, Barnes brings out Lê’s penchant for intertextuality, be it the reference to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Porcile (Pigsty) in the epigraph to “Vinh L.” or the discussion of Japanese author Kobo Abe’s Mort anonyme at the outset of her non-fictional work Tu écriras sur le bonheur. In this fifth and last chapter, “Toward a ‘Littérature déplacée’: The Aesthetics of Exile in Lê’s Nonfiction,” Barnes argues that Lê’s proclivity to reference other work reflects that intertextuality is “the ideal art of the double,” entailing repetition and displacement (226).

Ultimately, Lê, like Malraux and Duras, writes from in between: Indochina and France, the French and the francophone. Barnes’s book succeeds in demonstrating the importance of rethinking colonialism as a condition of metropolitan French literary production. Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature also provokes us to consider the impact of the colonial...