La Littérature vietnamienne francophone (1913–1986) by Giang-Huong Nguyen (review)

This clear and meticulous overview of Vietnamese literature in French between 1913 and 1986 mobilizes Giang-Huong Nguyen's exceptional bilingual and bicultural knowledge to build on earlier studies in the area, notably by Jack Yeager and Natalie Nguyen. Chargée de collections for the language and literature of South-East Asia at the BnF, Giang-Huong Nguyen is also an active researcher on Vietnamese francophone literature and is contributing to the translation of Proust into Vietnamese. In the study under review here, she identifies a corpus of twenty-five francophone Vietnamese novels published between 1913 and 1986 and selects twelve of them for special focus. Her study begins with a brief overview of the literary traditions of Vietnam before the beginning of the French colonial conquest in 1858, which included a flourishing oral tradition as well as elite writing in Chinese characters (hán) and popular literature in Vietnamese characters (nôm). The diffusion of the French language under the colonial regime took place alongside these two written traditions as well as a third: Vietnamese written in a Romanized alphabet, quốc ngũ, invented by missionaries in the seventeenth century. The use of the missionary alphabet rather than Chinese characters was encouraged by the French administration, largely because of a perceived link between traditional forms of writing and the symbolic power of the monarchy. Nguyen's study reveals the evolving bilingual situation of the Vietnamese elite both at home and studying in France, with geographical and thematic focuses on Hanoi, Saigon, the return to the home village, and Paris. She situates the emergence of a fragile Vietnamese francophone literature firmly in the context of the emerging modern literary culture in Vietnamese written in quốc ngũ, with novels in prose (rather than verse) appearing from 1887. In the early twentieth century both these literatures were influenced by translations from French literature, particularly Romantic poetry. This early period saw novels focus on love stories and the affirmation of individual identity in conflict with tradition. Later, with the weakening and then end of French colonization, francophone Vietnamese authors focused increasingly on the problems of the individual's bicultural identity. These novels explore the psychological impossibility of mixed unions, although one notable example (Bà-dầm by Truong Đính Tri and Albert de Teneuille (1930)) is paradoxically itself the product of a successful bicultural collaboration between two authors. The meeting of Asian and Western cultures is also the subject of the writings of Ph m Văn K, an author of particular interest for Nguyen's research. Drawing on Ruth Amossy and Anne Herschberg Pierrot's work, she also points out that stereotypes work both ways: the Orientalist stereotype of the congaï (literally 'young girl', but in the colonial era a young Vietnamese woman who was sexually available to the colonizers) has an unequal pairing in the Occidentalist stereotype of the bà-dầm (from the French 'madame': the Frenchwoman in the colonies, seen as sophisticated and elegant, though also exposing her body in ways that shock traditional Confucian culture).