The politics of Vietnamese authorship

The term tác giả, most usually rendered into English as “author,” is directly borrowed from the Chinese term zuojia. “Tác giả” (作 者) literally means “one who writes,” while traditionally tác refers to writing but also more broadly to making, doing, or working—to a creator. While the idea of a creator or framer implied by the term zuo/tắc may be ancient, zuojia is a neologism, likely coined in the late 19th or early 20th century and possibly introduced first into Chinese and Vietnamese. ¹

The fact that zuojia is of recent coinage has led authors commenting on both Chinese and South East Asian literature to conclude that the debates over authorship which developed into crucial conversations in European and American literary criticism from the 1970s onwards had a somewhat lesser impact in an Asian context. Since the conception of the author as such, rather than as a collective and relational creative process, is a relatively recent introduction in much of East Asian literature, one might argue that these debates are of less importance. ²

If that is the case, even the idea of the author in Vietnamese literature might lead to legitimate questions about devoting an entire volume to authorship. Yet the recent provenance of the idea of an individual author, and the various formulations of what it might mean to be an “author” in premodern Vietnam, are also what make the concept so contested in Vietnamese literature and history. In premodern times, texts were often altered, commented on, and added to over time, so that what was produced was an agglomeration of texts rather than a single text, and the authors of texts were many different people rather than one. The politics of corporate authorship—authorship by many different people—informed some of Vietnam’s greatest historical epics, and sorting out the meaning of that collective authorship engaged much of the late career of Oliver Wolters. ³ As Allison Truitt and Ben Tran have convincingly argued, the introduction of the personal pronoun “tôi” as a generic, subject-position-neutral personal pronoun profoundly increased the ability of Vietnamese authors to posit autonomous spaces for their protagonists. ⁴

The centrality of questions of the author does not end with literature in Vietnamese. Rather, Francophone Vietnamese authors struggled with questions of identity, and interspersed with those questions was whether it was possible to speak with an authoritative voice from the language of the colonizer. Since the August Revolution in 1945, Vietnamese Marxism has made its mark on authorship as well. State-sponsored socialist realism in art and literature constrained what writers were able to say. In Vietnam, socialist realism was more about the imposition of a romantic sensibility about the party than it was realist, and was more nationalistic than socialist. Its main feature, however, was the imposition of political and party control over literary expression. ⁵ Socialist realism changed the view of authorship in Vietnam both in the sense of who was authorized to speak—for the state, or for the Vietnamese—and in the sense of who was allowed to author works.

The first articles in this issue all struggle to define the contours of Vietnamese authorship through the years and ask questions related to the configuration of authorship and identity. In the first article, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox situates the status of the author in Vietnam in a larger discourse about authorship and provides a historical overview of the questions about authorship. The article traces the transition between various types of authorship and contends that rather than discussing “corporate authorship” or collectivities of premodern authorship, that premodern Vietnamese authors relied on two different techniques. The first, which Gadkar-Wilcox calls “supplanting,” refers to a tendency to provide layers of commentary designed not only to supplement each other but also to push toward new interpretations of old texts to supplant old interpretations. The second technique, which Gadkar-Wilcox calls “vernacularization,” refers to Vietnamese authors trying to create a new voice when translating from chữ Hán into chữ nôm. These authors take on the task of explaining high texts in a lower voice to make them accessible. This is more than simply creating chữ nôm texts to complement chữ Hán classics, although that process is certainly one example of such vernacularization. It also involves a process of asserting authority or authorship over a text through the process of introducing, re-explaining, and recopying a text. Finally, Gadkar-Wilcox offers an analysis of the way in which authorship becomes associated with 20th-century notions of modernity and individuality, in part through the assertion of the first person singular, but also through the use of new linguistic registers in quốc ngữ and in French.

In “The implications of gia truyền,” C Michele Thompson looks at the contested character of this genre of text. Though the term gia truyền could be loosely translated as “family recipe” or even colloquially as “home-style cooking,” in archival collections the term has become a genre of local medical texts that were passed down through a family lineage. As Thompson explains, this genre of text belies generalizations we might make about Vietnamese authorship—including some of the assertions by Gadkar-Wilcox in the previous article—by suggesting that corporate authorship and the use of chữ nôm writing have continued until nearly the present day. Indeed, these gia truyền force us to think about who authors a medical prescription and the contents of it, either in a traditional or a modern sense.

Nor are the questions of multiple or overlapping authorships confined to medical texts. In her article, Nora A Taylor finds many of the same quandaries that Thompson works through in a very different field: that of art exhibitions and their curators. Taylor considers a series of art installations presented at dOCUMENTA (13), an art exhibition in Kassel, Germany in 2012. The questions of authorship posed by this exhibition are profound. Taylor demonstrates that the intention of the curators, for example, in colligating diverse artwork from both Vietnam and Cambodia relating to the First and Second Indochina Wars was to offer a commentary on the artist as anti-Imperial Liberator. Yet this vision, as Taylor effectively shows, runs contrary to the intentions of one of the most important artists on display: Dinh Q Lê. Lê’s work is designed to use an interstitial perspective relating to his own liminal Vietnamese-American/Vietnamese perspective (as a returned Vietnamese-American) to question ideological narratives from both the north and south of Vietnam during the Second Indochina War—indeed, even to question the dichotomy of North and South.

Yet even in Dinh Q Lê’s artworks, Taylor finds a third, and equally fascinating, layer: his installations are themselves pastiches of photographs, works by other, often anonymous, original artists. The intentions of some of these artists, of course, will remain obscure. For others, though, such as the revolutionary artists of the Việt Bắc resistance zone, the authorial intention behind these paintings—in part, to depict the revolutionary artists—becomes decontextualized and divorced from historical context in Dinh Q Lê’s hands, in which the paintings become less a commentary on revolutionary war than a commentary on the art market. Taylor concludes that this triple authorship poses profound questions, both ethical and historical, about the responsibility of the viewer to the artist, of the curator to the artist, and of artists to each other.

The balance of the articles in this issue extends the exploration of aspects of identity in relation to authorship. In her compelling analysis, Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương traces a signal transformation of the plural into the singular, the move from collective to individual through an examination of the attribution of various written texts (and identities) to Hồ Chí Minh. Using the work of Ngô Tự Lập and Brent Hayes Edwards as a springboard, she sees Trần Lực’s 1949 (auto)biography The Ten-Year Sleep (Giấc Ngủ Mười Năm) as the pivotal moment in the collapsing of the collectivity into a single author, characterized by his omnipresence, permanence, constancy, and uniqueness. The cohering of identities around the Hồ Chí Minh nucleus and subsequent attribution of various texts to him effectively suppresses the heterogeneity of multiple authors, creating a homogeneity narrated by the unitary subject who would imagine the end of French colonialism in Indochina and the birth of the Vietnamese nation. In Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương’s words, Hồ Chí Minh thus “sutures” present to future and “cannibalizes” up to 217 identities, through pseudonyms, aliases, and mere appropriation, to create the “birthfather” of the nation.

In the final article, Jack A Yeager examines the question of authorial identities in selected narrative work by Linda Lê, the prolific writer in French with over 20 titles published. A strong metatextual thread runs throughout her work, as she frequently casts writers as primary characters in her novels and short stories, thus providing her opportunities to probe such issues as authorship, originality, and literary theft. Implicitly interrogating the nexus of collective “we” and singular “I,” she often represents the literary borrower and thief through metaphors of cannibalism and vampirism. Yeager sets his analysis against the accusations of plagiarism of several well-known Francophone writers such as Camara Laye and Yambo Ouologuem. In this context he suggests that Lê’s leitmotifs of loss and nostalgia, uncertain origins, a father left behind in Vietnam, and the dilemma of living as an immigrant abroad parallel her exploration of literary genealogies, textual forbears, intertextuality, and deception, and by extension her own identity as a writer born in Vietnam who left for France in her mid-teens. Immigrant identities thus resonate with the varied roles of writers in Lê’s work, reflecting the tensions among concepts of authorship across time, space, and cultures explored in all the pieces in this issue.

Taken as a whole, the articles in this issue demonstrate that the question of authorship should not be reduced to a binary opposition between East and West. Instead, the attitudes of writers and readers of various kinds of Vietnamese literature, broadly defined, to the question of the individuality of the author depends very much on context. Whether the literature is in chữ Hán, chữ Nôm, quốc ngữ, or in French shifts the perspectives of authors toward their work. Perhaps this suggests that the meaning and role of texts are determined to some extent by the cultural constructs of the languages in which they are embedded. Another general theme of these articles is that authorship may be altered to adhere to, or to avoid, the demands of state control over literature. In the case of medicinal texts, a lack of state control was a necessary element of maintaining the genre; in the case of dOCUMENTA (13), having multiple layers of authorship was a means of thwarting state control over an artistic narrative. These articles not only move us beyond the East/West or structuralist/contextualist dichotomy in the formation of authorship, but also show how the particular linguistic and literary forms in Vietnam, such as the different vernacular registers of chữ nôm and quốc ngữ, make Vietnamese art and literature particularly interesting/engaging case studies from which to study the tranformation of the idea of authorship.