Vanderbilt University
Today, I will discuss the modernization of literature by focusing on the topic of youth in Vietnam’s modern literature. More specifically, three axes determine the coordinates of this paper: 1) youth as a symbol for modernity’s mobility and instability, 2) gender, particularly the representation of women, and 3) fictionality. I want to argue that the significance of youth in modern Vietnamese novels must be understood through gender and fictionality. This paper is framed by the recent discourses that pluralize the study of modernity through non-European, alternative sites (“alternative modernities”), colonial modernity, and global literary studies. [The primary textual example for this paper will be Hoàng Đình Phụng’s 1924 Nghĩa trọng tao khang.]
The literary manifestation of youth’s symbolization of modern society is none other than the Bildungsroman. In this novelistic genre, a young protagonist comes of age, navigating modern [urban] society’s demands and uncertainties. Initially employed to distinguish German novels of introspection from French and English genres of social realism, the Bildungsroman has been studied by prominent critics like Wilhelm Dilthey and Mikhail Bakhtin. The application of the term Bildungsroman has moved well beyond the boundaries of Germany. More recently, Franco Moretti has reassessed the significance of the Bildungsroman within Western Europe during the nineteenth century. Moretti astutely uses the Bildungsroman as an entrée into the question of modernity’s development. In The Way of the World, Moretti explains the Bildungsroman as modernity’s symbolic form in the following manner:
Modernity was a bewitching and risky process full of ‘great expectations’ and ‘lost illusions.’ Modernity as—in Marx’s words—a ‘permanent revolution’ that perceives the experience piled up in tradition as a useless dead-weight.
In this first respect youth is ‘chosen’ as the new epoch’s ‘specific material sign,’ and it is chosen over the multitude of other possible signs, because of its ability to accentuate modernity’s dynamism and instability. Youth is, so to speak, modernity’s ‘essence,’ the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than the past. (7, original emphases)
For Moretti, the interrelationship between the novel and modernity is a mirroring effect between literary form and history. As the material sign of modernity, both youth and the novel signal open-endedness and formlessness, the compromise between interior subjectivity and external social forces [Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel], and meaning derived from unresolved and varying plot developments.
Moretti, however, only sees the significance of youth and the Bildungsroman within the contexts of Europe and, temporally speaking, before World War I (1914)—despite his later work to theorize and understand, boldly and contentiously, the novel at a global scale. Moretti not only acknowledges, but justifies why he fails to consider “others—women, workers, African Americans” in his conceptualization of the Bildungsroman. At first Moretti specifies his temporal framework: from the French Revolution to the triumph of capitalism” (which he ends prematurely at WWI). He then continues:
a deeper reason for those exclusions lie in the very elements that characterize the Bildungsroman as a form: wide cultural formation, professional mobility, full social freedom—for a long time, the western European middle-class man held a virtual monopoly on these […]
[…] The mistake of my book, then, is not that of having ‘denied’ the Bildungsroman to this or that human group […]; it consists rather in never fully explaining why this form was so deeply entwined with one social class, one region of the world, one sex. (ix-x)
These assumptions that exclusively focus on and thus privilege the “west European middle-class man” are problematic. If we follow Moretti’s methodology (and one that I think is quite valuable) of understanding literary form in conjunction with history, then we must understand symbolic forms of youth and the novel in conjunction with modernity. It has been all too clear that modernity has reached the far corners of the world well beyond Europe and much later than World War I, and that Asian modernities—from Vietnam and China to Japan—have shaped and been shaped by literary form. This is, after all, precisely the reason for our gathering at this conference. If modernity has irrevocably affected Asia, then why are youth and the genre of the novel not the symbolic forms of east Asian modernities? The significance of youth, I want to argue, is not circumscribed to the European man, but rather hinges on the convergence of fictionality and the representation of women.
But before I move on to this paper’s second axis of gender, I want to clarify that I am not trying to find the Bildungsroman in modernizing Asia. Such impositions of literary or scholarly categories, I believe, are unproductive. What I want to do is to extrapolate the Bildungsroman’s primary elements: the significance of youth, the emergence of both man and society in spatial and temporal verisimilitude [Bakhtin: “man growing in national-historical time”], and the “yearning for the shared experiences of a national community” [Morgenstern]. These elements—youth, verisimilitude, and national audience/community—are fundamental to Vietnam’s quốc ngữ literature during the 1920s and the 1930s.
In my initial proposal for this paper, I had intended to make this case through a comparison between two important novels from the 1920s: Nguyễn Trọng Thuật’s Quả dưa đỏ and Hoàng Ngọc Phách’s Tố Tâm. But today, I want to emphasize the fictional representation of femininity—one of the most politically significant and problematic aspects of modern Vietnamese literature. This relationship between fictionality and women will become clearer in my discussion of Hoàng Đình Phụng’s 1924 Nghĩa trọng tao khang.
Nghĩa trọng tao khang tells the story of Ngọc and his wife, mợ Ngọc. They are a young married coupled sharing a comfortable life with each other. The novel opens up with Hoàng-Vân, a friend who’s between job assignments, staying with the married couple. When Ngọc leaves the house to pick up his wife from a train station, Hoàng-Vân is approached by Ngọc’s flirtatious sister, Nga. The young female antagonist immediately abandons her sewing and asks to borrow his newspaper. Through the pretense of reading, she finds an occasion to strike up a conversation with the man she desires. Refusing her advances through vituperation, he criticizes her inability, despite a privileged education, to understand and practice proper behavior. More specifically, he cites her reading of western novels as the primary factor that rendered her schooling inefficacious (5). Irate and embarassed, the sister plots for revenge. She spins [bịa] a tale for Ngọc, accusing Hoàng-Vân and mợ Ngọc of having an affair with each other. Ngọc then throws out his wife and friend from his home, only to learn later that the affair was a fabrication. Mợ Ngọc is able to leave her husband’s home and successfully runs a business. Once mợ Ngọc leaves her husband, he falls into physical and financial despair, having to borrow money from a “tây đen.” However, mợ Ngọc uses her wealth to arrange a second marriage for Ngọc, who manages to make up with his estranged friend Hòang Vân. Nga gets married, but becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Both her in-laws and Ngọc disown her. This work is heavy handed with its moral judgments and poetic justice. The ending reestablishes and balances the work’s cosmology of right and wrong as the victims of Nga’s vengeful plot continue their lives merrily.
Nghĩa trọng tao khang is a gendered story, whereby the women are the agents, and the men are passive participants in a modernizing world. Besides such details as the story’s women riding trains or reading newspapers and novels, it is their untraditional desires and commercial dealings that set the plot in motion. I want to argue that Nghĩa trọng tao khang, particularly through Nga’s deceptive lies and mợ Ngọc’s business pursuits, portend the rise of fictionality [bịa đặt] in modern Vietnamese literature.
The main element that works against the novel’s heavy-handed moral conservatism is Nga’s fictional, yet effective storytelling. Her deceptive actions stem from a desire that signals, according to Ngọc, perverse modern times: “thời buổi nhân tâm đảo ngược này” (12). Nga’s sexual desires and acts, further stigmatized by her illegitimate pregnancy, violate the boundaries of the conventional family. My intention here is not to morally judge this character. Rather, I want to emphasize her creation of a fictional story that is believable. Once she convinces Ngọc of the affair between mợ Ngọc and Vân, jealousy sets in as Ngọc distances himself from everyone in the family:
Mợ Ngọc lại nghi chồng có ngoại tình với ai, nhiều khi ngồi một mình khóc. Cậu Vân thì ngờ bạn mải vui chỗ khác, lắm lúc than thân. Ba người không ngờ vì cái lưỡi gươm giáo của cô Nga, mới sinh ra lôi thôi làm vậy. (13)
Nga’s story breeds a triangulation of jealousy. Convinced of the fictional scenarios’ plausibility, each character is apprehensive of losing another character’s affection. [As a matter of fact, the theme of jealousy is consistent throughout the text, particularly through the character of Ngọc, who is described as overly jealous.]
Besides Nga’s vengeful fictionality that drives Nghĩa trọng tao khang, there is mợ Ngọc’s business acumen. Even while married, she had been lending money: “quanh năm ngày tháng chỉ giữ cái nghề cho vay, cầm hàng cầm hộ” (11). These profits provided the seed money for her commercial ventures, once she was forced from her home. Mợ Ngọc’s success allowed her to arrange for her husband’s second marriage. One could argue that her altruistic actions reaffirm a troubling, polygamous arrangement. However, her decisions are unconventional. She establishes her business in an alternative social sphere of single women—a “đàn-bà đứng tuổi, góa chồng” [24] and a forlorn stepdaughter roaming the streets. This is a social world devoid of men. Moreover, mợ Ngọc does not compromise her independence, refusing to return to her heteronormative relationship. She never forgives her husband for his unfounded accusations: “Chả nhẽ chồng đã đuổi lại mò về, mà oan mình chưa tỏ thì về làm gì?” (29).
On the one hand, Nga’s youthful desires and boldness disrupt any moral equilibrium, yet her convincing storytelling sets the narrative in motion. On the other hand, Ngọc’s spurned wife operates in a female business network that allows her to reestablish the story’s moral balance. These unconventional women spur on the story and bring it to a conclusion. I will even go so far to as to say that they are modern women—modern in the sense that they both act upon a kind of cognitive of provisionality, a competence that, as we will see shortly, is interrelated to reading fiction [specifically “tiểu thuyết”]. Nga’s fictional storytelling and all the subsequent jealousy, as well as mợ Ngọc’s money lending, are premised upon what is absent or insubstantial.
In his 1921 Khảo về tiểu thuyết, Phạm Quỳnh identified fictionality [bịa đặt] as the signature element of the novelistic genre—in both the East and the West. A text is a novel as long as its primary function is not formal didacticism, intellectual pontification, or lyrical composition. This explains the Chinese etymology of the Vietnamese term tiểu thuyết [novel]. Phạm Quỳnh explains, “Cứ nghĩa hai chữ ‘tiểu thuyết’ trong sách tàu thời lại rộng lắm nữa: phàm sách gì không phải là ‘chính thư’ (nghĩa là sách như kinh, truyện, sử, vân-vân), đều là tiểu thuyết cả” (8). According to Phạm Quỳnh, if the etymology of tiểu thuyết tells us anything, it is that “Tiểu thuyết đã là một truyện bịa đặt” (11). The term tiểu thuyết was an umbrella term for prosaic, fictional texts.
It is the imagined, fable-like fictionality that distinguishes the novelistic genre from other narrative modes. While Phạm Quỳnh acknowledges the significance of the realist qualities in Western novels, he insists that verisimilitude should work in unison with the novel’s fictional nature: “Kết-cấu khéo là bịa-đặt ra một truyện huyền mà vẫn căn-cứ ở sự thực, khiến cho người đọc vẫn biết rằng truyện không thực mà không thể không tin được” (13). The negation of realism (“không thực”) and the double negation (“không thể không tin”) capture the paradox of fiction: it is a discursive mode that is not wholly credulous or incredulous, yet it stands as believable and plausible.
Recently, Catherine Gallagher has elaborated on the rise of fictionality, emphasizing its historical relationship with the modern novel. In an interesting way, her articulation of fictionality expands on Phạm Quỳnh’s ideas, and even though she discusses fictionality in the context of British literature, her concepts are relevant to Vietnamese literature, in ways that Phạm Quỳnh did not anticipate. She explores the implications and historical significance of reading a narrative that affirms nothing, but is believable. Her work compliments Phạm Quỳnh’s observations on the novel’s fictionality: “Novels seek to suspend the reader’s disbelief, as an element is suspended in a solution that it thoroughly permeates. Disbelief is thus the condition of fictionality, prompting judgments, not about the story’s reality, but about its believability, its plausibility” (346). It is the novel’s quality of deception, not its “reality,” that matters [Nga]. Novelistic works are credible stories that operate on fictionality, not on the effects of realism. The genre’s fictionality, rather than its historical accuracy or literary mimesis, encourages the reader to believe in its likelihood so as to suspend his or her disbelief.
Unlike Phạm Quỳnh, Gallagher expands on the notion of fictionality and convincingly makes the connection between fictionality and modern subjectivity. The modern novel’s fictionality incites the reader to consider a story’s probability and plausibility—what Gallagher calls “suppositional speculation.” She writes,
Novels promoted a disposition of ironic credulity enabled by optimistic incredulity; one is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend through credit to buy into the game. Such flexible mental states were the sine qua non of modern subjectivity. . . . Indeed almost all of the developments we associate with modernity—from greater religious toleration to scientific discovery—required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit. (346)
The act of novel reading allows modern subjects to anticipate the likelihood or to weigh the probability of a hypothetical event, without making an irrevocable commitment to the speculation. As Gallagher notes, this applies to insurers, creditors, and consumers as they participated in the capitalist economy’s systems of credit and currency. Gallagher claims that fictionality leads to affective speculation in which readers of fiction can emotionally or sentimentally identify with others. [This is apparent in Nghĩa trọng tao khang’s theme of jealousy.] Gallagher’s observations dovetail with the actions of the two young women in Nghĩa trọng tao khang—as a narrator of fictional stories and business woman who offers credit.
Nghĩa trọng tao khang is not an exemplary modern literary text. [It still has a plot that comes full circle, and its language is stilted. And the author’s disposition is quite traditional.] However, its female characters anticipate the relationship between youth and fictionality in the novelistic genre—as seen ubiquitously in Vietnam’s novels during the 1930s. As a signifier of modernity’s open-endedness, instability and mobility, the novelistic representation of youth is not merely a symbol of modernity [as Moretti suggested], but rather promoted what was plausible in the future for a society or national community.
It is precisely modern literature’s fictionality—not realism’s referentiality of a temporal and geographical space called Vietnam—that makes possible Vietnamese nationalism, be it Romanticism or Realism. As an alternative to the principles of realism [hiện thực, xã hội, tả chân, tả thực], fictionality illuminates the stakes of literature and reading during the modern period—as represented through women.
__________________
i Pham Quynh, Khảo về tiểu thuyết (Hà Nội).
ii Pham Quynh 11.
iii Later in the text, Pham Quynh observes some of the differences in the western and eastern novel. On the one hand, the premodern novelistic style of the Chinese and Vietnamese traditions is premised upon chep sư [recording].
This compositional style reflects the convention of chronicling the entire progression of a narrative. The effect is a comprehensive narrative that has no gaps or omissions in the narrative, and a monotonous pace. On the other hand,
the western style employs the narrative style of tư sư [reporting]. The “reporting” novelist is not beholden to the conventions of recording everything, but rather draws a constellation of events from various points. A western novelist can select the elements of a story and vary the pace, so as to achieve a more appealing way of crafting a narrative. See Pham Quynh 28-9.
iv See Pham Quynh 13.
v Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 346.
vi Catherine Gallagher 346.
vii Nguyễn Công Hoan, Đời viết văn cua tôi (Hà Nội: NXB Hội nhà văn, 1994) 123-5.