Perverse Theaters and Refracted Histories: Violence and (Anti)realism in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

• Authors: Giacomo Traina

Abstracts

EN

This paper explores the way in which Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-prize-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015) reframes history by outlining unseen continuities, reimagining the war in Vietnam as a Petri dish for America’s Forever War, as if yesterday’s wars and today’s were one the mirror of the other. The Sympathizer is not about war as much as about war narratives and the power rationales that allow for their unequal dissemination. It tackles the well-rooted idea of the Second Indochina War as a war that defies representation. In this instance, however, aesthetic (un)representability of war is not intended as a philosophical matter as much as a political issue. The question is not “Is the war in Vietnam representable?” as much as “Whose representation of the war in Vietnam gets passed down?” In other words, the issue at hand is not representability but representations. All the cultural artifacts addressing the war’s memory, in Nguyen’s view, are fabrications that convey partial perspectives. A narrative about narratives, The Sympathizer is informed by a logic according to which the only way to expose this state of things is to put together a fiction at once realist and antirealist that with its own existence single-handedly redefines collective memory as “an arena of competing narratives, an uneven field dominated by the memory machines of Hollywood” (Chattarji). By bending the facts, Nguyen brings into question the power circumstances that make misrepresentation possible. 

Keywords

EN

Viet Thanh Nguyen; The Sympathizer; Vietnamese American Literature; Vietnam War

• Publisher: University of Silesia Press
• Journal: Review of International American Studies
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 141-158

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Giacomo Traina

• The "Sapienza" University of Rome

• https://orcid.org/000000032104323X

References

• Aguilar-San Juan, Karin. Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
• August, Timothy K. The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America. Temple University Press, 2021.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981.
• Britto, Karl Ashoka. “The Stranger’s Voice.” Think in Public: A Public Books Reader, edited by Sharon Marcus and Caitlin Zaloom, Columbia University Press, 2019, pp. 371–380.
• Chattarji, Subarno. The Distant Shores of Freedom: Vietnamese American Memoirs and Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2019.
• Chihaya, Sarah. “Slips and Slides.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 2, 2018, pp. 364–370.
• Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. “Vietnam, the Movie: Part Deux.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 2, 2018, pp. 371–377.
• Goscha, Christopher. Vietnam: A New History. Basic Books, 2016.
• Gradisek, Amanda R. “Refocusing on Women and the Obscene in Viet Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.” War, Literature & the Arts, vol. 32, 2020.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso Books, 1991.
• Liu, Yu-yen. “Gesturing beyond the frames: post-apocalyptic sentiments in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, 2019, pp. 541–551.
• McCoy, Alfred. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Henry Holt and Company, 2006.
• Nguyen, Canh Van. Vietnam Under Communism, 1975–1982. Hoover Institution Stanford University Press, 1983.
• Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.
• Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Harvard University Press, 2016.
• Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Interviewed by Richard Wolinsky. Radio Wolinsky. 94.1 KPFA, Berkeley. June 21, 2016. Radio.
• Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Refugees. Grove Atlantic, 2017.
• Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Personal interview. 10 March 2022.
• Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Personal interview. 23 April 2023.
• Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past. Columbia University Press, 1996.
• Pribbenow, Merle. “Re: A question regarding Bui Tin, Vietnamese reeducation camps, and CIA methods of interrogation.” Received by Giacomo Traina, 31 March 2023.
• Stefan, Hayley C. “Tortured Images in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and the War on Terror.” College Literature, vol. 48, no. 2, Spring 2021, pp. 209–232.
• Tomasulo, Frank P. “The Politics of Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as Prowar and Antiwar Film.” In From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 145–158.
• Tran, Ben. “The Literary Dubbing of Confession.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 2, March 2018, pp. 413–419.
• Tran, Quan Tue. “Remembering War and Migration: Mapping the Contours of Diasporic Vietnamese Memoryscapes.” In Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory, edited by Linda Ho Peché, Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, and Tuong Vu, Temple University Press, 2023, pp. 240–257.
• Valentine, Douglas. The Phoenix Program. William Morrow & Co., 1990.
• Vo, Nghia M. The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam. McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2004.
• Vo, Nghia M. “Re: A question regarding reeducation camps.” Received by Giacomo Traina, 14 November 2022.
• Xiang, Sunny. “The Ethnic Author Represents the Body Count.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 2, 2018, pp. 420–427.

Identifiers

DOI

10.31261/rias.15649

Biblioteka Nauki

35193838