Vietnamese politics and literature have always been strongly connected throughout the historical records. In the wartime, literature was influenced in the direction of patriotism and nationalism (Nguyen, 2004), and became a weapon to support the Communist Party. During the partition of North and South Vietnam from 1945-1975, the Communist Party endorsed Northern writers who later devoted their works to political aspects of socialist realism (Vo, 1992). After 1975, writers of postwar literature started questioning the doctrine of Communism and uncovered their confusing reality whilst some denied the past revolutionary experiences (Nguyen, 2004).
Freedom for writers and manipulation of the Communist Party towards literature publishing then became problematic. In 1986, due to the tendency towards widespread democratisation in most socialist countries, the Vietnamese Communist Party finally enacted a Renovation policy. The post-Renovation era witnessed a decline of socialist realism along with the transformation to the market economy, which shifted Vietnamese cultural production to post-socialist aesthetics with the liberation of arts and literature. The Renovation literary movement began in 1986, reached its peak in 1988-1989 and had no official conclusion.
Renovation promised to allow literature and arts a certain space of freedom and limit the right of the machinery of politics to interfere with the machinery of literature (Ha, 2016). Hence, the task of the post-Renovation era was to determine precisely the parameters of this space of freedom for literature and to determine the circumstances in which the government maintains a right to interfere with literature. This article aims to address this controversial literary politics in significant works of two Vietnamese authors during the post-Renovation period and the changed ideology of literary practice. The selected works to be examined include Nguyen Huy Thiep, a Renovation writer with his first short story, The General Retires, and Bao Ninh, an “ex-veteran” writer with his most famous novel, The Sorrow of War. The paper will also explore the issue of state censorship and criticisms towards these two authors under the cultural and moral attributes.
Renovation literature: A voice of individualism
A prominent ideological transformation in post-Renovation literature was the manifestation of individualism, regardless of a variety of topics including peasants and countryside, urban life or memoirs of the war. In “The General Retires”, the protagonist, Thuan, was a General who retired from the military. The story was narrated in the perspective of a son, who was faster immersed in the changes of the market economy than his father. In the past, General Thuan was a leader of his troop, a hero of his country with pride and dignity. The story did not merely compare a shifted doctrine but depict General Thuan as a product of war, an ideological loss. He once asked his son “Now that I’m retired, what shall I do?” (Lockhart, 1992, p. 117). General Thuan entered Vietnam’s military when he was twelve, similar to any other youths under the French colony. His patriotism was not fully embodied, instead, the motive was from a materialistic thought: the military was where they could have food, clothes, and money to send back home. This reality was not represented in most works during wartime. Another mindset also deep-seated into General Thuan was of veterans who believed fighting against enemies as the only purpose of living. However, his admirable achievement became useless and ironic in peacetime, as his son perceived: “Now that he has retired and he is still a general. Father is a commander; if he acts like an ordinary soldier, everything will be thrown into disorder” (Lockhart, 1992, p. 118).
In the end, he returned to the military after a call for the border conflict. What drove General Thuan back to the fight, where he was later killed in action, was his disillusionment with the empty ideals he was pursuing in his entire military career, as well as his dissatisfaction with the moral condition of his family and his people: his son was a cuckold; his daughter-in-law was a ruthless businesswoman who raised her German shepherds on aborted fetuses she brought home from her maternity clinic (Bac et al, 2016). “Vile! I don’t need wealth that’s made of this!”, (Lockhart, 1992, p. 122), General Thuan’s anger revealed his delusional breakdown of the postwar chaos. There was no longer a system of budget subsidies by the government as in his era, it was then a society challenged by modernization, materialism and poverty. At his nephew’s wedding, General Thuan was shocked by the guests’ behaviour: they were cheap and rude and had eyes only for money. Among others at this wedding were the retired General, some ox-cart coolies, a Deputy Head of a Government Department, village yokes, and the bride, a pretty kindergarten teacher from a well-educated family but was being married to a ruffian as his nephew. This family, despite claiming their extremely tight budget, provided three cars for the wedding party and so much food which was left uneaten. Yet the supply of filter cigarettes soon ran out, and General Thuan messed up his speech in the confusion of the crowd. All these people obviously did not belong to a low class but the way they presented produced a different definition of the social setting they were in. This is again another breakdown of social hierarchy that existed in the previous era. No previous writers had so effectively broken down the old political-social thought and this had never been revealed so starkly to the reading public before. Thiep’s viewing Vietnamese society, together with his way of writing is egalitarian and “democratic” (Thu, 1994).
“The Sorrow of War” is another individual voice but speaks up from the pain and loss of war’s memoirs. Different from Thiep, Ninh has a background from the military. The narrative, as such, is shaped from the perspective of a veteran-writer trying to finish his novel and searching for his old memories, with a mission to collect the bones of fallen comrades for reburial. Intertwined with the spirit of Renovation, Ninh’s writing shifts the literary ideology from praising the war of resistance to focusing on human destinies, universal values, and questioning and engaging reality (Ng, 2014). Through the reminiscence of Kien, the protagonist, Ninh expresses his viewing of war against all of romanticism and the beauty of socialist realism: “War was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A miserable journey, of endless drifting. War was a world without real men, without real women, without feeling” (Ninh and Palmos, 2018, p. 31). Ninh successfully portraits the obsession of the past that the soldiers suffered. For Kien, these obsessions crept into every corner of his ordinary life: when he heard the sound from the fan, he related to the war helicopters; he kept his guilt as his military’s companions got killed year by year; he constantly recalled the memories with his dead innocent lover. “I’m ready to jump in and mix it in the fiery scene of blood, mad killing, and brutality that warps soul and personality. The thirst for killing, the cruelty, animal psychology, the evil desperation. […] My heart beats rapidly as I stare at the dark corners of the room where ghost-soldiers emerge, shredded with gaping wounds.” (Ninh and Palmos, 2018, p. 47). The soldier in Ninh’s writing left the war with a severe mental breakdown. This is the truth untold in the literature of the previous era. The war is no longer romanticised; the beauty of violence that was once depicted through happiness and positiveness of soldiers was then uncovered with rough, horrible and deathly facets. Moreover, Ninh also presented the element of sex in his protagonist’s life, while none of the previous literary works dared to talk about this, strongly implying the value of individualism (Ng, 2014).
Literary criticism and politic challenge
As soon as “The General Retires'' was published, Thiep became well known as a new talent, and furthermore, as the pioneer of the attack on socialist realism and “doctrinaire-ism”, who generated various controversial debates among critics in Vietnam and abroad (Nguyen, 2004). Thiep shocked the critics with his accounts of cruelty and suffering that his characters found themselves in. The criticism revealed a concern that his writing was not rooted in old political-literary values in which writers often produced works that made people feel happy about their society (Thu, 1994). The conservative critic Do Van Khang said: “To consider the mind of Thiep is truly creepy”(1). Tran Manh Hao stated that the voice of Thiep’s characters was disrespectful and ungrateful and that without the Renovation policy, his works would not have been so well known(2). Compounding the controversy shrouding Thiep’s work was the sacking of Nguyen Ngoc, the editor-in-chief of Van Nghe Newspaper, the weekly organ of the Vietnamese Writers Association. It was the outspoken reformist Ngoc who, by publishing “The General Retires”, and then other short stories of Thiep in rapid succession beginning in 1987, gave the author a prestigious and high-profile forum in which to present his work. In Vietnam, it was strongly rumoured that Thiep's writing contributed decisively to Ngoc's deposition by the government in 1988(3).
Same as Thiep’s case, Ninh faced a wave of hostile critics when “The Sorrow of War” was published in 1990. In fact, at that time, the Vietnamese Writers Association changed the original name from “The Sorrow of War” to “The Destiny of Love” before publishing. The purpose was to shift the audience’s view that this is only a story of love in the war. However, this effort of romanticising was challenged as the book was afterwards secretly translated into English, by an Australian journalist and a Vietnamese translator in 1994 and achieved its international prominence (Ng, 2014). On the other hand, in Vietnam, within ten years after the first publication, the novel was “banned” to be reprinted. Even until recently, the depiction of war in Ninh’s writing still receives different critics and stereotypes by many groups of Vietnamese writers. In 2016, the novel failed to receive the most honoured award of Vietnamese government with only 76 per cent of votes while the required percentage to win had to be at least 90 per cent(4). This again sparked a debate among the modern generation of writers about an old judgement that many still hold: They refused to look at the despair and the image of hero-loners as a product of wars.
State censorship and rule of untouched politics
The post-Renovation era was the golden age of Vietnam’s state censorship. Along with Renovation writers, there was a group categorized as dissident writers. Nguyen Thi Hoai, one of those writers in exile, once said: “In Vietnam, there is not just one censor, but various tag teams and competing groups of censors, which operate in a hierarchy of censors that stretches all the way up to the head of the Communist Party”(5). So, how did Thiep and Ninh cross over this bounding line of state censorship? In fact, history has proven that both Thiep and Ninh used to be denounced by the communist writers and the Party. Particularly, Ninh was once seen as in the same group with another famous dissident writer named Duong Thu Huong. Huong was the recipient of several publishing bans, was imprisoned for seven months, expelled from the Communist Party and had her passport revoked and guards posted in Vietnam for twelve years (Rato, 2003). Like Ninh, her works are more well known internationally.
Thu (1994) argued that the literary nature of writers on exile lied on three elements: politics, opposition and freedom. As said by Pham Thi Hoai, the literary materials that would be removed were “materials that the Vietnamese consider subversive – conversations with exiled writers, accusations of corruption in the Communist Party of Vietnam, jokes about how ugly the language has become in postwar Vietnam”(6). It is not wrong to say “The General Retires” of Thiep does attack the ideology of the Communist regime and criticize the old political-literary mindset. However, in an interview, Thiep once shared that the voice in “The General Retires” was still very much indirect and carried an implication under ironic characters and the area of human complexity(7). He said: “Human beings have to think about many things, not only political affairs. Literature must pay attention to human life and reflect the complexity of life” (Rato, 2003). In such a sensitive context, this implication is a smart “sneak-away”. Thiep implemented the techniques of narrative construction that shift the narrative voice between characters in his story, and by all means, distract the audiences from the direct meaning. For example, “The General Retires” was a story of a retired General in reality’s failures but was told by the narrative voice of his son. Therefore, under the view of aesthetic criticisms, the “attacking” opinions were built on the perspectives of the son, a new generation of postwar intellectuals, not directly by the author. This technique was used in most of Thiep’s later works. In terms of Ninh, the political aspect was covered by the values of humanism. Since many literary criticisms looked at “The Sorrow of War” from the emphasis on individualism and humanistic view, it enabled the story to be detached from the political judgement. For example, Kien constantly recalled his memories with his girlfriend and companions during wartime, which directed the readers to a representation of individualistic desires rather than any political motive as an explicit point. Ninh also dynamically switched the narrative perspective between “I” (Kien expressed his feelings himself) and “He” (Bao Ninh, as the author at the third-person viewpoint, looked at Kien) between paragraphs to shift the points of views and use as a technique of authorial self-defence.
Both writers have an in-depth understanding of the cultural values of Vietnamese society that lie on spirituality, morals, and human dignity. Unlike the banned works of Duong Thu Huong, both discussed works embrace a certain component of ambiguity, which perfectly matches the idea of not touching politics. Specifically, in “The General Retires”, the image of a general who expressed his patriotism through his pride of a soldier’s admirable life is still acknowledged, or in “The Sorrow of War”, it is a portrayal of a brave soldier who continued the mission of commemorating the country’s heroes.
Conclusion
The line between dissident and acceptable writers is relatively blurry as the analysis and comparison in Thiep and Ninh’s writings. Obviously, the principle of literary freedom formed under Renovation policy is in line with the domain of contemporary politics. This type of openness is based on a framework in which the Vietnamese political establishment set the limits of what is permissible, appropriate and orthodox. The question of whether Vietnamese writers are free to write, hence, should be approached from the aspect of whether they are free to think. Undoubtedly, as pioneers in the literature of the post-Renovation era, the two authors’ achievements have inspired the next generations to willingly unveil societal contradictions, question the authority and build up new elements for literary freedom in terms of choosing to either immerse themselves in aesthetics or socio-political issues. In the end, literature should not be limited within any borders, it should be an exploration of both collectivism and individualism, humanism and current affairs.
Notes
(1) http://toquoc.vn/lich-su-trong-truyen-ngan-cua-nguyen-huy-thiep-va-dau-vet-cua-loi-viet-hau-hien-dai-99105868.htm
This portal is of Vietnam’s Ministry of Sport, Culture and Tourism. The article included some excerpts of previous literary criticism articles on newspapers and journals written during the end of 1990s till 2000s.
(2) https://www.rfa.org/vietnamese/binhluan/137054-20040527.html
Radio Free Asia is an international broadcasting organization funded by the United States. In Vietnam, this network is perceived as anti-communism and banned.
(3) https://thongtinchongphandong.com/nha-van-nguyen-ngoc-thoai-hoa-bien-chat-nhu-the-nao/
This website in Vietnam is known as an information portal for the propaganda of anti-capitalism groups and anti-dissidents of Communist Party. The article criticized Nguyen Ngoc, the editor-in-chief of Van Nghe Newspaper, the weekly organ of the Vietnamese Writers Association. The article claimed that Nguyen Ngoc was a part of the anti-communist groups.
https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/vietnam-46001383
BBC Vietnamese, derived from BBC Internationals, is also accused of usually including information that criticizes Vietnam’s Communist Party. This article reported the event when Nguyen Ngoc declared to withdraw himself from the Communist Party, which raised a huge criticism from the Party’s officials.
(4) https://vnexpress.net/giai-tri/bao-ninh-truot-giai-nha-nuoc-la-dieu-co-the-luong-truoc-3438452.html
Vnexpress is the most famous local news publisher. This article reported the event when Bao Ninh failed to be recognized in the National Awards.
(5) & (6) https://www.thevietnamese.org/2018/03/censorship-in-vietnam-jfk-miller-interviews-thomas-bass/
This is another banned website in Vietnam.
(7) https://vnexpress.net/giai-tri/nha-van-nguyen-huy-thiep-ngung-viet-2980998.html
In this article, Vnexpress interviewed Nguyen Huy Thiep after he decided to stop writing as the criticisms toward himself increased.
Reference
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Ha, Q.M. (2016). When Memory Speaks: Transnational Remembrances in Vietnam War Literature. Southeast Asian Studies, 5(3), pp. 463-489. Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. doi:10.20495/seas.5.3_463
Ng, A. (2014). Visitations of the dead: Trauma and storytelling in Ninh's The Sorrow of War. Storyworlds, 6(1), 83. doi:10.5250/storyworlds.6.1.0083
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Nguyen, H. T., & Lockhart, G. (1992). The general retires and other stories. Singapore: Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, H. T. (1995). Truyen ngan chon loc. Ha Noi: Hoi nha van.
Ninh, B., & Palmos, F. (2018). The sorrow of war: A novel of north Vietnam (First Anchor Books ed.). New York: Anchor Books.
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Vo, C. H. (2009). An assemblage of fragments: History, revolutionary aesthetics and global capitalism in Vietnamese /American literature, films and visual culture
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