When Memory Speaks: Transnational Remembrances in Vietnam War Literature

IF 0.4 Q3 AREA STUDIES
Q. Ha
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

The conflicting attitudes toward, and the moral dilemmas surrounding, the Vietnam War are recorded extensively in Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, and American histories and literatures. Each side interprets the war from its own partisan perspective, creating a plethora of opinions and well-argued positions on the political and military conflict. The year 2015 marked the 40th anniversary of Vietnam's reunification, and although nearly half a century has elapsed, the Vietnam War remains actual in the socio-political determinants, literary productions, and cultural memories of both Vietnam and the United States. Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, "So much is told about Viet Nam, and so little is understood" (V. T. Nguyen 2006, 13), and Neil L. Jamieson advises the Americans to "learn more about Vietnamese culture and Vietnamese paradigms in order to untangle the muddled debates about our own," because the Vietnam War is an important event that Americans must excogitate in their attempt to understand the Vietnamese and them· selves (Jamieson 1993, x). Discourses on the Vietnam War, in the West and particularly in the American cultural memory, have been criticized for their exclusion of the Vietnamese experience and suffering, and even if the Vietnamese are present in U.S. films and books, they tend to be presented as "shadowy cardboard figures, merely onedimensional stage props for the inner workings of the American psyche" (ibid.). Thus, in order to gain a multidimensional understanding of the war, Edward Miller and Tuong Vu suggest a new critical approach, dubbed "The Vietnamization of Vietnam War Studies" (Miller and Vu 2009, 2) that accentuates "Vietnamese agency and the sociocultural dimensions of the event as lived and experienced by Vietnamese" (ibid., 5). This approach facilitates examinations of how the war exercises perennial effects upon Vietnamese society and its postwar mentality and how it enriches our knowledge about this conflict. In this article, I respond to the appeal made by Miller and Vu above by highlighting several problems occurring in representations of the war in both U.S. and Vietnamese literature in order to challenge or debunk certain misconceptions about the Vietnamese experience. My analysis of Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War and Dang Thuy Tram's Last Night I Dreamed of Peace will indicate that these two Vietnamese literary texts function to humanize victims and pay due respect to the wounded and the dead on the Vietnamese side, thus challenging the way U.S. and Vietnamese American cultural politics funnel "all of these histories into the single story" that serves a narrow ideological agenda (Nguyen-Vo 2005, 171). The nameless faces and the faceless names of the Vietnamese victims of the war that Bao and Dang lament demand questioning the "narcissistic myths of the war as a US tragedy" (Schwenkel 2009, 39).Epic Heroism in Vietnamese Literature about the Vietnam War, 1960 to 1975Prior to considering the two literary texts selected for this article, it behooves readers to understand how war-related trauma and suffering necessarily were treated in Vietnamese literature produced under the guidelines prescribed by the Hanoi government: writers were required "to support the national endeavor by authoring stereotyped works that featured typical characters and themes and that focused on the goals of the collective struggle" (Schafer 2000, 13). If one were to study the wartime corpus of literature without some background knowledge of its historical and political context, one might mistakenly conclude that the Vietnamese did not suffer excessive loss and pain during the war, because the war was romanticized in the literature, as a propagandistic expedient to invigorate the people in their struggle against the enemy (the Americans and anti- communist South Vietnamese troops). Vuong Trl Nhân observes, retrospectively: "'Accentuate the positive, cover up the negative'-this way of thinking has sunk deep into the Vietnamese psyche and silently guides society" (Vuong 2008, 182). …
当记忆说话:越南战争文学中的跨国记忆
越南人、越南裔美国人和美国人的历史和文学中广泛记录了对越南战争的冲突态度和围绕越南战争的道德困境。每一方都从自己的党派角度来解释这场战争,在政治和军事冲突上产生了大量的观点和充分论证的立场。2015年是越南统一40周年,尽管近半个世纪过去了,越南战争在越南和美国的社会政治决定因素、文学作品和文化记忆中仍然存在。Viet Thanh Nguyen指出,“人们对越南的描述太多了,但对越南的了解却太少了”(V. T. Nguyen 2006,13), Neil L. Jamieson建议美国人“更多地了解越南文化和越南模式,以便理清关于我们自己的混乱辩论。”因为越南战争是美国人在试图理解越南人及其自我时必须深思的重要事件(Jamieson 1993, x)。关于越南战争的论述,在西方,尤其是在美国文化记忆中,因其排斥越南人的经历和痛苦而受到批评,即使越南人出现在美国的电影和书籍中,他们也倾向于被呈现为“模糊的纸板人物”。只不过是美国人内心活动的一维舞台道具”(同上)。因此,为了获得对战争的多维理解,Edward Miller和Tuong Vu提出了一种新的批评方法,被称为“越南战争研究的越南化”(Miller and Vu 2009, 2),强调“越南的代理和越南人生活和经历的事件的社会文化维度”(同上)。这种方法有助于研究战争如何对越南社会及其战后心态产生长期影响,以及它如何丰富我们对这场冲突的认识。在这篇文章中,我通过强调美国和越南文学中对战争的表现中出现的几个问题来回应米勒和吴的呼吁,以挑战或揭穿对越南经历的某些误解。我对鲍宁的《战争的悲哀》和党Thuy Tram的《昨晚我梦想和平》的分析将表明,这两个越南文学文本的功能是将受害者人性化,并对越南一方的伤者和死者给予应有的尊重,从而挑战美国和越南裔美国文化政治将“所有这些历史都纳入单一故事”的方式,这种方式服务于狭隘的意识形态议程(Nguyen-Vo 2005, 171)。Bao和Dang所哀叹的越南战争受害者的无名面孔和无名姓名要求质疑“战争作为美国悲剧的自恋神话”(Schwenkel 2009, 39)。关于越南战争的越南文学中的史诗英雄主义,1960 - 1975在考虑为本文选择的两个文学文本之前,读者有必要了解在河内政府规定的指导方针下,越南文学是如何处理与战争有关的创伤和痛苦的:作家被要求“通过创作具有典型人物和主题的刻板作品来支持国家的努力,并关注集体斗争的目标”(Schafer 2000, 13)。如果一个人在不了解其历史和政治背景的情况下研究战时文学语料库,他可能会错误地得出结论,认为越南人在战争中没有遭受过多的损失和痛苦,因为战争在文学中被浪漫化了,作为一种宣传权能,以激励人民与敌人(美国人和反共的南越军队)作斗争。Vuong Trl nh回顾道:“‘强调积极的一面,掩盖消极的一面’——这种思维方式已经深入越南人的心灵,默默地引导着社会”(Vuong 2008, 182)。…
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来源期刊
Southeast Asian Studies
Southeast Asian Studies AREA STUDIES-
CiteScore
0.90
自引率
25.00%
发文量
0
期刊介绍: The new journal aims to promote excellent, agenda-setting scholarship and provide a forum for dialogue and collaboration both within and beyond the region. Southeast Asian Studies engages in wide-ranging and in-depth discussions that are attuned to the issues, debates, and imperatives within the region, while affirming the importance of learning and sharing ideas on a cross-country, global, and historical scale. An integral part of the journal’s mandate is to foster scholarship that is capable of bridging the continuing divide in area studies between the social sciences and humanities, on the one hand, and the natural sciences, on the other hand. To this end, the journal welcomes accessibly written articles that build on insights and cutting-edge research from the natural sciences. The journal also publishes research reports, which are shorter but fully peer-reviewed articles that present original findings or new concepts that result from specific research projects or outcomes of research collaboration.
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