Constructing Human Identity and Writing the Past in Minh Tran Huy's Voyageur malgré lui Hors sujet : identité humaine et écriture du passé dans Voyageur malgré lui de Minh Tran Huy

Abstract

From the compelling story of her father growing up amid the horrors of the Vietnam war and finally escaping to become an engineer in France, Minh Tran Huy, in her novel Voyageur malgre lui (2014), strings together a set of seemingly heterogeneous narratives that in fact serve to (re)construct and (re)affirm the human identity of both the narrator and her entire Vietnamese family, and ultimately of the human being as such. This highly original approach to a traumatic past moreover features prominent themes articulated by Emmanuel Levinas in Humanisme de l’autre homme (1972), which responds to the Structuralists’ radical criticism of subjectivity. At the same time, our appreciation of Minh Tran Huy’s powerful work gains in scope and intensity when we gauge its aesthetic impact and philosophical resonance.