NOTE FROM EDITOR: The following typifies a literary critique, written by G.B.A Nash, pen name of an international lawyer whose undergraduate degree is in history and comparative literature.
Bài viết sau đây tượng trưng cho thể loại phân tích văn chương của tác giả G.B.A. Nash, là bút danh của một luật sư quốc tế tốt nghiệp ngành lịch sử và văn chương đối chiếu (ngoa`i chuye^n mo^n ve^` luật). Ba?n di.ch o pha^`n cuo^'i cu?a mu.c na`y.
by G.B.A. Nash
first published: December 1, 2010; vietthuc.org; vietbang.com
The novelist’ s journey and the burden of cultures
I got to know Mimi when her creator was struggling with an epic manuscript that was far too long. Mimi was born in the classic subconscious journey of novel writing that Robert Olen Butler advocates in his creative writing class. She was not planned, nor structured. She emerges as her creator submerges. Nowadays, no one wrote like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which, in today’s standards, would not be successful or even readable. Not to mention the fact that the attention span of readers of the 21st century is measured by the size of the computer screen and how quickly links can be clicked and browsed.
Yet, in the end, Postcards from Nam became a novella of fewer than 100 pages double-spaced. It is truly a novella in the count of words. Yet, it tells stories that are epic in the Vietnam experience: from lives in a small alley of pre-communist Saigon in the 1960s, to the very unique and contrasting personal characteristics of a young boy and a young girl of that era, all the way to the 1975 life-about-face, and a harsh, gruesome escape at sea, the sufferings of Vietnamese boat people, to the contemporary life of a female lawyer in the Capital City of America and her search homeward, embedding the conflicts in the lives of first-generation immigrants unknown to outsiders – all the complication of human beings spanning over a century.
The first question I ask is why the novella begins with a very detailed description of where Mimi lives. The Parc Royale? How is it relevant or even necessary to what we are about to see? In novel writing, one either narrates, describes, or interprets. I suppose this speaks for the 3 fundamental methods of story-writing: narration, description, and interpretation. Butler, the novelist-teacher, will certainly tell us that the key to effective creative writing lies not in narration but in description. “Showing, not telling” is our motto.
Barthes and Foucault, the incomprehensible theorists that no one is supposed to understand, tell us something else (perhaps what we think they may be telling us, because they are supposed to be not so understandable): self-interpretation is a taboo, because the author is supposed to be dead, in order for readers to be born.
Yet, in the end, to make it all in fewer than 100 pages double-spaced, our Mimi narrated and interpreted, as she (and her world) were described by her creator. Somehow, Mimi’s creator did all three to give us the story in fewer than 100 pages. A story within a story within a story in the novella form.
Parc Royale is important to Mimi in her journey to re-meet her “Nam,” such that the descriptive method has to be up for grab, because what we see at Parc Royale becomes the textual backdrop upon which we find our Mimi. Parc Royale is the constructed work of an architect, who purposely creates an illusion. The apartment complex is supposed to be an imitation of the South of France, yet it lies in the heart of hot and humid Houston, Texas. We know then at the beginning of the novella that nothing in Mimi’s world has been real. It is all an imitation of something else, very far removed from her authentic Vietnamese childhood. The postcards become the linkage between fragments of lives that have been broken, segregated and separated, into compartments, drawers, and blanket folds (as Mimi tells us). Nothing that is so disconnected can be real, just like the phoniness of Parc Royale. The postcards, therefore, constitute the only reality, if reality means continuation and re-connection of many pieces of life. The need to be back in touch with that reality – the only reality against the artificial Parc Royale scenery – foreshadows our Mimi’s return to her search for Nam.
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