From author to saint: the appropriations of Victor Hugo and Les Misérables in colonial Vietnam

Abstract

This paper argues that during the French colonization of Vietnam the emergence of Les Miserables as a transnational work and Victor Hugo as a global figure can be traced back to their successful and seamless integration into local literature and religion. Based on the concept of appropriation, a process in which the target text “takes over” the source text, subjecting it to different forms of transformation, a rereading of Hugo and his masterpiece will be proposed through three of these forms: a translation of Les Miserables by Nguyen-Van-Vĩnh, an adaptation of the same novel by Hồ-Biểu-Chanh, and an indigenization of Spirit Hugo in Caodaism by Phạm-Cong-Tắc. In the light of anticolonial resistance, this study investigates the extent to which the subversive act of literary and cultural appropriation carried out by these three Vietnamese authors in the 1920s can be seen as a reversed assimilation that transgresses the boundaries between dominant and dominated, colonizer and the colonized.