Le roman vietnamien francophone: orientalisme, occidentalisme et hybridité by Ching Selao

Abstract

Roy shares Girard’s belief in the explanatory power of the concept of mimetic desire or mediated desire: we learn what to want by observing what others prize, as do the male victims of Freud’s Oedipus complex who desire their mother because they see their father desiring her (today, the increasing numbers of LGBT parents successfully raising ‘normal’ children who experience heterosexual desire suggest that both Freud’s and Girard’s views must be qualified). Of course, Girard’s concept of desire extends far beyond sexuality to other worldly goods such as wealth, power, and social status, as Pierre Bourdieu’s classic Distinction suggests. But Girard believes fictional characters can become free only through a religious revelation. Dostoevsky, his starting point, provides him with many apposite examples. Roy eventually finds Girard ‘too clear’ (41–75)–—in a word, reductive. He rereads Girard’s main proof texts—Don Quixote, Balzac, Flaubert’s three bourgeois novels, Proust, and the apparent counter-example of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste—to counterbalance Girard both with Mikhaïl Bakhtine, who emphasizes the freedom and indeterminacy of fictional characters, and also with a nuanced view of Henri Bergson’s theory of the comic. Roy explains that Bergson’s definition of comedy as ‘a mechanism stuck onto a living person’ works to explain why we laugh only because we perceive incongruity: the fool’s incorrigible repetition of a dysfunctional behavior together with the fool’s humanity. Roy’s ultimate model for understanding fiction is Milan Kundera, an excellent choice of a great writer who is also a great critic. One cannot begin to do justice to Roy’s judicious, wide-ranging, and incisive study in a brief review. Nearly every analysis of a critical or fictional work rewards the reader (he does not show us much new concerning Flaubert). His clear style makes him agreeable to read; his frequent teacherly recapitulations make his arguments easy to follow. His powers of synthesis are noteworthy, and he skillfully unfolds an ever-widening vision that begins by his appearing to be a disciple of Girard, and ends with his realization that the history of the novel is not a road toward a destination determined in advance, but a wandering path. In conclusion, he offers us a two-fold view. First he returns to Don Quixote to demonstrate how, despite Don Quixote’s deathbed conversion to common sense, Cervantes preserves the ambiguity that preserves the novel’s refreshing humor even long after his satiric targets—the knight-errant and Romances of Chivalry— have disappeared from our culture. Then Roy slyly concludes that the problem of excessive clarity is not peculiar to Girard, but to the genre of the essay in general: “On ne peut manier des concepts sans chercher à dissoudre des contradictions, et dès lors se voir obligé, face à celles qui résistent [... à] en être réduit à osciller soim ême entre les deux termes qui les constituent et, par ce mouvement même, à tourner sans cesse le dos à l’humour” (270). Michigan State University Laurence M. Porter SELAO, CHING. Le roman vietnamien francophone: orientalisme, occidentalisme et hybridité. Montréal: PU de Montréal, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7606-2222-7. Pp. 215. $34,95 Can. Née vers 1910, la littérature vietnamienne francophone demeure méconnue, malgré la présence de Franco-Vietnamiennes (Lefèvre, Lê, Moï) sur la scène 1274 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 littéraire contemporaine. Depuis les travaux de Yaeger, pionnier des années 80, peu de chercheurs se sont penchés dessus. Notons plusieurs lignes directrices au travail de Selao. Elle se concentre sur l’étude de romans qui traitent du choc des cultures mais sont écrits par des auteurs vietnamiens, et non européens. Si elle reconnaît que les formations discursives sont liées à des contextes de colonisation, décolonisation et postcolonisation, pour elle, l’orientalisme et l’occidentalisme sont deux types de discours pétrifiants: elle remet en question les binarismes des discours successifs sur l’Autre, les oppositions qui “hantent toutes les visions du monde” (16). Ses analyses de romans démontrent que l’évolution des discours sur l’orientalisme , l’occidentalisme et l’hybridité n’est pas forc...