‘Les mo(r)ts ne nous lâchent pas’: Death and the Paternal/Amorous Body in Linda Lê’s Lettre morte

Abstract

This article examines the developmental paradigms exhibited by the narrator of Lettre morte, drawing on parallels suggested in the text between the death of the narrator's father and the ending of her relationship with a lover, the appropriately named Morgue, a metaphorical collector of dead bodies in the form of his victimised gonzesses. Adopting a broadly psychoanalytical approach, it seeks to demonstrate that literary representation of the symbolic death of childhood as incarnated in the figure of the father appears to result in a more 'adult' assumption of responsibility in heterosexual relations, in a 'healthier' model of (self)perception: the narrator's revision of the paternal past through language following her father's demise--both in the sense of examining afresh her father's life story and the father/daughter relationship and, as this article argues, rewriting them in the form of a narrative text--leads to a re-vision of the amorous future, and of her ability to function successfully within it. Lettre morte constitutes the final work in a tryptich of texts, the first of which is entitled Les Trois Parques, the second, Voix, une crise. All three texts have strong links with Linda Le's own autobiographical trajectory. At the age of fourteen, she left Vietnam for France, along with her mother and sisters, while her father remained in Vietnam; conjugal relations between her parents had long since deteriorated. Le felt, and continues to feel, profound guilt at what she viewed as the betrayal and abandonment of both her father and her childhood. Despite the fact that, in several respects, Lettre morte appears to provide a form of resolution, numerous textual similarities bridge all three works, similarities which include the portrayal of women indulging in self-harm and being oppressed by parasitical men; the protagonists' feelings of self-loathing and sense of being pursued or haunted--frequently by madness; and the omnipresence of death--what Le refers to elsewhere as sentiment de la mort avant la mort, le sentiment de la corruption, de la decomposition. (1) Throughout the trilogy, but in Voix and Lettre morte in particular, the narrator's desire to regress to early childhood and to recapture the father/daughter intimacy characteristic of that period is translated into a frequent fairytale- or myth-like atmosphere in the texts, an atmosphere which also embodies the same fairytale potential for nightmarish elements to resurface, elements closely related to the narrator's own precarious grasp on sanity. Both this form of 'regression therapy' based on the narrator's reenactment of the past and the predominance of the allegorical and metaphorical in her interpretation of it elicit comparisons with the psychoanalytic model. The overriding theme of the trilogy is both the narrator's previous severance from the lonely father figure, a figure who inhabits the 'petite maison bleue' in Vietnam, and the endeavour to achieve a form of catharsis--and thus to appease any subsequent guilt--through re-establishing contact with him in the present, even if, as is the case in Lettre morte, such contact is posthumous. Indeed, all three texts adopt a stream-of-consciousness mode of writing, as if the narrator feels an overwhelming compunction to expiate her guilt through language and to express herself freely, if she is to uncover the key events and emotions of the past and thereby facilitate developmental growth. 'Action,' in the form of plot, is quasinon-existent in this trilogy; rather 'words' are the narrator's sole panacea in relation to her dead father. Les Trois Parques is the most verbose work of the trilogy, with a narrative crammed full of tangential meanderings that ultimately never converge to forma clear narrative core. Voix is at the other linguistic extreme. It is a brief, fragmented text with numerous typographical gaps. Nevertheless, both can be seen as illustrating the narrator's earlier inability or unwillingness to confront the consequences of her actions vis-a-vis her father. …