Linda Lê's Voix and the Crisis of Representation: Alterity and the Vietnamese Immigrant Writer in France

Abstract

Pour la premiere fois, j'avais le sentiment que les mots ne me sauveraient plus. Linda Le, interview with Catherine Argand Linda Le's novels are set in a deranged world, one inhabited by ghosts and dismembered bodies. Voix: Une Crise, the second book in a trilogy on the death of a father and the resulting psychosis for his progeny, is no exception. (1) In this short but devastating narrative, voices of madness drown out those of reason, and the atmosphere of fantastic paranoia and self-destruction overwhelms the reader. The novel begins with the narrator--a woman author--sitting on a bench in a long hallway, locked up, as she has been told, in a mental hospital, and surrounded by a cacophony of troubled voices. Her confinement is the result of a schizophrenic crisis, which is then recounted in an immediate, crushing prose. The narrator, haunted by the flaming image of her dead father and persecuted by what she calls l' Organisation, wanders feverishly among the physical and imaginary spaces of Paris and the pays natal. The voices from the hospital give way to those of the Organization, an ill-defined but omnipresent group of men in disguise, which begins by sending death threats in the newspaper but eventually employs the narrator's own nervous system as its primary means of communication. The goal of the Organization appears simple: it seeks only unquestioned conformity to the precise role created for each individual. For the narrator, emigrated from an unnamed country, the role to play is one of a representative, but of what exactly, it remains unclear. The specific content of the injunction to conform is vague: she is enlisted to represent a certain notion of alterity, such as this difference is understood by the Organization. Despite her adoption of French culture and her mastery of the language, the narrator is indelibly marked by her race and thus expected to adhere to the Organization's pre-established criteria of ethnic literary production. What is especially problematic about this demand is that for the immigrant author, the act of conforming necessarily includes a savage violence against both body and psyche. Le, who was born in Vietnam in 1963 and who immigrated to France with her mother and three sisters 14 years later, has infused much of her work with this current of violence. Catherine Argand suggests in an interview with Le that in Voix: Une Crise, the author inflicts the violence upon herself; in fact, Argand wonders if the text does not serve as Le's own public self-denunciation after the death of her father, who was left behind and who died in 1995, alone in Le's native country and fixed in an image of her abandoned past (1999, 28). It is indeed tempting to read the trilogy as the dramatization of the exiled Asian's guilt: having left her father to die alone, she has failed to fulfill her filial duty and thus broken Confucian law. The tremendous presence of fire and phantoms in the work points to a world of the living still connected to, or haunted by, that of the dead and effectively recreates the link between the worlds destroyed elsewhere by the author. In fact, we could interpret the trilogy as the literary creation of an altar dedicated to the father, to the past, and to Vietnam, before which Le kneels in deference. Nevertheless, however useful such a reading might be, it addresses neither the narrator's schizophrenic reaction to her two cultures--the abandoned and the adopted--nor the demands placed upon her by their respective Organizations. It also ignores the conflict between the polyvocality infusing the narrator's voice and the monological discourse informing the voices that surround her. The current article analyzes this conflict and suggests that the mental crisis dramatized in Voix: Une Crise does not simply result from the death of the father; rather, the narrator's madness is simultaneously the means to resist interpellation and the perceived consequence of failing to assume the political and social role assigned. …