Melancholic Ghosts in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt

Abstract

In The Melancholy of Race Anne Anlin Cheng observes that melancholia alludes not to per se but to entangled relationship with loss (2001, 8). It is precisely these entanglements with which this essay is concerned. Monique Truong's 2003 bestseller, The Book of Salt, offers a telling case study in and melancholia in diaspora, as haunted protagonist Binh copes with his expulsion from family and country. The Book of Salt is narrated by Binh, a gay exile Irving in Paris and working as a live-in chef for Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1930s at their famed residence at 27 rue de Fleurus. The narrative continually shifts in time and place, shuttling between Saigon, Paris, and sea, as Binh slowly recounts his life story, fragment by fragment. As his story unwinds, we learn that Binh was disowned by his abusive, alcoholic father - to whom Binh refers only as Man - when he learns that Binh has had an affair with Frenchman Bleriot, chef de cuisine at governor- general s house in Saigon where Binh works as a low-level cook. With nowhere else to go, Binh escapes to wide open sea where he spends next three years working as a galley cook before finally settling in Paris and finding his Mesdames Stein and Toklas. Binh works for couple for nearly five years, from 1929 until their return to United States in 1934, during which time he meets and begins an affair with Marcus Lattimore, a mixedrace African American passing as white, who attends Stein's Saturday salons. The Book of Salt is a deeply haunted text, from Old Man's voice that echoes in Binh's head as a constant reproach, to ghostly figure of the man on bridge (a fictionalized Ho Chi Minh) whom Binh longs to meet again, to Binh's own invisibility as he wanders streets of Paris.Banished from his family and country for his homosexuality, Binh is profoundly melancholic, holding on to life he lost through memory and repetition. The elliptical narration, continually returning to Binh's life in Vietnam, demonstrates how fully his present is saturated by past. Binh psychically preserves moment of his expulsion from home by literally internalizing voice of his disapproving father. Indeed, when Binh recounts day his father disowned him, he repeats phrase stand there still (Truong 2004, 164). This refers, at once, to momentary paralysis Binh experiences as his father berates and disowns him (still as in motionless) and to Binh's inability to move on emotionally from this traumatic scene of rejection (still as in continued until now) (OED). Just as he is haunted by violence and hatred of his father, Binh similarly relives love and nurturing he received from his mother. He compulsively and longingly cuts tips of his fingers while he cooks, transporting himself back to an early childhood memory in which his mother cradled him close to her body as she tended to his bloody fingers, soothing him with song, after he cut himself for first time while chopping scallions with her. Binh's every moment in Paris is achingly bound up with his past. Haunted by a home and family to which he cannot return, Binh wills his own psychic return through these compulsive repetitions of past.Moreover, novel itself is haunted - a literary project produced through Truong's conjuring of dead. Her central figure, Binh, is a composite character based on two chefs, Trac and Nguyen, who worked for Stein and Toklas in Paris. In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Toklas describes their insecure, unstable, unreliable, but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with (1954, 186). Although Trac and Nguyen are only two Vietnamese chefs Toklas names, she and Stein employed a succession of them while in Paris (187). While Toklas expresses a certain condescending affection for Trac and Nguyen - Gertrude Stein and I thought Nguyen delightfully Chinese (188) - she describes Indo-Chinese men she and Stein employed as alternately liars, gamblers, drunks, womanizers, and drug addicts (187). …