Une opportunité pour Dieu: du journal intime à l'atelier d'écriture

Abstract

Twenty years after the Dôi Moi movement initiated by the Vietnamese Communist party, a new generation of writers emerged. Their works revive the artistic values of the past overlooked by their predecessors, whose novels were mostly focussed on political themes. This paper is about Nguyễn Việt Hà's novel Cơ hôi cúa Chúa (An Opportunity for God), published in 1999. One of the leading writers of his generation, Nguyễn Việt Hà offers a powerful synthesis of various visions of the Self in Vietnamese literature. He scrutinizes the internal monologues and personal diaries of four characters in order to expose various "selves" shedding light on each other, a rhetorical device that allows the novel to gives off a deep sense of uncertainty and anxiety. The usual theme of the individual's faith in one's emancipation — whether social (through Marxism-Leninism), or national (through fighting against enemies) — gives way to an absolute lack of ideal characteristic of the post-war generation. Moreover, the study of the hero- narrator shows that it is the act of writing itself that constitues Nguyễn Việt Hà's favorite topic, an inclination shared by many other contemporary writers. This phenomenon represents an aspect of self-analysis within Vietnamese literature which leads to the advocacy for the power of subjectivity and the prominence of personal invention.