Đoàn Cầm Thi's Un moi sans masque is not only a study of Vietnamese works of autobiography. It is also a retelling of modern Vietnamese history, within a colonial as well as a trans-Asian context, presented in a series of compelling close readings of literary texts. The book begins by challenging long-held assumptions about the origins of the genre of autobiography, including the idea that the “West invented the individual,” bringing the concept to Asia and the rest of the world. According to Emmanuel Lozerand, this view is a European prejudice that is “perfectly concordant” with the concept of Oriental despotism (p. 7).
In the postcolonial period, this prejudice was adopted by Vietnamese literary critics. Shaped by the exigencies of war and informed by the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, this criticism, which was “concerned solely with classes and with the nation,” regarded autobiography as a reactionary form of literature (p. 23). Denying the existence of “non-Western individualisms,” this criticism condemned autobiography as a Western invention, foreign to the collective character of the Vietnamese (p. 22). During the postcolonial period, then, literary criticism, “excluding the individual subject from its program” (p. 209), became what the writer Bảo Ninh described as an obligatory exercise in “defining the class composition of mountains and rivers.”
This kind of criticism, however, overlooks the fact that the concepts of nation (quốc gia) and class (giai cấp) emerged contemporaneously with that of the self or tôi. These concepts, in other words, were products of the same colonial moment and the same history of translation, circulation, and the admixture of ideas among East Asian scholars that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was through Chinese translations of Japanese versions of the works of French thinkers that Vietnamese writers were introduced to Western political and autobiographical writings, including the Contrat social and Émile by Rousseau (p. 53).
On the other hand, this kind of class criticism ignores the way in which genres such as the revolutionary memoir and the socialist realist novel, which informed the development of class and national consciousness in colonial Vietnam, often rely on the same literary techniques of introspection and self-narrativization as autobiography. This commonality was noted by the Vietnamese Trotskyist leader Nguyễn An Ninh, who praised Tolstoy's candor in divulging the intimate details of his own dissolute adolescence in his diaries’ accounts of social conditions in Russia (p. 80). This suggests that in Vietnam, “the discourse of the self was elaborated . . . in forging a direct link with a national project inseparable from modernization and decolonization” (p. 35).
Intimate expressions of the subject, therefore, were not confined to the reactionary genre of autobiography. Rather, the latter embodied “a new outlook on the individual and the world” that also appeared in nonbourgeois genres of literature (p. 34). Nevertheless, as Đoàn Cầm Thi suggests, works of an explicitly autobiographical nature provide a privileged example of how the link between the modern self and the world was elaborated in writing.
The most compelling illustration of this is the discussion of the work of the poet Tản Đà (1889–1939), which challenges the conventional perception of the writer as a transitional figure, caught between Confucian tradition and the modern Vietnamese literature that emerged in the 1930s, celebrating the tôi. Although Tản Đà's work was eclipsed by the New Poetry (Thơ mới) and the Self-Strength Literary Group (Tự Lực văn đoàn), its narration of intimate experience was no less modern than the works of these later movements. Inspired by Zhuangzi and Li Po as well as Rousseau, Tản Đà, who was compelled by poverty to “submit to the laws of the market,” adapted his literary knowledge and talents to the demands of early print capitalism in Vietnam. The technique that Tản Đà developed was that of the scripteur de rêve, which conveyed the author's dreams and other intimate experiences, exposing them to a public that demanded un moi sans masque, an “I” stripped of its public persona. In Tản Đà's autobiographical works, this “I without a mask” assumes the particular form of a “Narcissus without a face.” No longer concerned with maintaining appearances, the poet unabashedly tells a story “attentive to the biological manifestations of [the] body . . . with [its] appetites and tastes” (p. 57). The pronoun that Tản Đà employs to refer to this anonymous experience of a body free of its social decorum is not tôi, which would emerge as the privileged term for the self in the New Poetry, but rather mình, which designates the body as well as the self. Whereas tôi, derived from an expression meaning “subject of the king” (vua-tôi), denotes “the I facing the universe,” the “mình employed by Tản Đà . . . evokes rather the subject facing itself” (p. 58).
As the conservative writer and critic Phạm Quỳnh complained at the time, Tản Đà's faceless narcissism was in fact a form of exhibitionism, plainly displaying an “obscene desire” to “get naked in the street” (p. 50). As Đoàn Cầm Thi argues, however, the effect of such autobiographical performances was to transform the writer into what Sartre described as a “singular universal” (p. 46). Through the autobiographical display of his individual passions, Tản Đà managed to embody private experiences with which his public could easily identify.
As Đoàn Cầm Thi suggests, a similar effect can be attributed to Nguyên Hồng's realist works of autobiography, which “lay bare the soul [of the author], delivering him to the public, making the unspoken heard” (p. 105). In Nguyên Hồng's singular account of his life as a young delinquent, growing up in poverty in Tonkin, Vietnamese readers in the colonial era could recognize a common experience within an emerging modern society.
Un moi sans masque is an elegant, rigorous, and accessible study that will appeal to specialists of modern Vietnamese literature and autobiography as well as nonspecialists seeking a broad introduction to the topic.
