Many fundamental aspects of literary narrative raise questions of power, agency, and authority. One might consider, for example, the relationship between a narrator and a character, the transformation of speech into written dialogue, or the often unacknowledged role of translation in the staging of cultural and linguistic difference. Narrators may assert their own authority to represent the words, thoughts, and desires of characters, and this authority may or may not recognize the particular forms of ethical responsibility inherent in the act of narrating the experience of another. On the other hand, narrators may take a radically different position with respect to this responsibility by refusing to speak in the place of characters, representing instead what might be at stake in a story that remains untold.
Such issues of authority and responsibility arise with particular intensity in narratives of war, especially those that seek to represent the experiences of characters whose vulnerability is heightened by political and military violence. In this article, I examine two quite different narrators who address aspects of gendered and racialized experience in mid-twentieth-century Vietnam: Thomas Fowler, the jaded British journalist who narrates Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), and the unnamed narrator of Anna Moï’s Le Venin du papillon (2017). I focus on the choices these narrators make as they portray variously exploitative relations between Vietnamese female characters and European or American men, relations that are of course situated against the broader backdrop of violence during this period of overlap and eventual transition from French colonial rule to American military intervention. What might close attention to the details of language and form reveal about the practices that bring Vietnamese women into these narratives, or that instead speak in their place?
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Asie du Sud Est Research Network 