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Rival Nationalisms and the Rebranding of Language in Early 20Th Century 40 Vietnam and Korea in the longue durée. The Focus Negotiating tributary and colonial positions. Phạm Quỳnh and the rebranding of language in the modern nation Despite fluency in both Literary Chinese and modern Mandarin, Phạm Quỳnh was not classicaly educated, but rather a graduate of the school of interpreters and a beneficiary of French education. As both Ho Tai Hue-Tam and David Marr have noted, Phạm Quỳnh himself was possessed of a vision of Vietnamese national identity deeply influenced both by European models of the nation-state, and efforts to modernize throughout East and South Asia, such as the national essence sub-movement of contemporary Chinese neo-traditionalists, and the views of the Indian intellectual Rabindranath Tagore.3 As Hue-Tam Ho Tai put forth, Phạm Quỳnh spearheaded a Vietnamese instantiation of Chinese neo- traditionalist thought, which sought to identify the quintessence of Vietnamese culture in order to preserve it, and—like Rabindranath Tagore’s vision for South Asia—ultimately merge it with western features of civilization in order to produce a new modern Vietnam. Phạm Quỳnh was perhaps best known as the the editor-in-chief of Nam Phong, selected by the Governor-General of Indochina, Albert Sarraut, and the chief of the sûreté, Louis Marty, to use the magazine to promote collaboration with the French colonial regime. For this, Phạm Quỳnh became almost universally reviled for what was perceived to be a pro-colonial and collaboratist stance. Phạm Quỳnh sought to define a Vietnam- ese quintessence rooted in the Vietnamese language, which nevertheless espoused a (perhaps diluted) version of classical values— and which would in turn remain open and amenable to French influence. This required the drawing of new lines around language, culture, and society, that made the older concept of a Vietnamese nation—one in Rival nationalisms and the which Vietnamese language was only considered secondary in power and expressivity to Literary Chinese—awkward and unacceptable. Although Phạm Quỳnh rebranding of language in drew heavy criticism—especially from anticolonial intellectuals like Ngô Đức Kế 吳德繼 (1879-1929)—even his greatest 1 detractors would eventually embrace both the early 20th century Tonkin Vietnamese vernacular, and the romanized alphabet (Quốc Ngữ; lit.: national language) as the new linguistic vehicles of modern Vietnamese nationalism. John D. Phan The French colonization of Vietnam in the mid-late 19th century The Nam Phong project strongly recalls Benedict Anderson’s seminal description of generated a massive and traumatic conduit, along which a rich modern nationalism, particularly the standard- diversity of technologies, products, social values, and cultural ization and promotion of a ‘print language’ as a powerful tool for nationalistic self- concepts, traveled with alarming speed. One of the most articulation, to the empowerment of certain influential concepts to be imported from Europe was the model capitalist and political agendas (and at the expense of pre-national diversity). As Anderson of French nationalism, and the notion of an invisible fellowship also noted, the essential fantasy of the nation that bound together the people of a state through a shared and was founded on an imagined fellowship defined monolithic history, culture, and most significantly—language. by shared language, ethnicity, and cultural beliefs. From this perspective, Phạm Quỳnh may be viewed as passionately dedicated to reifying a particular (and particularly elitist) longside these new nationalist concepts, known as The Tale of Kiêu [Truyện Kiều 傳翹] vision of Vietnamese nationhood, which the Vietnamese were deeply influenced by Phạm Quỳnh himself, as well as another enshrined vernacular language and vernacular Aby contemporary efforts to modernize, article defending Literary Chinese as a literature at its heart. and resist either the threat or reality of cornerstone of Vietnamese national identity This agenda is made particularly clear in colonialism in other parts of the world. These by the literatus Phạm Huy-Hổ. Despite the Phạm Quỳnh’s famous defense of the Tale of forces converged to form a particularly volatile apparently opposing views of these two Kiêu as the definitive repository of Vietnamese intellectual space over the first few decades publications, a closer look reveals that they culture (or national essence), published in of the 20th century; and in the center and both support—or attempt to support—a vision 1919.4 The universal love and acclaim of the the north, where traditional education in of the Vietnamese nation that enshrined the poem today, is perhaps rooted in Phạm Literary Chinese and the Confucian Classics vernacular language at its heart, and sought Quỳnh’s 1919 elaborate and impassioned continued to receive entrenched support, to identify a national essence [quốc túy 國粹] defense of the poem. Phạm Quỳnh begins the debates over language and education as encoded in Vietnamese literary and with a series of rhetorical questions that came to occupy the center of the nationalist educational practice. The task at hand was attempt to reify and amplify the poem’s conversation.2 Yet by the end of 1919, the civil to reconcile an older concept of Vietnamese universal popularity among the Vietnamese:5 service examinations had been dismantled identity—one that enshrined Literary Chinese in Hue, and the lycée Albert Sarraut (where at the heart of Vietnamese culture—with [Among] the people of our country, who many of Vietnam’s future leaders would be new concepts of nationalism that demanded does not know The Tale of Kiều? Who educated) was opened in Hanoi. In the same Vietnamese vernacular as the ‘national has not memorized some measure of lines year, the French-endorsed literary magazine language’. To do so, Phạm Quỳnh and Phạm from The Tale of Kiều? Who does not Nam Phong [Southern Wind] edited by Phạm Huy-Hổ had to grip the beast by both ends— know clearly the story of the maiden Kiều, Above: Page from Quỳnh (1892-1945), published both a famous rebranding and promoting the Vietnamese or does not feel for Miss Kiều—a beautiful 'the tale of Kiêu’. © British Library Board defense of vernacular Vietnamese language vernacular on one side, while redefining and lady, cursed by fate, full of talent and (shelf no. 14287/p.14). as emblematized by the long narrative poem denationalizing Literary Chinese on the other. beauty, but who encountered a destiny The Newsletter No. 79 Spring 2018 Vietnam and Korea in the longue durée. 41 Negotiating tributary and colonial positions. The Focus of broken hearts, fifteen years of bitterness in life, as though cruelly spurned by Heaven Today, our country must study Quốc so as to make a shining mirror for all those Ngữ and French letters, but neither must of shallow disposition?6 Chinese writing be abandoned.13 Although reviled as a collaborator, it is not Clearly, the nation-state requirement to hard to see how Phạm Quỳnh’s views on the enshrine the vernacular language needed to Tale of Kiêu became so popular: he is a master reckon with the incumbent preeminence of of emotive rhetoric, armed with a deeply Literary Chinese in Vietnamese society. The intuitive sense of literature. This combined way in which Phạm Huy-Hổ chose to do this, with, as David Marr noted, the popularity was to revise the history of Chinese writing of a message of ‘language nationalism’, in Vietnam, starting from the very beginning. amplified the voice of his message beyond That beginning, in turn, he identifies as the very his own deeply ambiguous reputation.7 mythological dawn of the Vietnamese people: But what is more interesting than the power of his rhetoric, is the cultural vision of the I believe that we have known Chinese Vietnamese nation that he is constructing. writing ever since the moment when the In a rather grand move, Phạm Quỳnh attempts Hồng-Bàng clan first established our to sweep away all socio-economic and country. The Hồng-Bàng were the children cultural diversity in Vietnam, and to extend of the clan of Shennong [Thần-Nông], his elitist vision of the Vietnamese nation far already knew Chinese writing, and so and beyond the educated class, by hitching of course taught it to their children.14 it to the popularity of The Tale of Kiêu. In the following passage, Phạm Quỳnh Here, Phạm Huy-Hổ repeats a claim assembles an image—not only of the universal, initially found in the 15th century historical trans-class, trans-labor, transregional love for chronicle known as the Đại Việt sử ký toàn the poem—but also of a national identity based thư, linking the (perhaps mythological) on that love, which unites all these disparate Hồng Bàng dynasty with the Sinitic sage- groups of Vietnamese: king inventor of agriculture, Shennong.15 However, Phạm Huy-Hổ makes explicit what But is it not wondrous that each and every might be considered an implicit point in this class of people within our country—from association: if we accept it, we must also men of literature and knowledge to the accept that the Hùng kings of the Hồng Bàng common worker, from those elites of the dynasty knew Chinese, and were perhaps arched gates to those who work the fields even native Chinese speakers. gathering mulberry—that there are none This historiographic construction, along who do not love the Tale of Kiều, none who with all of its controversial implications, not read The Tale of Kiều and are not moved, only raised no nationalist eyebrows in the as though experiencing those desperate 15th century (when the Đại Việt sử ký toàn situations, suffering that bitter pain, under- thư was composed), but was in fact an going those catastrophes, and weathering integral feature of a double-articulated the footsteps of those roads for themselves.8 concept of the Vietnamese nation as a southern instantiation of classical culture Here, Phạm Quỳnh is actively fabricating that was formalized at this time.16 Since an ‘imagined community’—one in which language was not tied to national identity people of all classes and backgrounds are in a zero-sum manner, and since Literary bound together by a shared understanding Cover of the first issue of Nam Phong, published in 1917.
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