The Sympathizer: a Dialectical Reading

[ PMLA theories and methodologies

The Sympathizer: A Dialectical Reading

VIET THANH NGUYEN’S AWARD-WINNING NOVEL, THE SYMPATHIZER, anjali prabhu INTERPELLATES AN INTERNAL VIETNAMESE READER ALONGSIDE AN

American (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two- sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Ameri- cans and Vietnamese. he critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the En glish of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude’s fellow Americans (5). In the same dis- arming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator’s Vietnamese com- patriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would ind occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam” (29). What quickly becomes evident is that the plot (and perhaps the point) is the narration. In an extraordinary formalist feat (or coincidence), the narrative illustrates the materialist dialectic as proposed by Marx and Engels (122–38). he narrator’s confession, which frames the novel, becomes linked to his material reality in an extreme and vivid form when the narrator is imprisoned and consequently generates the narrative from the knowledge that his bruised body allows his mind to piece together. He incarnates, in ANJALI PRABHU is director of the Suzy his slippery and changeable identity, the essence of social reality: Newhouse Center for the Humanities dynamism. his dynamism, as the subject (and hope) of Marx and and professor of French and franco- Engels’s theorization, illustrates through Nguyen’s vertiginous plot phone studies at Wellesley College. She the Marxian dialectic. he dialectic holds that opposites—as Hegel is the author of Contemporary Cinema pointed out—inhere in one another and that the process of change of Africa and the Diaspora (Blackwell Publishing, 2014) and Hybridity: Limits, occurs through transformation of quantity to quality. It also shows, Transformations, Prospects (State U of dramatically, how the law of the negation of negation operates. hese New York P, 2007). aspects of the dialectic are cleverly developed through a process that

© 2018 anjali prabhu 388 PMLA 133.2 (2018), published by the Modern Language Association of America 133.2 ] Anjali Prabhu 389 implicates the reader and is nothing short version of assimilation is brought to bear on theories and methodologies of brilliant, recalling the poem that opens how this process plays out when the narrator Charles Baudelaire’s collection Les leurs du is in the United States: “If an American closed mal (Flowers of Evil), “Au lecteur” (“To the his eyes to hear me speak, he would think I Reader”), at the end of which the poet ad- was one of his kind.” In fact, the narrator goes dresses his reader as an “[h] ypocrite” (“hypo- on, “[m]y vocabulary was broader, my gram- crite”) while also resembling him and being mar more precise than the average educated his “frère” (“brother”).1 Although Nguyen’s American” (7). Having attended Occidental narrator does not reach out to the reader in College, in California, before returning to this type of direct address, he does establish Vietnam and into the General’s service, the complicity with the reader through the use of narrator assimilated in a way that was not metaphor and revelations in the plot.2 just linguistic but also eagerly cultural: “To Paradoxically, Nguyen’s two- way critique speak . . . [a] language,” wrote Frantz Fanon, is linked to the ability to see the other side that quintessential évolué (“assimilated colo- and to sympathize with it. he ability involves nial”) from a French colony, “means above all an intellectual and emotional understanding to assume a culture, to support the weight of of otherness: “[W]hen I say ‘we’ or ‘us,’ . . . in a civilization” (17–18). he narrator’s uneasi- those moments . . . I identify with the south- ness toward language comes from his desire to ern soldiers and evacuees on whom I was sent master English as spoken in the United States to spy.” he narrator links this innate ability and assume that country’s culture alongside to his being “a bastard,” though he concedes the ambiguities and real fear of discovery as that not all bastards have this predisposition an undercover communist. In the novel, these (36). That essential and innate tendency to sources of a particular form of hybridity— blur lines that are imposed through norms or here, I mean simply a mixed identity that is conventions harks back to the way his Viet- linked to a corollary intent of passing—sub- namese mother blurred the line between her vert the novelistic form: we soon learn that status as a maid and that of the white, French the narrative is a confession, addressed to a priest who was the narrator’s father and who commandant and managed by a commissar, had sex with his mother when she was just a that also refers to various other texts, some of child. his ironic reference also makes clear which afect the form and our reception of the to the reader the racial and cultural hybrid- text. Whereas Graham Greene managed to ity of the narrator and the scope of his action bring to our attention a balancing ethical act as he takes on a form of dynamism. Because in he Quiet American, Nguyen brutalizes the of the narrator’s natural aversion to the idea very notion of ethics through his monstrous of marriage, his consequential bachelorhood “bastard” in he Sympathizer. Brilliant narra- “suits” his “subterranean life as a mole, who tive coups lead back to a creative illustration of burrows better alone” (37). However, the nar- the dialectical method. But Nguyen is less in- rator conirms he is not deprived of the abil- terested in participating in an ethnic literature ity to fall in love, something he does “two or (related to immigrants) than in producing a three times a year” (39). philosophical space that emerges from a mo- he above examples give a sense of the re- ment in history, a moment known as one of vi- lentless irony that turns on the narrator, and olence, war, and separation from a homeland it becomes a predictable aspect of the text, an that does not represent any kind of choice. aspect that the reader anticipates with grow- He is also questioning the memorialization ing dread and pleasure.3 In this ironic por- of the Vietnam War through the (imperial- trayal of the narrator’s identity, the French ist) cultural mechanisms of the United States 390 The Sympathizer: A Dialectical Reading [ PMLA

that work to validate the military reasons for eventually making their home in California. the presence of so many Vietnamese in the Man has stayed behind in Vietnam. West. Meanwhile, his ambition is clearly to The language of the novel, in keeping surpass that memorialization in an argument with the narrator’s most basic preoccupation that co- opts his reader to his side. Nguyen’s of passing, is rife with metaphor: the rain elegance as a thinker and a writer emerges is “amniotic water bursting over the city,” because Nguyen bypasses any discussion of whereas the narrator’s guitar, which the nar- his characters’ disenchantment with the re- rator has to leave behind when he leaves for ality of communism in favor of an ingenious Guam to escape to the United States, shows plot that dramatizes the tragedy of that reality “its full, reproachful hips” on his bed. The and incarnates the structure of thought that white envelopes containing sizable tips for the

theories and methodologies and theories spawned it. Remarkably, key moments of the servants at the General’s lavish home in Sai- plot are linked to a coming to consciousness gon become “tickets to nowhere” as the lee- through telling and, especially, writing, thus ing masters drive away from the house (23). making the entire enterprise thoroughly liter- When Saigon is about to fall to the commu- ary. he compactness of the enterprise’s total- nists and Bon and the narrator are preparing ity also makes it literary, in that it implicates to leave, having secured places on the plane to in the diegesis the writer (narrator) of the Guam with the General and his family, Man, confession and its reader: his friend and blood Bon, and the narrator go to a bar together brother Man, a Vietnamese communist. Any before their imminent separation. Bon does reference to the reader here or in Nguyen’s text not know that Man, who is to remain in Viet- must include this internal reader. nam, is a communist nor that the narrator The narrator and his two best friends, is a communist spy, a mole in the General’s Bon and Man, bond in school through a entourage. As the three friends sing, each ex- ritual that consists of making a cut in their periencing the moment diferently, the nar- palms and mingling their blood. he agent rator describes them as “feeling only for the from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, past” and directing their “gaze from the fu- who was in Vietnam when it was a French ture, swimmers doing the backstroke toward colony, has lived through the period when his a waterfall” (17). Marines (Vietnamese sol- agency and Ho Chi Minh were on friendly diers in American marine gear) stumble out terms. Claude presents the young narra- of the “vaginal darkness. . . . [E]ach showed tor with a manual by an academic from the off a spare pair of testicles” (17), which are United States, Richard Hedd, entitled “Asian grenades attached to their belts. Communism and the Oriental Mode of De- his surfeit of metaphors aligns with the struction: Understanding and Defeating the narrator’s constant feeling of inauthenticity, Marxist hreat to Asia.” Later in the novel, irst as not a true Vietnamese but then also the narrator encounters Hedd in California, because, beneath this feeling, his identity as at a dinner organized to garner support for a communist somehow nulliies everything exiled Vietnamese to return to their coun- the narrator says in his narrative. For most of try to take it back from the communists. he the plot, the character is the anticommunist General and his family; the narrator, who General’s right-hand man, but Nguyen con- serves the General; and the narrator’s other verts his reader, in Baudelaire’s terms, into a blood brother, the anticommunist Bon— “hypocrite” and a “brother,” appealing to the along with other Vietnamese—have remade reader through metaphor, which depends on their lives in the United States as anticommu- shared knowledge of a common language. nists, ater leeing from Saigon to Guam and Metaphor involves deviating from the ma- 133.2 ] Anjali Prabhu 391 terial truth and requires the reader’s par- torturer may elicit the confession. It is only theories and methodologies ticipation to unfold. Indeed, like Baudelaire, ater “nothing” has emerged as the thing not Nguyen views “confessions,” or repentance, confessed that the narrator is able to inally as cowardly “lies.” Baudelaire writes, “Nos acknowledge, in rewriting his own words to péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont laches” remedy his incomplete confession, “a grow- (“Our sins are mulish, our confessions lies”). ing sympathy for the man” in the pages he he sins cannot be washed away through re- has written (372). Baudelaire and his reader— pentance, the narrator’s Catholic background to whom his poem is addressed—know that notwithstanding. Hypocrisy—a quality elusive monster: “Ennui!” (“BOREDOM”). shared between the reader and the narrator Baude laire writes, “Tu le connais, lecteur, beyond metaphor—is operative once we learn ce monstre délicat” (“You know it well, my the narrator’s true identity as a communist, Reader. This obscene / beast . . .”). Ennui, a because we become complicit with the nar- type of boredom that is linked to inertia, is— rator when our knowledge of that identity (a in Baudelaire’s poem—cleverly also associated knowledge that coincides with his) surpasses with cowardice in our souls, a cowardice that the other characters’ knowledge (except for makes our souls sick: “C’est que notre âme, that of Man) in the diegesis. hé las, n’est pas hardie” (“it is because our souls he light tone with which the novel begins are still too sick”).4 In Nguyen’s novel, the self- soon turns dark, and we sense the negation by irony is softened only when the narrator is the father of the narrator’s being: “He called copying out what he has already written and me nothing at all” (Nguyen 21). he narrator, when he therefore has enough distance from acknowledging his constant performativity in his discourse to acknowledge the full sense of the relentless play of language, remarks that, his inaction and can recognize himself in his like the prostitutes he encounters in the wait- text as he takes the role of its reader. And in ing area in Guam, “performers perform at subsequently writing the additional scene of least partially to forget their sadness” (38). By his torture, he feels sympathy for his friend the time we reach the last part of the novel, Man, who “was my interrogator but also my when the narrator is imprisoned and being in- conidant; he was the iend who had tortured terrogated, we have been thoroughly schooled me but also my friend” (374). Man has ar- in the contingency related to roles, power, ranged for the narrator and Bon, imprisoned and hierarchies and, like the reader in Baude- in the same camp, as well as Bon’s relative, to laire’s poem, been taken through the gamut escape. We learn that Man has become “the of vices: “la ménagerie infâme de nos vices” faceless man” after being burned (375), and (“the disorderly circus of our vice”). he word he is unrecognizable except for his smile and “nothing” returns in the end as the key, “the his palm, marked by their childhood vow of punch line,” which will then make the narra- friendship. Through this encounter, where tor punch himself and beat his head against his blood brother is transformed into his tor- the wall until he has to be tied down in his turer, the narrator understands that the revo- cell by the “baby- faced” guard, the comman- lution he lived for “had gone from being the dant, and the commissar (Nguyen 370). Un- vanguard of political change to the rearguard der interrogation, the narrator has been asked hoarding power” because “independence and by the commissar to try to remember the one freedom,” ideals for which the revolutionaries thing that he has not confessed, and the nar- fought, turned out to be the things of which rator’s body undergoes an excruciating form their “defeated brethren” were deprived (376). of torture by bright lights and other means When the narrator is being interrogated, to prevent his mind from resting so that his he recalls the many interrogations he has 392 The Sympathizer: A Dialectical Reading [ PMLA

witnessed and in which he has participated. the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand he commissar is convinced that the narra- years . . . if I had never been born . . . please, tor is not being entirely truthful and that his could you please just let me sleep? (353–54) confession is incomplete. He is being asked to remember something he did not put into the This rambling is set apart from the self- confession. Finally, he realizes that the lacuna conscious, constructed sentences and oc- involves a female communist agent who was curs ater the revelation of the horriic rape, captured and held by the General’s men. Un- which the narrator witnessed. he comman- able to give away his identity as a communist, dant comes in to assert that the narrator is the narrator witnessed her torture in silence. as guilty of rape as those who watched the Four local policemen raped her repeatedly. A rape of Vietnam and did nothing. he narrator finally admits that he is guilty of the theories and methodologies and theories striking moment in the plot occurs when the rapists ask for her name: “My surname is Viet “thing” he “had not done” (357): “nothing.” and my given name is Nam,” she says (350). This term leads back to the formative mo- his answer is a direct reference to the title of ment for his unstable identity when his fa- Trinh T. Minh- ha’s pseudo documentary ilm ther called him “nothing,” and it returns to Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), which the monstrousness of the “Ennui” described is ostensibly composed of interviews with by Baudelaire, who, in an ultimate metaphor, Vietnamese women recounting their experi- “rêve d’échafauds, en fumant son hookah” ences to interviewers who are ofscreen. he (“dreams of the guillotine, while smoking documentary is unnerving because the wom- his hookah”; my trans.).6 he narrative irmly en’s delivery of text is hard to follow and oten links the hybrid’s position—which is not of diicult to trust. But more signiicant for the his making—to the accomplishment of mon- ilm’s closeness to the form of this novel, the strosity that, for its part, requires his agency, women turn out not to be the ones who expe- which does “nothing.” Further, the refer- rienced what they recounted: they are Viet- ences to the ilm hybridize the story itself in namese women living in America, who, in the the sense that Trinh’s documentary, which second half of the ilm, play themselves.5 contains the key for unlocking our full un- Nguyen’s clever reference to this film derstanding of the narrative, completes and through the female agent catapults the epi- complicates the diegesis by drawing it out to sode into its philosophical framework, which a diferent storytelling process. posits the limits of (documentary) narra- A similar narrative feat occurs through tive. When the woman stops screaming, the the protagonist’s stint as the consultant for narrator recalls, “She was staring directly at The Hamlet, a Hollywood film on the Viet- me. . . . I had the feeling she did not see me nam War. The reference is to Francis Ford at all” (351). Whereas elsewhere the narrative Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which comes is carefully crated, here we witness its com- from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. plete breakdown. In a sentence that lasts two he narrator, as a native of Vietnam, is sup- pages, the narrator addresses his oldest friend posed to act as a corrective to an admittedly and now agent of his own torture: outsider representation of Vietnamese in the film, though it is, in reality, an imperi- hey learned their lesson well, and so have I, so if you would please just turn of the lights . . . if alist one. Shot in the Philippines, the film you could see I have nothing let to confess . . . if uses Vietnamese-looking actors for the main some of us had not called ourselves nationalists roles, while crowd scenes are peopled by Viet- or communists or capitalists or realists . . . if namese refugees, whom the narrator has to the French had never sought to civilize us . . . if manage. Nguyen’s rage against Coppola, the 133.2 ] Anjali Prabhu 393

“Auteur” in he Sympathizer, about how Viet- action to the cinematic choices made by the theories and methodologies namese are represented is latent in the novel.7 Auteur—all work to undo the adulation of As Nguyen recently stated, his experience of Coppola in American popular culture and the film as a child in the United States was by cinephiles the world over. Nguyen cleverly one of indignation: “It was an antiwar movie uses this section to insert the representation about the war in Vietnam, but the movie was of the Vietnam War, the depiction of Ameri- about Americans. . . . he Vietnamese were can heroism, and the paucity of Vietnamese silent and erased” (qtd. in Streitfeld). Yet self- representation into the critical framework Nguyen does not get carried away. of the novel. But he also reveals the Vietnam- This part of the story does not simply ese refugees to be as easily changeable (from inlict vengeance on Coppola; instead, it ex- anticommunists to Viet Cong) when they ea- plores the narrator’s relation to Vietnam and gerly torture and rape as actors. In this way, questions the status of homeland for the refu- he remains true to the double critique light- gee. For example, in the cemetery on the ilm’s heartedly made at the start of the novel. vast set, the narrator arranges for one of the he narrator’s rumination at the end of gravestones to be dedicated to his mother, The Sympathizer marks the novel’s ethical and he provides a picture of her to be inserted stand: “while nothing is more precious than next to her name on the stone. His efort to independence and freedom, nothing is also make the ilm better, to give his people a voice more precious than independence and free- in it, transforms the artiicial setting into a dom” (375). hese relections are possible only space for authentic feeling—he even robustly ater the narrator has confessed his inaction opposes the Auteur’s inclusion in the ilm of while observing the rape of the female com- a scene in which a young girl is raped by four munist agent. In the ilm, the narrator tries to men from the Viet Cong. But, like any ques- intervene in the rape, telling the Auteur that tioning of rape in the narrator’s real life, it the rape need not be shown so graphically, amounts to “nothing,” and the scene is shot in but the narrator inds out in this and many his absence: “hey owned the means of pro- other instances that he has no agency in the duction, and therefore the means of represen- decision making. The Auteur is God. The tation, and the best that we could ever hope first version of the quotation is from Ho, a for was to get a word in edgewise before our quotation that could incite a person to die in anonymous deaths” (Nguyen 179). his propi- serving the ideals of independence and free- tious moment allows Nguyen to signal the im- dom. But its mischievous echo now invites an portance of thinking about the material along uneasy ambiguity because of the “also” and with the discursive by connecting the means because of the new meaning of “nothing.” It of production with the means of representa- picks up from the narrator’s inaction and sug- tion. Before wrapping up on the set, the nar- gests that revolutionaries lapse into ennui and rator, illed with emotion, is approaching his could, sooner or later, put baser things above mother’s gravestone when an explosion hurls those same ideals, thus making the elevation him into the air. He is burned and needs to be of baser things “worth less than nothing” hospitalized. he extras (his people) whom he (376), whereby even “nothing” then could had hired visit him in the hospital and con- take on a value greater than what a complete irm his fears that the explosion was ordered lapse in ethics reduces those ideals to. by the “Auteur,” who hates him and hates be- This novel’s hybridity stems first from ing challenged by a mere native. he lengthy the self-proclaimed hybridity of its narra- section in the Philippines, the details on the tor. But the novel goes much further in in- ilm’s shooting, the narrator’s emotional re- corporating other narrative spaces: Trinh’s 394 The Sympathizer: A Dialectical Reading [ PMLA

film, Apocalypse Now, and different genres, irst- person plural form continues when the such as the confession or the mystery novel. narrator meets his other friend, Bon, whom In its form, it plays with the three basic laws he hasn’t seen for more than a year, the time of dialectical materialism, suggested cleverly he has been locked up writing his confession. in the language and bolstered by the plot and Bon, of course, is unaware of the secret iden- rhetorical devices. In a nutshell, the narrative tity of his two closest friends. When Bon says is precarious because a given statement or that the narrator “looks like hell,” the passage movement of plot already contains its oppo- verges on madness: “Us? What about him? site, which can appear at any time through the Our disembodied minds laughed but our em- narrator’s irony or through a sudden reversal bodied selves did not. How could we?” (377).8 or revelation. he surfeit of metaphors, simi- his ingenious narrative “we,” which refers to

theories and methodologies and theories les, and other types of comparisons, as well as the split narrator, inally at ease with all his other forms of rhetoric that mirror the narra- selves, brilliantly concludes with a larger col- tor’s performative role in the plot, are quali- lective that is given the last word: “we swear tatively transformative—that is, they lead to to keep, on penalty of death, this one prom- changes in the plot and propel the novel into ise: ‘We will live!’” (382). his declaration is a a philosophical space for considering this concession, perhaps, and a wink to the now- heavy historical moment that has not been forgotten communist chant: “Ho Ho Ho Chi healed collectively. Most strikingly, the nega- Minh, we shall ight, we shall win!” tion of the negation (“nothing”) is presented as the pivotal moment for the narrator’s self- knowledge. In Lenin’s terms, such negation is “a moment of connection, . . . a moment of NOTES development retaining the positive” (qtd. in Dunayevskaya 51). The moment allows the 1. Unless otherwise indicated, I use Robert Lowell’s narrator to gain a higher understanding of translation from the site Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, which provides some of the best his bifurcated selhood, to inally have “sym- translations by various translators of every poem in Les pathy” for himself, and he arrives at the mo- leurs du mal. ment through (re)writing his confession for 2. Lorentzen discusses the way metaphor familiar- the commissar. Nguyen’s narrative brilliance izes the writer’s position for the reader (11). Caracciolo then transforms this consciousness into a call considers phenomenological metaphors—in particular, metaphors that convey the feel of the character and bring for a more politically inlected collective. the reader closer to it. Startlingly, ater the self-revelation that 3. his type of two-way critique in postcolonial writ- “nothing” brings, the narrator is transformed ing has a long tradition. Waberi’s Voltairean fable, Aux into a “we” and “us” as he bids Man goodbye: États- Unis d’Afrique (In the United States of Africa), and Dadié’s classic rewriting of Montesquieu’s Lettres “we took the rucksack . . . we went, ruck- persanes (Persian Letters), for example, cleverly stage a sack over our shoulders . . . [,]” reciting silly critique of colonialism or its atermath, without sparing rhymes, “but if we had thought of anything the native. he Moroccan sociologist Abdelkébir Khat- more serious we would have fallen down un- ibi notably coined the term “double critique” to desig- nate this type of two-way critique (43). Nguyen’s book, der the weight of disbelief, of our sheer relief” on the surface, joins a corpus beyond Asian American (Nguyen 377). Released through the emer- writing and could be inserted into a type of exilic, dia- gence of “nothing” and its negation, he need sporic, postcolonial writing alongside authors such as not be merged into one. He can inhabit the Dany Laferrière and Henri Lopès or Vietnamese writers diferent versions of himself as he is watched using French or En glish such as Linda Lê, Kim Lefèvre, Nguyen Huu Khoa, Monique Truong, and Kim Thúy. by his communist friend, the one person who Lefèvre’s classic Métisse blanche stages her narrator’s can be trusted with that full knowledge. he strangeness in much the same way as he Sympathizer 133.2 ] Anjali Prabhu 395 stages its narrator’s strangeness. Lefèvre’s narrator con- it is “we, carrying in our rucksack our rubber-bound ci- theories and methodologies templates a photograph and then looks in a mirror that pher and this unbounded manuscript . . .” (379). conirms her “al té rité” (“strangeness”; 155). he narrator has a mother who has transgressed and produced a child (the narrator) who, like Nguyen’s narrator, has to con- WORKS CITED front her “mon struo sité” (“monstrousness”; 14). Educa- tion is also a key factor in this text: the narrator expresses Baudelaire, Charles. “Au lecteur.” Charles Baudelaire’s a sense of superiority in relation to Vietnamese who are Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, 2018, fleursdumal not convent- educated and a distinct uneasiness among .org/poem/ 099. French people. Lefèvre’s text also has a more clearly ———. “To the Reader.” Translated by Robert Lowell. gender- inlected interest in identity, experimenting with Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, the narrator’s relationship with other women and engag- 2018, leursdumal.org/ poem/099. ing ideas of third space creatively. Nguyen’s creativity in Caracciolo, Marco. “Phenomenological Metaphors in he Sympathizer is focused on a narrative voice that com- Readers’ Engagement with Characters: he Case of pletely carries the plot through the twists and turns in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Language and Literature, the confession; it pursues far less the tropes of hybridity vol. 22, no. 1, 2013, pp. 60–76. or biracialism beyond their establishing the space for the Dadié, Bernard. Un nègre à Paris. Éditions du Seuil, 1968. narrator’s discourse. Dunayevskaya, Raya. Russia: From Proletarian Revolu- 4. Although in Lowell’s translation, the souls are sick, tion to State- Capitalist Counter- revolution. Brill, 2017. it might be more precise to say that the souls lack boldness. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by 5. Originally, these interviews were conducted Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008. in Vietnamese by Mai Thu Vân and translated into French. Trinh translates them into En glish. Juxtaposed Greene, Graham. he Quiet American: Text and Criticism. Edited by John Clark Pratt, Penguin Books, 1996. cleverly with archival footage and print material, the interviews bring into focus the impossibility of accessing Khatibi, Abdelkébir. Maghreb pluriel. Denoël, 1983. the original. Lefèvre, Kim. Métisse blanche. Barrault, 1989. 6. Lowell’s translation does not use hookah. Lowell Lorentzen, Jamie. Kierkegaard’s Metaphors. Mercer UP, translates the last stanza as follows: “It’s BOREDOM. 2001. International Kierkegaard Commentary. Tears have glued its eyes together. // You know it well, Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Chance and Necessity.” my Reader. his obscene // beast chain-smokes its yawn- Reader in Marxist Philosophy: From the Writings of ing for the guillotine— // you—hypocrite Reader—my Marx, Engels, and Lenin, edited by Howard Selsam and double—my brother!” (Baudelaire, “To the Reader”). Harry Martel, International Publishers, 1973, pp. 119–39. 7. Nguyen’s use of “Auteur” for the ilmmaker refers Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. Paperback ed., to the godlike status Coppola enjoys. It draws on auteur Grove Press, 2015. theory, oten associated with the Cahiers du cinema and Streitfeld, David. “For Viet Thanh Nguyen, Author of the French New Wave filmmakers, whereby the film- he Sympathizer, a Pulitzer but No Peace.” New York maker, as an artist, has a distinctive style that is actual- Times, 21 June 2016, www .nytimes .com/2016/06/22/ ized by his control of the entire ilmmaking process. books/ viet -thanh- nguyen- prizewinning- author -of -the 8. here is one deviation from this use of “we” in this -sympathizer -still- wrestles- with- apocalypse -now .ht ml. section: “We have paid for Bon’s fare and our own with Surname Viet Given Name Nam. Directed by Trinh T. the commissar’s gold, hidden in my rucksack’s false bot- Minh-ha, Women Make Movies, 1989. tom” (378–79). he singular possessive, “my,” seems to be Waberi, Abdourahman. Aux États-Unis d’Afrique. Jean- an unintended discrepancy because the next reference to Claude Lattès, 2006.