Linda Le
Slander
Trans. by Esther Allen
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Pp. 156. $14.00
Reviewed by Uzoma Esonwanne

Translation scholars like Margaret Sayers Peden might celebrate Slander (1996), Esther Allen’s beautiful translation of Linda Le’s Calomnies (1993), as a “new ice cube.” Also likely to celebrate it are students of francophone literature, albeit for different reasons. One such reason, I suspect, is Slander’s approach to displacement, loss, and isolation, which are staple motifs of “Third World” émigré fiction. Rather than construct a mimetic narrative which purports to re-present the alienation of “natives” in the erstwhile “Mother Country,” Le opts for a self-reflexive narrative which interrogates a variety of received “truths” about the “self” and identity held by such peoples, displays a corrosive skepticism toward the possibility of representing the “truth” of past events, and generally unsettles the assumptions and expectations of any unwary reader.

Slander seems designed to scandalize France’s Vietnamese émigrés. Taking as its object their anxieties about their displacement from “home,” their naïve perceptions about the significance of this experience, and their assumptions about who they are, the novel playfully yet resolutely attempts to strip off the ragged bandages of comforting myths with which they are wont to stanch the bleeding wounds of alienation. With the passage of each chapter, a strip of the exile’s sense of “self” and identity peels off, as Le dismantles memories of the institutions of Vietnamese civil society (the family, the “country”) in which they were grounded.

Le’s narrative consists of monologues by two characters-a mad Vietnamese émigré and his niece. Isolated in France, they must rely on each other’s memory to search for the “truths” of their past experiences. The secret in Uncle’s past consists of incest with his sister. Declared insane by his unscrupulous family, he was promptly dispatched to Correze. There, he valiantly tried to sedate himself with books and to erase family from his memory. However, when we encounter him at the beginning of the narrative, he has just failed. His family, in the form of a letter from his niece, has sought him out in Correze. She wants “some genealogical news” about the identity of her “real” father, having learnt from her mother that she had been fathered by a French colonial army officer. Niece’s letter triggers in the mad Uncle some bitter family reminiscences, none of which she receives and which, if she had, would not have resolved her question.

Meanwhile, she appears to suffer from a mental breakdown. Afraid that she is being stalked by a man with a black dog, she seeks counseling. In her monologues, she reveals details of Uncle’s incest. She also cultivates the company of Ricin. Ricin, however, suffers from a victim complex which matches her paranoia in intensity. So madness, we discover, reigns both inside and outside the French asylum, just as in Vietnam it reigned within and without the family home. Thus, not only does the specter of insanity cast a shadow over each character’s narrative but, in the end, they admit that the past, in all of its plenitude, cannot be represented in language. As Uncle declares, just before announcing his intention to destroy himself and his books “tomorrow night”: “There will be no revelation. Truth’s mouth is toothless, its breath is foul. The secrets it turns and turns between tongue and palate smell like bad food gone stale” (148). Always fugitive, “truth” is neither there nor then. For readers, Uncle and Niece, then, the discovery that the “self” is always fugitive is the only morsel of “truth” Scandal offers.

Like the émigré “self” and identity in contemporary France, Le’s writing seems calculated to evade the mental clutches of readers or, at least, teach their imagination. Written in the form of interlocking monologues, Slander can sometimes bewilder. Its “skein of allusions, literary, philosophical, and artistic” (155) makes knowledge of contemporary Western philosophy and art essential. Yet however much readers might be disturbed by Le’s style or by her unraveling of the Vietnamese émigré’s myths of “self,” family, and “home,” they are likely to find the absence, in Slander, of alternative myths even more disturbing. This concern applies, equally, to the novel’s apparent skepticism toward memory.

In Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Richard Terdiman defines memory as the “faculty that sustains continuity in collective and individual experience” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993, 8). By contrast, Slander seems to view memory as the faculty which undermines “continuity” in social and personal experience. Is this, perhaps, not why, according to Allen, Le is contemptuous of “the idea of ‘fully belonging’ to any culture?” For to “belong” to any culture, even partially, is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, that there is a link between one’s memory and the collective’s. If so, might Slander’s assaults on memory and the myths by which émigré communities in France sustain themselves not appear quixotic?