PERVERSE THEATERS AND REFRACTED HISTORIES. Violence and (Anti)realism in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
PERVERSE THEATERS AND REFRACTED HISTORIES. Violence and (Anti)realism in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the way in which Viet Thanh Nguyen’sPulitzer-prize-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015) reframeshistory by outlining unseen continuities, reimagining the war in Vietnamas a Petri dish for America’s Forever War, as if yesterday’s warsand today’s were one the mirror of the other. The Sympathizer isnot about war as much as about war narratives and the power rationalesthat allow for their unequal dissemination. It tackles the well-rooted ideaof the Second Indochina War as a war that defies representation. In thisinstance, however, aesthetic (un)representability of war is not intendedas a philosophical matter as much as a political issue. The question isnot “Is the war in Vietnam representable?” as much as “Whose representationof the war in Vietnam gets passed down?” In other words,the issue at hand is not representability but representations. All the culturalartifacts addressing the war’s memory, in Nguyen’s view, arefabrications that convey partial perspectives. A narrative about narratives,The Sympathizer is informed by a logic according to which the onlyway to expose this state of things is to put together a fiction at oncerealist and antirealist that with its own existence single-handedly redefinescollective memory as “an arena of competing narratives, an unevenfield dominated by the memory machines of Hollywood” (Chattarji2019: 207). By bending the facts, Nguyen brings into question the powercircumstances that make misrepresentation possible.

• Details
• Contents