Snapshots of authorship and authority in Vietnamese historical writing

Theories of authorship and the question of Asian exceptionalism

Two forces led to the reevaluation of what it meant to be an author, and of the author’s relationship to authorizing and authority, in 20th century critical theory and continental philosophy. The first was the rise of existential thought in the late 19th century, particularly in its Nietzschean form, which posited that moral and ideological statements in literature and politics were in fact manifestations of the will to power, and that the expressions of individuals of moral ideas were actually a part of a power-brokered system in which institutions used moral and legal normative abstractions to manage resentment against them and to convince people to allow their own subordination by participating in power dynamics. ⁷

The second force was the rise of structuralism, largely precipitated by the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics in 1915, which attempted to unite the various subfields of language such as grammar or philology. Saussure did this by delimiting language, excluding speech acts from language (since language is not itself speech) and suggesting that linguists focus on studying the comparative social patterns under which people make meaning out of the multifarious symbols—characters, alphabets, pictures, stop signs—that make up language. ⁸ This approach Saussure called semiology, and it gave rise to the essential principles of structuralist method: that the interactions of social beings can be understood by analyzing the organizational methods and categories through which knowledge and meaning are produced. It also gave rise to one of the key insights of deconstruction: that there is “no outside-text,” because social interaction is all within the structure of negotiated signs and symbols and there is no way of separating the interpretation of the text from the text itself. ⁹

In the late 1960s, two influential works on authorship were advanced on the basis of these two literary and philosophical theories. Out of Nietzsche’s conception of writing as embedded in larger systems of power came Michel Foucault’s “What is an author?,” published in 1969. ¹⁰ Foucault pointed us to the idea that the assigning of an author coincided with a moment in time—modernity—when it became important to individuate ideas. To have authenticity, ideas had to be authorized by an identifiable individual or group of individuals, but at the same time, in the interior of the text, the author as a subject was largely erased. Foucault focused on this productive contradiction: that just as the importance of authorship as a property claim, as the owner of the text, became significant in the 18th century, the authority of the author over the truths of the texts became attenuated. “The author’s name faded away,” Foucault notes, “and the inventor’s name served only to christen a theorem, proposition, particular effect, property, body, group of elements, or pathological syndrome. By the same token, literary discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author function.” ¹¹

The author is not herself or himself individually responsible for the means through which his or her texts are attributed to her or him. Instead, Foucault explained, authorship is a function regulated in discourse by which, in order to count as an author, one’s works must be deemed consistent and legible. The author function is therefore “linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.” ¹² For example, in our contemporary environment, the potentially dangerous or subversive ideas of an author are controlled through a number of checks, such as the economy of the book and journal market, the predilections of publishers, the vicissitudes of peer review, the process of registering a work for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress, the fickleness of distribution networks, and the way in which certain items, like cheque books or menus, are excluded from the realm of authorship. Narrowing the author function allows institutions to control the inchoate multiplicity of significations and voices, and make the author “the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” ¹³ Like the pious exhortations that Nietzsche revealed to be manifestations of the will to power, Foucault’s author function, while seeming to guarantee individual expression, actually functions as a mechanism of control. Foucault is quick to note, however, that his theory should not be subject to universal application; rather, the author function “does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization.” ¹⁴

Emerging from the tradition of structuralist analysis was Roland Barthes’s “The death of the author,” also written in 1969. Barthes theorizes that the act of writing necessitates the death of the author. The act of writing is a process of externalizing one’s thoughts such that:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with of view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. ¹⁵

That Foucault and Barthes were careful to locate their theories in the particular conditions of European enlightenment modernity allowed Asian scholars who were wary of structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to history and literature to argue that these ideas should not be extended to Asia. Those who posit a radical difference between European and Asian ideas of authorship see them diverging at two different points, one sociolinguistic and the other philosophical. The sociolinguistic point has to do with the relational character of terms of address in many Asian languages, including Vietnamese. Vietnamese, like several other Asian languages, lacks any neutral, stable form of reference to refer to a third party, no “she” or “her.” Rather, someone who in English would be referred to by the third person pronoun “she” may be “aunt,” “niece,” or “grandmother,” depending on how her age placed her in fictive relation with the speaker referring to her. In addition, there is no stable self-reference in this system, as fictive kinship is the rule in using the first person singular as well. Thus there is no single way to say “I”; rather, one may refer to oneself as “brother,” “sister,” “teacher,” and so on, depending on a mutually agreed upon relationship between the speaker and the person being addressed. ¹⁸

The sociolinguistic flexibility of the Vietnamese language is seen as having two implications relevant to authorship. The first is that it is difficult to ask questions of “how an author is individualized in a culture such as ours,” or even to determine “the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text,” because there is no such singular relationship. ¹⁹ The author’s relationship to the characters in a history or in a novel, as well as to his or her readers, is dependent on their social standing and relationship. From this point of view, there is no such thing as “individualization” or a “singular relationship” in Vietnamese sociolinguistics, because each person is literally determined by the social context in which he or she is speaking or writing. As Neil Jamieson has argued, “in Vietnam discourse and meanings are embedded in a dialogic process that is distinctly — if not in all ways uniquely — Vietnamese and which to some considerable degree transcends genres and historical periods in Vietnam.” ²⁰ Therefore, the argument goes, Western theories of authorship are irrelevant to a Vietnamese concept because there can be no such thing as an individual author per se.

Those who believe that Western theories of authorship are of questionable relevance in an Asian context might also point to differences in philosophical discourses about writing and authority in Asia. Although the philosophical implications of Vietnamese authorship have been little studied, there is an extensive literature in Chinese studies about conceptions of authorship. These studies generally point out that while literary authority did exist in ancient China and often served to bolster both the state and the elites who acted as gatekeepers to certain kinds of writing, this authority was usually constituted intertextually by these elites as a whole. ²¹ In other words, writing was socially significant in constructions of the state and the public sphere, but this authorship was more collective than individual.

A key to this interpretation is the blurring of the distinction between commentary and authorship in classical Chinese writing. As Martin W Huang has pointed out, there is no precise term for author in Chinese, only concepts closer to “framer” (作, tác/zuo) or “transmitter” (書者, thư giả/shuzhe) of a book. Moreover, in ancient China, writers would avoid calling themselves the “authors” of books, insisting instead that they were only commenting on ideas and texts that had already been established. The classical commentator Jin Shengtan is famous for pointing out that Confucius was careful not to argue that he had written any books, for fear that he would set a bad example for commoners who would then write books of low quality. Instead, Confucius emphasized his role as transmitter of and commentator on the classic texts. ²² Huang concludes that “the concept of ‘author’ in traditional Chinese intellectual discourse was not at all unproblematic, and the boundaries between author and commentator were often crossed, consciously or unconsciously.” ²³ Since the tradition of text and commentary carried over to Vietnamese intellectuals as well, some scholars of Vietnamese literature have made similar claims about the nature of corporate authorship, arguing that “Vietnamese demands the active participation of listeners or readers in pulling together the meaning implied by the words.” ²⁴

When put together, these sociolinguistic and philosophical observations imply that the question of authorship—at least in the way investigated in the last three decades by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and others—cannot be studied in the same way in Vietnam because there is no such thing as an author as such in premodern Vietnamese literature. Rather, authorship was communal and was determined by a layering of interpretations of classic texts through the process of commentary.

Though I would not deny all parts of this interpretation, I would point out that the interpretations of the uniqueness of Asian corporate authorship tend to be ahistorical and reductionist. Asian notions of authorship might change under these interpretations, but their alterity exists only within a prescribed classical Chinese framework. What is more troubling is that some of these interpretations run the risk of reducing the question of authorship to that of a cultural aesthetic. What Foucault and Barthes both contribute is a sense of the author as a political figure immersed in power relations, whereas the claims of the uniqueness of Asian authorship see authorship as cultural rather than political. The author is the one who authorizes, the one who signs, the one who grants a certain notion of political authority. ²⁵ While this article does not engage in reader-response theory, and nor does it claim that the appropriation of authorship as a mechanism of power works the same in every location around the world, it does attempt to see techniques of authorship in Vietnam as attempts to assert authority over a text.

Finally, examining the case of Vietnamese authorship raises the possibility that Foucault’s notion of the interrelationship between the author, authority, and power/knowledge is not limited to a Eurocentric modernist epoch. Foucault’s suggestion implies that the author is never truly an individual; that the processes of review, publishing, and distribution are intermeshed with the social institutions that “authorize texts” for their own discursive purposes. Premodern techniques of Vietnamese authorship thus offer an unexpected and interesting case study for Foucault’s approach. Unlike the 19th and 20th century authorship of Foucault’s analysis, there was never any real discursive illusion of the author as “individual.” Nevertheless, the first two snapshots of authorship suggest that social institutions in premodern Vietnam appropriated authority from authors for purposes similar to those of Foucault’s modern examples.

Similarly, Barthes’s view of the “death of the author”—the purposeful distancing of a writer and a text—takes on a different meaning in the context of these snapshots, such as when the author is changing the authorial voice of a text by rendering it in the vernacular, but it still offers fertile ground for analysis. In sum, this article suggests that we can and should move away from binary assumptions about Western theory and Eastern practice, and that it is possible to do so without giving in to universalistic or static assumptions about national culture.

Snapshot one: Authorial supplanting in the historical annals

The first snapshot of a way in which authority was asserted over a text comes from the reading of the annals, which were accumulated by a series of authors whose number grew over time. Most scholars who have examined earlier histories of Vietnam have agreed that Vietnamese historians operated within the “Confucian” genre of historical writing, in the sense that they modeled themselves after the historical chronologies of the Chinese classical histories such as the Spring and Autumn Annals, which premodern Chinese literati attributed to Confucius, and Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. ²⁶ This is particularly the case for the most significant historical compilations on premodern Vietnam, Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư (Complete Historical Record of Đại Việt), a compilation of history that contained the work and commentary of several different authors over different periods of time in ways that seemingly match the tradition of transmittal, commentary, and collective authorship. ²⁷ However, a closer look reveals that the most recent “author” of the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư, Ngô Sĩ Liên, offered his commentary on the historical records of earlier “authors” not to explicate their writing but to supplant their interpretations of those events, effectively seizing authority from them by reinterpreting their texts to serve his own interpretations.

The Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư is a complex amalgam of three different texts by three different authors. The earliest is presumed to be Đại Việt Sử Ký, which was a text written by the literatus Lê Văn Hưu (1229–1322). After passing the imperial examinations in 1247, Lê Văn Hưu was tasked with writing a history of Đại Việt up until the conclusion of the Lý dynasty in 1225. This history was presented to King Trần Thánh Tông in 1272. He produced a history of 30 chapters, the original of which has been lost. ²⁸ The second text on which the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư is based is Đại Việt Sử Ký Tục Biên (Continued Annals of the History of Đại Việt) by Phan Phu Tiên (c. 1371–c. 1460). In 1455, King Lê Nhân Tông commissioned Phan Phu Tiên to write this text, which was to be a history of Đại Việt from the beginning of the Trần dynasty in 1225 to the end of the occupation of Đại Việt by China’s Ming Dynasty in 1428. ²⁹

In 1479, these two texts were amalgamated by the famous Vietnamese literatus Ngô Sĩ Liên and presented to King Lê Thánh Tông. ³⁰ In this new compilation, Ngô Sĩ Liên edited out large sections of these earlier texts, changing the language used by the earlier authors and substantially reducing the length of their original contributions, while also adding substantial commentaries and employing new sources for the elucidation of Vietnamese history. ³¹ In addition, Ngô Sĩ Liên makes this new text his own by adding substantial commentary—72 comments on Trần dynasty history alone—to these older histories. ³² The result was a 15-volume work that provided a comprehensive history of the Đại Việt polities from the mythical Hồng Bắng Dynasty that supposedly existed nearly 5000 years ago until the beginning of the Lê dynasty in 1428.

What kind of author is Ngô Sĩ Liên? Since he revises old texts rather than inventing an entirely new one, one might argue that Ngô Sĩ Liên belongs to the “transmitter” tradition of classical Confucian commentary. Yet, by redacting, erasing, and adding and superimposing his interpretations onto older texts, it seems that Liên is doing much more than merely “transmitting” old knowledge.

Vietnamese scholars have debated what precisely Ngô Sĩ Liên’s intentions were in compiling such a text. Over the past century, his work has attracted more attention than perhaps any other premodern Vietnamese historian. Early French introductions to Vietnamese historiography focused a great deal of their work on Ngô Si Liên. ³³ Over the past several decades, his work has again been the subject of great interest and controversy. Within Vietnam, a prominent conference was held on Ngô Sĩ Liên in 1997 that produced a lengthy volume of papers, while at the same time Ngô Sĩ Liên has attracted the attention of scholars such as Insun Yu, OW Wolters, and KW Taylor.

The authors of these different works diverge pointedly on the question of what role Ngô Sĩ Liên takes as the “author” of the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn thư. To Wolters, Liên is a moralistic editor who saw his role as that of a kind of didactic censor bent upon imposing neo-Confucian orthodoxy on Vietnamese history. His editor’s pen smoothed over “serious lapses in good manners and social usage.” His comments were “tedious when they are not pompous.” ³⁴ To Wolters, Liên’s ultimate design was to impose a coherency to earlier Vietnamese history by erasing from the historical record any trace of the persistence of a non-orthodox, essentially pre-Confucian Vietnam. ³⁵ Writing more recently, Olga Dror agrees with Wolters’s view. She argues that Liên’s text is “a paroxysm of desire for antiquity” that bears “the clear imprint of a moral agenda that is Confucian.” ³⁶ Insun Yu also endorses that Liên was motivated by a belief that “the nation should be governed in accordance with proper Confucian ethics.” ³⁷ Liên’s aim was to produce an orthodox Vietnamese subjectivity that legitimated the Lê regime by giving the past a veneer of legitimacy.

Not all scholars share this view of Liên, however. For example, KW Taylor has offered a more nuanced analysis of Liên’s role as author of the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn thư. Taylor sees Ngô Sĩ Liên as someone who offers more “detailed” and “subtle” analyses than his predecessors. His Ngô Sĩ Liên is someone more interested in understanding the details of “political calculation.” ³⁸ Liên’s efforts to impose new interpretations on older texts was not only about a desire to impose a certain moral sensibility but about securing legitimacy for certain kings over others—perhaps so that he could serve the political interests of his own monarch. ³⁹

Whether Ngô Sĩ Liên is merely rewriting history to impose a neo-Confucian orthodoxy or whether he is making more complex arguments that have to do with reordering former Vietnamese monarchs so as to serve the claims to legitimacy of the Lê Emperor for whom he was writing, one thing is clear: his “authorship” does not fit into the stereotype of the literatus “transmitter” of ancient knowledge. Rather than merely accumulating and clarifying the history of Đại Việt, the purpose of his comments seems rather often to be correcting previous interpretations or hijacking a text in order to veer its narrative toward his own particular concerns. In one passage about the controversial King Lý Thánh Tôn (1054–1072), for example, he corrects what we may presume was a previous interpretation of Lê Văn Hưu by arguing that some “say that he was excessively kind and insufficiently tough, but I am not satisfied that this is the case.” ⁴⁰ This kind of direct refutation suggests that something more than “transmitting” is afoot.

An additional example of hijacking the narrative of the text is contained in Ngô Sĩ Liên’s comments about the death of Trần Quốc Chân, the father of the Empress and a General well known for his success against Champa. The text itself, presumably based on Phan Phu Tiên’s original, laments the tragic and criminal circumstances surrounding Quốc Chân’s poisoning, which was perpetrated by proponents of the crown prince, Prince Vương. But Ngô Sĩ Liên’s comments direct our attention away from the palace intrigue and the tragic death of an important figure and toward the problems of imperial succession, pointing out that Trần Quốc Chân had taken the moral high ground by advocating that the king wait for a more legitimate heir, a son of the Empress, before declaring a crown prince:

The position of an heir to the throne is a crucial foundation of the country, and it should not be done prematurely. Having heirs from the legitimate Empress will prevent the multitude of concubines from plotting to take the Emperor’s throne. Even if the emperor has been on the throne for a long time and has many children, if the Empress has not yet had a legitimate offspring, by what authority can he declare an heir? ⁴¹

The Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn thư is a convenient way to examine the “supplanting” authorship strategy, not only because it is an amalgamation of several texts revised over time but also because it is a text of great significance in premodern Vietnam. It is, however, not the exception to the rule. Many premodern Vietnamese texts share these same features, from multiple or unclear authorship to material that is added or subtracted by later authors in order not only to supplement but also to supplant previous versions of texts. Various versions of the collection of both historical and legendary tales Việt định u linh tập (Book of the Departed Spirits of the Viet Realm), for example, contain added stories, commentaries, and personalities designed to expand the pantheon of Việt heroes from the past to serve present needs. ⁴² And there are many other cases of multiple authors or unclear authorship in which writers quote other texts without attribution and then add to them to prove their own points. ⁴³

Snapshot two: Asserting authority in the vernacularization of classical texts

The second snapshot is an analysis of the process by which classical Chinese texts are altered by being shifted into the vernacular. ⁴⁴ Like “supplanting,” vernacularization involves an author neither supplementing existing knowledge through the process of commentary nor staking out his or her own position over a text like contemporary versions of authorship. Instead, texts are vernacularized through a process that looks on initial analysis like a translation process. For example, Vietnamese texts intersperse Hán (classical Chinese) text with Nôm (demotic Vietnamese) “explanations” of the Hán. In addition, one can find texts with a different “translation”: from Hán to Quốc Ngữ (Romanized Vietnamese).

As a means of transliterating proper names from classical Chinese, Nôm may date to as early as the second century CE; however, there is no evidence of its use as a literary language until the 13th century, and there are no extant texts from before the 15th century. ⁴⁵ Quốc ngữ, on the other hand, was a system to convert Vietnamese into a Romanized alphabet that was devised by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century as a means of learning to preach the gospel more quickly. It therefore reflects the orthographic conventions of Portuguese, interspersed in more recent centuries with considerable French influence as well. ⁴⁶

Sheldon Pollock has suggested that the vernacularization of language and society in Asia is an indication of an early movement toward modernity, as language and institutions became more accessible over time to broader population groups. Though his argument is focused on the vernacularization of Sanskrit, he extends his arguments to Vietnam as well. ⁴⁷ Picking up on these claims, Alexander Woodside has asserted that the vernacularization of civil religions in Vietnam was part of a 17th and 18th century Asian “modernity.” ⁴⁸

In an article about the politics of translation in a parallel text that includes both Hán and Nôm, Keith Taylor has explained that vernacular translation involves “four categories of phenomena” that define it as more than mere transcription: “shift of meaning, explanation, interpretation, and error.” ⁴⁹ In order to describe these four categories, Taylor uses as an example the Buddhist text Cổ châu Pháp Vân Phật bản Hành Ngữ lục (Record of the Acts of the Cloud Dharma Buddha at Co Chau), a prose text in Hán that includes a “phrase-by-phrase translation” into Nôm that Taylor believes is not so much a translation as a “retelling,” since the “ideological intent of the translator was sufficiently exuberant to produce what can only be viewed as a new work.” ⁵⁰

In shift of meaning, writers intentionally divert the meaning of a sentence into a vernacular direction in a way that represents a departure from the signification of the text in its original classical Hán. The purposes of these shifts in meaning are not always clear, but they seem to reflect a desire to represent experiences familiar to those of lower class status to whom the vernacular texts were primarily addressed. ⁵¹ In explanation, authors of the vernacular add on sections of text to provide additional details to readers who may not be familiar with the vocabulary used in the classical Hán language. Interpretation is distinguished from explanation in that it pertains to “semantic” rather than “lexical” differences between the classical and vernacular. When it is the themes or concepts, rather than the vocabulary, which are unclear to a reader of the vernacular Nôm language, our translator provides an interpretation of that language. Finally, Taylor characterizes “error” as arising from “misunderstandings” or “misreadings” of text. ⁵² This process becomes interesting when Barthes’s conception of the death of the author is applied to it. Here, whatever “original” author might have existed for the text is totally transformed by the process of the work being read by later generations of Vietnamese intellectuals, and then being reoriented and translated into a popular register of speech. In this way, translation may be regarded as an act consistent with reader-response literary theory.

Of these categories, each, except for error, provides us a useful insight into the interaction between translation, intertextuality, and authorship in premodern Vietnam. These three categories make it clear, first of all, that many premodern “translations” are not really translations at all. They are not, in fact, attempts to find equivalency for words between languages perceived to be discrete—what Roman Jacobson, in his tripartite definition of translation has called interlingual translation. But neither are these texts models of intralingual translation—modes of explanation within the same language. ⁵³ It does not seem as though the author/translator of the text—a person identified in the text of Taylor’s example as Viên Thái—conceived of his project as providing a word for word translation between one “foreign” language and another. These were clearly both indigenous languages, adopted freely as a natural part of intellectual culture. ⁵⁴ Yet neither did he think about Hán and Nôm as perfectly equivalent. The two languages appear rather to have a different register reflecting the different social classes that used the languages—mostly male classical scholars and officials throughout East Asia for Hán, and Buddhists, poets, novelists, and women for Nôm. The fact that there is significant overlap in these languages explains the supplementary nature of the project of “translation” supplied by vernacularization in Vietnam. In other words, the translation from Hán to Nôm is more of an elaboration rather than a “translation” because the two languages are neither fully separate from one another nor are they within each other. Nôm texts contain substantial overlap from, and frequently use Hán words in their original meanings; likewise, Nôm meanings and words will occasionally also interfere in Hán texts. This interaction between Vietnamese languages indicates a middle space between interlingual and intralingual translation.

This “middle space” implication of the process of vernacularization in language has similar implications for the transformation of Vietnamese authorship. Because the authors of vernacularizing texts perform an act that changes the meaning and register of the classical, vernacularization also represents a middle space between the conception of authorship as “transmittal” in the East Asian Commentary tradition and a more individualized modern conception of authorship as asserting one’s authority and ownership over a text. Rather, the process of shifting classical texts to a vernacular register between the 17th and early 20th centuries manifests a different conception of authorship that is neither fully communal nor fully individual. These vernacularizing texts represent a middle register in which they rely on the meaning of the classical texts but neither “transmit” them faithfully through the process of commentary nor define themselves as departing from them.

Snapshot three: Authorship, authority, and civil service examinations

The third snapshot depicts the alteration of the authority of the classics as seen in policy question responses on the highest-level Confucian examinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These questions and responses are particularly fruitful avenues to examine changes in discourse because in the late 19th century the Emperor’s policy questions repeatedly asked candidates to comment on what the dynasty should do about French military encroachment. Such was the explicit question asked in 1862, 1868, and 1877, and French authority was also implicitly at the heart of the questions asked in 1904, 1910, and 1919.

Through the course of these examinations, we can see a transformation in discourse in which the authority of the four books, five classics, and dynastic histories on which policy question responses were traditionally based is slowly attenuated. This occurred because both the Emperor and his educational officials and the candidates themselves gradually lost faith in the ability of the classics to offer useful information and advice to deal with the French threat. Both the Emperor and the candidates came to the conclusion that the French were substantively mentioned neither in the classics nor the histories.

Yet because faith in the universal civilization which was represented by the system of civil service examinations was premised on using the classics as precedential knowledge from which most important decisions could be derived, concluding that the proper procedure to understand and respond to the French was outside of the authorship and authority of the classics fundamentally altered the epistemological dynamics of literati authority. Since the French were outside a civilization based on the classics that was previously assumed to be universal, intellectuals in Vietnam came to conceive of at least two particular civilizations—a European and an Asian one—rather than one universal civilization.

This in turn led them to inquire into the nature and development of European civilization, which led to a second change in the conception of the development of authority. The major sources for this knowledge were European, which tended to articulate European conceptions of historical development. Rather than rectifying the present by attempting to emulate the behavior of the past, as was the method of literati following the canon, Vietnamese intellectuals were now exposed to a conception of European history that was undeniably teleological, a conception that privileged the unfolding of events as the story of a European civilization progressing forward based on the ideas and discoveries of great men and women. In short, this transformation introduced literati to a particularly modern aesthetic.

In the examination of 1862, the Tự Đức Emperor presented the first of several policy questions to candidates on the topic of responding to French aggression. He asked students to provide him with a solution not only to the problem that the south of the country had been defeated and effectively colonized by the French, but that the north was in the throes of a major rebellion. In that context, he exhorted the candidates to find something in the classics that would tell them how to react: “What precedents regarding the forcible annexation of territory can we study to use their experience to assuage our grief? Again and again, the classics direct our decrees, and we turn to them for help.” ⁵⁵ Having considered all standard information from the classics on defeating a foreign enemy, the Emperor urged candidates to dig deeper into the classic texts and find more profound explanations rather than merely choosing whether to attack the French, defend their territory, or negotiate.

Successful examination candidates then responded by finding creative ways to appropriate classical texts. One candidate, Nguyễn Hữu Lập (1824–1874), suggested that the classical concept of thông biến (tongbian, 通変), which was explained in commentaries on the Yijing, or book of changes, provided a template for action. This concept, which might literally be translated as “rectifying borders” but metaphorically refers to the continuity and ubiquity of processes of change, could be used to combine strategies to respond flexibly to this unusual situation. ⁵⁶ Lập suggested therefore, based on the advice of this classical commentary, that the dynasty could simultaneously negotiate with the French by paying them a substantial sum, as the Song Dynasty in China (960–1279) had done in paying off the Kitan Empire, while also defending the nation by punishing those who were seen as sympathetic to the French. ⁵⁷

By 1877, the discursive assumptions of the Emperor and the candidates had changed entirely. In that year, the Tự Đức Emperor asked:

The strange countries of the West have been established for a very long time, since the time people have existed. Since ancient times, this has been the case. Why is there no record of their origin or of them in previous times? How have we completely lacked knowledge of how to regulate them? What precedent should we use? In past times, these matters were under control. Even when that was not the case, unauthorized action would prompt investigations. How is it that we cannot regulate them? For the domestic, there is the king; for the foreign, there is diplomacy. If there is idleness domestically, then the foreign will cause trouble. How can we use taxes and duties to achieve these ends? ⁵⁸

Snapshot four: Authorship, teleology, and individualism

The final snapshot in this article will consider this modernist politics of authorship, in the context of the development of the notion of dueling particular Eastern and Western civilizations. Naoki Sakai has proposed that in order for interlingual and intercultural translation to occur, there has to be a perception of cultural purity and thus of cultural difference. Writing in the context of early modern Japanese intellectual history, Sakai proposes that once early modern East Asian intellectuals sought to determine the whole and original meaning of the Chinese classics in order to pin down the difference between the classical tradition and the new modernity. To do this, they had to “recover” the ancient past from its many centuries of commentary tradition through devising procedures of determining what the “original text” was in order to translate it to a modern audience. Though this task of discovering an “original” Confucian tradition was an impossible one, the task of pinning down the past was ultimately one that defined a new modern present. This was because the operation of finding a pure past created a dichotomy between the pure past and the compromised present, whereas the commentary tradition merely blended past and present together in a continuum. ⁶⁴

Another historical phenomenon that had a profound effect on 20th century Vietnamese conceptions of authorship is what Sakai has called the “co-figuration” of Asia and the West. Emerging from the political and military challenges of the 19th century, East Asian intellectuals sought to define their own identity by endorsing a false dichotomy between “Asia” and “the West,” and by defining Asian traditions either in their opposition to Western tradition or as perfectly equivalent to them. In either case, the purpose of this move was to show that these intellectuals’ own societies could measure up to the West. But the real result of this move was an adoption of European conventions of thought as non-Western intellectuals across East Asia adopted the conventional conceptions of the world. If “the West” had authors, “the East” had to have authors too, who were equal or greater in their capacity to write than Western authors. In their opposition to Eurocentrism, Sakai notes, Asian intellectuals became even more Eurocentric than their Western counterparts. ⁶⁵

While the Vietnamese traditions of supplanting and vernacularization involved more active agency on the part of writers, they share certain aspects of Sakai’s description of the commentary tradition that modern Japanese intellectuals sought to undermine. Premodern Vietnamese texts reflected a tradition of adding on and elaborating onto other texts in a way that precluded either an epistemological break from the past or a defining of the past qua past. The implication of this was that, while there may have been such a thing as a premodern politics of authorship, these political dynamics did not operate on a level of defining and critiquing the authority of single discrete authors of texts.

In addition, crisis created by the colonization of Indochina at the hands of the French in the 19th century brought Vietnamese intellectuals and writers to a crossroads and created a number of fundamental changes that eventually led to new kinds of authors and new conceptions of authorship in Vietnam. The first changes related to language. By the 1910s, the French colonial administration in Indochina had endorsed a policy of using the Romanized script (quốc ngữ) in schools in the three Vietnamese provinces of Indochina as a means of increasing native literacy. French officials also began to authorize the publication of newspapers and magazines in quốc ngữ under the theory that this would help their efforts to spread French cultural values and aid in the transmission of pro-French propaganda. ⁶⁶ Since Vietnamese anticolonial reformers also generally favored a turn to Romanized script, the result was a relatively rapid changeover from Hán and Nôm texts to texts in quốc ngữ. The growth of a new middle class who read quốc ngữ and were interested in the publications of reform groups only further spurred this literary change. ⁶⁷

The shift to quốc ngữ also facilitated printing on printing presses designed for Romanized alphabets. In the 1920s, print journals, magazines, and other printed words exploded in popularity in major cities throughout Vietnam. As literacy increased, so did access to readily available materials to read. Printed materials began to be published in very large publication runs, which in turned spurred on religious, social, and political movements. These materials grew at the same time as a widespread cultural movement in the cities toward the “modern” and toward “Europeanization.” Elite Vietnamese competed with one another to adopt the newest European fashions and to prove their skill at using the French phrases and the French language as a way of showing their status. ⁶⁸

Naturally, these changes would have profound effects on Vietnamese language and literature as well. The first consequence was the production of Vietnamese literature in French, which was written by Vietnamese authors both in Vietnam and in Europe. ⁶⁹ The shift to quốc ngữ had even more profound influence over the Vietnamese language. In the 1920s and 1930s, authors increasingly turned to European literary genres. In theatre, for example, new styles such as cải lương (reform) theatre were established, and comedies and dramas were introduced in Vietnamese.

In addition, essays and novels adopted European styles and formats. The changes were so rapid during this period that leading intellectual Phaạm Quyýnh was forced to write a series of articles defining what essays, plays, and other forms of writing were. ⁷⁰ This use of categories led Vietnamese authors in the 1920s and 1930s to compartmentalize their works and to distinguish histories from historical novels, biographies from chronicles, and so on. ⁷¹ These new definitions put pressure on authors to craft their works in ways that conformed to the genres that they were adapting from European traditions.

At the same time, changes in the structure of the Vietnamese language were affecting these new literary developments. As Allison Truitt has noted, the new explosion in vernacular writing in the 1920s and 1930s coincided with the development of the non-relational first person pronoun tôi, or “I.” The pronoun tôi, which literally means “subject” and was used in premodern times in Nôm as a personal pronoun to be used by people when addressing the king, was adopted in the 1920s as a generic first person “subject” to approximate the same general first person subjects in European languages. The formulation of a universal “tôi” also allowed authors to posit a universal “us,” ta in Vietnamese. In its original context, tôi and ta were used in nationalistic writings to talk about mất nước ta (the loss of our country) in ways that would create a clear-cut “us” and “them” that was impossible in the purely relational terms of earlier Vietnamese terms of address, in which the “them” could only be “them” in certain contexts while not in others. ⁷² The advent of tôi, and its common usage among authors who were increasingly writing novels, poems, and plays in ways approximating Western genres, allowed Vietnamese authors to create a singular conception of authorship. One was no longer an “author” only in relation to a text, or depending on who was being addressed; one could now be an author in the abstract. As Ben Tran has shown us, this alteration goes together with the ideological shift from collective to individual identity, as it becomes much easier to articulate individualism in a language that has a personal subject such as tôi than without it. ⁷³

As Sakai notes, this new concept of authorship results from changes in the 19th and 20th centuries in which concepts assumed to be universalistic appear instead as binary oppositions of particular categories. Rather than having a single Confucian ethical tradition that is “transmitted” throughout the ages, 20th-century Vietnamese authors now conceived of a “tradition” that was opposed to “modernity.” Rather than having universal genres of literature whose boundaries were blurred by commentary, supplementation, and supplanting by authors through the ages, and the vernacular “translation” of texts, 20th-century authors now opposed “Asian literature” with “Western literature” and responded to “the challenge of the West” with nationalistic writing. The irony of these moves by Vietnamese intellectuals, of course, was that the forms of nationalistic writing being used to oppose the West were in fact the result of Vietnamese intellectuals embracing certain genres of Western literature. Thus, authorship in Vietnam was transformed by new concepts of the world by Vietnamese intellectuals in which “tradition” came to be seen as opposed to “modernity,” “Vietnam” to the “West,” the individual to the collective. ⁷⁴

The result of these binary oppositions in the new quốc ngữ literature of the early 20th century was a new politics of authorship. Nationalist authors used their positions to oppose Asian history to the West and to emphasize new polemical and oppositional attitudes toward authorship and history. The nationalist intellectual Phan Bội Châu (1867–1940), for example, wrote prolifically about how Vietnam would be transformed from its moribund traditional past into a “New Vietnam” through modernization, and wrote a history of the colonization of the Ryukyu Islands by Japan as an example of the perpetual colonization that would occur to countries that failed to become modern. ⁷⁵ He also used new genres, such as the autobiography, to emphasize his nationalist agenda. ⁷⁶

Naturally, this new discourse made authors individually responsible for their works. Authorship thus became politicized, as authors could be smeared for works that were “collaborationist” or otherwise insufficiently nationalist. They could also be accused of plagiarizing their work and for claiming authorship for a work that was not theirs. These concerns did not come to the forefront in premodern Vietnamese literature, precisely because in the traditions of “supplanting” and “vernacularization” authorship was always presumed to be corporate. Without the concept of a singular author who is singularly responsible for her or his work, accusations of copying or plagiarism made little sense, since such behavior was considered normal, even laudable, in the transmission of texts. ⁷⁷ Yet modern oppositions changed that.

One example of the political ends to which authorship could be used is found in the criticisms that other professional writers and historians launched against Phan Trần Chúc (1907–1946), who had written a number of histories and historical novels about significant figures in the resistance to the French occupation of Vietnam in the 19th century. Entrenched historians and intellectuals attacked Phan Trần Chúc for distorting Vietnamese national history by portraying a patriotic emperor as a weak child, as well as for making up facts and documents. ⁷⁸

Another example of this politics of authors concerns the authorship of “prison diaries”—accounts written by Communist leaders of their experiences while incarcerated by the French, usually in the 1930s. In practice, these accounts allowed leaders of the Communist Party—who were often from middle-class or upper-class backgrounds—to establish their credentials as Communists by showing their own experiences of struggle. Thus, these revolutionary prison memoirs are a part of the effort of the Communist Party to “construct and promote an official public history of their rise to power.” ⁷⁹ As such, these memoirs often became subject to this new spirit of the politics of authorship. A particular example of this is Hồ Chí Minh’s Nhật Ký Trong Tù (Prison Diary), which was essential in erasing the fact that the President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the most visible leader of the Communist Party did not, in fact, have similar experiences and hardships to his fellow Communist party members while incarcerated. As Nguyễn-võ Thu Hương has shown in this issue, Hồ Chí Minh’s diary, released more than two decades after his experiences in prison, has become a focal point of the politics of authorship, as well as the works of fiction attributed to him. ⁸⁰

Hồ Chí Minh is said to have written this diary, which was originally a series of poems in Hán entitled Ngục Trung Nhật Ký, while incarcerated in a local jail in Jingxi, China in the early 1940s. ⁸¹ Twenty years later, these diaries were widely disseminated throughout the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This time lag, and the fact that Hồ Chí Minh’s experiences were so different from other Vietnamese Communists who were imprisoned by the French in the 1920s and 1930s, has led to questions about the diary. For many years, overseas Vietnamese scholars have questioned whether Hồ Chí Minh wrote his prison memoirs at all. For example, Lê Hữu Mục’s 1990 study Hồ Chí Minh không phải là tác giả “Ngục Trung Nhật Ký” (Ho Chi Minh is not the author of the Prison Diaries) advances a number of well-known claims about the Prison Diaries, including the claim that the original Hán text had printed dates on the cover that indicate it was written in 1932 and 1933, dates which are inconsistent with the dates of Hồ Chí Minh’s incarceration in 1942. ⁸² Picking up on this argument and combining it with circumstantial evidence about the language used in the original texts, anticommunist Vietnamese have seized upon this controversy as a way of questioning Hồ Chí Minh’s revolutionary authority. More than 60 essays have been written that theorize that the real author of the diary is Trân Dân Tiên, who was a contemporary of Hồ Chí Minh in China. ⁸³

There may be good reasons to suppose that these accusations have merit. But whether or not Hồ Chí Minh wrote the prison diaries is ancillary to the main point this episode illustrates about authorship in 20th century Vietnam. The important point is that leaders in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam thought it imperative to publish this diary as Hồ Chí Minh’s “authentic” work in 1960, which then served as a support for his authority as an icon, a “father” of Vietnam, someone whose “revolutionary credentials” were “in line with his colleagues.” ⁸⁴ The need of party leaders to publish such an “authentic” account of his life and to ward off accusations of his being aloof from rank and file party members indicates that a prevailing notion of authorship as individual subjectivity existed in Vietnam by that time. Hồ Chí Minh was constructed as a historical subject through an appeal to his “legitimate experience,” and this experience was contingent on the legitimacy of the claim that he authored his own diaries. In this more modern conception that seems to resonate with Roland Barthes’s writing on the dissolution of the author, Hồ Chí Minh as an author seems produced by the text, rather than the other way around. ⁸⁵ Similarly, one would presume that overseas Vietnamese would not be focused on the question of whether Hồ Chí Minh authored his diary unless such authorship was crucial to the authority of his legacy as the father of the nation.

In the 20th century, censorship also mediated the relationship between authors and the state. Censorship was nothing particularly new in modernity. In imperial times, heterodox texts, including Christian or Buddhist texts, that were thought to be threatening to the authority of the dynasty, were frequently censored. ⁸⁶ In addition, taboo characters—such as those that contained elements of the names of the Emperor and key members of the imperial family—were also banned. ⁸⁷ In the 1920s, with the rise of potentially anticolonial quốc ngữ literature, French colonial officials increased their censorship efforts, particularly in the northern and central parts of Vietnam. French police would extensively censor books before publication, and would not hesitate to shutter the offices of newspapers and magazines found publishing nationalist or anti-French material. ⁸⁸

From the 1950s to the 1970s, censorship also prevailed in both South and North Vietnam. In the Republic of Vietnam in the south, most publications were subject to the approval of government censors. ⁸⁹ During the Buddhist crisis of 1963, the Ngô Đình Diệm regime temporarily closed universities and arrested students protesting against it. ⁹⁰ Additionally, particularly in the Điệm period, the state steered readers to publications of their liking by ensuring that figures friendly to the government’s interest were on editorial boards; this system was augmented by the United States Information Agency, which provided funding and material assistance to journals, radio programmes, and other forms of artistic expression that were anticommunist or otherwise assisted in propaganda campaigns against the north. ⁹¹

In North Vietnam, state-run academic institutes and publishing houses focused on producing a unified national spirit in the 1950s and early 1960s. ⁹² The 1950s also saw the revival of the private publishing houses that had dominated Vietnamese cultural and literary life in the late colonial period. ⁹³ The Nhân văn-Giai Phẩm affair, however, changed state attitudes toward private publishing when a number of writers were accused of publishing anti-government essays and poetry in a several private journals. ⁹⁴ By 1958, the North Vietnamese state took firm control over publishing and intellectual activity. After that time intellectuals became direct servants of the state, and publishing became a state-sponsored activity. ⁹⁵ State restrictions on intellectual activity were confirmed by the mid-1960s efforts to stamp out “revisionist” influences in Vietnamese literature in the context of increased party debate over US-Vietnam war military policy and controversy over Vietnam’s position in the Sino-Soviet rift. ⁹⁶ Finally, the announcement of the đổi mới (renovation) spurred a brief period of intellectual openness in the late 1980s, which was stimulated when Communist Party general secretary denounced the “dogmatism” in Vietnamese literature and urged intellectuals to tell the truth and if necessary even make claims that were critical of the party. ⁹⁷ By the late 1990s, however, the tide had turned against this level of political openness, with writers and poets such as Dương Thu Hương, Tiêu Dao Bảo Cự, and Bùi Minh Quốc being arrested and detained. ⁹⁸

Despite this lengthy history of censorship, the relationship between censorship and authorship is not as simple as a story of mere restriction or muzzling. In the premodern period, writers avoided imperial censorship by developing sophisticated techniques of double meaning, metaphor, and allegory to make their political positions somewhat less transparent. ⁹⁹ In the French colonial period, authors employed a variety of strategies to thwart censors. In the first two decades of the 20th century, literati used literary references from classic texts such as the Yijing to communicate with each other in ways not easily comprehended by the French. During the explosion of Vietnamese newspapers and publishing houses in the 1920s and 1930s, authors and editors of journals that had been shut down would simply change the title of their publication and re-open in a different venue. Thus, as had been the case in the colonial era, censorship frequently forced authors to be more creative about the use of figurative language in their communication. ¹⁰⁰ Censorship also fueled the use of pseudonyms and other efforts to protect authorial identity. Even under today’s oppressive literary environment, ideas find their ways to readers. Even as purely political ideas are still subject to strict censorship, one lasting legacy of the late 1980s spirit of openness is that the era of the stultifying strictures of socialist realism is gone, replaced even in official publishing in Vietnam by a rich literary field influenced by phenomenology or even poststructuralism. ¹⁰¹ Even those writers who wish to challenge the politics of the regime can frequently air their opinions with overseas websites online, which the Vietnamese state finds more difficult to censor.

By the second half of the 20th century, the function of authorship in Vietnamese literature had thus shifted into a political arena, reflecting an individualistic view of an author’s responsibility for his or her text. This shift in authorship from the collective to the individual is a result of a new sensibility produced in the 20th century in which intellectuals defined “tradition” in opposition to modernity and “Vietnam” in opposition to “the West.” Both of these moves were promoted by Vietnamese nationalist authors who wished to produce a Vietnamese national identity as separate from the West, but did so with tools of analysis that were Western in their nature. They adopted “dynamics of attraction to and repulsion from the West” as their mission, and thus embraced new concepts of individualized authorship that persist today.

Conclusion

Over the course of the past 15 years, scholars specializing in East and South East Asian studies have begun to emerge from a traditional attitude of resistance to structuralist and poststructuralist theories of authorship. The reasons for Asianists, especially historians, to have traditionally been reticent may be several; as Rey Chow has pointed out, a common discursive move in Asian literary criticism is that of a critic who “makes a gesture toward Western theory, but only in such a way as to advance the point that such theory is inadequate, negligent, and Eurocentric.” Such critics then point to particularistic elements of Asian tradition that make these models irrelevant to the study of Asian history and literature. ¹⁰² In the case of authorship, the objection to the structuralist and poststructuralist format came from the nature of the commentary tradition in East Asian intellectual history, in which the ideal of a text involved many authors “transmitting” ideas through the generations and in which commentators would ideally “commune” with authors to produce texts. ¹⁰³

While not necessarily rebutting this view of authorship, this article has made some observations from examining the politics of authorship in several texts. This work is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of authorship in Vietnam; it merely offers an analysis of a few specific texts and authorial situations. However, from this analysis it is possible to make some tentative conclusions. First, the changes in authorship in Vietnam across time were more complicated than the “transmitting” commentary model would suggest, as authors found ways to make their stamp on works. Authors would “transmit” or “comment” on previous works to compile new works, but would do so, in part, to rebut or reinterpret what had come before them, not to faithfully transmit it. Additionally, beginning in the 17th century, authors of texts written in Nôm or quốc ngữ added on to classical texts by making them accessible in the vernacular. These works, while technically “translations” of existing texts, are actually largely independent of the texts they are translating, as they reinterpret and re-explain material to allow it to make sense to the audiences likely to read vernacular texts.

By the 20th century, Vietnamese authors increasingly grasped a world in terms of the binary oppositions between tradition and modernity, Vietnam and the West, and author and reader. There was no firm or particularly new break with the past, as existing strategies of understanding the author remained in place and were supplemented with new conceptions of teleological development and the role of the individual. In addition, the early 20th century saw an explosion of publication in Vietnamese cities that can be attributed to the introduction of modern printing technology and increases in literacy that came with the widespread use of quốc ngữ. The serial publications and books that suddenly came to be mass-produced were different as well. Because of the interest in modernity and Westernization, the new texts often came in genres—from novels, to dramas, to comedies—that either mixed Vietnamese and Western styles or were entirely European in inspiration.

Conceptions of authorship in Vietnam were altered along with changes in mentality and genre. By the 1930s, authorship became both increasingly individualized and politicized. The influence of individualistic ideas, both culturally from the Westernization movements and linguistically with such changes as the introduction and widespread use of the first person singular pronoun tôi, led to a different understanding of texts in which authors could be held individually responsible for their actions or critiqued for not being properly part of a particular ideology, for example for not being sufficiently nationalistic. Questions of plagiarism, improper sources, and whether someone “really was” the author of a text arose as ways of rendering authorship politically pragmatic.

It would be a distortion to say that 20th-century Vietnamese engaged in a mere mimicry of French conceptions of authorship and genres of literature. Rather, following Karl Britto, it is more accurate to say that the literary elite felt a “bifurcated sense of identity” that led them to “a profound concern with the problem of interculturality.” ¹⁰⁴ In the colonial setting of the early 20th century, for example, some authors would use their fluency with the languages and concepts of the colonizers to write back against collaboration with the French, as in the case of Nam Xương’s 1930 play Ông Tây An-Nam (The Western Annamite), which describes a Vietnamese scholar who returns from many years of study in France and refuses to recognize his family, refuses to speak Vietnamese, and detests all things Vietnamese from traditional clothing to smells and food. In this case, a modern genre (the satirical play) with modern language choices (French and quốc ngữ) is being used to propagate an anticolonial message. ¹⁰⁵

By the mid-20th century, due to the influence of the ideologies of modernity, modern nationalism, and the bifurcation of “East” and “West,” the politics of authorship in Vietnam shared many of the same features that have been critiqued by structuralists and poststructuralists from Barthes to Foucault. Though techniques of authorship were localized in particular ways, it remains the case that the status of the author, whether corporate or individual, remains inexorably tied up with social structure and with the mechanisms of power. Returning to Craig Reynolds’s observation of the reasons for the resistance of South East Asian scholars to these theories of authorship, it seems that such thinking is dependent on the assumption of the cultural particularity of East and South East Asia that did not bear itself out in practice in 20th-century Vietnam.