Vietnam and the colonial condition of French literature: Andre Malraux, Marguerite Duras, Linda Le

This study of twentieth-century and contemporary French literature departs from the notion that neither cultural identity nor cultural production can be given as pure or homogenous, and contributes to a new discourse on the French literary "canon" by identifying its underlying, yet often ignored, cultural heterogeneity. I read André Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Linda Lê as exemplars of three phases of the French novel between 1926 and 2009 – the existentialist novel of the interwar years, the postwar nouveau roman, and the contemporary "francophone" immigrant narrative – and correlate each writer's formal advances with his or her experiences of colonial Indochina or postcolonial Vietnam. Even the most recent histories of twentieth-century French literature fail to fully interrogate the potential influence of colonialism on shifts in hexagonal literary production. Critical inquiry often centers on literature's relation to other French cultural spaces, notably painting, music, and the cinema. My goal, by contrast, is to consider it in relation to the physical spaces of other cultures, and to Vietnam in particular. Further, moving beyond a tendency to focus on the colony as a theme or object of representation in literature, this dissertation explores the ways in which certain developments in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French novel can be read as aesthetic and political responses to contact with the colonies. The primary goal of the project is to uncover the textual traces of a Vietnamese colonial experience in the works of these three authors, and through this specific example, to insist on the central role of colonialism in the history of French literature.;The project begins with Malraux, whose first novel I read as a twentieth-century manifestation of a nineteenth-century exoticist gesture and as the foundation for the subsequent articulation of the author's existentialist vision in his Asian trilogy. Conditioned by Malraux's formal affinities with literary exoticism and his first-hand experience of the moral depravity reigning in colonial Indochina, the novels written between 1926 and 1933 create a critical distance in which the author strives to expose and respond to the absurdity of the human condition. What is more, this response bears marked stylistic affinities with other colonial-exotic novels of the period. Just two years before Malraux won the Goncourt for La Condition humaine, Duras left Saigon to pursue her studies in Paris. Though she spent her youth on the margins of colonial society in Indochina and spoke fluent Vietnamese as a child, critics have only recently begun to question what effect this early cultural and linguistic experience may have had on her literary innovation. Focusing on the shift from a politics to a poetics of métissage in Duras's autobiographical writing, I analyze the linguistic structures of the later work in light of her early fluency in Vietnamese. In the final section, I examine the ways in which Linda Lê's trauma narratives serve as a metaliterary commentary on a larger crisis of literary representation at the end of the twentieth century. Taking the postcolonial condition of liminality – between Vietnam and France, trauma and healing, French and francophone – as my point of departure, I focus on Lê's use of literature not only to mediate between the particular and the universal, but also to think through the formal transformations of French literature in the twenty-first century.