The voice that carries everything: history and confession in Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The sympathizer"

The focus of the present study is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, "The Sympathizer" (2015), in its double capacity of historical novel and confessional narrative. "The Sympathizer" does not deal with the war in Vietnam as much as with Vietnam War narratives and the power rationales that allow for their (unequal) dissemination. In Nguyen’s perspective, all cultural artifacts addressing the war’s memory are to be seen as fabrications that always convey partial perspectives. This study claims that Nguyen’s answer to this state of things was devising a fiction that was in turn based on distortions, but deliberately so. This fiction is informed by a logic according to which the only way to expose the power (un)balances underlying the industries of memory is to put together an implausible narrative that with its own existence questions the reliability of the others. In the case of "The Sympathizer," as this study demonstrates, this is accomplished via a patent rejection of realism. This rejection is to be read as intentional and as part of a political/aesthetic project aimed at rethinking the war and its afterlives in memory under a new critical light. By bending the facts, Nguyen brings into question the power circumstances that make misrepresentation possible. "The Sympathizer" is a “thriller of ideas,” a piece of criticism written in form of genre novel. Spy novel tropes are but screens concealing a more challenging class of narrative. By pairing the work with Nguyen’s essay/manifesto, "Nothing Ever Dies" (2016), we derive a picture in which Nguyen’s fiction and nonfiction are part of one same “fict-critical” project. Every oddity within "The Sympathizer" is thus to be explained as a “strategy of implausibility” meant to sew political discourses into the story. By having a spy protagonist from the 1970s that thinks like an ethnic studies professor from the 2000s, by merging plots of cinematic classics and B-movies, by showing Vietnamese communists dressed as mad scientists using CIA methods of torture, and a number of other such oddities, the novel goes far beyond the mere necessity of opposing hegemonic memories with suppressed histories, to embrace instead an aesthetic of distortion and infidelity meant to unsettle easy dichotomies of victims/victimizers typically found in other Vietnam War narratives. Key in this respect is also the adoption of the confessional mode. My contention is that all the oddities can be accounted for by bearing in mind that the whole novel takes place inside one man’s head. All the stock characters, names-function, and general weirdness of the story can be explained by the fact that the novel is structured as a first-person narrative in which the hostile circumstances that ignited the autobiographical impulse are made evident by the textual frame itself. A coerced confession penned by an unreliable narrator and addressed to a hostile audience is the narrative pretext for a metafiction aimed at exposing the invisible connections that tie stories with power. All implausible elements, ironies, and modernist/expressionist solutions one can find in the novel should always be read in the context of a narrative that is intradiegetically “artistic.” In the metafiction of "The Sympathizer," Vietnamese reeducation camps become MFA workshops, commandants become teachers, and political commissars become demanding editors willing to revise people through the words they produce. The fact that every dialogue is reported without quotation marks suggests that the narrator’s voice contains every other, that all the characters are to be seen as literary recreations of ‘real’ people filtered by an unbridled imagination. In essence, the novel is a parable, the parable of a prisoner forced to write his own history until he becomes an artist that sees through the limits of language and audience reception. This parable underlies the idea of a scholar/novelist grappling with the expectations of a publishing industry that pigeonholes every “ethnic” American author into the ill-fitting role of a memoirist/representative authorized to speak on behalf of a whole community.