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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Linda Lê

Linda_Le_2010_(2) 2010 Wikiwand CC BY-SA 4.0.jpg
Linda Lê, 2010 (via Wikiwand CC BY-SA 4.0)

Linda Lê was born in 1963 in Dalat, Saigon to a French mother and a Vietnamese father who was an engineer. Due to an incursion in 1968 by North Vietnamese troops in to South Vietnam, the family was forced to relocate. The exodus was traumatic, with the young Lê encountering corpses on route. Although Lê rejects the reading of a direct ‘parallélisme’ between the worlds depicted in her texts and mid-20th-century Vietnam, she has also stated that she feels that Vietnam itself is like a dead body carried around inside her, ‘J'ai l'impression de porter en moi un corps mort. C'est sûrement le Vietnam que je porte comme un enfant mort’. Visions of dead and dying bodies, often with severed heads or limbs or in states of decomposition haunt Lê’s writing and the imaginations and nightmares of her narrators. Nevertheless, such trauma is not depicted merely in the pursuit of representing Vietnam itself. It has wider resonances. As Jack A. Yeager notes in 2000, ‘Lê blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, French and Vietnamese, the personal and the plural.’

In 1969 the family moved to Saigon. In an interview with  Catharine Argand in 1999, Lê identified this time as one in which her sense of security was ruptured. The external threat was complicated by a breakdown in the relationship between her parents, ‘[t]out a basculé lorsque nous nous sommes installés à Saigon. Je suis passée du paradis enfantin à l'enfer. J'avais six ans, la ville était une fournaise et les rapports entre mes parents s'étaient profondément dégradés. A partir de ce moment a commencé la chute, l'impression d'être damnée.’

In Saigon Lê started to study at the French lycée. She spoke French at home and had access to her Francophone mother’s library as well as the school library. She claims to have read Balzac and Hugo avidly and to have known that she would become a writer. She has also reported being drawn to harsh subject matter in texts nominally directed at children, relishing fairy tales such as that of the little match girl who freezes to death. In the interview with Argand, she states ‘J'éprouve une attirance pour les êtres funestes’. She reprised a horrific fairytale style in some of her own texts, particularly in Lettre morte (1999) in which the narrator’s lover ‘Morgue’ metamorphoses in her dreams into a bird of prey and a vengeful swordbearer.

Despite being drawn to dark reading material, Lê also presents the acts of reading and writing as a type of ‘salvation’. This view is underscored in Calomnies (1993) in which reading is presented as a type of refuge from a stressful society and writing as a means, albeit an imperfect one, by which the 'mad' and marginalized might gain a voice. Lê has professed that she only once doubted literature’s capacity to ‘sauver celui qui s'en approche’ and that was after her father’s death and her subsequent breakdown. Even in extremis, however, she eventually found authors that she felt spoke to her situation, naming Tolstoy in particular as one she felt had attempted to reconstitute his life through writing, in the face of personal crisis.

In 1977, two years after Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese troops, Lê, her mother and three sisters left for France. Lê transferred to a lycée in Le Havre, where a literature teacher introduced her to the works of Proust. Her non-French-speaking father remained behind in Vietnam. Although he survived the occupation of Saigon and lived the best part of another two decades, the motif of the abandoned father figure occurs in many of her novels. The disturbed narrator of Voix (1998), for example, has recurring visions of her dead father, including one in which he appears in a cloak of flames next to her bed, demanding ‘Pourquoi ne m’as tu pas sauvé?’

Lê spent the years from 1977 to 1981 at a lycée in Le Havre, where she found a sympathetic literature teacher who introduced her to the works of Proust. Encouraged by her teacher, she applied to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris and was accepted in 1981. From there she went on to study at the Sorbonne.

The 1980s saw Lê’s earliest works published in quick succession: Un si tendre vampire (1987), Fuir (1988) and Solo (1989). Lê does not regard these novels as equal in standard to her later work, and they do not always appear in formal bibliographies. To support herself she worked as a preface editor for Hachette. A collection of her prefaces has been published in the anthology Tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999).

In the early 1990s Lê began to establish herself as a more mature writer, coming to greater public attention when Juilliard published Les Évangiles du crime to critical acclaim in 1992. Mimicking the form of four gospels, the text consists of four stories that explore characters’ deaths and suicides within wider power relations. In 1993 Lê moved to Christian Bourgois Éditeur, starting a fruitful publishing relationship that has lasted to date.

Lê's beloved father died in 1995 as he was preparing to come to France for the first time. The two had carried on an intense correspondence, but had not seen each other for nearly twenty years. Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time, for his funeral. After his death, Lê reported suffering ‘d'hallucinations, de pensées suicidaires, de conduites paranoïaques’. She had lost not only a father, but the man she claimed was her ‘lecteur ideal’, leaving her in ‘[un]monde sans dieu’.

The type of mental disintegration that Lê experienced after this bereavement, which led to her own hospitalization is explored in both Voix and Lettre morte (1999). Images of a dead and abandoned father and the destroying of precious letters haunt both texts. In Voix, for example, the daughter character burns the letters from her deceased father; he returns in a horrific vision and pulls the burnt, blue-inked papers out of her body. In Lettre morte, the narrator has a dream in which she tries to cradle her father’s head after the lover ‘Morgue’ decapitates him, but Morgue ties her to a tree to punish her for destroying their correspondence. The most horrific incidents and dreams in these texts feature father and daughter pairings.

Yet Lê has stated that she does not wish these novels and Les Trois Parques (1997), which also ends with the death of a father figure, to be read as veiled autobiography. She has aimed for the expression of a more universal sense of loss, mediated by specific styles, ‘J'ai tenté […]atteindre une dimension presque universelle, ne pas rester dans l'autobiographie, faire de la mort du père une mort symbolique. C'est pour cela que Les Trois Parques appartiennent au registre du mythe, Voix à celui du rêve et Lettre morte à la fantasmagorie’. The idea that the narrator of profound loss cannot be reduced to Lê herself is also underscored by the use of multiple narrators at the start of Voix, a series of mental hospital patients who each articulate an experience of falling, suffocating and wanting to strike out at God because of their great sense of hurt and abandonment.

The need to get beyond a state in which suffering is all-engulfing is addressed in Les Aubes, published in 2000. The male narrator, reports experiencing suicidal tendencies from the age of ten, and longs for relief. Blinded by his third suicide attempt, he reviews his life, his parents’ destructive marriage and his idealization of his father’s mistress ‘Forever’, a writer who comforted him after his first suicide attempt, yet later died of anorexia. The narrator’s blindness has an ambiguous quality – it grants him insight and freedom from the ongoing sight of physical corruption that haunt Lê’s imagination, yet it also isolates him. The novel has been read as a critical parable of the life of a writer. Autres jeux avec le feu, an exploration in 14 parts of the relationships between writing and death, was published in 2002.

Lê’s most recent novel Personne was published in 2003. It reprises a fantasmagorical writing style, also traced in Lettre morte. It centres around an encrypted, fragmented text allegedly found in a computer’s memory, that relates a museum guard’s account of ‘[les] inquiétants phénomènes qui se déroulent sous ses yeux - les peintures s'animent, les marbres palpitent de désir de vie - et ses impressions sibyllines sur Prague’. Like other texts by Lê, the novel is constructed along multiple viewpoints  and challenges conservative notions of what is ‘real’.

2004 saw the publication of Kriss: suivi de, L’Homme de Porlock. The principal novella, Kriss, is a modernisation of the Electra complex, where Kriss herself awaits the return of her brother to exact revenge for her mother’s murder of her father. Vietnam appears war-torn through the eyes of the other, since the murdered father in question is an American Vietnam War Veteran. The themes of absence of the father, judgement of the mother figure and mythological representations all make a reappearance here.

Le Complexe de Caliban (2005) and Au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau (2009), Lê’s most recent work, as well as Tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999), construct a triad of non-fiction works, which discuss the importance and specific influences of literature on Linda Lê as a young girl. In the former, Lê pays homage to iconic French writers such as Hugo, Céline, Montaigne, Proust and Flaubert, the discovery of whom founded in her a love of French literature as a child in Saigon. She interprets the Caliban Complex as the heretic state of the foreign writer who is forced to express themselves in a language which is not their own.

In Au fond de l’inconnu Lê names authors who she found influential in her adult life as a writer. She does not restrict herself to French literature, but recognizes the work of Robert Walser, Ladislav Klíma and Ingeborg Bachmann, among 13 others. Brief portraits of each reveal Lê’s profound respect for and adoration of both their individual craft and solitary, often fatal, manner in which they chose to live their lives.

Written only two years apart, Conte de l’amour Bifrons (2005)and In Memoriam (2007), Lê’s last fictional publication of the decade, are connected by a fixation on suicide, itself not an uncommon theme in her work. The former novel sees Lê return to the narrative scene of Voix: une crise, a psychiatric hospital, where two suicidal young protagonists Ylane and Yvan fall impossibly in love. The latter novel allows Lê to explore both the exile she attributes to her own father’s flight from northern to southern Vietnam and the compulsion to write about one’s loss. Her protagonist, Sola, was a writer. She has committed suicide at the outset of the novel, while her life is narrated by the besotted brother of her lover. Throughout the course of the novel the reader experiences Sola’s father’s exile from Persia in Paris, his desolation and eventual suicide. Just like Lê herself, Sola is inconsolable, even a lifetime after the death, using writing as a cathartic exercise to express guilt, regret and loss.

Updated by Alexandra Kurmann (Sydney)