Professor Tran Ngoc Vuong: Literature is action

1. There are repetitions that, when thinking about them, the similarity, even to the point of coincidence, makes it impossible to think that it is a coincidence. I want to talk about the choices of Tran Dinh Huou and Tran Ngoc Vuong when they went to the Soviet Union, an important turning point in their lives. Both of them made choices that were not easy to understand for outsiders and "insiders". In the mid-1950s of the last century, it was hard for anyone to imagine that Tran Dinh Huou, a communist party member, when setting foot in the Soviet Union, would choose as his research subject a philosopher, a thinker of China in the pre-Qin period, a thinker who, at first glance, had little connection with Vietnam and Vietnam at the time when it had just ended the resistance war against France and begun the construction of socialism.

Tran Ngoc Vuong was no exception. The time he studied in the Soviet Union (1988-1993) was the period of Perestroika and then the collapse of the Soviet Union. The wind changed direction and the door opened. Western rock bands set foot and performed in places that only a few years earlier they could only reach by sports plane, landed, received long prison sentences and were then returned as prisoners of war and spies. The divisions and antagonisms of the Cold War had temporarily subsided. Russia became more open and tolerant of itself and the world. Many legacies of the past were re-evaluated. Many researchers once considered “heretics” were rehabilitated and even promoted. Western ideas and research theories were received, not as enemies but with a much friendlier attitude than before. Formal studies, psychoanalysis or even structuralism, post-structuralism at least, have been introduced in a very complete and systematic way. It is worth mentioning an ironic but very true fact that at least, until today, the best dictionary of modern Western Philosophy that we have is the dictionary published by the Social Sciences Publishing House in 1996, which is a translation of the dictionary compiled in Moscow in 1991. Saying so, to see the terrible changes of the times and academia in Russia at the end of the reform period and in the years when the Soviet Union collapsed.

In such a context, with the responsibility of renewing academics in the country, a graduate student would certainly be easily attracted by new, novel theories, attracted by formal or psychoanalytic studies, structuralism. In the academic context in Vietnam in the 80s of the last century, those theories were not without great effect in adjusting the view on literature, adjusting the approach to literary reality which had long been dominated by a sociological perspective that sometimes became vulgar, forgetting or degrading the aesthetic and personal creative nature of literature. However, Tran Ngoc Vuong had another choice. He pursued the typology of the author, an approach that at that time had more or less become classical, even in the sense that it was no longer fashionable. It should also be said that this was also the time when in the West, theses about the death of the author were making noise and blowing its heat to cold Russia. And to make that choice, Tran Ngoc Vuong abandoned another choice: abandoning academia to bring materialism from the realm of theory to the realm of practice.

Professor, Doctor, Meritorious Teacher Tran Ngoc Vuong

The miracle is that this seemingly conservative choice has created a work with many discoveries, a monograph that has been ranked as a classic by the academic community: The Typology of Literary Authors - Confucian Scholars and Vietnamese Literature. Developed from the profound ideas of researcher Tran Dinh Huou, the monograph for the first time presents in a complete, systematic and profound way the appearance of a type of author who plays a particularly important role in the formation of artistic literature in Vietnam. It is a genius cut when through one type of author, one can imagine other types of literary and intellectual authors who play an important role in the creation of Vietnamese history and culture. And in this aspect, Tran Ngoc Vuong's contribution is not small. It can be said that after Tran Trong Kim and Tran Dinh Huou's articles on Confucianism, readers can have a different view of Confucianism, present through human portraits and different from the view that has dominated the academic world for decades, associated with systems that are often simplified about feudalism and patriotism. Choosing the Confucianist typology to do his thesis in the Soviet Union, Tran Ngoc Vuong received the most quintessential, most humane and humanistic part of the academic scholarship of Russia and the Soviet Union. That is classical Russian philology and Orientalism. That is the important foundation for creating basic science in the field of philology, the white foundation that Confucius, the Saint of Confucianism, once told his students. Deep beneath that choice is a strong desire, paid for by the sufferings of life, sufferings that are not academic, for a fundamental science of lasting value, something immortal that guarantees the future, as Hoai Thanh said.

2. Read the works of Tran Ngoc Vuong, fromTypology of literary authorship… viaVietnamese Literature: A Separate Stream Between a Common SourcearriveVietnamese entities viewed from letter coordinates, we can see a concept that he often repeats: paradigm. If language is a reflection of thinking, then paradigm is the concept that most faithfully reflects Tran Ngoc Vuong's way of thinking. As a researcher of philology but above all, a researcher of humanities, Tran Ngoc Vuong's perspective is always a holistic one. That direction is revealed right from his first monograph on the typology of literary authors. Taking the author, the creative subject, as the center of the survey, in his work, that creative person is always placed in intricate relationships with biography, including hidden, deep parts that only those who "immerse themselves" (as he often said) in documents can see; with the times, in the complexity and multidimensionality of history (not just a history that is simplified and extremely politicized); and above all, of the historical, ideological, and philosophical foundations on which the act of writing is built. Literature is viewed throughout its history, with all its connections and discontinuities. Therefore, even if you are not an expert in modern literature, if you read carefullyGeometric type… by Tran Ngoc Vuong, we can still see the reincarnation of Confucian literary talent in many successive periods, even when this type of author no longer exists. And it is absolutely not a wordplay when his second book is titledVietnamese Literature - A separate stream in a common source. The unique national literature is decoded, analyzed, read, explained and interpreted through placing it in the common source of history and history of ideas of Vietnam, East Asia and the world. And as a matter of course, his third monumental work has gone beyond the scope of literature. It is an ambition to find the essential elements, the constant characteristics, the most essential laws of the Vietnamese entity throughout history, seen from words that are not only literature. For that reason, Tran Ngoc Vuong's works are not only a narrow reference source in the field of philology but also provide extremely important suggestions for related fields such as history, history of ideas and history of political science.

Photo: Jackie Chan

If we speak in the author's own words, from the works of Tran Ngoc Vuong, we can see the image of a special type of scholar. That is the type of person who blends the qualities of an expert and a scholar. Each of his articles and works is an exhaustive exploitation, "going deep" (still the author's own way of speaking) of a problem in a single approach. However, that exhaustion is extremely productive and suggestive. That is because each of his problems is placed in extremely complex links to other fields of knowledge. To do that, researchers need to build their knowledge in many fields. It can be said that Tran Ngoc Vuong belongs to the type of researcher - encyclopedist, which in today's era, when the professionalism and depth of research disciplines become extremely complex, is increasingly lacking in academic life. He is the continuation of a tradition of Dao Duy Anh, Truong Tuu, Dang Thai Mai, Tran Dinh Huou, Ha Van Tan..., a tradition without which it would be difficult to have what is called true basic science.

3. It is not by chance that in his entire life of literary research up to today, what Tran Ngoc Vuong has chosen is not the text or the genre but the author. Reading his essays on Nguyen Trai, Nguyen Khuyen, Phan Boi Chau and especially Tan Da, one can see that he does not deny the complexity of the human entity, does not turn his back on the hidden and deep areas of biography. However, in him, there is a resolute refusal to reduce those hidden areas to biological impulses or individual desires in the style of classical psychoanalysis. At this point, Tran Ngoc Vuong is not unfamiliar with psychoanalysts after K. Jung. For him, a person, even an artist, is first and foremost a social creature. Literature, for him, is not a game of words, a pure liberation of creative impulses, but first and foremost, a taking on social responsibility. Perhaps that is also the reason why Confucianism, the most worldly doctrine among East Asian ideologies, became his lifelong obsession. And not only that, he also brought that very concept into his research and academic work. Understanding that, it is inevitable that all of his most recent works are works that directly reflect on the fate of the nation, on the issues of today's society, on the sovereignty and existence of the Vietnamese people and the Vietnamese nation in the modern world. For Tran Ngoc Vuong, literature or research absolutely cannot be an intellectual game, no matter how noble, but must be an act of taking responsibility for society, a critical voice of an intellectual. For him, literature is the door to understanding people and the nation, writing literature is also a way of taking responsibility, an act where the danger of misunderstanding is always close. It is a continuation of a tradition of intellectual responsibility, a tradition that was perfectly realized in his teacher, Professor Tran Dinh Huou.

Looking back at Tran Ngoc Vuong's monographs, we can see that his most passionate, profound and beautiful writings are his writings about Nguyen Trai and Phan Boi Chau. They are definitely not just cold, objective discoveries in the style of empirical science, but the reality of an aspiration, an immense aspiration for the sublime. That is also the reason why he almost never writes about contemporary literature, an era lacking heroes. In the hustle and bustle of today's life, those works are always a reminder of something indispensable, something "needed more than a hundred thousand other things" (Hoai Thanh's words), something without which life lacks meaning: a belief in the truth and meaning of life itself.