​​​​​​​Scholar Phan Ngoc "Living a small but useful life"

1. At the age of 95, scholar Phan Ngoc, the last lecturer of the generation of teachers who “laid the foundation” for the early Faculty of Literature and Pedagogy (1954), the predecessor of the social sciences and humanities of the Hanoi Pedagogical University and Hanoi University of Science, the remaining erudite and talented national scholar of an education system in which literature, language, history, and philosophy were indistinguishable… has passed away to the land of eternal peace. Passing through the rapids of a turbulent era, he reached this great age thanks to his pure soul, who spent his whole life only knowing how to enjoy books, and also thanks to the devoted care from all the love of his grandmother. He left behind an example of the spirit of diligent self-study, of the persistent will to overcome the difficulties of a time, of the ability to use more than ten foreign languages ​​and dozens of translations rich in genres from literature to science and diverse in languages ​​from English, French, Russian, German to ancient Chinese, Latin, Greek, etc. Standing before a giant monument of intelligence, we cannot rush to fully admire the magnificence, because that massive store of knowledge, countless researchers at home and abroad have pondered, discussed, even cited as a truth, from the bright, suggestive ideas to the solid system of arguments. Choosing my limited knowledge, I choose a different perspective. I want to record Phan Ngoc's suggestions (perhaps for me alone) from his contributions to literature, linguistics and cultural studies, the fields in which he left many marks.

When I grew up and followed my grandfather to visit Mr. Phan Ngoc, all the “yesterday stories” of his life had “flowed like water to the east”. I still remember clearly the beautiful impression I had when I first met him. That day, he had surpassed the threshold of “ancient and modern”, but his strong yet gentle temperament, his leisurely yet serious demeanor… were exactly like my imagination of an Eastern sage coming from somewhere far away in the clouds and sky. From that attraction, I was attracted even more strongly by his stories. From my childhood in the “cultural homeland” of Hue to the difficult days in Viet Bac, from Hong Kong chatting with the great Sinology master Nhieu Tong Di (饶宗颐) to the conference room of the prestigious Paris Sorbonne University, etc. I often visited my grandparents to listen to him share about the extremely rich life he had lived. That was the given name Nhu Thanh, which he later used as a pen name, which his father took from the "second to last" sentence in the immortal work of Song Confucianism - the poem Tay Minh: "The poor prefer to wear jade and beautify the city.” (Truong Tai) to clarify more clearly the main name was named after a mountain where he was born (Ngoc mountain, Tinh Gia, Thanh Hoa); that is, he asked President Ho for help so he could return to his hometown to pick up his father in time to escape the mistakes of a time of extreme leftism; that is also the story about the article “The task of literature is not to illustrate policy” and the consequences that followed, etc. But every conversation, whether long or short, hurried or leisurely, eventually returned to the never-ending thoughts about expertise. I understand that, for him, where is the value of this life. I remember his works:

2. Over the past hundred years, discussions about Kieu, comments on Kieu and research on Kieu have attracted many scholars, because The Tale of Kieu is a masterpiece of the nation. In works written about The Tale of Kieu,Learn about Nguyen Du's style in The Tale of Kieu(basically completed in 1965 and then continued to be edited until the first edition in 1985 published by the Social Sciences Publishing House) is a milestone that cannot be ignored. There are very meticulous researchers who have to admit: "This work makes the academic world look good", and there are also (somewhat extreme) conclusions that: "The greatest study on Kieu is by Phan Ngoc". Normally, research works on Truyen Kieu only focus on the text of the work to analyze the beauty of the words, the humanistic spirit of the plot, and then depending on the writer's personal perception, praise or ridicule. As a result, there have been many times when polemics have arisen around the fate of Kieu. Phan Ngoc stood at the center of those debates to clarify his own but convincing understanding of Truyen Kieu.

First of all, he realized the need to build an objective toolkit - the field of stylistics, a sub-field that applies linguistic knowledge to interpret literature. In addition to establishing theoretical tools and stylistic operations for analysis, he paid special attention to the empirical approach from form but envisioned the harmonious compatibility of form to express content, in order to find out the genius points of Nguyen Du, who did not learn from the ancients and was also not like the times. What Phan Ngoc honored Nguyen Du for was the things that the author of Truyen Kieu had done that no one had achieved before and could only be followed later. With knowledge of history and society, Phan Ngoc proved that the central idea of ​​"talent and fate are different" that people often mentioned in the analysis of Truyen Kieu was the story of the late Le - early Nguyen period with many authors and works that had also mentioned it, but Nguyen Du generalized it into a contemporary issue. "We need to remember that there is a story of fate and talent because of the Tale of Kieu.” [P. Ngoc 1985; 52]. Along with establishing a basic cognitive ideology, Nguyen Du's talent is proven in his sharp expression of emotional levels combined into tight structures to reasonably describe the inner developments of each character, not simply recounting the events like Kim Van Kieu story by Thanh Tam Tai Nhan or more broadly the traditional Chinese chapter novel genre. According to Phan Ngoc's analysis, Nguyen Du was very knowledgeable about humanistic concepts (or philosophical trends) to apply Buddhist thinking methods, he even had profound knowledge of many genres to blend the achievements of Nom stories, ballads and especially the contrasts in drama, aiming at "elevates The Tale of Kieu to the first model of the great psychological novels we know.” [P. Ngoc 1985; 198].

To have convincing comments about Nguyen Du's genius, Phan Ngoc set himself very strict requirements for his working process. He put the "distinctive" criterion as the focus for comparisons throughout the study. From a specific phenomenon in the work to establishing a prominent distinctive feature of Nguyen Du's style is a process of frequency statistics, comparison with history and era, comparison with other authors and masterpieces. For example, when analyzing verses in The Tale of Kieu, Phan Ngoc always uses contrast to draw conclusions. Or like calculating the ratio of verses and images also shows the reliable value of the quantitative method that he pays great attention to. There are some opinions that Phan Ngoc's thorough application of structuralism with extremely strict formal analysis operations was only modern at the time the work was carried out (around the 60s) and by the time it was published (mid-80s), the work had revealed its limitations because the Structuralist movement had been replaced by newer movements in literary studies. It is true that Phan Ngoc's research method has a methodological basis from structuralism in linguistic research, and many analyses are even influenced by the American Descriptive School, a school that is particularly interested in form in the structural linguistics movement. However, do not forget that, consistent in taking the expressive form of Truyen Kieu to study Nguyen Du's style, Phan Ngoc also has his own complementary views: "…this form is good, not because it is good in itself, but because only this form can successfully express the chosen content.” [P. Ngoc 1985; 6]. Obviously, with the sense of a Vietnamese researcher, he understood the role and value of semantics. That is why in the chapter on Nguyen Du's Grammar, his explanations of semantic grammar have the shadow of Tesnière's theory of Linguistics and Fillmore's very modern Grammar of Methods.[1]. Along with that, surely, Phan Ngoc cannot help but pay attention to the decisiveness of content for every specific formal expression. And he succeeded in identifying content by form to see more clearly their compatible expressive value in the masterpiece that makes a genius author like Nguyen Du and Truyen Kieu. Although the dialogue and guidance of a person who is always enthusiastic about sharing as if to reveal all the deep thoughts are still somewhat incomplete, the effort to use his knowledge to overcome aesthetic perceptions and aim to explain the hidden depths of a literary phenomenon, in order to open a new path of perception is also a task that if not a learned and sophisticated person, it is not easy to do.

3. After months in the documentation room of the Faculty of Literature, in the early 80s, Phan Ngoc was invited to the Southeast Asia Institute. And from here, he was free to present his ideas. The bookLanguage Contact in Southeast Asia(co-written with Pham Duc Duong, published by the Southeast Asia Institute in 1983) was an initial breakthrough, “liberating” the perception of the linguistic approach, which only cared about the internal structural system, which had long dominated Vietnamese studies. In the first chapter introducing the phenomenon of language contact, Phan Ngoc once again set out the task of explaining the influence of a language on the internal structure as well as the operating mechanism of another language, not simply the discrete, random borrowings of a vocabulary class, a few grammatical phenomena, etc. And he sought the answer in non-inflected languages ​​such as Vietnamese and languages ​​in Southeast Asia, the subjects for which the bilingual approach proved necessary and effective.A bilingual or multilingual approach specific to the Southeast Asian region has an objective basis.” [P. Ngoc 1983;19], due to a number of reasons analyzed by Phan Ngoc such as geographical distance, the process of conquest, the need for economic and cultural exchange. From here, Phan Ngoc examines the semantic contact between Vietnamese and Chinese in the Sino-Vietnamese word group and the influence of the grammar of European languages ​​in contact with Vietnamese, aiming to explain the linguistic sense of Vietnamese people.

In the chapter discussing the semantics of Sino-Vietnamese words, from the classifications of forms and combinations of Sino-Vietnamese elements, he examines the relationships that determine the nuances of the content of Sino-Vietnamese words and points out that: “The Sino-Vietnamese story seems more scholarly than the pure Vietnamese one…first of all because of the B element[Chinese origin element]lies first and second due to the fact that this B element has more or less productive power. The less productive power, that is, the fewer words the element creates, the more scholarly and difficult to understand it is.” [P. Ngoc 1983; 180]”. Explaining the methodological contact between two languages ​​of the same type such as Chinese and Vietnamese in terms of content, Phan Ngoc introduced the concept of “polyphony”, a prominent feature that adds semantic nuances, affects acquisition, which may have been noticed by many people but cannot be generalized. As for grammar, the imitation of European grammatical structures (specifically French, Russian, English) into Vietnamese is a case analysis of the phenomenon of contact between two languages ​​of different types, aiming to demonstrate the great effect of this phenomenon on the modernization of Vietnamese. For the first time in Vietnamese linguistics, he compared Vietnamese grammar before and after contact with European languages, to see the differentiation of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. thanks to accompanying elements such as su, viec, cai, da, se, very, mot, cach, etc.; to see with the tools of prepositions and conjunctions that nouns and verbs together with noun phrases and verb phrases have gradually been leveled; and also to see the transformation between nouns and verbs (classification), especially the transformation of simple sentences into multi-level complex sentences with the expansion of subordinate clauses or into multi-component sentences that perform the same syntactic function with continuous-length clauses, etc. The goal that Phan Ngoc aimed for was to outline a grammatical model that is semantically compatible with Vietnamese corpus, an uninflected language. This idea is a very modern suggestion for further Vietnamese linguistic research to deepen and expand, whether analyzing Vietnamese grammar in the synchronic aspect or studying the development of Vietnamese grammar in the historical direction.

With three parts written in a book of less than 300 pages, Phan Ngoc has made an important shift in the cognitive process. He asserted that a new approach - polylingualism should and must replace the monolingual approach if one wants to properly study the ontology of Vietnamese and other languages ​​in Southeast Asia. But hidden behind that is the discovery of the nature of contact as an essential characteristic of the ethnic groups in this region. At the same time as the shift in approach, Phan Ngoc also made a shift in the field of research. He went from literary philology to cultural studies.

Scholar Phan Ngoc takes a photo with Professor Pham Duc Duong and the author (2009)

4. Unlike researchers who delve into each discipline and then expand to discuss more general, more abstract issues, generally called culture, Phan Ngoc is consistent in shaping a science called Cultural Studies with its own subjects, methods and terminology. In his typical and outstanding workVietnamese Culture, a New Approach(Culture and Information Publishing House first published in 1994 and reprinted many times) starting the books discussing culture that followed. He emphasized three central terms:relationship, choiceandrefractionto analyze the object and method of cultural studies. The object of research of this science must of course be “culture” but not vaguely but with a connotation that Phan Ngoc clearly defines: “The object of culture can only be the reciprocal relationship between the symbolic world and the real world, expressed in types of choices, expressed in a particular refraction present in all fields." [P. Ngoc 1994; 114-115]. He proves that because of that invisible relationship, people will model what is in their minds (symbolic world) into concrete objects and activities outside (real world).[2]). Real objects are not culture, but the thread that connects them with human intelligence is culture. And because of that relationship, each ethnic group has its own choices to form different cultures. Phan Ngoc borrowed the concept of refraction from physics, the phenomenon of light rays passing through different environments will have different deviations, to study the penetration of an external phenomenon into an internal cultural layer through the selection mechanism. At this point, it seems that the line of thinking about contact in language has been extended, expanded to the scope of culture. Along with distinguishing the object, his analysis revolves around the task of trying to establish a technical operation to explain refraction in culture, more specifically Vietnamese culture. Operational theory, as Phan Ngoc identifies, is the steps to find a way to explain the phenomenon consistently and closely, not the story of providing general knowledge. He was very successful in explaining Nguyen Du's consciousness expressed in The Tale of Kieu and initially tried to apply it to the study of Vietnamese culture.

Scholar Phan Ngoc and his wife take a photo with Professor Hoang Thi Chau, People's Teacher Le Hong Sam and the author (2014)

Starting from the form to deeply explore the content, value and meaning of those forms, the work Vietnamese Culture, a new approach has contributed an important voice about the identity of Vietnamese culture: "Cultural identity is therefore not an object but a type of relationship. The relationship combines and joins together many very different roots but creates a miraculous organic unity… the Vietnamese are masters of the art of bricolage.[3]” [P. Ngoc 1994; 108-109]. Phan Ngoc is very convincing when pointing out that contact is a prominent feature due to the geographical and historical conditions of Vietnam. Therefore, acculturation with contacts from many different major cultural sources and then transcending the aggregation and assimilation of different manifestations of foreign cultural phenomena on the “filter” of the native consciousness is the identity of Vietnamese culture – a composite culture.

Of course, the exploratory work cannot be completed as the theorist wishes, and it is difficult to immediately satisfy the academic community, especially in a field as vast and detailed as culture. However, the systematic ideas and persistent efforts to research and build cultural studies into a truly legitimate science to decode the Vietnamese consciousness are worthy of Phan Ngoc being mentioned as a face of modern Vietnamese social sciences and humanities.

5. From the foundation of epistemology, specialism and operationalism, works with such fundamental research hypotheses, with such layered proofs of arguments, and such attractive and inspiring arguments, are the recognitions given to Phan Ngoc really appropriate? But it seems that he did not care much! He chose the way of conduct of a person influenced by Confucianism. Quietly without complaining and quietly without demanding. There are opinions that Phan Ngoc wanted to build his own theory. This is understandable! Because he has the character of a Confucian scholar, and a "crazy" Confucian scholar from Nghe An who is poor but studious and values ​​literature (Phan Ngoc always admits that he is a "crazy scholar"), deep inside he is a very orthodox person. And an orthodox Confucian scholar will always be motivated by a legitimate need: to express his own opinions. Opinions are the common purpose of life for all those who have courage and intelligence.

Phan Ngoc did not think about fame, much less about profit, but he always had a desire to contribute to the country. In his confidences, he often mentioned the motto of his life: "Live a small but useful lifeWith his not-so-small works, raising questions for the academic community to continue to ponder and debate, creating a foundation to inspire the next generation to continue to explore and perfect, Phan Ngoc lived a useful life as he always wished.