Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer – Confession, Torture, and the Psychoanalytic Process

This brutally beautiful book is difficult to remember, to integrate, and therefore to review or discuss.  Traumatic memories have been described as being recovered like paint splotches – as bits and pieces without a narrative whole that links them together.  The narrative that forms the skeleton of this story is not revealed until page 308.  And it is also at page 308 that we plunge from the ordinary every day trauma of the aftermath of war and its remembrance into the heart – and this is a pun – of darkness.

I will tell the story in reverse order because I think that it will help organize what has happened – and will allow me to clarify how this traumatic book resembles psychoanalysis (and in the process perhaps send every potential analysand among the readership running to the hills).  This will, however, likely take away some of the delicious pleasure of reading this book for those who have not yet done so.  The author of the manuscript, who never identifies himself by name – he is simply the Captain, his title in the South Vietnamese army, is clear throughout that he is writing a confession at the command of another.  Why and for what purpose is unclear, and this question nags at us we move more and more deeply into who it is that the Captain is and what he has done.

The Captain was born in North Vietnam.  His father was French – the village Catholic priest – and his mother was his maid, until she became pregnant.  His father disavowed him, though also preached to him and taught him.  His mother, who loved him dearly and sacrificed greatly for him, remained a committed Catholic believer, but the (future) Captain was credulous about his father.  The Captain has two blood brother friends – Man, who is a communist agent of the north and a true believer in the communist way, and Bon, who leaves the North with the captain and becomes a South Vietnamese patriot.  The Captain – the sympathizer of the title – travels to the US to be educated, returns to South Vietnam and serves as an aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese General charged with Military Intelligence and torture of captured North Vietnamese and is in regular contact with Bon.  Unbeknownst to Bon, he also stays in contact with Man and serves as a conduit of information about the functioning of the South to the communists – the Captain is a mole.

The novel/confession begins with the evacuation of Saigon and the captain leaving the country with the General and with Bon – Bon’s wife and child die in Bon's arms on the tarmac as they dash for what seems like the last plane to leave the country.  The Captain, ordered by Man to America to spy on the Vietnamese who congregate there, carries with him a text by Richard Hedd (Dickhead is the Bevis and Butthead level translation of this man’s name), an American who purports to explain in it the Vietnamese culture.  The book is used to send coded messages back and forth between Man and the Captain while the Captain is in America – they write, in invisible ink. the page, paragraph, sentence and word number of each word in their messages as letters to and from the Captain's "Aunt" in Paris.

I have told this in a straightforward and simple fashion that drains all of the poetry, mystery and beauty out of a story told by a true poet who is writing so solidly in the American vernacular that you would swear he was Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson, both because of the cultural references and because of the stream of consciousness style with minimal punctuation.  But I think that the style serves a very different (though also parallel) function than for the Euro-Americans who use it.  What we discover on page 308 – or thereabouts – is that the first 307 pages have been written while the Captain has been in solitary confinement in a re-education camp in North Vietnam.  Even more disorienting, the ultimate reader of the manuscript, unbeknownst to the Captain, is Man, who has orchestrated becoming the commandant of the prisoner camp to which the Captain is taken in order to oversee the Captain’s necessary torture, re-education, and release as a means of preserving his (and Bon’s) life.

The stream of consciousness style, then, or, as we psychoanalysts would say – his attempts to freely associate – is adopted in order to help his captors know who he is – and ultimately that he is innocent.  But of course he is not.  None of us are.  In his description of the capture of a North Vietnamese operative whom he tortured, the captain describes a dialogue with this man, whom he describes as a philosopher, who points out the fundamental contradiction of the western world.  In the court of law, a person is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty, but in the foundational cultural and religious beliefs, that self-same person is guilty of original sin.  The point of the torture that the Captain himself undergoes (and, even though he has read the pamphlets that are the basis for the tortures that he endures, they effectively erode his identity as surely as the Napalm that Man ran through erased the features of his face) is that the Captain is not, as he would portray himself by completely and totally confessing his sins, innocent, but guilty.

The next bit is something that I think bears saying because I think it helps us make sense of the text, but I think it will ring hollow to those who read it without having read the text: the Captain is guilty of nothing.  In the context of the story, he is guilty of having done nothing – both of his sins are errors of omission – he did not prevent a horrible crime against a communist woman (whose name was Viet Nam) and he did not follow the order to stay away from a return to Vietnam, which he felt was justified because he was protecting Bon by coming with him.  He is also guilty of murder – a murder he committed in order to be able to return to Vietnam,  but this is a crime only to himself – he is haunted by the ghosts – but not a crime in the eyes of those to whom he is confessing because the murdered man was a Vietnamese man hostile to the communist cause.

The text is told with the authority of someone who believes he did no wrong.  We live inside our own heads and I think it is possible to believe that all that we have done has been done for a reason.  I remember when my grandfather died – I was about six years old – he was a very upright, but also judgmental man.  I assumed that he had access to my thoughts because he was dead and the dead can see such things (this somewhat crazy thought stuck with me longer than I care to admit – in fact, it is there, or vestiges of it, to this day).  In any case, as he served as a very real representative of my conscience, I was able to avoid his harshest criticism because, after all, he was privy to everything and thus could see – even better than I could – that I was acting in the best way possible given the circumstances.  How could I not ogle that woman?  I was an adolescent male, after all – and he would know that.  I think it takes this kind of confidence – the confidence that the captain had that he was working on behalf of the revolution – that he was doing what the communists wanted – that allowed him to freely and openly confess to all sorts of sins – in part because he saw them as justified, but also because he saw his actions as justified through the eyes that he imagined to be reading his confession.

I think it is this kind of freedom – the freedom to believe that what we are doing is right – that it is justified – that this author is really trying to get at and to undermine.  He wants us to know that American exceptionalism – our ability to overlook our own failures to implement the values that we believe in so strongly when applied to ourselves when we apply them to others – is something that he wants us to wrestle with – the idea that, even though the courts may take the position that we are innocent until proven guilty – he knows otherwise – is an important lesson for us to learn from this text.  But he teaches us this not by preaching (as Brad Pitt does in War Machine – where Pitt nicely demonstrates that the counterinsurgency tactics first articulated in Vietnam inevitably lead to failure), but by applying this to himself. 

Actually, I think, the three split selves in the text are all guilty.  Man, the representative of North Vietnam, tortures his closest friend and most reliable ally because this friend has betrayed him by returning to Vietnam.  When Man is feeling the pain of having his family look with horror at him after his disfiguration, his only solace is that his friend the Captain has it worse than him because he has to live in America.  By returning, the Captain robs Man of his only pleasure.  But, I think more primally, by embracing American culture, as he so thoroughly does in his use of the American vernacular and his American imbued understanding of himself, the Captain has betrayed his heritage.  Finally, Bon, by allying himself with Americans and with the South Vietnamese government has betrayed the ideals of the country that are espoused by Ho Chi Minh, and he feels the guilt of having been responsible for the death of his wife and daughter - something that effectively paralyzes him. 

My rather dry exposition of this somewhat philosophical position takes away the visceral experience of the terror this novel visits on the reader.  In the same way, any description of a psychoanalysis reduces the terror that is at the heart of opening yourself to yourself and to another in the ways that the method invites you to do.  To know what you are capable of – and to accept that, to the extent that you are able to do that not by the exceptional justification of getting a pass from the internal benign grandfather, but by sitting with it – perhaps not in a white room with bright lights on 24/7 while being shocked each time you nod off to sleep – is a deep and terrible revelation. 

Ho Chi Minh’s slogan “Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty” is the graduation bar that the Captain must cross in his re-education.  His ultimate realization, and there is a Zen beauty to this, is that he – as nothing – as he has lost all that he is and was – is more precious than independence and liberty.  The Captain is released from the camp, Man assures that he and Bon will have perilous passage “home” (to the US), and the book ends with the Captain’s asserting his will to live.

I think this is a profound book about the complicated nature of identity.  We are not unitary beings.  We are complex, convoluted, internally contradictory people who are guilty.  I think that the author is proposing that the acknowledgement of our guilt brings independence and liberty.  We are free to acknowledge who it is that we are and what we have done – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  The author of this book is a proud citizen of the USA – and an angry one.  We can learn a lot from him – especially if we allow ourselves to realize that he is encouraging us to recognize ourselves in him – not to turn away.  In doing so, we will see our divided selves (I think it is his own divided self that is so nakedly on display in this tremendous novel).  And, if we honestly do that, if we acknowledge our contradictoriness, this will lead us not into a feared shameful position, but will be a process that, though painful, will position us to move forward – to live – more fully aware of the complicated and messy ways that we do that.    

  

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