Le communisme vietnamien (iv)
from Céline Marangé of l'Institut de Recherche Stratégique de l’École Militaire
Index. Point with the index between a thumb and middle finger to the index of a book. It indicates the contents and points you inside.
Index des noms. Index of names which in French are also nouns. In either language an index tout court would be an index of nouns, not all of them, but the ones you choose.
So you must always engage a professional to index your book, the wife of the ambassador of the United States to San Lorenzo advises the author Jonah on their way to the end of the world. She will spare you the embarrassment of revealing what you think is important about what you wrote.
In her author Kurt Vonnegut’s day the very brightest and well-prepared women did work like indexing to perfection. Katherine Hepburn played them in movies.
Index des noms de personnes. Index of names of persons not of personal names, not Dick, Jerry, and Tom, but of the characters who play their role each in their proper mask.
Proper nouns in English but only those proper names of human beings. The indexer and Jonah are literary characters from the novel Cat’s Cradle, suitable for a dramatis personae but not this index of individual names. So it goes. Kurt didn’t make it either.
I suspect that Céline Marangé, once a carp Audrey now well on her way to be a dragon Katherine Hepburn, indexed her own Le communisme Vietnamien (1919-1991): construction d'un État-nation entre Moscou et Pékin. What does indexing only the names of persons reveal about the political scientist?
The first name in her index is that of the German politician who first led the Federal Republic of Germany, the second name is that of the poet who stood witness to the passion of the Bolsheviks, the third is a Soviet diplomat, and the fourth is our Ben of Southeast Asia Studies, Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson,
son of an opium pusher for the Crown, thorn in the side of the Republic of Indonesia. Last time I saw him we were in line at the corner grocery in my native city and he was in his underwear, as one might do in Southeast Asia and makes perfect sense in New Haven, Connecticut in August.
Last time we spoke was when I arranged for the author Nguyen Huy Thiep to visit my Yale University there. I had not expected a mandarin, Ben said. Active against the United States involvement once upon a time Ben did not concern himself as a scholar with Thiep’s country, except, except, the only reason anyone outside Southeast Asia Studies ever heard of the great man is that Ha Noi beat Beijing bloody and rolled back the Khmer Rouge in 1979.
It woke him from dogmatic slumbers, he explains on the first page of his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. See, Ben’s dad was an imperialist and Ben was an anti-imperialist. His dissertation adviser George McTurnan Kahin was a dissident in the Andrei Sakharov, top-down sense.
All very authoritarian in one direction or the other. What the hell were these various subalterns doing fighting each other? Ben spoke to the university world about the life world of nations, our phenomenology. Who do we think we are? When do we think we are? Where do we think we are?
In sum, how do we think we are? Books and newspapers, mostly. The newspaper is a novel, Ben observed, by an author who has given up all pretense. Céline Marangé, writing her own index to her tale of Vietnamese communism, has revealed that she writes from Ben’s world among poets and politicians.
Let’s take in the whole index another time.
Thanks
Fired up an unknown little corner of my brain with this one Dan! ❤️