Tino Cao
The Sorrow of War, first published in English in 1994, is the translation of the Vietnamese novel Nỗi buồn chiến tranhby Bảo Ninh. The English version, translated by Phan Thanh Hao and edited by Frank Palmos, originally appeared with Secker & Warburg in the UK before later editions reached the United States. Since its introduction to Anglophone readers, the novel has been recognized as one of the most important literary accounts of the Vietnam War—yet it remains persistently misunderstood, frequently misread, and perennially controversial.
Public outrage directed at literature rarely originates in the text itself. It tends to arise when a literary work is removed from its aesthetic domain and forced to answer demands that are ideological, moral, or commemorative. In this sense, the repeated attacks on The Sorrow of War are neither accidental nor episodic. They belong to a wider cultural pattern: a familiar hostility toward literature that surfaces whenever a text resists simplification. What unsettles readers is not a particular argument the novel makes, but its insistence on existing fully as literature—claiming the right to ambiguity, fragmentation, and the absence of a stabilizing moral message.
Literature does not operate according to the logic of final clarification. It does not issue definitive judgments, nor does it function as a conduit for fixed truths. Its mode of action is indirect and accumulative; meaning emerges through resonance, delay, and overlap rather than resolution. Such openness often proves unsettling in intellectual environments accustomed to clarity, coherence, and controlled interpretation. When a text is approached with the expectation that it confirm a shared system of values or reinforce an established narrative, discomfort becomes inevitable. And in the absence of a mature critical culture, that discomfort easily hardens into resentment.
What repeatedly places The Sorrow of War under scrutiny is not that it misrepresents war, but that it refuses to narrate war according to sanctioned models. The novel offers no continuous epic structure, no heroic progression from sacrifice to redemption, no assurance that individual suffering will ultimately be absorbed into a higher symbolic order. Instead, it presents a consciousness fractured by war, a sense of time splintered into discontinuous moments, a memory made of dispersed fragments, and a sorrow that does not resolve into moral clarity. This is not an aesthetic failure but a deliberate formal choice grounded in the nature of the lived experience being expressed. For those who survive war, it does not persist as a coherent story but as a lasting disturbance within the inner life.
Hostility toward literature becomes most visible when a novel is conscripted into serving as historical evidence. Characters are treated as witnesses, narrative voices are judged by standards of factual accuracy, and the novel is approached as if it were an archival document. Such reading practices erase the essential distinction between history and literature. History seeks to reconstruct what happened; literature seeks to articulate how events are lived, remembered, distorted, suppressed, or reorganized within consciousness. To reproach a literary work for lacking chronological order is to deny its right to remain faithful to subjective experience, which is inherently non-linear and internally contradictory. Under such pressures, criticism too easily devolves into moralization, replacing aesthetic judgment with normative evaluation. In a media environment dominated by immediacy, this mode of reading overwhelms slower, formally attentive approaches and displaces literature from sustained critical dialogue.
Closely related is the recurring collapse of the boundary between author and work. Writers are increasingly expected to assume responsibility for every voice in their texts, as though fiction were not precisely the arena in which autonomous subjectivities are created. When this boundary dissolves, literature ceases to be read as an artistic construction and becomes instead a declaration of ideological position. At that moment, hostility is no longer directed at a particular book but at the very idea of literature as a space where multiple voices may coexist without submission to a single moral authority.
Underneath these reactions lies a deeper anxiety about subjectivity itself. Since the advent of modernity, literature has asserted the legitimacy of individual experience as a value in its own right. The literary subject does not claim to speak for a community, nor does it seek to validate a collective identity. This autonomy becomes suspect in cultural contexts that expect literature to forge consensus. The value of a work is then measured less by the depth of its expression than by its degree of conformity. The Sorrow of War does not offer a collective memory of how “we” experienced war; it explores how one individual continues to bear an irreducible burden shaped by personal experience. The sorrow it conveys is not smoothed into a shared symbol. It remains intimate, heavy, and unsettling. Its refusal of reconciliation is precisely what constitutes the novel’s literary power.
This suspicion of subjectivity is reinforced by a utilitarian conception of literature that demands usefulness. Works are interrogated for their purpose, their pedagogical function, their ability to guide or instruct. Such demands impose an external framework in which aesthetic criteria are subordinated to immediate social function. Literature is no longer understood as an arena of inquiry but as an instrument requiring supervision. Yet the enduring value of literature rarely lies in immediate effect. It lies in its capacity to unsettle habitual modes of thought, to confront readers with questions that resist quick answers, and to insist on complexity as an unavoidable condition of intellectual life.
Seen in this light, the recurring controversy surrounding The Sorrow of War is not an anomaly but a familiar chapter in the long history of literary reception. The pattern is recognizable: demands for ideological clarity, confusion of genres, moralized judgment, conflation of author and text, and the reflexive rejection of individual perspectives that diverge from collective narratives. These responses indicate that the problem lies not in the work itself but in a cultural environment still unable to distinguish aesthetic criticism from ideological regulation.
The central question, therefore, is not whether there is enough evidence to speak of a hatred of literature—there is already an abundance. The real question is whether an intellectual space exists in which critical reflection can be received without immediately being converted into ideological antagonism. A mature literary culture is not one that celebrates every work uncritically, but one that grants literature the right to disturb, to remain opaque, and to refuse immediate utility. To defend literature, in this sense, is not merely to defend a single book against controversy; it is to defend the capacity for complex thought within a cultural landscape increasingly inclined to reduce all difference to conflict.
— Tino