Poetics of Vietnamese short stories in the post-war period 1975

Nguyen Tri Huan follows the arduous journey of self-awareness of the character Quy from the time she was 13, 14 years old until she has experienced all the sorrows, glories, misfortunes... to come to the conclusion: "Isn't that what life is like? It is both easy to understand and difficult to understand. Moreover, if everything in humans were simple, clear, and could be explained and interpreted immediately, how boring life would be!" [85, 127] .

When presenting the simple, mechanical, willful, crude model of a time of childishness and clumsiness, Nguyen Khai also expressed the mystery of life through the questioning character: "If everything makes sense and can be understood, then what is literature, sir?" (A group of friends during the resistance war). So people need literature because they know that it is an endless world, difficult to understand completely, they expect literature's ability to explore and express. And the appeal of prose today is that it continuously discovers hidden, hidden things, strange powers that control and guide the fate of each individual, no two are alike.

Humans are so complex that it is impossible to measure them with a fixed criterion. Any idealization of humans makes them false and unreal. Characters in short stories after 1975 are clearly less ideal, imperfect, clean , and not covered in a sterile atmosphere as they were often seen before 1975. In literature, there are still beautiful characters, but it is beauty in the dust of everyday life. Nguyen Minh Chau's works are still a hunt for the moral pearls hidden in humans, but at the same time, it is also to prove what the author experiences: "Observing the people around me, I see that good people are still the majority. But it seems that they always have to resist something inside themselves, good and evil, reason and desire, the individual and the collective within each person. People are still good, but the goodness seems to be less than before.

One must always guard oneself from doing bad and evil things” [53].

For Nguyen Minh Chau, short stories after 1975 gradually focused on people as individuals, people who do not coincide with themselves, people who are complex and multidimensional. His paintings are people facing themselves, the most enlightened court of conscience that judges human status in relation to the majority and to the individual barber. In the first capacity, the painter is right: "I am an artist, not a portrait painter... The artist's job is to serve the majority, not just one person." In the second capacity, he is selfish and deceitful: "Because of the artist's purpose of serving the majority, you forgot me? Do you have the right to deceive?" [30].

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The issue of responsibility towards the soldiers of the past war was written very carefully by Nguyen Minh Chau in the short storyThe Painting. Therefore, the work was written before that, but it was not published until 1983. In The Painting, there is no ideal person but a person with multiple personalities, both noble and base. From the torments and confrontations of the painter character, the big, painful question that needs to be answered right in the work is: we cannot ignore the fate of the individual because of the glorious title of the national community. The writer's perspective has changed to look straight at the nature of reality: war is not only the halo of revolutionary heroism but also loss, pain, and falsehood. War makes people worse rather than better, people no longer shine with angelic beauty but gather trivial, base desires.

Nguyen Khai once philosophized: "The spiritual world of humans is extremely complex because humans always aim for the highest and the farthest." He was surprised to see that there were people who were "full but sad, had no worries but were sad" (Heroic Misfortune), and there were people who were "so gentle, so innocent but had

"Will one day become a murderer?" (Changing Life). Nguyen Minh Chau, from the short story collection The Woman on the Express Train , seems to continuously conduct experiments and tests on the strange nature of humans . Rank, Storm, Role-playing, The Boat Out at Sea,... all more or less describe the complexity of life, the inner struggles that sometimes make people feel like they are split apart.

After 1975, the whole nation had to heal the wounds of war, build the foundation of socialism, and face border wars. The difficult life was made even more difficult by the bureaucratic mechanism and negative aspects in economic management and social organization. Faced with that reality, many writers did not hesitate to address the issues of life such as Nguyen Manh Tuan, Duong Thu Huong, Le Minh Khue. These are writers whose short stories reflect the negative side of society. In the collection of stories A Moment Away from the City , Le Minh Khue subtly reflected the silent but powerful movement in the spiritual life of people of the time. They were caught up in the flood of comfortable life, consumer psychology, and indifference to the past and to their fellow human beings. The writer's criticism of people's bad habits was gentle but profound. From an enthusiastic and eager girl, Tan became a hedonist and selfish person. She was indifferent to her old friends and pursued a materialistic lifestyle, causing her husband to say with contempt, “the shallowness of a woman is like a crime” [102]. However, applying Tan’s lifestyle to the majority of people today is not really appropriate, but it is a warning. People approaching modern life make them more insensitive to their surroundings and as a result, push themselves into a lonely and empty place.

In the short story " Peaceful Dawn", a soldier returning from the battlefield to integrate into normal life in the rear encountered many difficulties. The provincial lifestyle was shabby and casual, and some cadres were indifferent and indifferent.

responsibility. Everything was like a thick glue surrounding him, like a stagnant pond that had stunted his good intentions. Therefore, he only wanted to live honestly, but that had bothered many people and caused them a lot of frustration. Duong Thu Huong did not hesitate to look straight at the truth of life, ignoring the superficial appearance, to go straight to what belongs to the nature of phenomena. Therefore, readers can easily see the dark side, the hidden part of human life. After 1975, the change of life had a significant impact on each individual in society, people were again struggling, aware to build for themselves a new and suitable moral standard. The world is uncertain, human life has many paradoxes, insecurities, and uncertainties, while people themselves are full of misconceptions. They always have illusions about power, about omnipotent will, so they are extremely ambitious. The personality and morality of each person at this time is very difficult to determine: “With the majority of Vietnamese people standing in a team, standing under a flag of great cause, each person can be a hero. But when the flags are rolled up, everyone goes home, lives for themselves, for their wives and children, then be careful, the seeds of Chi Pheo or Xuan Toc Do are still hiding somewhere in the subconscious, in the blood, gradually finding an opportunity to rise up” [111, 69].

In modern life, people have too many needs that need to be solved. These are the needs for food, clothing, housing, entertainment and happiness. To meet those needs, people need to have many things to exchange, and money is the dominant currency. However, not everyone can have money to satisfy all their needs. Faced with shortages, needs and temptations, there are people who have degenerated or revealed bad qualities. Through the character Tri (Two people return to the regiment), Thai Ba Loi has abandoned the simple, one-sided view of people. Here, people are discovered mainly on the moral level, and war is the environment that reveals the complex character of people. As a team leader

Tri is a good assassin in battle, but in love, he is ready to use tricks to defeat his opponent, even if it is a friend who has gone through life and death with him. That incident only “roused a little regret, it was just as fleeting as the sound of a small bullet in a big battle” [170, 667]. Later on in his life’s ladder of fame, Tri continued to trample on many other spiritual values to achieve his goals. However, the issue of paying the price for the ethical violations he caused was written about quite cautiously and handled lightly by the writer. Perhaps, human morality is a burning issue in post-war society that the writer has not dared to expose because the long shadow of the illustrative literature genre is obscuring it.

Presenting people as they are, without idealizing or sanctifying them, is a prominent feature in the concept of people in short stories since 1975. The concept of ordinary people, mortal people, and imperfect people is both like a dialogue with the past, rejecting formulaic expressions, and proposing a new system of values to evaluate people: human values. This can be seen as an innovation in short story material in the direction of increasing realism and democratization. Many people, while searching for the universal philosophical meaning of people, have found the truth in the de-sacred view of people and they bravely accept ordinary people, even boring, defective, and incomplete. For example, in The Woman on the Express Train, Nguyen Minh Chau lets the character Quy pay the price and awaken: "I will not demand from you an absolutely perfect person... Live naturally" [30] .

The richness and complexity of ordinary human life are shown in the work The Woman on the Express Train . The regimental commander has outstanding talent, making the soldiers on the other side admire him. But in daily life, Hoa also has this and that bad habits like other ordinary people. That is to say,

also revealed his desires and weaknesses. These are the manifestations of Hoa in his daily life: “Living close to each other and seeing each other almost every day, I had the opportunity to see him happy and excited when he was promoted, to see him eat, sleep, walk, also raise his own flock of chickens, wear a pair of shorts to clear the fields, also love this person, talk badly about that person behind his back. And, he also has sweaty hands, his two hands are always sticky” [179, 231]. In the flow of life events, people often look towards the bright spots, the big events, but easily miss the small bright spots of life. From seemingly ordinary and trivial stories in One Test, Mother and Child of Hang, Huong and Phai, The Thief, A Good Woman, Living Forever with Green Trees..., Nguyen Minh Chau has discovered the sharp aspects of human nature, of both small and large issues in personal destiny. From there, the writer has contributed to enriching the spiritual life of each person, fostering a sense of responsibility towards fellow human beings and multiplying the love of life. Humans degenerate in many complex and unpredictable relationships.

With this theme, Nguyen Minh Chau's works after 1985 mentioned it again in The Season of Tamarind Fruits in the South . He brought readers to the meeting of the sacred maternal love between the mother (old monk Thien Linh) and her son - battalion commander Toan after more than twenty years of separation. It was thought that in that situation, he should be happy and touched, but it was completely unexpected and contrary like a criminal trial. The poor mother regretted all her life for displeasing her son, after 20 years of taking refuge in Buddhism to calm her mind and atone for her mistakes. She placed all her faith and hope for salvation in her only son, who was now an officer of the liberation army. Unexpectedly, that hope was just kindled and then immediately extinguished due to Toan's indifferent and indifferent attitude. The narrator could not hide the horror of the moral corruption that no longer had humanity and cried out "oh

Oh my god, has anyone in this world seen a child smelling his mother's tears" [179, 542]. But that same hand, when facing his superior, was "full of eagerness, full of enthusiasm, his ten fingers wrapped around and twisted... some fingers were tightly wrapped around like a rope, while the extremely strong thumb was tightly clenched like the beak of a magpie" [179, 529]. During the time he met his mother, what Toan was most interested in was not how his mother had lived for the past twenty years, how much she had suffered, how much she had endured, but the issue of her background: "Come on! Now tell me, what did you do in these years in here, who did you live with" [179, 543].

Returning to everyday reality, choosing ordinary people and events as the focus, placing them in the observational orbit of literature, writers have opened up a new source to enrich human perception and spiritual life. In these short stories, literature suddenly becomes "the joys and sorrows of human life, the contemplation of what has been lost, the memories of the past and the premonition of the future, the contemplation of the reason for human existence, in relation to society, nature and the universe" [210, 61].

2.2.4. People with spiritual life

Spirituality in humans is often the belief in a world, a certain thing that they and science have not yet been able to explain. These are just beliefs, faiths, that make human life richer, such as: believing in a god that they worship, in dreams in the unconscious mind, or just traditional worship customs... According to Nguyen Dang Duy, "Spirituality is the sacred and sublime in everyday life, the sacred belief in the life of religious beliefs. That sacred and sublime, sacred belief is condensed in symbols, images, and concepts" [83, 89]. Therefore, Vietnamese people have always worshiped

worshiping the gods who protect the land and houses where they live. In addition, there is also the custom of worshiping grandparents, the people who gave birth to them, raised them, and took care of them. When grandparents pass away, people pay their respects to commemorate their merits and they also believe that their grandparents still live in a better world, still follow their descendants and bless those living in the present.

Short stories after 1975 not only delve into exploring the outer and inner lives of people, but also delve into the subconscious to understand more about the hidden things in their souls. Therefore, the spiritual life of people is given more comprehensive attention in works after 1975, including Nguyen Minh Chau. He not only renewed the artistic concept of people in self-awareness, but also saw that people have an extremely complex spiritual life. The image of female doctor Quy in the short story The Woman on the Express Train is an example . She has a very deep and complex inner life that we call the spiritual horn in each person. Once, when checking the luggage of the students in the cave, she accidentally came across the diaries of the young soldiers who had sacrificed. Reading every page, she saw her name, Quy was moved to press the diary lines to her chest and call out sacred words such as Fatherland, Country . “I suddenly thought of extremely abstract, sacred words like Fatherland, Country, I also imagined each of his hometowns with relatives living under the same roof, the dikes, a river with alluvial soil, a path with the creaking sound of bamboo and the purple color of purple xoan flowers sprinkled on the warm land, and the Western iron bucket touching the well wall making a clanging sound” [93]. Usually, when people encounter sacred situations, deep thoughts, deeply rooted in the subconscious, are revealed. Perhaps in that situation, Quy's inner life awakened something very deep that we call the spiritual horn, the most sacred and sublime things.

Poetics of Vietnamese short stories in the post-war period 1975 – 1985 - 9

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