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Space/Time Art – A Picture of the World Through the Eyes of Women

The story is also tragicomic: an intellectual in dire economic circumstances, instead of nurturing scientific ideas, he has to raise Japanese dogs every day to make a living; the man in After Paradise is miserable in both roles: as a husband and as a lover. The diary entries of a sixteen-year-old girl make people feel sad: “In the store, there were only six or seven thousand bars of soap. I bought a ZET bar, it had a pungent smell but was pleasant. He returned it to the saleswoman and chose for himself a bar of soap. It was bigger than ZET, hard and had no scent. I had never used that kind before. The bar of soap he took was only 2,500 VND. He said: “It is big, durable and cheap”. I agreed to buy it after he said it. When I gave him 10,000 VND, the saleswoman gave me back 2,500 VND, he reached out and took it and put it in his pocket. I was a bit embarrassed but didn’t dare ask because maybe he forgot.” [117, p.172]. And: “He disappeared for two days and then told me: I’ll try to arrange my work as soon as possible. I’ll raise one child, and my wife will raise the other. I’ll fight with my wife to win. She’ll have to leave the house and be left with nothing. Then I’ll marry you. Why is he so miserable? I wish I could share it with him”… “This morning we ate sticky rice. The sticky rice seller said: You two sit here and eat sticky rice! He was very angry and scolded her for having paper dog eyes. I tried very hard and could only eat five hundred. I like to eat crab vermicelli soup. He definitely didn’t eat it. He said that kind of thing has a big stomach and gets hungry quickly, eating sticky rice is more filling. I gave five thousand to pay for the sticky rice, and we ate 2,500 VND. He told the sticky rice seller to keep it and eat it again tomorrow. I don’t care about anything. As long as he’s happy.” [117, p.173]. The first time a sixteen-year-old girl's heart flutters, she dates and falls in love with a belief that makes people feel pain: "Now I see that it's very good that my mother is always away. If my mother was always at home, I probably would never have gone out with him like that. My mother scolded me to death. Because she said that all men are bad, don't trust anyone. I think everyone is trustworthy. Especially him." [117, p.165]. Reading After Paradise , the reader cannot help but feel the anxiety and pain of the mother: "Where is my child? With men who have one wife and two children, they only want to eat sticky rice to be sure.

belly and still embezzle every penny. Yet my child thought he was in heaven" [117, p.174].

And the mother's confession - a forty-year-old woman in After Heaven - is also very bitter and poignant: "The men who pass through my life are like they suddenly encounter a shower, and they don't bring plastic to cover themselves. I am a wide porch for them to run into, feel secure, happily wait for the rain to pass, then go home." [117, p.164].

Not only that, the great men in the eyes of Nguyen Thi Thu Hue's female characters are portrayed as: "cold, rude businessmen. The Vietnamese overseas are stingy and miserly. The poet is weak and frail" with a face: "distorted, twisted like a flattened cake" ( Where is love ). In an interview with Viet Bao on January 10, 2005, writer Nguyen Thi Thu Hue explained why the men in her works are so disappointing: "I only write about men in my own way, maybe a bit one-sided, but I have my own perspective, it's already like that, it's hard to change".

These are the selfish and ungrateful people in Y Ban's works (most clearly shown in stories such as Nhan tinh, Tu, Twenty-seven steps are up to heaven, Toi va anh, Thang be va con snake, ...). Nhan tinh brings people to the two-faced world full of lies of men who, besides work, from Monday noon to Friday noon is the time for their lovers; and the evenings, Saturdays and Sundays are for their families, for their wives. The cold voice when answering the phone of the lover calling on Sunday is like the author's message about a sad truth: "About work, call the office tomorrow. We'll talk later". Y Ban's short story Tu also makes people ache because the world of men is so disappointing. The story revolves around a female doctor of sociology who lives alone with her daughter. Her husband, who was her soul mate, left her after a long time of suffering from impotence. The next two men who came into her life had titles and high degrees, but they behaved like vulgar "males". During the date,

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First, they had to give her fresh flowers or a kiss, then they tried to push her onto the bed to "do it". Too disappointed with men, she decided to buy sex toys so she wouldn't have to depend on any man. She realized that "a long time ago, people in the world invented a tool, just to satisfy without needing love. That is the fake penis. And I came up with fake penis therapy. With a fake penis, I will hold my head high and say: No, I will never see you again. But the main thing is that I will preserve the good things for the men of my people". As a thorny and individualistic female writer in the literary world, Y Ban does not hesitate to build the image of mediocre and boring men in many of her works. Y Ban believes that the reason women are disappointed with men is because they trust their men too much, but what men show in real life is too "trivial".

That is the man - the cruel father who finds a way to solve the physiological problem of the woman he bows down to from the pain of resentment of his wife leaving him for another man, and then throws away like people throw away leftovers in Nguyen Ngoc Tu's Endless Field : "Father gave her some money right at the meal, when the whole family was present, "I paid for it the other day...". Then father calmly dusted off his ass and slowly stood up, full of contempt and triumph". The woman has self-respect and loves children, although she speaks rudely, but when faced with the scene of two children lacking their mother's love, she accepts and is happy: "But luckily, thanks to that (being beaten) I get to meet you guys, get to live together like this, so happy...". Then the author did not mention her again (only at the end of the story did the reader meet her again), but let the life of the father and his three children drift to where they needed to go, the father took "revenge" on a landlady, even though she was "abandoned", he still "believed that this choice was right, this love was worth the exchange", after satisfying his sexual desires with the play: "Father stopped by a small market at the beginning of the Kinh village, told her to go up and buy some pickled radish to bring with him. As soon as he disappeared into the grocery store, father smiled. My sisters and I will never forget that smile, it was fierce, painful, wild, bitter, cruel. The smile was very long, clinging to father's face, making his eyes bulge out slightly,

Space/Time Art – A Picture of the World Through the Eyes of Women

The boat shone as if it had water. Father threw her belongings ashore and scattered them. And started the engine to move the boat away.” And those are also the men who live slowly and carelessly on the rivers of the West in many other short stories by Nguyen Ngoc Tu.

That is the husband who is as eccentric as his own work or the handsome intellectual lover who is willing to promise his lover sweet words, but when discovered, he quickly abandons his lover in a cowardly way: "Don't come see me anymore. I'm so scared. I want peace" ( The Leper River ); the man who is always close to his wife but is often afraid every time his wife asks for sex and is an accomplice to the dark forces of the ancestral altar, abandoning his wife to be raped by the tablets ( Bong De ) in the work of Do Hoang Dieu. In the Bong De dream, the wife is so lonely: "Oh my God, I have to call Thu, the white sleeveless shirt of my husband is shining brightly like his eyes wide open in the dark darkness... It seems that my husband is still awake , his two white eyes are wet and wide open. He lies on his back, his two hands neatly folded in front of his stomach like a corpse with its eyes open. For a moment I think my husband is looking at the ceiling. For a moment I hear Thu's breathing scattered. How could you sleep so soundly?... You left me alone, miserable.” The men in Do Hoang Dieu’s works are not only cowardly but also irresponsible and unfaithful. In Vu Quy , that pain is clearly shown: “Everything, everything slowly left with the hand of the doctor with the overly long face. I never expected that at the very moment I was panicking because of that loss, he had managed to implant a new embryo in another girl” [99, p.46]. Those men really

Loneliness, adrift, drifting and lacking support in this life are the feelings of modern women in women's prose in recent years. It can be said that, from each of their perspectives, contemporary female writers have brought into their works the dark corners of each man's soul, making the picture of the world of men appear distorted and gloomy. Those men represent many classes in society (from intellectuals, businessmen to farmers and even the homeless, jobless) and also represent all the bad habits of human beings (selfishness, cowardice,

brutal, irresponsible and inhumane). It may be one-sided when women write about men in their works with their female perspective, but one thing we can clearly see is that women have overcome the obsession with status, with the petty life of women in traditional literature. They have stood up to face men, delved into understanding to "re-examine" the nature of men whose only concern in the past was obedience and devotion. The image of imperfect men in the eyes of women is a partial expression of the feminist tone in contemporary Vietnamese prose.

Summary

Research on gender and feminist influences in literary creation, especially the works of female writers in recent years, is an attractive, engaging and controversial research issue. In this chapter, applying systematic research methods, comparing and contrasting and approaching works in the direction of poetics, we focus on analyzing, perceiving and evaluating the issue from the content perspective. It can be affirmed that the most typical female writers of contemporary Vietnamese literature have established a female writing style through the journey of finding the ego and reviewing an imperfect male world with a burning desire for freedom/liberation. Unlike male authors, they write about women, perceive women through the perspective and feelings of homosexuals in all aspects of women's lives; bringing readers more complete and rounded experiences and feelings about women who were previously only perceived through the eyes of male power.

Chapter 4

GENDER CONSCIOUSNESS AND FEMINIST INFLUENCES IN VIETNAMESE WOMEN'S PROSE AFTER 1975 FROM AN ARTISTIC PERSPECTIVE

4.1. Artistic space/time – a picture of the world through the eyes of women

In the Dictionary of Literary Terms , author Le Ba Han stated: “ Artistic space and time are the internal form of the artistic image that expresses its integrity ” [16, p.162]. Researcher Tran Dinh Su also emphasized: “There is no artistic image without space, there is no character without a certain background”, and “artistic space and time are the creative products of the artist to express people and express a certain concept of life ” [16, pp.88 - 89]. Thus, artistic space and time are the mode of existence and formation of the artistic world. Artistic space and time become the means of capturing life, “ bearing artistic symbolic meaning ”. And the description and narration within a literary work always originate from a point of view, and we can determine the position of the subject in space and time, expressed in the direction of view, taking place in a certain field of view. Artistic space and time not only show us the internal structure of a literary work, symbolic languages, but also show the conceptions of the world, the depth of perception of the author or a literary period. It provides an objective basis for the "interpretive community" to explore the uniqueness as well as research the type of artistic images. Therefore, we cannot separate the image from the space and time in which it exists. Artistic space and time is a lively artistic image, not a rigid one. It is not simply perceived by conscious thinking, but it is also perceived by the subjective mind, by the emotions, by the mood of the writer. That space and time can be expanded vast or narrowed cramped; can progress dizzyingly fast or slowly

suffocation depends on the author's artistic perspective. Artistic space and time are unified but not identical with objective space and time. Material space and time itself exists objectively, meaning that its existence does not depend on human consciousness, but that material space and time only becomes artistic space when the author perceives it and thereby expresses the writer's perspective and feelings about the world, about a concept of life, or an attitude towards life. Space and time in literature are divided into value boundaries that express the concept of world order and human choice. That is the separation of the boundaries of space and time; between internal space and time and external space and time; between the immutable and the mutable boundaries. The artistic space and time in a literary work have a boundary that is distinct from the physical space and time outside, but it is not as easily seen as the frame of a painting or the stage of a play. And so, covering the artistic space is the writer's concept. That is what makes the physical space become the artistic space. And the writer's point of view always changes with the times, just like when the tide rises, it carries away all the foam, and after each return, it renews the sandbank. Therefore, the organization of the artistic space in the work is always under the direct influence and influence of the concept of the times and the genre factor.

In folk literature, we can see the common characteristics of space and time in the works of the working people as the model of three worlds, three levels, three realms: the upper world, the earthly world and hell with gods, humans, and demons. There, people can freely move in the three realms without encountering any obstacles. The reason is that folk literature works are innocent thoughts, genuine feelings of the daily working people. Therefore, their conceptual views are also very simple, less complicated than in the later stages - when human thinking has developed to a high level. However, among different genres of folk literature, we can also see that space and time have different features.

different in each genre. Specifically, space and time in folk literature are divided into three types: mythical space and time, epic space and time, and fairy tale space and time.

Vietnamese literature in the medieval period was established by a new concept of space and time. It was a space and time with a highly symbolic and conventional character. Throughout the medieval literature period, we can see that all pairs of opposites in the space of the universe contain ideological and moral content, and images rich in symbolic meaning are often used to convey moods and emotions. For example, when talking about separation, the authors always use images of roads, intersections, train stations, mangrove forests, and river wharves; and when mentioning the nostalgia of travelers for their homeland, they borrow the space of immense rivers and waters with the blue smoke of the afternoon.

Vietnamese literature from the early 20th century to 1975 marked a change in artistic space and time according to the author's creative perspective. Besides the narrow, deadlocked spaces and times of realistic literature, we also see a space and time of love and sadness, or a space full of illusion, dreams, and ghosts of romantic literature. In the works of revolutionary literature, artistic space and time return closer to human life. The image of man appears as the central character in the picture of social life.

Following the literary period since 1975, especially from 1986 to the present, we have noticed that the space and time in the works of writers, especially female writers, have a rare chaos, confusion and complexity. That space and time are like deep "mazes". In that space and time, there is the co-existence of both the space and time of previous literary periods and also spaces and times that bear the appearance of haunting, magical, and confusing aspects of life and of the human heart. Time and space are the world in which humans exist, in which humans feel their position and destiny.

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