The Truth is Immortal
Nguyen Khac Ngan Vi (Vietnam)

　

Is an autobiography considered as a true novel, when the story does not depart from the life (or part of the life) of a real person? Is it possible that a fictional novel could be considered as a record when it could collate with the movement of life? I, who first started as a journalist - a job where the amount of documents or sources of information that you hold determines your position in this profession, and your job is to constantly check and double check the fact, then later, as an author (novels, poems, screenplays) - I always hear the inner scream, "go beyond the limits of knowing!", then I would answer "yes", to both questions above. The romanticism of life and the reality in 500 pages of novels have equal persuasiveness.

When my friend, a Vietnamese documentary filmmaker in the Varan organization in Southeast Asia, filmed and showed the footage of transgender people in a fairground theatre on the big screen, it reminded people a lot of the traveling theatre troupe in Fellini's La Strada, not because of the similar topic, but because of the way how the artists looked at life. And of course, there is no need to list here the works of fiction which were written based on historical events as the backbone. We know that everyone has a story to tell. Nowadays, people often say, grand narratives are no longer reliable. But is this a problem? Humans will never give up the habit of telling stories, it is how they show their existence, or become immortal. So, the end purpose of the art or genre in each art form is just storytelling.

The question should be proposed, after all, what is storytelling? Should it be about describing what is outside of us or expressing what is inside of us? For me, literature is a game of words. The words are there, ready to tell the story they want, we are just the ones who arrange them in certain order. And to arrange the words into literature, we need the harmonious coordination of life experience and the sensitivity of the soul.

How to describe/express it?

There are two types of auteurs, one type I look up to, the other type I love. Just like literature, there are writings those when read make us want to throw away our pens, but there are also writings those, after enjoying, impel us to write. I always see the future of those characters that the type of film-maker-I-love has gifted them, a certain movie scene where even if the character is a killer, a prostitute, a cyclo rider... still has a hint of utopia when those characters will be completely stripped of their relationship with the social conventions we know.

This is difficult, because it requires both romance and daring.

But to create that cinematic sense in cinema, it depends on the rhythm of the film, which reliess on the very own intuition of the director.

The same goes for placing words in literature. If it is as precise as a director who controls the rhythm of the film, then we have utopia/ paradise.

This paradise is not a place absence of blood and tears, it always has birth, death, and destruction- women still go through the burden and pain of being pregnant and giving birth to possess, and men still waste their strength to protect power. Children will grow up, turn into men or women. I am not stereotyping and gender prejudice, I am just stating the most acceptable truth. Paradise is when, we can read poetry by the water slowly drifting while life never stops for a second from proving the price of eating the forbidden fruit.

Writing, it seems like I am looking for my own paradise. Many friends who work in other fields of art such as cinema, painting, music, etc. told me that when they originate, it means to write something down. It always starts with words. I am a writer, it is not easy for me to agree or disagree with that idea, because wherever it leads it would end up being arrogant. But I am assured of myself that words bring me a lot of truth. I often get asked, am I not the characters in my novels and screenplays? I don't know how to answer, I moulded a few characters, and the writing process is to create a space and within that space my characters can follow their truth. So in the end, does it matter whether the character is me or the character is another person? In my paradise, there is only the woman who ate the forbidden fruit, and the man who gave up everything to follow her. Or, if the man had let the woman leave, he would have stayed and danced with the snake.

In fact, the author is God when they write, even though their creation does not take place in seven days. And every God has his own truth, a truth that does not depend on reality nor imagination. Remember Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, as if human history were only streched in just one hundred years, brief, but eternal.