On Telling a Story of Vietnam in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

My essay in celebration of the Journal's anniversary sketches what may be the concluding chapter in a study of Vietnam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Tran dynasty reigned (1226-1400). In 1225 the Tran family overthrew the last emperor of the previous dynasty, the Ly (1009-1225) and hitherto the only long lived one. The Ly imperial line, in fact, lasted nearly fifty years longer than its successor. Nevertheless, the Tran is unquestionably the most renowned of all Vietnamese dynasties on account of its victories when Kubilai Khan's armies attacked three times in the thirteenth century. Yet one has to ask what kind of dynasty it was and how the country it ruled should be defined. Should one look to China, the source of the dynastic institution, for guidance or should one look elsewhere? An event in 1237 suggests ambiguity. That year officials were required to offer betel and tea to the emperor when he was departing from the Eastern Pier near the capital. "Betel and tea" bring Southeast Asia as well as China into the picture. My concluding chapter will be written as a chronologically constructed and, I hope, not too narrowly focused narrative history. An account of a unit of time as important as the Tran centuries needs room. Another merit of narrative history is that the historian is continually encouraged to ask questions about how and why things actually happened in a particular and maybe changing cultural context. The historian should also have space for reflecting on problems that arise and be challenged to experience with effective narrational devices and craftsmanship in general. The final chapter will be preceded by five others which seek to unravel my sources' textual properties. A chapter by chapter analysis of the sources will, I hope, relieve me of the problem I had foreseen if a historian tried to combine a narrational approach with the requirements of textual criticism and continually had to slow down his pace in order to ask questions about a text's form as well as its contents.(1) "The mind is refrigerated by interruptions", remarked Dr. Johnson, and so, too, would be narrative history. By the sources' "textual properties" I refer to no more than patterned literary features and structures which bid for recognition to allow the sources to be endowed with meaning over and above specific items of information. A source's textual meaning represents how Vietnam "appeared" to its author, or its style. My own narrative of Vietnam in the concluding chapter would take into account the sources' competing "appearances", ways in which they illuminated each other, and also instances of how they sometimes sounded alike. What I write cannot help being yet another "appearance", though, perhaps, it may be closer to a "countenance", or substance, behind the various "appearances". By "countenance", derived from the Latin "continentia" (the way one holds oneself together), I understand the extent to which Tran Vietnam "held together". Writing narrative history is telling a story with a plot. The plot comprises the way a story's parts and effects cohere. My sources can be read as stories with plots responsible for their meanings and "appearance". For a long time I have believed that the fourteenth century constituted a watershed in Vietnamese history, but I did not sense the drama until I knew more about the thirteenth century. Thus, the sweep of Tran time has suggested a subject for the plot in my concluding chapter: simply a dynasty which was already disintegrating within a century of spectacular military triumph. The story and its plot, sketched in this essay, reflect some considerations to be borne in mind when I come to write my concluding chapter. The essay resembles, as it were, one of Henry James's prefaces which tells the story of a story. In my first chapter I would have furnished a historical background to the Tran period and explained my intentions. But my final chapter would need what I had come to regard as an appropriate setting for Tran history, and, for this purpose, I would take note of several sources. …