Linda Lê, on writing and not writing

Linda Lê has noted that writing shapes her identity more than any origins or affiliations, a knowledge which she claims allows her to occupy with ease the illegitimate spaces between homeland and adopted country, between belonging and unbelonging. But Lê’s work regularly stages the encounter between writing and not writing—juxtaposing the writer and the blank page, inspiration and silence—and figures the act of writing as a symbiotic relationship between a parasite and its host. This paper will examine these themes in two of Lê’s novels: Un si tendre vampire (1987) and Conte de l’amour bifrons (2005). Focusing on the figure of l’oiseau de mauvais augure and drawing on the dialogues between Lê and the silenced writers to whom she looks for inspiration in her nonfiction essays, I will present the inability to write not as the opposite of literary inspiration, but as it’s double. The double is an equally recurrent image in Lê’s writing, often represented by the figure of Janus, or the God of beginnings and endings. I will suggest that the bird of ill omen is another Janus figure, the (imagined) presence who embodies both inspiration and its loss, and who is the necessary double within each writer.