The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

HEV!I!:WS 391
prolongation of the political struggle. Dauphin admires the positive
aspects of the North Vietnamese novel, dealing with 'purely national
problems of Vietnamese evolving in a society undergomg complete
transformation' and points out that there are no schools but only socialist
realist writers. Boudarel is probably right to point out that.
'La litterature d'un pays en lutte pour son independence ne peut
se juger uniquement sur le critere de ses oeuvres purement
litteraires'
and in his article on North Vietnamese literature stresses the use made
of literacy: everyone was systematically encouraged to write, and the
lead was given by the Popular Army, which in 1959 produced 34,000
texts on thf1! theme "the most striking recollection from my time as a
soldier'•, with the best being collected and printed in a volume that ran
to more than 20,000 copies.
When the colloquium took place, Cambodia was also still at war,
though this was not apparently reflected in its popular literature in
Martine Plat's brief but penetrating study paying particular attention to
comic strips.
The themes of thwarted love, rape, the taste for the
Brahminical marvellous and the unreality of the situations (orphans with
neither brothers nor sisters nor relatives, even Khmer usurers with no
Chinese or Vietnamese in sight) show this 'literature' to be completely
escapist; Khmer heroes fight single banded the country's traditional
enemies, Siamese, Vietnamese, or French (in Mile Pmt's text, only the
French were sufficiently important to be capitalised) in night clubs, the
most extravagant description of which does not go beyond a taudry
Phnom Penh establishment.
Mile Piat concludes
"II nous parait done inquietant de voir le Cambodge passer
directement du Stade de l'incuriosite a celui de la lecture de Cette
litterature commerciale."
This comment sufficiently roused Chau Seng, then Prince Sihanouk's
representative in France, at the Paris proceedings to launch, in the
subsequent discussion of the paper, into a splendid attack on 'Ia
litterature decadente alimentaire' without stopping to think that much
of it was produced under him when he was Minister of Information. He