Testimony and Impure Subjects: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

This article begins by describing how puristic accounts of testimony tend to connect witnessing with the stable and morally-elevated subject position of victimhood. It argues that Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) offers a significant challenge to these accounts through its use of a complicit narrator, calling into question the connection between the subject position of the witness and any assumption of moral purity. The first part of the article argues that the presence of complicity disrupts the notion that testimony can be adjectivized with easily identifiable subject positions such as ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. The second part examines the way that the novel’s scrutiny of  the process of testimony encourages consideration of the ideological frameworks by which definitions of ‘wrongdoing’ and ‘complicity’ are themselves produced. The third and final section argues that the fictional representation of a complicit testimony induces a process of reflection with regard to reading and judgement. For this reason, the fictional testimony represented in The Sympathizer is less a mode of access to historical truth than it is an attempt to reconsider how judgements and evaluations of history are made.