Nguyen Duc Binh’s article was violently criticized at that time and its author accused of a kind of licentious Freudianism.
It is from VDP’s article in the Review Nghien Cuu Van Hoc (Literary Research, No. 6, 1963) that he received the fiercest blow, which cannot be read again today without an ironical smile.
He criticized the poem on the jack-fruit praised by Nguyen Duc Binh.
My body is like the jack-fruit Prickly skin, thick pulp.
Dear friend, if you like it, drive a wedge into it: Don’t touch it, your hands will be slimed all over.
And he cries out:
“I suppose that all the respectable poets are startled, hide their eyes and hold these noses’… “I am not so respectable, but I have also held my nose. Not because those lines are erotic, but for another reason. If a girl had written ‘The Snail” or “The Jack-fruit”, this would have been the cause of her misfortune. Some old satiric mandarin or landowner would have surely asked her: “Come in here, my dear little girl!” Even a social class as unhappy as the prostitutes before the revolution, used to flirt with their customers in a language more poetic than Ho Xuan Huong’s invitation in “The Jack-fruit”.
“… If we attributed such poems to a poet considered “talented’ in our country, it would put women to shame”
And, calling Marxist theory to his rescue, he argues:
‘Haven’t we noticed that Marx and Engels, in “The Manifesto of Communism” and in “The Origin of the Family” have more than once criticized the male and female prostitutes of the bourgeois’ world.”
He brings in all the heavy artillery, even Lenin’s famous glass of water.
‘As Lenin said, if one considers having sexual relations to be like drinking a glass of water, one must at least drink out of a clean glass… The problem begins with the notion of cleanness because it is a matter of human beings and not that of quadrupeds.”
