In Les Trois Parques, Linda Lê translates the process of “sampling,” which was devised in radical African-American music composition (rap, hip-hop, for instance), into the scriptural realm. Using it, she builds her narrative of materials specific to her tale of three women in Paris’s Vietnamese diaspora and the father two of them left behind (a tale we are invited to surmise corresponds loosely to the author’s life history) and of materials “borrowed” from Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare, the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, American writers Stephen Crane and Joyce Carol Oats, the Eastern European/South American poet Alessandra Pizarnik, and others. The fact that she borrows from the realm of radical African American music is consistent with Lê’s hard-edged posture vis-à-vis the position of diasporic writer she is expected to assume. Unlike others, she refuses to "exploi[t] the figure of the exiled writer who exploits the clientele of the exile" to be a "métèque who narrates exotic tales" (Ollier, Of Vietnam, 242); to write as anyone's victim, or, as she also puts it, as anyone's "little starving bird." Rather, she weaves her story of exile into the longer duree of European colonialism from the Greeks on, and into a broad geopolitical expanse from Saigon to Paris, from Eastern Europe to South America and Paris, from New Jersey to Greece and then to the UK. The effect of his interweaving is to positions all of us in the post-colonial world (post-1492 at the latest) in the same boat; a boat she has ruled by the intransigent Fates.

This paper is especially concerned with the “performative” aspect of Lê's “sampling” practice, and the radical threat it poses to its characters, author and readers alike. Les Trois Parques constantly goes to the limits of intelligibility, and it drags its narrator(s) and reader with it into the complex fabric of a fascinating, chaotic narrative from which one resurfaces, occasionally, when a given fragment ends, having lost one's bearing, wondering, "who was talking, anyway?" What, exactly, is this narrative is doing? To what end does Les Trois Parques take us to the place where we also break down, losing our sense of a narrative in which we have become implicated as well as our sense of our own places in relation to all of this? What, exactly, is the nature of the tragedy (/travesty) Lê tells in retelling (for instance) King Lear? What is the relation between her attempt to avoid being stereotyped into an existing position and the "unsituatedness" into which her narrative “beckons” (in Kristeva’s sense) its reader?