Decoding Evil in Scholarly Nôm Narrative Poetry: The Cases of Lư Kỉ and Hoàng Tung in Cải dịch Nhị độ mai truyện by Đặng Xuân Bảng

THE REPRESENTATION OF EVIL IN DANG XUAN BANG’S ADAPTATION OF NHI DO MAI TRUYEN: THE CASE OF LU KY AND HOANG TUNG

Abstract

This article examines the construction of Evil in late nineteenth - early twentieth-century scholarly Nôm narrative poetry through the cases of the antagonistic figures Lư Kỉ and Hoàng Tung in Cải dịch Nhị độ mai truyện by Đặng Xuân Bảng. By addressing long-standing textual misconceptions that have reduced this work to a mere “variant” of the anonymous Nhị độ mai diễn ca, the study reaffirms the text’s independent status and its distinctive ideological and aesthetic value as an authored Nôm work. The analysis integrates A.J. Greimas’s actantial model with archetype theory in dialogue with Confucian thought to investigate narrative structure, discourse strategies, and the mechanisms of power underlying the formation of Evil. The findings demonstrate that Evil in Cải dịch Nhị độ mai truyện is no longer constructed as a simplistic moral category or a supernatural phenomenon, but is reconfigured as a socio-institutional reality arising from the corruption of bureaucratic power and the degradation of political–legal language. The author’s shift from spiritual retribution to juridical justice reflects an officialdom-oriented realism and a pronounced legal consciousness characteristic of a late-medieval Confucian scholar-official. By doing so, the article broadens critical approaches to scholarly Nôm narrative poetry and provides significant evidence for understanding the internal dynamics of Vietnamese literary thought during the transitional period between the medieval and modern eras.