Brian Castro's Fiction: The Seductive Play of Language By Bernade ...

Castro is aware that he could be seen to be taking a contradictory stance on what he argues is writing’s relationship to its social context. On the one hand, he argues that every novel must make an ethical gesture toward the end of suffering and that writing can never be dissociated from its social context. On the other, he argues that language can never affirm any particular position and that ‘fiction’s hypotheses and lies have no necessary connection to the real’ (Barker, ‘Artful Man’ 239). Castro has tried to explain how his narrative strategies, after Theodor Adorno, employ a ‘morality of style’; that is to say, he seeks to make art, which lends ‘a voice to suffering which cannot be unified in the present’(‘Fireworks’ 244). He purposely makes his art difficult to understand so that the reader must work to comprehend how the narrative might relate to its cultural, historical, and political context. The reader must be engaged in the discovery. While his writing may not seek to communicate meaning, meaning is ‘always embedded and elusive’ (‘Fireworks’ 242).

On of the ways Castro lends a voice to suffering is through his wounded, displaced, marginalised protagonists. We see the world through their eyes; we come to understand their histories. All Castro’s writing is interested in history, particularly the history of people treated unjustly. So in Birds of Passage and The Garden Book, he explores the traumatic experiences of Chinese migrants to Australia in the late nineteenth through to the late twentieth centuries. In Drift, he offers a revisionist, more complex and ambiguous history of the clash between black and white Tasmanians and the Aboriginal massacre at Suicide Cove. Stepper narrates a tale of espionage, betrayal, and love in Japan against the backdrop of World War II. Double-Wolf postulates an alternative history to the development of psychoanalysis. After China can be read as a meditation on the history of desire and writing from ancient Chinese times to the present. Finally, Shanghai Dancing is a tour de force, a dizzying dance of personal and global histories spinning across the world and spanning centuries. One of Castro’s agendas, most obvious in Birds of Passage, Drift, and The Garden Book, is to destroy the nationalist myths of Australian history.