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

At the age of ten, Castro was sent to boarding school in Australia. In his writing, he revisits repeatedly the repercussions of this traumatic separation from his family and from the sophisticated cosmopolitan lifestyle he enjoyed in Hong Kong. He has stated that his arrival in Australia marked the moment when he began to write. It was the first time he had ever been asked where he came from, and in a country still in the grips of the ‘White Australia Policy’, he was quickly categorised in terms of his race and ethnicity. In Australia, it seemed that his identity was determined by his appearance and so he learnt to wear ‘a mask’, to present an acceptable ‘other’ to those around him. He was acutely aware that his lineage cast him as a ‘hybrid’, as something less than ‘authentic’ (‘Arrivals’ 10). His writing explores issues of lineage, hybridity, and authenticity on two significant levels: a personal concern to do with individual and national identity and an intellectual concern related to modes of writing or cross-genres.

Hybridity operates in Castro’s writing as a powerfully subversive force, which disrupts the supposedly established binaries of self/other, Australian/Chinese, fact/fiction. Because Castro’s first novel, Birds of Passage, related the experiences of an Australian-born Chinese teacher and writer, it was classified as autobiographical. Frustrated by the way in which he, as author, was read into his fiction, Castro set about parodying both the notion of self and of genre. His next novel, Pomeroy, part thriller, crime novel, and romance, marked the beginning of his ongoing project to demolish, or at least destabilise, the restrictions he feels genre imposes on writing. Castro constructs hybrid characters who are fragmented and reflected in other characters or who are doubled. These characters are often of mixed race origin: the Australian-born Chinese Seamus of Birds of Passage, Drift’s albino Tasmanian Aboriginal Thomas McGann, the spectacularly hybridised António in Shanghai Dancing. Such characters operate to undo any perceived distinction between a homogenous, dominant culture and multiethnic others; they ensure that the ‘ “racial seams” are no longer distinguishable or capable of being identified within the culture’ (Barker, ‘Theory as Fireworks’ 246). In an Australian context, these characters play on national anxieties about miscegenation and its effect on Australian identity by dissolving the slash between, or the space between, self and other.