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

In Birds of Passage, Seamus and Shan seem to merge across space and time. In Drift, Thomas McGann morphs into B. S. Johnson, who is himself a mutant version of a dead author. In After China, the architect is and is not the writer; he is both Chinese and ‘You’. In Stepper, Ishi is and is not Stepper, and so on. Castro has stated that he situates his ‘hybrid heroes’ outside an assimilatory mainstream in order to ‘liberate a dialectical combination of aesthetics and critique’ (Barker, ‘Theory as Fireworks’ 248, hereafter referred to as ‘Fireworks’)—an apt description of his writing project.

Some critics have labeled Castro as a postmodern writer. It is a label he is happy to wear, up to a certain point. Though he employs many of the linguistic strategies associated with postmodernism—strategies that celebrate the instability of language which, incidentally, Castro associates with modernism—Castro denounces what he sees as postmodernism’s ‘overly self-conscious, ideological and theoretical’ modes of discourse. He believes, ‘[E]very novel…must make an ethical gesture toward the end of suffering’ (‘Fireworks’ 244). In his essays, he decries the kind of disinterested postmodernist writing where ‘anything goes’ and argues that at the heart of good experimental writing there is pain born of the ‘wounds of experience’ (‘Auto/biography’ 109). Good experimental writing, argues Castro, must be bold and encourage the reader’s imagination to be bold rather than defensive, for only then will they see surprising difference in the place of expected sameness; only then will they develop a ‘self-confident and distinctive pluralism’ (‘Lesions’ 199).

This drive to celebrate heterogeneity and uncertainty forms the ethical basis of Castro’s language games. His aesthetics affirm Nietzsche’s assessment of language and its capabilities, as stated in the epigraph. Language can throw up questions, but it cannot offer definitive conclusions. To reiterate: ‘[T]he difference between truth and fiction, philosophy and literature, verification and the rhetoric of performance, philosophical persuasion and literary troping is finally undecidable’ (‘Auto/biography’ 107–108). Such a belief has deeply political implications when it comes to storytelling and its relation to history, particularly the history of marginalised or disenfranchised minorities within dominant cultures.