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

Chapter :  Introduction
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[F]or it was only here that he would find her again, as he stood on the catwalk beside the warm glass reading, discovering the junction of concrete and glass wherein everything had begun…when on his early morning rounds he had switched on the lights in a hitherto unused passage in the hotel and people had begun to move, laundry trolleys rolled, plants grew, the air-conditioning buzzed, glasses clinked and Lao-tzu spoke, having accidentally found the same labyrinth of narrative which would ultimately lead to glimpses of her, a corridor heading down to the sand and the sea and looking out over the roof at a half-rainbow, he would have asked her if he could tell her a story and she would have nodded…then drinking in the colours he would have felt comforted by the long, wide, iridescent stream, by the two dolphins breaking the surface at unexpected intervals and by the way the world had metamorphosed, had become small almost surreptitiously, in that brief, inconceivable moment of reflection. (143–144)

In ‘Lesions’, Castro notes that his subjects are always sex and death. Throughout his work he investigates the relationship between writing and death through language games, fragmentation, multiple perspectives and absences because he believes that it is only through such writing strategies that the ‘wound of existence, which asks the most profound question: What is that emptiness we have inherited in simply being?’ can be contemplated (‘Looking’ 200). His writing challenges us ‘to see ourselves naked, accepting the fact that we have to die, understanding that blind-spot which we have always contrived not to investigate but to hide’ (‘Lesions’ 200). Castro seeks to unwrap death, to set it free from the silences in language and beneath language where it lurks, and he embraces death as a powerful creative force of freedom and possibility. He insists that writing is a melancholic activity that necessarily entails the negation or annihilation of the self. His preoccupation with death is married to a personal sense of sorrow and negativity; the experience of grief and anxiety that he sees as being the critical edge to writing. He explains: ‘For me, writing is not a celebratory, joyous nor a politically correct activity. It is a melancholic and mostly frightening thing to discover the dark sides of human nature and to wrangle them into a linguistic overload’ (‘Lesions’ 183).

Castro has a deserved reputation for being a melancholic writer but, thanks to his verbal wit and ironic gaze, his writing is also extremely amusing. Here is just one example of how he plays entertainingly with language: