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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I was living on a sampan in Hong Kong, in the Causeway Bay typhoon shelter to be exact, when I received a fax on my sampanasonic inviting me to say something about translation, or failing that, about music. I was reading Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed at the time. (Witness the undecidable etymology of the word testament, probably from testis, or balls.) The book was in French, and it was on translation and music, though I’m not sure if there was much of a crossover. Since every translation, they tell me, is a betrayal, and since music is tongueless, I accepted. The task smacked of an exquisite tension between virtue and scandal, between purity and dirty linen. Let me remind you that the word sampan comes from the Cantonese sam ban, meaning a washboard. It’s all I play these days. But while laundries hold no fear for me, I do have a particular angst about being washed overboard, or going overboard, particularly at the end of long dinners…as I’ve always said, echoing my uncle Umberto, who stole it from someone else: traditor trattoria. Which means: Hand over your takeaway. Or perhaps: Translate before you eat. (‘Masked Balls’ 69)

The cross-cultural connections between China and Australia are an important aspect of Castro’s work. As is evident, particularly in Birds of Passage, After China, Shanghai Dancing, and The Garden Book, Chinese traditions and history provide a richly imaginative source for him. Castro uses his migrant, outsider position to disrupt or unsettle his idea of canonical Australian literature, literature he sees as ‘doggedly unadventurous because it constantly speaks to itself without any wider context’ (‘Fireworks’ 246–247). While the position of the outsider fosters a perspective of loss—of family, homeland, culture and language—and while it nourishes a sense of anxiety and despair, it also operates as a liberating position. Castro is free to demolish established boundaries of writing, culture, identity, and personal history and in the process open up spaces for new stories, for new performances of identity. His interweaving of Chinese and Australian concerns makes for exciting fiction.