Interview #203 — Brian Castro

by Cher Tan

Brian Castro is the author of the prize-winning Australian classic Shanghai Dancing (2003) and recipient of the 2014 Patrick White Award for Literature. His novels include The Garden Book (2005) and The Bath Fugues (2009), both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Street to Street (2012), loosely based on the life of poet Christopher Brennan.

His most recent work, the verse novel Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria (2017), won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Mascara Avant-garde Award for Fiction in 2018.

Brian speaks to Cher about the right to opacity, risk-taking and experimentation in writing, and what it means when textual and cultural hybridities intersect.

Let’s start from the beginning. How did your life as a writer form? Are there notable experiences within literature that have endured in your imagination?

I think it began when I was sent to boarding school in Australia from Hong Kong at the age of 11. I was totally isolated, as my parents and relations were not in Australia. I was therefore both self-reliant and fearful of the future. On holidays, I was fostered out to what were known as ‘guardians’. Literature was what gave me an inner world. I also had close-ups of how other families worked or not worked. This was encapsulated in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Perhaps that was my first truly literary experience.

As a novelist, you have been called “daring”, “challenging” and “experimental” by critics. What strikes me most about your oeuvre is the way you lean in to the margins—in the sense that marginality does not limit you but, rather, emboldens you to take even more risks. How do you think this attitude was nurtured, and how has it changed throughout the years?

I have always felt marginal. It probably relates to boarding school again. I had to go against the grain, to fight every inch of the way. I hated any kind of nationalism that, to me, equated as racism, and in boarding school, there was a lot of it. I take risks because there is nothing to lose. Writers who are too precious about their public image will only decline into a reproduction of themselves. There is no more edge because there is too much to lose. Over the years, what seemed ‘daring’ for me has changed to what is ‘challenging’—in terms of weighing up how thought and language can penetrate the sentence. A written sentence should not be wasted on speed and plot. It should be, at the least, slightly difficult to untangle.

When I read your writing, what immediately comes to mind is Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity. In Poetics of Relation, he calls it the “right to opacity”—what he believes those who have been historically constructed as Other should indulge in, in that we should encourage unknowability and untranslatability in our work. Can you speak more to this?

Yes, the Other is full of languages of all kinds. What I mean by this is that ethnicities, cultures, histories are all linguistically constructed. What language is in my head changes the density of my thought, makes things ‘sticky’ with memory and emotion. When I speak or think in French, I become someone immersed in a sophistication outside the blunt logic of English. Perhaps I can call it a poetics of difference(s). When I speak or think in Cantonese, I am brought back to the silences of my mother, to the philosophies of weather and the rhythms of village life. These linguistic emotions are untranslatable to a certain degree, but they penetrate thought as if one has lived for a long time in those cultures. One is ‘opaque’ with an unknowability of origins.

On a related tangent, I greatly enjoy the hybridity that comes through in your novels, in which you employ literary and philosophical hybridity to make sense of racial or cultural hybridity. And sometimes, like in Drift (1994), you even attempt to annihilate it. The tensions that arise between belonging and unbelonging, truth and memory, and certainty and doubt are constantly present, yet there is a firm sense of always wanting to remain within liminality. Why do you choose to situate your work in that in-between?

Well, the limen in Latin is, of course, the threshold. In psychology, the absolute sensory threshold is when a person detects a stimulus. I like the idea of a linguistic threshold, the liminality of language and sensation. The threshold, the stoep or doorstep, is where all kinds of conversations and stimuli take place without an intrusion into the house. But, with my history, the home or heim is not a sacred place. It can be a communal one, but it also can be a frightening one. So, as you say, belonging and unbelonging are quite tense—a subliminal emotion brought to the liminal surface and re-questioned inside the home. (Families fuck you up, to paraphrase Philip Larkin. I think that’s why I was in love with Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.) I think the in-between keeps the ideal at bay, that anything fixed will fall prey to the ephemerality of nature.

What would you say to someone who wants to be a better reader?

Read slowly and read widely. Today, with the internet, the temptation is to skim as much as possible. This doesn’t allow depth of reading. I was brought up in old-fashioned libraries with paper books and spent many hours browsing in the stacks, not for research, but for sheer pleasure and curiosity, intrigued by why certain books were grouped together—why English literature, for instance, was in the Dewey Decimal Classification number of around 823. This proximity of texts and smells brought about a hybridity, a melding of minds and worlds and interests.

When I interviewed your friend John Young—with whom you collaborated on Macau Days (2012) and who created the cover for The Garden Book—I asked him about his views on the evolution of Asian-Australian art since his founding of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 1995. I strongly believe intergenerational interrogations are important, so that we don’t risk decontextualising history. So I would like to ask you: do you see a shift in the kind(s) of conversations that the Anglophone literary world is having when it comes to work by writers on the so-called margins? Is there much you’re excited about when it comes to talk of ‘representation’ and ‘diversity’, or is it inadequate to think about identity in this way?

That’s an interesting question. I think the conversations being held in Britain and the USA are at least ten times more intense than in Australia. Marginal work and their representations are very much part of the main arena. I don’t mean they are more ideological, though this can be the case, but the critical mass is changing, in the same way as women’s writing is a long way away from that practised by pipe-smoking white men in tweed jackets.

The key to understanding the push in the UK and the USA is the diversity of diasporic writers. Many do not feel they are ‘from China’, for example, when they are third- and fourth-generation Asian Americans. So there are very healthy subcultures cutting themselves adrift from traditional stereotypes. There is no doubt that, in Australia, Indigenous writing is now part of the curriculum, but there is still no sign of a shift to the complex margins. In other words, it is only when the margins become what can be broadly described as the tension within the national discourse that the centre of gravity will shift. The centre becomes marginal. I see that happening with Zadie Smith, Jia Tolentino, Alexander Chee. You’re right that intergenerational interrogations are very important. It is the first move towards creating a context and a history. It’s a museum for where we’re at. Nothing arises out of a vacuum.

In addition to your writing practice, you’ve held various professorial positions in Australian universities, and you were also the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide from 2008 to 2019. Do you see mentoring as a form of investigation? What do you think mentoring others has taught you about your own writing?

Yes, mentoring is probably the most important thing an old writer can do for a new writer. Very few know how to go about getting published, for example. Very few know it is a long and slow process, and that any instant result may also mean instant failure. It is important to nurture a career, even if it may be unrewarding fiscally. Mentoring others has changed the way I look at publishing and editing. I now see editing as a further creative process. A lot of writers see it as irksome, having to rethink their writing. I now see it as a further opportunity to create new types of expression and crafting, removing subjectivity, reading with a third eye.

In the 2013 Sydney Review of Books essay ‘Literature and Fashion’, you assert: “Language is losing out to spectacle. It is the spectacle of easy individual rebellion. There is a refusal of meaning or trajectory in deference to commentary.” For better or worse, I am wondering if your view on this has changed since then. Is there anything within the realm of contemporary literature that you feel hopeful about?

I’m always hopeful about literature—that, somewhere, a writer will spring up and astonish you with individuality, energy and a comprehensive vision. I’ve changed a bit in regard to this expectation. I now find older writers who were little recognised (at least in the Anglophone world) to be far more interesting. I have in mind Arno Schmidt, Wolfgang Hilbig, Fleur Jaeggy.

You’ve mentioned numerous times, over various essays and interviews, your distrust towards the publishing business; for instance, in a 2003 Age profile of Shanghai Dancing, you said, “You can’t just reconcile writing with making a living … It’s a byproduct of your struggle, your day-to-day existence.” But you have also gone on to win more than a few prestigious literary awards. As a young writer who seeks to also resist commodification in writing, I’m curious how you’ve managed to navigate this friction.

I always managed to have a day job—at least two to three days a week. I’ve always seen writing not as a living but as a form of existence outside the realm of living and its commonplaces. It’s a kind of melancholy pleasure. The day jobs stave off depression and hunger. I don’t think depression and hunger are at all good for writing. What I liked as a young writer was the wide spectrum of experiences and emotions. The world also opens up if you’re humble and willing to learn. Now that I’m old, these things have been stymied or blunted, but, as an incurable romantic, I still long for an intense meeting of minds and hearts. As a semi-recluse, I find this very hard to achieve except through writing!

When do you know that a piece of writing is ‘done’?

I don’t think writing is ever ‘done’. But I certainly would not like to revisit old work. I think eternal fiddling is when the book burns out. Sometimes, just leaving it for a few months and then rereading it is a good practice to follow.

Do you have any advice for emerging novelists and essayists?

Have patience and tenacity. Fire in the belly, if you know you’re good. Passion about literature and what it can do. Read and read. Live in a world of books and writing.

Who are you inspired by?

Thomas Bernhard. Daša Drndić. Peter Handke.

What are you currently listening to?

Naudo Rodrigues on acoustic guitar. Check out his version of Begin the Beguine on YouTube. He’s totally self-taught and does not read music. He just listened and listened to good players from the age of five. He plays Afro-Brazilian music and is very elusive. No-one knows where he is at the moment. He might be in London or Tenerife. He may turn up at a bar or restaurant and simply start playing. He is recognised by some of the best guitarists in the world.

What are you currently reading?

Lydia Davis’ collected short stories. She was once married to Paul Auster. The stories are mostly sad but extremely thought-provoking.

How do you practise self-care?

It takes a long time to develop self-worth, if that’s what you mean. My mother taught me not to worry about self-image. It’s integrity and conduct that count. If one sticks to those, the rest will come. It’s an ethical project.

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

I normally don’t like to be pigeonholed, but it always depends on who is speaking. I’m happy to be called ‘Asian Australian’ among those who are like-minded. My antennae are out, though, for those who have problems with uninterrogated racial assumptions. Again, I come back to the ideas of nationality, nation and nationalism. My ideal passport would be a Writer’s Passport issued in the Land of Writing. In a strange kind of way, Ireland represents a bit of this, where writers aren’t taxed and the place is awash with literature. Then again, when I was in Dublin, I was asked what I did. When I replied I was a writer, my interlocutor commented that they didn’t need any more of them.