“Those who couldn’t tell stories, wrote letters.”
Brian Castro, Shanghai Dancing
The narrator of Brian Castro’s most recent novel Chinese Postman is a critically acclaimed novelist named Abraham Quin. Abe Quin is not Brian Castro. Quin is a retired creative writing professor in his mid-seventies, who lives a reclusive life on a bush block in the Adelaide Hills with his rescue dogs. He suspects he is dying: “losing his life: losing his possessions and gaining depression, obsessions and repressions.” Abe Quin isn’t Brian Castro, but they sometimes share a voice. It is a voice that is at turns effervescent and resentful, self-righteous and provocative, struck through with a sense of resignation. He evokes the narrators of W. G. Sebald and Daša Drndić with their long digressions, use of paraphrase and quotation, the thick impasto of fiction and history and personal memory. Quin is a disillusioned writer who sees himself as a mere “scrivener”. Bartleby in old age, dependent on whiskey, cursed with a bad back and gum disease, subjected to gastroscopies and endoscopies, married three times, divorced twice. “I deal with trivia and fret over trivia,” he proclaims.
Though the “auto/biographical”
①
Castro addresses this form at length in his essay collection Looking for Estrellita (University of Queensland Press) 1999.
or autofictive mode has interested Castro since his debut in Birds of Paradise (1983) he has always resisted the obstructions of genre. The ‘Chinese Postman’ of the novel’s title refers (among other things) to an optimisation problem examined by mathematician Kwan Mei-Ko in the 1960s: a postman must deliver the mail to every house in a given neighbourhood, passing each street once, while travelling the least distance. The solution is to find the shortest possible route within a closed circuit and return to the original point, without traversing the same street twice. In doing so, Quin thinks, he “eliminat[es] the perils of repetition-compulsion and of useless passion. People, mainly, are inertia itself. They tread the same paths.” He has strived all his writing life to avoid stagnation and escape classification and the result is that his work has received little attention. He fears that he will die unrecognised. There are petty—and comic—moments when Castro has Quin kvetch about the Australian literary culture which shies away from complexity and overlooks writers in the margins. It is a culture that fetishises youth and forces “the old [to make] way for the young [which] guaranteed a juvenile legacy.” In China, esteemed writers had pensions and their personal effects were enshrined in museums. Old and dead writers were honoured and the young had to earn their place. In the anglophone world, writers “were less honoured than bitched about.”
A loose series of events comprises the book’s plot. The writer sits at his desk and struggles to write. He engages in an email correspondence with a woman in Ukraine that he suspects, at first, to be a “bearded scammer”; he constructs a Japanese-style outhouse with the aid of his neighbour; he sells a stamp collection. It is a meditative work, a book of memory. Quin reflects on his mother and father, his youth, his migration to Australia, the people he has loved. He contemplates art and desire, death and legacy. He ponders the pain in his bowels and writes, at length, about shit. This wouldn’t be the first time a postmodernist has fixated on the scatological, though it’s hard to think of a novel where shit is tasked with representing so much (Quin might joke about floating signifiers). Bodily waste takes has the grave thematic import it has in a DeLillo or Pynchon. The faecal sculptures in David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Suffering Channel” spring to mind. Shit is death, obviously (“[it] is the smell of death, much stronger than the smell of blood…”) and all the indignities of ageing (“Nursing homes smell overwhelmingly of shit and echo with the verbiage of dementia, a Morse of logorrhea”). Shit is nature—the real, embodied world (“It is important that writing smells because life smells. Dogs are alive because they smell”). Art is shit, or at least good art stinks. An artist should be vulnerable, and their work should shock and unsettle us. Anything less is “summer reading for bourgeois ladies” and bloodless sleight of hand. “You give your life to your craft in order to provide some insight and life for others,” he laments. “But you die doing it, and not many care, having lost the communal nose for ordure. In other words, no one gives a shit unless there is sanitised order: chronological or narratorial.”
This obsession with excrement originates from his time as a student at Sydney University. Quin cleaned the Fisher Library toilets because “he was not entitled to a scholarship”—as he was not an Australian citizen at the time—so he needed to “[trade] shit for library privileges.” He was amused by the literary graffiti in the men’s toilet stalls, and pens some of his own. He spends his nights reading the books he stores away in the stacks. When he grew bored of his law studies, Quin dropped out of university and wrote a novel entitled Cleaner Dreams “in longhand, in a microscript to save on paper.” He sent it to a small publisher and heard nothing back. Then he read in the newspaper that the publisher’s office had burned down “under a suspect insurance claim.” Critics have commented on the parallels between this novel and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023).
② Leah Jing McIntosh, “Review: Chinese Postman by Brian Castro,” The Age, 5 November 2024.
Wenders’ film follows Hiriyama, a middle-aged toilet cleaner in Tokyo, who lives a life of solitude and detachment, collecting maple tree saplings, listening to Lou Reed cassettes, reading Faulkner and Highsmith and Aya Kōda. Hiriyama takes a craftsperson’s pride in his work and we are invited to see this as dignified, even noble. Despite his self-imposed exile, he craves human connection but any disruption to his controlled routine troubles him deeply and the anxieties and traumas he has successfully sublimated froth up to the surface. Similarly, for the neurotic Quin it is “[m]aintenance; orderliness; attention to ritual detail [that] stilled the mind’s agitation.” (Here, we might finally reflect on Freud, shitting/suppressing the urge, and the futile attempts to exert control over the uncontrollable). Quin excoriates dirty public toilets and the type of indoor toilets whose “tiles and mirrors presage death like operating theatres without hygiene”. For this reason, he embarks on the quixotic construction of the perfect “wabi-sabi toilet hut set amidst moss and ferns, camellias and plane trees” where “all was cleanliness and elegance, quietude and balm.”
Perfect Days and Chinese Postman are subversive works in different and contrary ways: Wenders’ in the way it withholds from the audience, Castro’s in the way it discloses. The subjects are alike, but the interiority of the novel gives us a precise accounting of Quin’s inner turmoil that we aren’t afforded of Hiriyama. Castro does not insist that Quin is a noble figure, and we aren’t expected to fill in his blanks. He is no hunger artist but an old man of ego and appetite. Chinese Postman is a claustrophobically close study of a mind that is “a geography of anxiety, a nervous, sinuous network of mini-crises.” He claims to have once enjoyed his “peaceful reminiscences” in his younger days, before the “brain fog”, but it’s hard to imagine a mind like Quin’s knowing tranquillity for any decent stretch. Much of his disquiet stems from his status as an outsider in Australia where “being Asian is a physical effort.” He recalls experiences with childhood bullies in boarding school, bigoted university lecturers, “white and blonde [women who] seemed to regard me as an ink spot needing white-out”, altercations with racists and nationalists, the scourge of sinophobes during the pandemic. There are benign moments of unbelonging as when, on a trip to China, a young couple “approached him in English, smiling and asking if he were Uighur.” He could speak Cantonese but had no Mandarin and so in Beijing “like everywhere else” he was a stranger.
In the decades since writing Cleaner Dreams, Quin has become disenchanted with his craft. Writing fiction is reduced, in his mind, to “grave-robbing; scene-stealing; masking; causing grief; mischief-making.” Because he can no longer tell stories, the novel cannot take a conventional form. The sanitised order is blasted away, leaving behind rubble and debris. Chinese Postman is presented as a series of digressive ruminations, stray observations, and pilfered bits of other books. Theodor Adorno—and, later, Edward Said—wrote about the kind of work artists might produce at a mature stage of their career, in that melancholic period marked by senescence and a sense of impending death.
③ Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style,” The London Review of Books, Vol. 26 No. 15, 5 August 2004.
In Said’s reading of Adorno, works in this ‘late style’ were generally not produced in the “spirit of reconciliation and serenity” we typically associate with old age. Rather, artistic lateness was characterised by “intransigence, difficulty and contradiction”; the work is challenging and even antagonistic to its audience; there is a “contradictory, alienated relationship” with the establishment that the artist had found earlier success within and an “increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism”. An artist working in a late style defies (perhaps fruitlessly) tradition and social order, jettisons convention, eschews harmony, and communicates through silence.
“Fragments were what fired [Quin],” we are told by the third person narrator, borrowing a line from Castro’s essay “Rekindling Disquiet”, about Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet—another aesthetic touchstone, where he explores Pessoa’s deployment of ‘heteronyms’ in his work—“not pseudonyms, but invented authors […] whose lives [he] vicariously lived.” Pessoa composed his fictions using “fragments” which “formed an over-active multiplication of ideas and selves straining to break out into a master-work that would never be written […] he would be read only after he was dead.”
④ Brian Castro, “Rekindling Disquiet”, Liminal, 27 April 2022.
Quin too finds solace in the unfinished word, the temporary word, the unread word. He believes that, instead of typing fiction on a page, he can “think thoughts to their end by writing them in the sand.” He has taken to writing in pencil because it can be erased; he returns to writing in a “microscopic hand” in letters, in the inner flaps of origami doves and cranes as if they were the pages of his first, lost novel and he was a young man scouring porcelain again.
There’s a Zen-like quality to this practice which seems incongruous with his earthly attachments. He possesses a beloved collection of curios: “bric-à-brac, tchotchkes… and pretty girl students, with whom he had no serious relationships except through letters and emails.” We are told that he has fed this compulsion to collect since he started writing stories. At that point, he was “no longer hiding, folding his work from the world and he was beginning to collect things instead… coins, stamps, minor experiences…” It's a non-exhaustive list. We might also add aphorisms and apothegms, obscure historical facts, forgotten authors etc., all picked up and squirrelled away for later appreciation, just as his friend Ginnie gathered stones at the beach to count them and protect them (like a young Beckett). The topics that interest Quin are wide and rambling. In a core sample of two to three pages, he touches on Baudelaire; Japanese furniture from the 19th century; Lawrence Durrell and Françoise Sagan; Dostoevsky; Freud; Foucault; a Swabian revolt in Salzburg in 1525; St Terese of Avila. There’s a palpable glee in these long sections, as nuances and new shades of meaning are accreted through collage. He riffs on double entendres, polysemy, and deliberate mishearings. He contemplates the work of poet Louise Glück—whose surname is “pronounced ‘Glick’ like the sound my dislocated shoulder made”—and this spins out into a morbid joke about the sound of an empty revolver. Castro/Quin loves to play up his own unreliability and the unreliability of memory—Sebald, again
⑤ Castro has written about Sebald in Heatand the Sydney Review of Books. In the latter essay, he describes his experience of having personally met the German author at the Prague Literary Festival in April 1999. It’s worth mentioning as an aside that Sebald’s characteristic use of unattributed, uncaptioned images—images that seem to gesture at the veracity of his accounts—is a device Castro also leans on (particularly in earlier work). However, he employs photographs only twice in Chinese Postman. The first photograph is of the eponymous “Chinese postman” depicted on a crimped postage stamp, which is also on the book’s cover. The second is an old French pissoir.
—blurring the edges between history and fiction. He relates a story by Anatole France in which a doddering Pontius Pilate “either through dementia or through a willed forgetting” cannot recall his having sentenced Jesus to death. Pilate quips that “he was the one with INRI on his tombstone: In Need of Rest and Inspiration.” The speaker is the one to finally confess: “Maybe I’m making that up again.” The collector presents his fragments to the reader with fervour and delight, but he is not so precious that he can’t stomach a smudge, a few fingerprints, a bit of damage.
Abe Quin isn’t Brian Castro but they’ve written the same books. They share passions and preoccupations. Quin was also born in Hong Kong and is of mixed-Chinese and European heritage. Their mothers lived through the Japanese occupation of the region. Quin has Jewish ancestry on his father’s side, as does Castro’s narrator in Shanghai Dancing (a distant cousin congratulates Quin “on an autobiography that [he] took pains to label a novel”). You’d be forgiven for thinking they’re one and the same and Castro doesn’t do much to deter that assumption. In fact he goads it, teasing at his presence as the author, as the subject, and as the subject’s ventriloquist. The third person narration regularly shifts to the first person, sometimes mid-paragraph or mid-sentence. It could be framed as the third person narrator’s slip (“That ‘I’ is in the sentence again”), or as the first-person interrupts the third-person as in an overheard conversation (“Hello. This is me we’re speaking about”). Sometimes it is dismissed as the speaker’s negative self-talk (the voices “going back and forth between the voices in his head, those third-person dialogues and reprimands”); or else it could be a purely literary contrivance – a literalisation of the self-consciousness that must beleaguer all memoir writers (“it was poor form to speak in the first person about pain without poverty”). In any case, the distinct consciousnesses of the subject of Chinese Postman, and the author of Chinese Postman is one of the novel’s central metaphors. Castro’s/Quin’s heteronym was born of little disruptions—moments of epiphany, shock and shame throughout his life – that began with “him, in that chrysalis, growing alongside me” like a medieval homunculus and ending with this final and irreversible depersonalisation. Reading Virginia Woolf as a boy “was the first time a book disturbed, took the ‘I’ out of him. So ‘I’ became ‘he’.” Castro has mentioned that To the Lighthouse was his “first truly literary experience.”
⑥ Cher Tan, “Interview #203 with Brian Castro”, Liminal, 29 July 2022.
While at university, his gaffe about Plato is spread across campus by a philosophy tutor and the story “came back to him like Chinese whispers… he was not identified directly [he] clearly saw himself in the third person.” The death of his wife and of Ginnie by suicide are a “splinter” in his memory. He recalls the moment he learned of Ginnie’s death and there is another switch in grammatical person as the narrator admonishes him: “he should have stepped out of the body of his work, levitated, and looked outside of himself to look out for the other.”
What happens to the writer’s authentic self when they use so much as their life as fodder for their fiction? Or, as Quin puts it: “Can the past be expressed without the turmoil of one ego being replaced by another?” If readers of biographies and autobiographies “can die into someone else’s life” the same might be said for those books’ authors. His body of work is populated with these heteronymous apparitions, superimposed on the author’s authentic self: a self whose experiences have been embroidered and embellished as each book demanded. Where does Quin end and Castro begin? Like his mother, Quin is consumed by his most painful memories. She “employed tenses interchangeably [and was] always present in the past.” Her “depression and melancholia” was her “lethal legacy” to him. He now wonders whether his constant examination of his own past has meant that he has “lived most of his life backwards, without discovering happiness.” Oblivion would be simpler. In forgetting, one can “[erase] the hurts and the embarrassments and the idiocies.” But Quin resists Pontious Pilate’s “willed forgetting” and advocates for a “proactive” ethics of remembrance and responsibility. It is not merely about the remembrance of our own pain, but of historic brutality and ongoing injustice too; dispossession and genocide; our assimilation into the amnesiac settler-colony. We should grit our teeth and suffer the smell. “There is a difference between being guilty and being responsible,” he concludes. “One is recursive: I’m not to blame; I wasn’t there. Let me out of here. The other is proactive. I am in some way responsible, albeit indirectly, for not acting. I am not afraid of taking some blame.”
In the novel Vertigo, Sebald presents the reader with a condensed biography of Henri-Marie Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendahl. As a young man, Beyle served as a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army and crossed the Alps through the Col du Grand St-Bernard. Even in his middle age, Beyle felt that he could still vividly recall descending those mountains and seeing the Italian town of Ivrea in the fading afternoon light. Many years later, however, after coming across an engraving entitled Prospetto d'Ivrea he realised that what he thought was his memory of that vista was, in fact, merely a memory of the artist’s representation of Ivrea. Sebald/Stendahl suggests that one should not purchase engravings of “fine views and landscapes seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.”
⑦
W. G. Sebald, Vertigo (New Directions, 2016).
Quin might be more ambivalent, obsessed as he is with death and legacy. We know that, in his younger days, he aspired to immortality. If there is a chance that the “he” (even an ersatz copy) would endure after the “I” was gone, that may well be a cold comfort.
✷
Iryna Zarębina sends emails from Lviv as the Russian army advances through the Donbas. “I am reading one of your books on the doorstep of war,” she writes. “You once wrote about war eloquently, so the critics said. I do not believe anyone can write eloquently about war.” Quin often finds himself chastened by her words. How frivolous his musings must be to a woman like Iryna who describes cruise missiles raining down on power plants and dogs without owners roaming the streets. Quin tangles up grammatical persons but Iryna mixes up her wars—“German to Soviet and back again”—as she shares her grandmother’s stories about life under the Reich and, later, Stalin. He has only read of war, and dreamt of it. Prior to the events of the novel, he dropped a lit Havana on the carpet of his library and burned it down amidst dreams of a Polish forest during the Nazi occupation. He has a “whole lifetime of reading … about disasters and wars always in a setting of natural beauty.”
Ever since he was a young, “pathologically shy” young man Quin has loved letter-writing since, in letters, he was able to “remain hidden”. They are another literary puzzle box:
To him, it was moral camouflage, not motives that inspired [letters]. Enacting one role to elicit another response. And so on. Gradually the other writer is revealed as either ingenuous or as a player, and if the latter is the case, then let the game begin.
When Iryna’s fire and flair shakes Quin out of his malaise, we see that his “shell of typography” has cracks. We detect a shift in tenor. He is most vulnerable—and perhaps uncharacteristically naïve—when he describes his feelings for Iryna. He does sound like a scammer’s mark at times, writing “to Iryna, discarding all suspicions of her fakery, promising any help she may require, within his means.” The narrator proclaims that “[i]n fact, Quin had fallen in love with Iryna.” Their correspondence sustains and energises him. Ginnie—a spectral presence throughout the novel—is finally, expressly identified with Iryna after much preliminary subtext. Quin becomes convinced that something Iryna wrote was also what “Ginnie would have said. Iryna was now Ginnie’s reincarnation and had dovetailed into his aesthetics...” As we might expect, Castro pulls it back just enough to dodge sentimentality. Ambiguities linger around Iryna’s identity and even the authorship of her emails. There are moments where it is obvious that Quin is writing Iryna, when she shares not only his melancholy but his stylistic idiosyncrasies too: the multi-clausal sentences, the European history lessons, the Quinian turns of phrase ( “I, the woman in exile, always looking back in anger […] tired of this farce called life but not courageous enough to commit suicide, dragging sadness like a tail”). In another email, Iryna reports that her friend Mariia travelled to Sydney and decided that it was a “beautiful city […] but the people sunbake like sea lions with no memory.”
⑧ The image echoes a line in Shanghai Dancing (Giramondo, 2003) in a stunning, ventriloquised deathbed rant delivered by the narrator’s father: “[A]lleyways are familiar to those born to them,” says Arnaldo José Castro, “knowing them like the postmaster that I am, past-master of Shanghai alleyways which never mislead […] certain to lead to more confusing outside roads where the first tappings and rumblings of an opening pub can fortuitously be heard; Sydney: the end of memory…”
Quin even imagines an entire conversation between Iryna and her daughter Marika, after school, about “the Chinese man writing to me from […] that country furthest away from us” and whether they should take his offer to travel to Australia. (Notably, this is a moment in the book where Quin might ‘naturally’ be spoken about in the third person, and see himself from the outside, yet he can’t escape the artifice. He must invent the scene).
These sections are more or less played straight relative to the rest of the novel. Quin believes that his connection to Iryna is “beyond the ludic”, so the metafictive mischief is turned down and he treats her experiences with appropriate solemnity. Often, the best he feels he can offer is silence. When Iryna sends him a poem that describes her assault by Russian soldiers, he “did not know how to respond.” He is “paralysed, waiting for a sign.” When she writes that her husband may have been killed in a massacre in Olenivka, he says nothing because he feels that “a response would sound hollow and no words would be able to describe adequately any comfort or condolence.” During a period of mourning, Quin claims that “Wittgenstein was right: the world cannot be explained except outside of it when it records a cry of pain.” Perhaps it should not surprise us that a novelist’s ‘late style’ work is concerned, in part, with language’s inability to ameliorate or redeem us but Castro/Quin is not satisfied with leaving that proposition uninterrogated. He reflects on ‘silence’ in a manner that recalls his ethics of remembrance: it is often imperative that we countenance the unsayable, that we ask ourselves what or whom silence serves. To remain silent often “was the worst expression of empathy” and yet silence could also be an apt response to grief where it was “not unfeeling, but […] an honesty shared and meant to be shared.”
We eventually find out that Iryna’s husband is still alive (a “happy ending of sorts,” Quin thinks) and her emails cease abruptly. Facing a silence without end, Quin is soon back into old grooves: the heavy drinking, the pessimism, the fixation on death, “the knot in his bowels at the end of each day […] hardly moral camouflage now, but reality, and soon to be an unreality.” There is a “cemetery beyond the hedgerow where the silence is only broken by birdsong at dawn and dusk.” This image—of birdsong breaking the silence, of caged birds singing—recurs throughout the novel. Like the Qing Dynasty postmen who supposedly walked around with canaries in cages on their heads as they delivered mail, Quin these days feels that he has “a caged bird in my head hardly ever sings and never flies.” He recalls the words of a friend deployed in Vietnam. “After the incoming artillery rounds […] if you’re still conscious” there is an “atavistic silence.” He continues: “You will listen for the bird call and if you find it […] you are then back in the world of unreality.” Grief will shock us into silence—after that we can choose what we will do with it. Quin is a scrivener of unreality by calling. Long ago, he made the choice to canalise his despair into exquisite sentences and ambitious novels: this is both the cause of his deep loneliness and his only means of escape.
At the novel’s conclusion, he awaits the arrival of his beloved correspondent at the international luggage carousel. We know not to expect a neat resolution. Kafka’s own Chinese postman—he once wrote to Iryna—bore a “letter from a dying emperor to his ideal lover” but the messenger “could never breach the walls of the courtyard of the courtyard of the courtyard of the Forbidden City.” Maybe he made that up. There is no paper letter in Kafka’s story. It is a whispered message, and its intended recipient is “you, the humble subject […] you alone” the reader of the story, “cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun.”
⑨ Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Knopf, 2015).
Castro’s Chinese Postman is a love letter to his ideal reader. It is a transmission of the literary self far into the future—perhaps many years into the future—depending on how long it takes to navigate the labyrinths of distance, history, language, fashion and the shit pile of hegemonies standing in the way of communion. But that hope of communion is enough for the sender, even if he might not be around to read the reply.
