AustLit

'In The Breaking of Style, Helen Vendler observes that "in lyric writing, style in its largest sense is best understood as a material body." The body of style resists reshaping, and though the breaking may seem, at last, as fluid as water, many poems may be needed to prepare the transformation. This essay explores the emergence of an original voice through the first four collections by the distinguished Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe. It tracks the agonistic forces of two distinct styles, present from the beginning of Wallace-Crabbe's oeuvre, demonstrating how these stylistic sources led through gradual transformation to the poet's mature voice.'  (Publication abstract)

'The central argument of this essay is that Peter Cowan's modernist experiments in fiction have not received due acknowledgment. A complex and conflicted personality, Cowan emerged in the 1940s as a writer under the sponsorship of the Angry Penguins in Melbourne but has become identified with Western Australia, where he was born and lived almost all his life. This essay, which discusses his love-hate relationship with the place, attempts to counter the limiting view that he is a regional writer. Drawing attention to the extraordinary contrast been his modernist fiction and his old-fashioned historical chronicles of his colonial forbears, it reveals him as a man psychically wounded by his family's past, whose overriding concern in his fiction was to match in words the emotional immediacy that the Angry Penguins achieved in paint.'  (Publication abstract)

'This essay looks at the significance of the semblable, the figure of the double or likeness, which Brian Castro borrows, in this instance, from Baudelaire. The similarity of the semblable helps to draw out in Castro's fiction not only what is familiar but also, in an uncanny move, what is unfamiliar about the world around us, its essential foreignness. Castro's fascination with the foreign springs from a double ethical impetus: first, as an outsider's refusal of the racist prejudices of mainstream society and, second, as a recognition of the radical contingency that underpins all existence, making each of us a foreigner, as it were, in the world. The essay then considers the recurrent tendency in Castro's novels to "overwrite" the stories of others in ways that similarly blur the line between self and Other: O'Young's translation of Shan in Birds of Passage, for instance, or Artie Catacomb's attempts to hijack the story of Sergei Wespe in Double-Wolf, with each antagonist becoming the double (or semblable) of his counterpart. Finally, the essay examines the normalizing function of the gaze, with Castro borrowing from Sartre and Lacan, such as the latter's discussions of anamorphosis in Pomeroy. Castro demonstrates in his fiction how this gaze can be subverted and confused by the subject's adoption of a second (or even multiple) identities, a deliberate cultivation of the semblable that helps to protect the vulnerable outsider from the normalizing power of the gaze.' (Publication abstract) 

'Brian Castro's Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria is a verse novel published in 2017 and the unlikely winner of a Prime Minister's Award in 2018. This article concentrates on the role of France and French referents in the text, showing that they embody a literary, transnational cosmopolitanism that the text at once hails and critiques. Beneath the gaudy and flashy serve of the novel's erudite sheen, a self-questioning or even self-vexation occurs, where the text gets in the way of itself. By ironizing its protagonist, Lucien Gracq, and presenting the alternate personas of Catherine Bourgeois and the Dogman, and examining the realization that Gracq's writerly quest is also a propulsion toward his own demise, we see that the text's literariness is a kind of disguise. Yet the text's self-vexation does not involute it further; rather, it provides a way for readerly access into the poem, helping explain why, unexpectedly, this has proven to be Castro's most popular work with the Australian reading public.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article explores the representation of mixed-race bodies in Brian Castro's fiction. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995), Robert Young demonstrates the deep anxieties caused by the existence of mixed-race individuals in colonial contexts. Miscegenation threatened the clear racial separation required by colonial domination and reveals, as Patrick Wolfe underlines, "the points at which racial classifications most conspicuously come undone" ("Land, Labor, and Difference," 867). All of Brian Castro's novels feature mixed-race characters, and several part-Chinese or part-Indigenous characters are main protagonists. Avoiding the binary distinction between happy and tragic hybrids, his novels engage with colonial and contemporary representations of mixed-race individuals and play with the threat to racial and cultural purity posed by hybridity. Castro's representation of the mixed-race body is characterized by a particular set of images, metaphors, and modes of representation, which underline the essential impact of the white gaze on racialized others and dramatize the racial ambiguity of mixed-race corporality through images of monstrosity and disability. Castro engages with racist discourse by exaggerating and amplifying its postulates, thus denouncing the absurdity of racial classification and the very concept of race.'  (Publication abstract)

'Brian Castro's novel Double-Wolf (1991) is a playful fictionalization of the life of the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff (Pankeyev, 1886–1979), known to history as the "Wolf Man." This essay seeks to situate Castro's novel within the context of both psychoanalysis and literary postmodernism and to explore the particularities of the Wolf Man case as a narrative that problematizes the borders of fictionality. Like Pankejeff himself, Castro's Double-Wolf remains both skeptical and faithful to Freudian precepts. To maintain this double affinity, the novel adopts a parodic stance and is written in the form of a postmodern farce. However, the purpose of the parody is not finally to suggest that the insights of psychoanalysis are nonsense but that their truth so radically disrupts common sense that they can only be upheld in an absurdist register. Just like Freud's case history, the novel turns on a primal scene, and it is only the existence of such a scene that makes the encounter between the novel's two protagonists (Sergei Wespe and Art Catacomb) meaningful. While the plot of the novel revolves around the attempt to prevent a scandal—the fear that a suddenly chatty Wolf Man might belatedly subvert the psychoanalytic practice that his neuroses helped establish—its true subject is the deeper scandal of knowledge itself and the fact that it might end in a scene and not a statement.'  (Publication abstract)

'In the book H.C. for Life, That Is to Say …, Jacques Derrida implores us to "imagine a reading at the bottom of the elemental sea" (29). Following on from Derrida, this essay shows how such a reading might be possible through an analysis of Brian Castro's novel Shanghai Dancing. To a large extent, the current critical literature on Castro's novel highlights how it resists traditional reading methods and practices but fails to think through how this impacts the way the critic should write about the novel. To do this, I argue that Castro's tropes and metaphors for writing—dancing, doppelgängers, phantom brothers, ghosts, the sea, typhoons, and flowers—are also metaphors and tropes for reading, which in turn demand a figurative response from the critic. The novel demands to be read as if from the bottom of the sea, which emphasizes Harold Bloom's idea that "every good reader properly desires to drown" (Anxiety of Influence, 29).'  (Publication abstract)