道与流变－卡斯特罗《中国之后》

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Chapter 1 Introduction

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Chapter 1 Introduction

In the resplendent realm of Australian literature, Brian Castro is one of my favorite

Australian writers. With one-fourth Chinese descent, he and his works are inextricably

linked to many aspects of China. Among all of his works, After China is one of his

typical representatives which relate with Chinese culture. As an ethnic Australian writer,

Brian Castro creates innovative perspectives to the divergences between the eastern and

western cultures and makes great contributions to the convergence of both.

§1.1 A General Account of the Novel After China

Brian Castro’s After China can certainly be described as an enigmatic novel. Those

many time shifts, the insertion of the Taoist anecdotes and the rapid movements of

locale from China to Australia suggest the author’s consciousness of postmodernist

narrative techniques. On the other hand, the strange hotel which You Bok mun1had

designed for the Pacific Ocean foreshore (even below the waterline) seems like a

product of the “magic realism” movement that came out of Latin America in the 1980s.

The final scenes of the disintegration of the hotel in a great storm and the hero’s

underwater swim through human excrement to open the sea valves is rather like a

nightmare seen from a magic realism story. Of course it is also highly symbolic of the

transitional stages of some transmigratory re-birth just as we have seen occur in the

story of “Tang Ying’s Butterfly”, the “rebirth” of You Bok mun after his imprisonment

during the Cultural Revolution or his rehabilitation after his near-death work accident

through his migration (or diasporean experience) to Australia.

Then again the expurgation of the obsessively self-indulgent design of the hotel

(along with its consumerism and idiosyncratic features) is highly symbolic when the

sea—or storm—cocks are opened and the rush of rubbish goes into the sea. It replicates

other transitions: conversion of energy to waste, the cycle destruction and rebuilding of

the world’s great cities and their edifices (as related by T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land”)

as well as the constant cycle of human life from creation to decay. In the hero’s life, the

decay and fall of his hotel design also mirror his brief happiness with his Australian

lover, which begins with an encounter on the beach and ends with her body being

carried away on the dream flood. For it does seem that the hero’s anguish may be

1The final part of the name is not capitalized in Castro’s text of the novel.

Taoism and Transformation: Brian Castro’s After China

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depicted by Castro as a transition into a magic realism fantasy. The stories of ancient

China and the Taoism philosophy are really a series of transitional stages for the dying

woman friend. They are symbolic of the greater process of transition which is her dying.

The novel After China combines the autobiography of the mentally and physically

impaired You Bok mun hero with a series of flashbacks to classical Chinese history and

Taoist beliefs. This autobiography has two major sequences—the upbringing of You

Bok mun and his fall from grace as a Chinese citizen during the cultural revolution and

later as a flawed (if not failed) architect migrant to Australia. In the story and its manner

of telling, After China is a sharp break from the majority of Australian novels. “With

cross-cultural love story as the thread of the whole work, After China interweaves

elements of postcolonialism, postmodernism and intracultural communication” ( 王

267).

§1.2 Castro’s Inclination of Deterritorialization and Minor Literature

Brian Castro is categorized as one of the diasporic Chinese writers by many critics.

Like most of exiled writers, he regards “deterritorialization” and “minor literature” as

the great momentum and the highest state so that he can realize his dream of

transcending any restraints. Whether he personally likes or dislikes such a title as

diasporic writer, he is undeniably for us the most fascinating and influential writer in

Australia since the 1980s and 1990s. He is widely accepted as the most outstanding

representative in the process of promoting and helping to form Australia’s

multiculturalism. His birth was at the junction of three major cultures, that is, Portugal,

Britain and China. That same multicultural family background constitutes great

importance for his literary creation. Just as he put it, “For a writer, this is a priceless

treasure, because other writers only have one culture or tradition” (王209).

In his critical essays, Looking for Estrellita, Brian Castro himself enunciated as

follows: “born into a cosmopolitan family which had its origins in Shanghai, I have

lived in Paris, in Hong Kong and for many years, in the Blue Mountains outside of

Sydney. I currently reside in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne, completing a

manuscript which maps a family lunacy”. On the grounds of his hybridization of

identity, Brian Castro wrote at least four novels which were connected with China in

their construction, respectively, Birds of Passage (1983), After China (1992), Pomeroy

(1990) and Shanghai Dancing (2003). His first novel, Birds of Passage, won the 1982

Chapter 1 Introduction

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Australian Vogel Literary Award. From then on, a range of famous scholars and

commentators at home and abroad have concentrated on his themes of identity,

displacement and transcendence to make further exploration of him, one after another.

Through deep analysis of Birds of Passage, many scholars integrate the writer’s work

with his creative thinking. The result is that they delve into the writer’s perplexity over

cultural belonging and his pursuit of multicultural creative ideas.

Among all of Brian Castro’s works, After China impresses me most. It not only

alludes to the fantastic ancient Chinese story adapted within this novel, but also a

touching and romantic love story. Moreover, many scholars and commentators also

express their great interest in After China. In 1992, Brian Castro won the Victorian

Premier's Literary Award for it. In the book Being and Becoming, Professor Wang

Guanglin stated, “The novel presents the storytelling in a labyrinthine, associative form

with a postmodern plethora of parody, pastiche, quotation, self-reflexiveness and

eclecticism that challenges any adaptation to find performative equivalence” (王267).

Helen Daniel, in her essay “A Double Fan”, also addressed her unique insight, “desiring,

prowling, storytelling, seducing, these are the activities of After China, a work of wit

and invention and a restraint which is somehow chaste” (Daniel 68).

§1.3 Castro’s Complex Story of Diaspora

Aside from After China,Birds of Passage and other novels, Brian Castro also

wrote one collection of essays entitled Looking for Estrellita. In this essay, he

mentioned, “With my cultural background, I was an outsider within outsiders” (Castro

11). In this sense, the author’s cultural identity becomes the focus of attention among

scholars and commentators. The other two focal points are writing techniques and the

theme of the novel. In Professor Wang’s interviewing of Brian Castro, the author stated

clearly that he would not like people to call him either an Australian writer or a Chinese

Australian writer, because he was just a writer. In his view, if a label was attached to his

identity, his imaginary space would be restricted so that his creative ability could not

bring its dominance into full play ( 王209). Australian reviewer Sue Bond once

commented, “All of Castro's work is concerned with identity and racial prejudice,

language and wordplay, erotics, dissociation and disorientation. He breaks boundaries

constantly” (Bond 5). In the essay “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel”, Howard

Nemerov declared that “One theme was pervasive to the point of obsession in this form,

Taoism and Transformation: Brian Castro’s After China

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which was identity” (Pierce 155). Professor Ma Lili, in his essay “Identity and

Creativity: Reading Brian Castro’s After China”, demonstrated that, “In After China,

Chinese people are no longer portrayed as the orientalised “Other,” (first proposed by

Bhabha in 1994), but endowed with new identity, who finally become the source of

inspiration of creativity and the vehicle of connecting the Western and Eastern cultures

and cultures of the two sexes. Castro seems to suggest that Chinese, or even Asian,

culture eventually becomes a birthplace of new ‘hybridization’ ( 马97). What Castro

aspired to present was his ideally creative pursuit of transcending the dispute about

identity and belonging. He seemed inclined to advocate the trend of multi-culturalism,

as Xavier Pons says:

Although race is the major external factor of alienation in his novel, the

implications are not limited to the predicament of the man who is made to

feel alienated because his skin is the wrong color. To some extent, this is

merely a convenient peg on which Castro hangs his wide-ranging analysis

of the sense of displacement which all human beings come to experience.

Nor does the author endorse political solutions of any kind. Being a writer,

not a reformer (Pons 464).

A second matter for attention is his writing techniques. Wenche Ommundsen, in

his article entitled “After Castro, Post Multiculturalism?” pointed out the doubling of

characters ran through After China, e.g. the Chinese architect and the Australian writer’s

former love. Castro employed a changing point of view to create a complicated

perspective by uncanny parallels, impossible coincidences and the blurring of

boundaries between self and other, inside and outside (Ommundsen 11). Yu Hai and Li

Rucheng also took great interest in Castro’s narrative techniques. They published an

essay entitled “Memory and Fiction”, and argued that Castro put much more emphasis

on diction, and as well the language between the lines is very powerful. Castro proposed

that the concise language and brief words were the best writing which could enrich and

add much more connotation to the work. “Over-talk and over-explanation would make

trouble for our writing” ( 于23). Brian Moloughney, an editor of the New Zealand

Journal of Asian Studies, in his article named “The Bent Hairpin of Unreason: Brian

Castro ＆Autobiography” held that “Castro shuns the singular. In all his novels the

perspective constantly shifts between characters, while the consciousness of individuals

is fractured, conveyed in different registers and different voices” (Moloughney 154).

OuYang yu, Australian Chinese poet, employed the words “the deconstruction of the

archetype” and “the deconstruction of the oriental” to observe the narrative techniques

Chapter 1 Introduction

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of After China.

Another focus is the theme of rheology2. Ma Lili brought out that the information

and materials of After China were derived from the flowing, limitless historical

knowledge base, which reflected the major theme of this novel: transformation, flow

and endless flow once again. This theme was also manifested in the transformation of

time, space and place, the uncertainty of the boundary as well as the reoccurrence of the

characters (马101-102).

What Ma Lili asserted on this theme partly contributes to the inspiration for my

thesis. Consulting many works on this subject, I discover that there exist some

similarities between the theme reflected in After China and the Taoist thoughts. Still

other famous scholars also mentioned the theme of rheology in their critical articles.

Some believed that the Japanese idea of ‘metabolist’ architecture puts emphasis on the

changeability of space, flexibility of function and transmutability of individual

construction (李84). This echoes exactly with the repeated designs of the precarious

hotel, a motif throughout the novel and a symbol of a constant change process.

As for Taoist philosophy, Castro is not the only one who shows his predilection for

it in his writings. Several other Australian writers have been attracted to giving their

readers some insight into the Taoist philosophy. T. A. G. Hungerford is one such, while

the most important example is Randolph Stow. In his poetry, he includes many

references to Taoist literature, and in his novel Tourmaline, he provides the most

significant advocacy of Taoism up to the publication of Castro’s After China.

§1.4 The Purpose and the Structure of the Thesis

There are two key reasons why I focus my academic attention on After China. One

is that I could find relatively few research papers or books about this novel in China. In

this case, it will be of great value if I could make some study of it. On the other hand, I

could find many enticing parodies of ancient Chinese stories reflecting Taoist thought

and philosophy in After China. Apparently, the novel is adapted in accordance with the

Taoist manuals, especially the book of Laozi and Zhuangzi.

In his collection of essays, Looking for Estrellita, Castro illuminated in part the

doctrines of Taoism. He expounded that Taoists believed that in order for the man to

2rheology: “the branch of physics that deals with the deformation and flow of matter, especially the

non-Newtonian flow of liquids and the plastic flow of solids” (Pearsall, 1998: 1591).

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摘要：

Chapter1Introduction-1-Chapter1IntroductionIntheresplendentrealmofAustralianliterature,BrianCastroisoneofmyfavoriteAustralianwriters.Withone-fourthChinesedescent,heandhisworksareinextricablylinkedtomanyaspectsofChina.Amongallofhisworks,AfterChinaisoneofhistypicalrepresentativeswhichrelatewithChinese...

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