Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Introduction : Brian Castro— Mon Semblable—Mon Frère!
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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) 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Antipodes vol. 34 no. 1 June 2020 22817380 2020 periodical issue

    'Before I wrote my first book, I didn't fully understand how the "editor" really worked. In shepherding that first book to publication, I had the good fortune and excellent guidance of Helen Tartar, longtime humanities editor at Stanford University Press, underappreciated there and in a fit of downsizing, forced to relocate to Fordham University Press, where she was given the means and the opportunity to flourish, especially in her forte, working with young scholars. My book had its particular fits and starts and a bit of a challenge getting past the review board. I'll never forget sitting with Helen at a book exhibit, probably at the American Comparative Literature Association annual convention, a moment of quiet while everyone was in sessions, and figuring out the last revisions to my manuscript. It wasn't a long conversation, or a demanding one, but somehow, she was working her magic. I left that convention knowing exactly what I needed to do, and I marveled at her ability to help me figure that out. At that point, I started to know what an editor could do, to understand when writers talked about "my editor" and all that this relationship implied.' (Brenda Machosky, From the Editor, introduction)

    2020
    pg. 45-56
Last amended 1 Sep 2021 13:24:38
45-56 Introduction : Brian Castro— Mon Semblable—Mon Frère!small AustLit logo Antipodes
X