The Representation Of Disinheritance In Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing

Brian Castro (1950-), hitherto foreign to most readers of English literature, has reached a higher stature in his total impression as an author distinguished by all the standards of greatness in Australian literary circle-intelligence, erudition, cultivation, and creativeness. Famed in all arts, Castro is supreme in fabricating his storytelling in such a powerful way that neither the stylistic complexity, nor the rhetoric, or the ubiquitous reference and allusions, derail its idiosyncrasy. If we situate Castro among other Australian literati within a span of a hundred years, it is titillating that Castro would be superior enough to be venerable, standing out more sharply and fully etched against his witticism and insightfulness than that of any other fellow.In current academic scholarship on Castro, considerable research has been done to explore the political or moral magnitude of his literary works. However, I hope it is not immodest to say that an intellectual space of Castro's aesthetic depth seems to have opened up for the propositions of this thesis. For a man with such a versatile talent like Castro, who aims at symmetry, poise, and the beautiful harmony of all artistic impulses and appreciation, to be judged merely from such biased perspectives is an unfair thing enough. From the fin de siecle of the twentieth century on, due to the far-reaching influence of "political unconsciousness," the interest in post-colonial literature has been rather political and moral than philological or aesthetic; thereafter, there is a relatively miniature scale of published scholarship on its aesthetic value, a groundless academic field photosynthesized by the relatively dry intellectual light, sterile and rather impoverishment. In this regard, all serious exploration of the political or social concern of Castro in this thesis will attempt to come to grips with his engrossing virtuosity for aesthetics, by which a sense of spiritual loss is strongly reinforced through his intelligent connotation of music in Shanghai Dancing. Hence, if this thesis has any merit, it lies in its indefatigable zeal to do justice to this extraordinary man by finding a great stick to cast attention on his aesthetic capability which is after long self-cultivation come to perfection in his literary experiments.The last decades of the twentieth century, examined in retrospect, can be seen as an era of rising minor literature and the parallel submergence of disinheritance in critical literary thought. The disinheritance, a state of spiritual homeless, rootless, or unbelonging, is essentially the sort of anguish unbearable. This thesis structures around Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theory of minor literature. Castro once proclaimed that he interprets Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "minor literature" from the perspective of the "minor" key in musical sense. Had we taken pains to probe more deeply into Castro's works, we would see his copious reference to art and especially, music. Then, Shanghai Dancing gives us, as it were, only small puffs and short draughts of Castro-ian winds of aesthetic doctrine of music-to be a metaphor.Music in Chinese, stands for "yin"("音")which is homonymic to "yin" ("隐"[connotations]). According to Chinese scholar Huang Kan's eminent method of "exegesis by homo sound" ("Yinxun")-annotating a word with the aid of another word similar in sound, it is small wonder to discern a felicitous dalliance between "yin"("音")and "yin"("隐"):The music, like a signifier, is to embody connotations so as to project a trace of significations of emotions(音,隐也,音乐借隐喻体有所指也)In Castro's metaphor of music one finds much of that suggestiveness, that charm of an elusive dark lady willingly half-veiled, which prompts his readers to investigate a history of miseries, traumas, and pains behind the Castro family's ups and downs, and feel close to their heart beset by disinheritance. By delving into the three components of minor literature-namely, the purposeful words chosen to carry intensive meaning and terms that insinuate sorrow, a collective assemblage of enunciation and the connection of the individual with the political, this thesis will analyze the three dimensions of disinheritance as well as their impact on intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships among immigrants, push those three folds of meanings further into musical meditations—minor key, polyphony and atonality, and discuss in detail Castro's mechanism of spiritual loss in this fictional autobiography.A minor literature, for Castro, is a piece of minor music:solemn, melancholy, and downbeaten, while his signification of musicality embodied in chosen words, or phrases rich in the pain of disinheritance intensifies the allure of what lies beneath. In Castro's deeply negative intensity of binary oppositions, one might read age-old difficulty, for post-colonial societies, of integrating these two phenomena-different phenomena at that-of the inversion of superior role of major key or secondary role like minor key and intercourse between individuals of different races. As the history of the Castro family unfolds like an epic of diaspora, Castro's polyphonic arrangement of a collective assemblage of utterances enlivens a deep sensitivity to the authenticity of history, the family situation and the milieu in which they live, and the collective trauma reared by colonialism and immigration. Castro does open up the subject of dichotomy between what is privileged major and what is marginalized minor. Indeed, he lands himself in hot water both for his frank revelations about the cultural colonialism lurking in a demagogic propaganda of nationalism, patriotism, cultural homogeneity, and for his Utopian dream of an atonal society in which traditional identitarian thinking is where the snows of yesteryear are. The Chinese diasporic writer Mu Xin's dictum "Culture is like wind, and wind knows no boundary or center," is apt to lend weight to Castro's atonal fantasy here.