Vanitas and the life of the author: in Chinese Postman, Brian Castro transforms fiction into a mechanism of truth

By Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia

There was a point in the 1990s where it became fashionable to emphasise that autobiography was fiction. This proposition sprang up to complement an earlier stricture that emerged with the New Criticism of the mid-20th century – namely, that the author of a work of fiction was never the narrator. So, autobiography was always fiction and fiction was never autobiography.

While both ideas had the virtue of interrupting the seductions of biographical essentialism, one comes up against their limitations…

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