Kitabı oku: «Creative Lives», sayfa 5

BH: Indeed, it must have been very reassuring to realize that you were able to pull this together despite your disrupted and unpredictable schedule. How would you describe the next stage of writing a novel, that is, your process of editing a first draft?

SC: It is different, but a big job. For the next round of edits, I really feel that I need a lot of time because I actually need to restructure it. I can edit language while I am in the car waiting to pick up a child from their guitar class but, for a structural edit, you need to step back and look at the whole novel. Then, you need to step in and look at individual scenes. You constantly step out and step in, and this process requires time. I do not have much time any more because I’ve returned to running a social justice program. Given that writing is not necessarily a way to create a sustainable income for a family of six, I have focused back on being a lawyer at this stage in my life. I feel fortunate to return to the law after a few years of not working in the paid economy, and I am very fortunate that it’s a job that I love.

But I do hope that I will be able to write at least a minimum amount that nourishes my soul. Time and fatigue are my worst enemies. I need to think, once again, about Stephen King and work out how to make time my friend. And I do have an hour or two in the evening if I can overcome my fatigue. Of course, we also need to allow ourselves to not write. We have to recognize that all the other things that we’re doing are valid and necessary because, as writers, all we want to do is write. That is all I want to do. I want to be with my children and my husband, occasionally hang out with friends and then write some more. I would very happily have a completely binary life where I am either with my family or writing, either writing or with my family.

BH: Maybe one day …

SC: One day, one day.

BH: I gather that that Song of the Sun God has been accepted as the basis of a TV series. Could you give an update on the progress of that project?

SC: I’m excited about the proposed TV series. Olivia Hetreed, BAFTA-winning writer of Oscar-nominated film Girl with A Pearl Earring, will adapt the novel for Synchronicity Films, producer of the recent ABC / BBC drama The Cry, and Australia’s Dragonet Films. Olivia is working on a six-part series based on the novel, and the adaptation will focus on the youngest generation through Smrithi, a young woman living in London, who is disconnected from her culture and long-held family secrets. I have been working with the team over email and was fortunate to go to London in January 2020 with Karen Radzyner from Dragonet, to work with Olivia and Claire Mundell from Synchronicity in developing the adaptation. The team has created a compelling overview of the series which is now being pitched for development funding.

BH: A final question about the process of your writing. I was wondering how you gather and develop ideas. Do you simply type them into your computer? Or do you prefer to keep a notebook where you can jot down notes or map out more complex ideas like the intricate web of family relations in Song of the Sun God?

SC: I make notes of interesting ideas or scenes—sometimes a scene will just flash into my mind—or words. I love words. I have a notebook where all of this just gets dumped but sometimes I will put up a file on my computer where I collect ideas for future books. I keep this document secret somewhere in my computer because I think my husband would be terrified to see it—“What? You haven’t finished with the third book?” But when I write, I write directly into the computer. For Song of the Sun God, I did do some writing on a notepad because my children were much younger then, and I often needed to sit in a doctor’s waiting room or one would have speech therapy, and for an hour or so, I would just handwrite scenes. But nowadays I write directly into a computer and I actually prefer it because it is very fast, and it allows me to check my word count. A good day of writing, though, is a day when I forget about the targets because I am absorbed into my world. And when I emerge from that world, I realize that in those few hours, I wrote 2,000 words. You know, that is a beautiful day. And there are days like that. They are a real joy, and I feel that they are good for me.

Bibliography

Chandran, Shankari. 2017a. Song of the Sun God. Colombo: Perera-Hussein Publishing House.

---. 2017b. The Barrier. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia.

In a State of Indifference:
Amit Chaudhuri in Conversation with Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Photograph of Amit Chaudhuri by Geoff Pugh

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, three collections of poetry. a collection of short stories, three books of essays, two works of non fiction and numerous edited collections. Finding the Raga, about his relationship to North Indian classical music, will appear in 2021. He is also a composer, singer, and a concert performer of Indian classical music. His musical creations are known for their eclecticism, improvisation, and experimental quality across genres: jazz, blues, and classical Hindustani. Born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay, Chaudhuri spent his formative years between London, Bombay, and Oxford before choosing Calcutta as his home. Chaudhuri’s artistic oeuvre is at once expansive and elusive. It is hard to pin down his work to a specific genre, tradition, or movement in the catalogue of literary criticism. He is a diasporic South Asian writer in the sense that his geographical location spans Europe and India, yet as he says in this interview, the terms diaspora, exile, nation and identity make his mind “fog over” and are not at the forefront of his artistic practice. Modernists, postmodernists, and postcolonial critics have all grappled with his work, and at times, struggled to place him amongst canonical literati.

Chaudhuri is one of the great stylists of modern fiction. The difficulty of defining his output can be gauged by the fact that while the novelist Sumana Roy (2017), in an engaging essay, recalls her delighted laughter on first reading Chaudhuri’s first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address (Chaudhuri 1991), critic Ian Almond (2010) has written of “melancholy, fantasy and economy in Amit Chaudhuri’s short fiction”. Both responses are valid. The delicate, poetic richness of his writing, and his avowed debt to the great Bombay poets Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Arun Kolatkar (Chaudhuri 2017a) give his novels a particular sense of intimacy. This is the case with the walks through London of 22-year-old Ananda and his uncle Radhesh in Odysseus Abroad (Chaudhuri 2014), where the attention to relations between the generations is characteristic. It features, too, in the vivid detail of the return to Bombay of a novelist named “Amit Chaudhuri” in Friend of my Youth (Chaudhuri 2017b). In the opening pages of latter novel, the narrator finds himself in a taxi, registering unfamiliar aspects of the city:

the new flyovers, the disappearance of certain things which weren’t quite landmarks but which helped you orient yourself—furniture showrooms, fisherfolk’s settlements. I would be surprised—maybe even disappointed—if these large-scale changes did not occur. On the right-hand side at the end of the road from the airport towards Mahim is, I know, the mosque with loudspeakers, hemmed in by traffic on the left; further up, past the brief stink of the sea, will be the church where I once went to attend an NA meeting. I was keeping Ramu company.

The details carry the mood, the sense of connection and detachment, the significance of the narrator’s friend Ramu who is his remaining human connection to the city. It is not surprising that Amit Chaudhuri, in his interview here with Pavan Kumar Malreddy, expresses his admiration for D.H. Lawrence, recalling his first reading of Sons and Lovers and his sense of Lawrence’s desire to convey “the incandescence of living in the here and now”. Postcolonial criticism, as Sumana Roy says, often tends to focus on the nation, the race, the marginalized. Chaudhuri’s writing, while it does not ignore these elements, is, in Roy’s words, “grounded in explorations of the sensuous, the emotional, the affective” (2017, n.p.). Cristina Sandru (2010), writing in the volume Rerouting the Postcolonial, has noticed a similar development in postcolonial writing.

In his review of Odysseus Abroad, the writer Neel Mukherjee (himself interviewed elsewhere in this volume by Anjali Joseph) remarks that Chaudhuri’s “signature sentences” are “elegant and classical, rich in parentheses, subclauses and digressions; unexpected, surprising spaces open up within them to accommodate the ever-present past and the infinite branching of thought” (Mukherjee 2015). Throughout the novels, there are piquant observations concerning social and intellectual life. The taxi journey of “Chaudhuri” on his arrival in Bombay soon leads him to reflect mischievously on his early years and to the comment that “Lacan says our subjectivity takes form at the ‘mirror stage’. The term and notion are so well worn they might make you laugh—the fate of most revolutionary ideas in psychoanalysis”. This piquant observation does not prevent the narrator from exploring his early years and impressions in intriguing ways. In similar fashion, Chaudhuri can turn the usual advice to aspiring writers on its head: “For me, the protagonist is only one element in a story: evening, room, wall, smoke, car, are other possible ones” (Chaudhuri 2016), or mount trenchant social and political commentary on contemporary India: “India has not, outside of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of emergency, been in this place before, and certainly not with the degree of popular support we see now, which can only be characterized as a form of inebriation” (Chaudhuri 2019).

In this interview, which took place at Amangalla Hotel on 25 January 2018 in Galle, Sri Lanka—“against the piano tinkles of a guest performer in the lobby, and the distant echo of Tamil vocals from the wall-mounted radio”, recalls interviewer Pavan Malreddy—Chaudhuri discusses his literary influences, musical inspirations, and what it means to produce art in an age of “market activism”.

The interviewer, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, teaches English literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. His recent publications include a monograph, Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism (2015), the co-edited collections Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (2015), and Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (2019). He has co-edited special issues of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2012), ZAA: Journal of English and American Studies (2014), Kairos (2018), and European Journal of English Studies (2018) and has authored over 30 essays and chapters on terrorism, political violence, and postcolonial theory in journals such as The European Legacy, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Intertexts, and AlterNative, among others. He is currently working on a monograph titled Insurgent Cultures.

Pavan Kumar Malreddy (PKM): Let me start with a quote from the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah: “Being away has helped me to write with a clear vision. Distance distils and makes ideas worth pursuing. […] One needs to extricate oneself from the daily needs and demands of living at home” (quoted in Jonas 1988, 74–75). I am aware of the fact that you are neither a diasporic nor an exile writer but you do spend a considerable amount of time away from home; you hold a professorship in England, and you have a second home in Oxford. But unlike what Farah is saying—that one needs to extricate oneself from the grind of domesticity, you seem to make an art out of domesticity. Much of your fiction is, in my reading, about the aesthetics of domesticity, the slow and slumbering lives of the urban Indian middle classes, where nothing moves. How do you look at this rather enabling tension with domesticity in your work?

Amit Chaudhuri (AC): Firstly, I think what Nuruddin Farah says must be true, but for me, my mind fogs over when I hear terms like exile, diaspora, nation, and identity, just as my mind fogs over when I see terms like description, character, or setting.

PKM: That’s the reason you once said you don’t like 19th-century novels?

AC: Right. So, categories like those are very difficult for me to comprehend. My mind won’t get around them. I think, yes, distance can produce a renewal of perception and perspective. It certainly happened to me when I was in London [in the early 1980s] without my being aware of it, because I was in such agony at that time, of homesickness. So being away not only influenced the way I’d look at home, but also the language—in terms of the way I use words, and the way those words change in their resonances in other locations.

PKM: And their effects?

AC: That too. But I also know that it is possible to have that kind of renewal and that sense of movement even if one has not travelled very far, and you might be living in a city whose landmarks you’ve never seen. In fact, we do not visit the landmarks of our own city, or certain places in one’s own city that may be 45 minutes away by car. One might find these places not only strange, but almost unreachable because one hardly registers their existence. I think it is important to understand those experiences as to why a place that is just 45 minutes away is so seldom visited by you. Why, when you go there, you feel a reconstitution of what you know about your city. I think those things are of great interest to me.

PKM: The difference between Farah and you is that you talk about a certain variation and the creation of these affects rather than having a clear vision, or an objective vision. But thinking about movement—at least the way you talk about it—that is, moving without having travelled afar—reminds me of Yann Martell, who told me that he writes while moving. He has a treadmill in his garage with a writing desk mounted on it, and he writes while strolling on the machine.

AC: That’s fantastic.

PKM: Like I said, I don’t consider you as a diasporic writer who is on the move, but you do move quite a bit between Mumbai, Calcutta, and Oxford.

AC: But I also move between rooms in my house because I don’t have a fixed writing desk or spot. People do ask me about it, especially when they come to photograph me after an interview: “where do you write?” I don’t have one place. I move between bed, sofa, bedroom, and drawing room. And I often write, because I write longhand, in my notebook while walking from one place to another. So, what you’re saying with Yann Martell surprises me because I didn’t realize there were other people like that. But I do write and revise often while walking.

PKM: In movement.

AC: Yes, while walking.

PKM: Yes, that’s one of the arguments made in performance arts, that artists think better when they’re on the move. On that note, I wanted to ask you about another kind of movement, that is, movement between different kinds of thinking or, say, imaginary worlds. You are one of those rare people who have a foot both in fiction and academia. In the academic world, there is this idea of dialogue and public engagement. But in fiction, there is a romantic notion that writers do everything in private; they are under no obligation to reveal their notes or sources of inspiration or imagination. How does this tension play out with you as a fiction writer? Do you collect some sort of ethnographic notes, and is there any kind of dialogue in your fiction in the process of its making?

AC: Of course, yes, but firstly, I don’t see myself really as part of academia. I see myself, throughout my life, as having used academia to further my interests as a writer. I make use of certain fringe spaces in academia to have discussions which involve not only academics, but also artists, publishers, and thinkers. I want a space which is unlike an academic conference or a literary festival. I feel it’s important to have that space. And to get back to your question: yes, writers are always in a state of argument. Writing itself is a form of argumentation. When you write something, you reject a whole range of things as part of a dialogue with yourself and your traditions. On some level, it would have been easier to go in a direction which is familiar; the direction that the time or age is going in. And yet, there are writers who step out of their time and reject that direction. So, there is always a process of dialogue and argumentation in the moment a writer takes a decision about the direction of his or her work. But it’s not even a decision; it’s not even a choice to do something that their innocence compelled them to do because it would be much easier to go with the flow. Once you go against the current, you’re in a more difficult position. But you do this because you have to do it. And in that, you’re engaging in an argument. Your writing is an argument.

PKM: So there is a dialogue, an internal dialogue.

AC: Yes, there’s a dialogue not just internal, but with existing structures, conventions, your past, your inheritance and more importantly, with what you are supposed to be as a writer, and what is expected of you as a writer; as an Indian writer, or as a writer of novels—all the things that are expected of you, you are in dialogue with that.

PKM: This is very avant-gardist, in my view, though I am not sure if that is a term used to describe your work, as it is typically associated with European art. Your response reminds me of G.V. Desani’s (1948) All About H. Hatterr, and now I think of it, there are parallels between Desani’s classic and your Odysseus Abroad (Chaudhuri 2014). It also reminds me of Borges’s famous quote on Kafka that “every writer creates his own precursors” (1964, 177), in the sense that a writer’s work sheds a renewed perspective on other (established) writers. Odysseus Abroad does exactly the same: it casts a new angle on Joyce, Homer, or G.V. Desani. I know this is a question that should be reserved for critics, but I wonder if you’ve ever thought about your work in this way.

AC: You know, it is very interesting you should say this and I hesitate to make this reference because it’s a reference that both touched me and also it’s one, as you said, others should be talking about. The other person who said this, oddly enough, was the novelist Will Self. When introducing me at a particular event, he made the same comparison, invoking Borges’s essay on Kafka. I feel very embarrassed because I don’t deserve …

PKM: But I have a specific example in mind that prompted this comparison, from your novel The Immortals. The protagonist Shyamji says: “you cannot practice art on an empty stomach”. Now, in his famous story “The Hunger Artist”, Kafka turns this empty stomach into a form of art. But my question is more general: why is it that in the Indian literary tradition, writing against set conventions, or bourgeois conventions of art, or doing “art for art’s sake” has not been very fashionable?

AC: If you look at Indian vernacular literatures in the past, they have astonishing avant-garde traditions, some of which have also been translated into other domains such as cinema and art. We only know of a few of these great avant-garde figures like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mani Kaul.

PKM: Adoor Gopalakrishnan, O.V. Vijayan …

AC: U.R. Ananthamurthy, and Urdu writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, where you often see not just a testing of extreme experience but also a sense of drift, and a sense of pausing over inconsequential things with an absurd amount of attention to them as well. You see these avant-garde preoccupations by which I mean, slightly irresponsible traditions, very robustly forming in Indian vernacular writings. I wouldn’t even call this an “art for art’s sake” avant-garde tradition, but a particular kind of exploration of consciousness.

PKM: On that note, it is also quite refreshing to see your work not being labelled as “postcolonial literature”, though it’s not a term you completely disassociate from, and you do use it very carefully and selectively, especially in your essay collection Clearing a Space (Chaudhuri 2008) where you make a case for “lowbrow” modernities. But you do not talk about middlebrow modernities as such, although most of your stories are about urban middle classes who, in your own way, fall under the subaltern category. I find this curious because much of the postcolonial discourse takes the middle classes for granted, as though they do not deserve the same kind of security or attention as the rural or peasant subalterns.

AC: I don’t like the middlebrow as a category because the middlebrow is a mainstream category where the parameters have to do with conventional realism, all of the things I don’t like. I’m very interested in, as you’ve said, the avant-garde and modernist element. But the history of the middle class does interest me and it’s a very rich history in India. We are all products of that history. So, to suppress the ways in which we are products of that history is to suppress our own everyday. Indian Anglophone writing and thinking is often about suppressing ourselves and inhabiting some kind of transcendental, neutral tone. Even the postcolonialists do not speak as themselves, but within a kind of neutral tone of an objective academic discourse …

PKM: Speaking for others?

AC: … and speaking in a way where, somehow, they are not enmeshed directly, the persons who have seen those things or are writing those things are not enmeshed directly with what they’re saying. This reproduces a sort of enlightened objectivity of speaking from above, where the self’s existence in the world and its memory don’t come into play. All those things are suppressed.

PKM: It’s very interesting you say this because in your piece in Literary Activism (2017c), you invoke this very intimacy and memory you say is missing in postcolonial Anglophone discourse. You start with a peculiar encounter in a car park and suddenly drift into involuntary memory, delving into insignificant yet intimate details. This is quite formulaic of your literary essays, most of which begin with your own personal encounters. Even when you are addressing serious discursive themes such as modernity, intertextuality, or deconstruction, you tend to refrain from an overtly scholarly or value-neutral tone.

AC: Because these things, in my case, are always emerging from a life encounter. It’s an encounter in life that produces the thought process. So, the encounter with life has to be a part, in my essays, of the thought process.

PKM: I find this approach all the more remarkable in your book on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry, in which you propose a major theoretical intervention between canonical and communal poetry. But I have always wondered why you were so drawn to the poetry of Lawrence? I mean he has enough prose to inspire, or was your book D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (2003) completely an academic exercise?

AC: I was transformed by my reading of Sons and Lovers (Lawrence 1913). As I’ve said many times before, Sons and Lovers, to me, was the first text I read that was contemporaneous with the modernists, which seemed to reject the metaphysical, by which I mean an extraneous source of value—whether that source of value is religion or heaven, or whether it’s a lost religion, or a lost civilization—as was the case with a certain kind of modernism. That civilization once existed and it had been fragmented, and, it was those fragments that animated a kind of sense of value that was receding. With Lawrence, there is no sense of civilizational crisis in Sons and Lovers. There’s a rejection of that idea and a kind of affirmation of being in the present, the incandescence of living in the here and now. And he was saying something in Sons and Lovers, without using so many words—and I’ve said this before—which he would say again closer to the time of his death in a book called Apocalypse (Lawrence 1931): “whatever the dead and unborn might know, they cannot know the marvel of being alive in the flesh”. This seemed to me a rejection of metaphysics on behalf of the fact of existence. I realized when reading Sons and Lovers that this was very important to me—the affirmation of the fact of existence. So that directed me in the ways I was to think about writing.

PKM: Your fiction writing?

AC: And that transformed into my fiction writing, beginning with A Strange and Sublime Address (Chaudhuri 1991), which I wanted to be a narrative about the present moment: what it means to inhabit the present moment. I could have made it a narrative about childhood or the past because I was basing it on precisely those things, or my visits to Calcutta from Bombay. But I decided in some subconscious kind of capacity that I would make it about living in the here and now, and thereby reject this narrative to be grounded in the past, of what has occurred. Roland Barthes says the “unreal time of novels, cosmogonies, and histories” depends on the simple past tense. And it begins with, in the case of the novel, a sentence in the simple past tense like “The marchioness went out at five o’clock”. So, I wanted to reject that sense of time, where the narrative represents something that’s over and perfect and available for reproduction in a novel. I wanted to reject all of that. It’s not that I didn’t write in the past tense. But you can use that tense to somehow still give a sense of the present moment.

PKM: But besides Lawrence, one also sees the influences of the likes of Joyce and Borges in your work. These are canonical writers now, but were avant-garde figures in their own times. Writers likes Borges are also fabulists, and fabulists, as William Golding (1989) argues, are moralists who “cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it” (77). So, do all your influences—be they modernist, avant-gardist, or fabulist—reject metaphysis in the way you just described, or do they also inculcate moral lessons? Or do they have their own kind of politics?

AC: I think they comprise their own kind of politics, and their own kind of argumentation. I don’t like moralism, again moralism depends so much on the suppression of the self and its encounter with life. And I don’t like that.

PKM: But coming to the music part of your work, there is a lot of improvisation which is again a sign of being in the present, or performing in the moment. Is there some sort of interaction between your writing and your music? I remember you telling us in Chemnitz at the 2013 Association for the Study of New Literatures in English conference that you were practising your vocals in the hotel minutes before you came down to deliver a lecture on art and literature.

AC: I neither think of them as existing separately, nor do I think of them as separate selves co-existing with an overseer looking upon them, where that overseer is somebody who exists in my brain. They are discontinuous but related.

PKM: They feed off each other?

AC: They must do so, because of their existing neighbourliness. But they’re not aware of existing in relation to each other any more than when you’re sitting in one lane, you’re aware of what is going on in the next one. There must be some kind of give and take going on between that lane and this one.

PKM: But you don’t do it consciously.

AC: Yes, you don’t do it consciously.

PKM: But it’s very interesting though because in your music, you work within traditions, there is no rejection of sorts?

AC: But I also experimented, with jazz and the blues.

PKM: That’s right, your own beginnings were a bit unorthodox; you wanted to become a Canadian singer-songwriter? Could you tell a bit more about how you became interested in Hindustani classical music?

AC: As I was growing up in Bombay, my creative life, like my musical life, had been very fitful, and I arrived at places without expecting to arrive or wanting to arrive. I never knew I would be a prose writer when I wanted to write poetry. But that’s what happened. Similarly, I never knew that I would become a Hindustani classical singer. Once I became a Hindustani classical singer, I completely rejected other kinds of music, like my earlier background in western popular music. So for years, I never listened to western music, especially after I started practising Hindustani music when I was in England. Only after 16 years did I go back to listening to western music again. That eventually led to the experiment I mentioned earlier. One morning, I thought I heard the riff to “Layla” (by Derek and the Dominos) as I was practising raag todi. So I decided to do something with the notes I was singing in compositional terms. But if you told me in 1985, when I was in the midst of training myself as an Indian classical singer, that one day I would be listening to Derek and the Dominos again, or that I would be incorporating something that they had written into a composition involving raag todi, I wouldn’t have believed you. If somebody had told me at the age of 14 when I was listening to The Who and playing the guitar that one day I would be a classical singer, I wouldn’t have believed them either. At each place, I’ve arrived by chance.

PKM: It’s your own odyssey in that sense.

AC: Perhaps, yes.

PKM: Talking about experimentation again, my thoughts drift in the direction of your latest novel Friend of My Youth (Chaudhuri 2017b), which is, in my reading, a prime example of experimental avant-garde. Fiction, non-fiction, or auto-fiction, however you want to call it. Usually works involving autobiographical elements arrive at the end of one’s career. I’d like to think that there is a lot of writing left in you. I’m just curious why, at this stage of your writing career, you decided to write a semi-autobiographical work. Is it something you had to do now?