The enchanted author

Amit Chaudhuri updates James Joyce’s Ulysses in Odysseus Abroad. In the bargain, he tells the story of an uncle and a nephew set in London that is as moving as it is ribald; as telling of individuals as it is of society. Excerpts from an interview:

In an interview, you once said you don’t believe in the 19th century novel. Why not?

A certain idea of the 19th-century novel has something — that I still don’t quite understand — called character in the centre and that never really interested me. Social inter-relationship never really interested me. Living in the world interested me and opting out of social inter-relationships — daydreaming, creating fantasies — interested me. Magic is of interest to me. Not magic realism. But enchantment. The 19th-century novel is a very grown-up form. It comes out of understanding the aspirational nature of human beings. So when I say I am not comfortable or not at home in the 19th-century novel, I mean I am not at home with such a grown-up understanding of the world.

If character at the centre is not what interests you, would you say, the city – be it Bombay or Calcutta or London – is your special muse?

The urban interests me. Writing about place is one way of escaping novel of character. It is a way to go out into the street, away from closed rooms, either of the mind or a physical closed room. And if you are not going out on the street — open a window, so at least you are distracted by what is happening outside. To not be completely attentive to what is happening before you. To be slightly inattentive. Therefore slightly decentred. To not be a complete character, so that there are parts of you leaking somewhere else. And I explore that in this novel as well.

One of the things about sound that always interests me — as a writer and a musician — is the way the invisible touches you. What you are listening to, is what you cannot see. That is why I am interested in the soundtracks of Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray’s films. There are two characters talking to each other, let’s say, but you can always hear a nearly unrelated soundtrack happening somewhere else. That is the way both showed us how we are constantly being impacted upon by the invisible.

Do you think ‘leakiness’ is expedited by travel, by not being at home. In Odysseus Abroad — Ananda and his uncle Rangamama — are rather leaky characters…

It depends. You can move around. And be completely self-enclosed. Many Indians are like that. So you can move about and yet not see anything. I have learned a lot from all my miserable experiences. I hate travelling. I hated living in London. For one, what we think of the globalised world is not true. There are so many different stories of globalisation.

Ananda expects to acclimatise to London, but quickly realises that ‘class was what formed you but didn’t move to other cultures’. On the other hand, the uncle thinks he is a ‘Black Englishman’. Can you expand on that?

The uncle comes from the background of small-town cosmopolitanism. He is a deeply cosmopolitan and cultured person, but he is trying to lose every part of himself. He seems to not want to identify with where he came from. For various reasons of regret and anger. He wants to escape being Bengali. Wants to escape family. At the same time, he loves his family. Loves Bengaliness. He wants to have both these things — family and Bengaliness — on his own terms. If he can’t, he will disavow them.

In another way, Ananda wants to have things completely his own way. If he can’t, he wouldn’t engage with them. Maybe, he feels he owns literary history.

These are very strange people.

Which takes me to the next, if slightly unfair question: are they true to life?

A lot of my writing tries to undo this dichotomy between what is life and what is fiction. I don’t believe life is prior to fiction. Fictionalisation begins for me with the everyday. There is an undoing of a binary between life and art that is at work here. When I look at myself, when I was 16, 17, 22, ya, I was very strange. I find myself hilarious. Also moving in a way.

Were you acutely sensitive to the world?

I don’t know if I was more sensitive. But I thought I was more sensitive than the rest. And that is a reason for hilarity. There is an immediacy for one’s concerns at that time, which one does not have any more. I feel moved by that. And that combination of comedy and seriousness is something I tapped into when writing The Immortals as well. But The Immortals and Odysseus Abroad are about characters who want to become someone, we don’t know if they ever will.

Why did you fill this book with the bawdy and fantasy sexual experiences?

I felt it was important to the story. It gave me an opportunity to write about characters who have an obsession with body and bodily functions — everything from masturbation to defecation. Bengalis seem especially obsessed with digestion. And this gave me an opportunity to write about that. But it is also a reference to Joyce writing about eating, frying kidneys, shitting. One of my favourite scenes in Ulysses occurs in a chapter called ‘Calypso’. Leopold Bloom gives his wife tea, pats his cat, goes off to shit, but before that, fries some kidneys for himself. Having fried the kidneys he then goes off to the loo and he takes a magazine with him called Titbits. Which is a trashy magazine. He reads that while shitting. Even I as an Indian... it is too much for me. He tears off a page from Titbits and wipes himself. So I am making references to those scenes. And that becomes part of the play of the novel.

Tell us about your encounters with Ulysses.

I first read it when I was 16, 17. I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then Ulysses. I remember not taking to either book. Read it because I had to. Angst had made me an intellectual. Got absolutely nothing out of it (laughs). As I was revising A Strange and Sublime Address, I was 25, I fell ill with jaundice and I re-read Portrait. And read Anna Karenina for the first time — the 19th century novel — with great admiration. But I realised that temperamentally I am closer to Portrait than Anna Karenina. You need to read Ulysses as a piece of writing on Dublin and forget all the baggage.

Is it hard for you to write funny?

For me humour is connected to joy. The word comedia means ending on a joyous note, not that there are lots of jokes in it. One thing Ananda learns from Sanskrit literature is that tragedy does not need to be the end of all things. The end can be joy. For writers like me, heaven is not something outside, it is here.

Clearly the everyday is your muse. You once quoted Philip Larkin: “Deprivation to me is what daffodils are to Wordsworth”. What are your daffodils?

My daffodils are the ramshackle within a city.

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