Get Transfigured

Amit Chaudhuri and James Wood discuss modernism, realism, and Chaudhuri’s three recently reissued novels.

By James WoodAugust 9, 2024

• Fiction

ON APRIL 29, Amit Chaudhuri and James Wood met for a conversation at Harvard University as part of the Long 20th Century Colloquium organized by the English Department and Jeffrey Careyva, Shalisa James, and Manan Kapoor. The occasion was the republication of Chaudhuri’s first three novels in the NYRB Classics imprint. Below is an excerpt from the transcription of their talk (edited for readability), which moves from the Bhagavad Gita to literary modernism, Salman Rushdie and realism to Chaudhuri’s own novels.

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JAMES WOOD: Thank you very much. It’s lovely to be here. I think we’re going to speak for about 40 minutes and then open it up to the audience. Amit, I have a couple of passages in mind to read—the fabulous early passage from A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) about cleaning, which I know I have—

AMIT CHAUDHURI: Which you may have quoted in your essay in The New Yorker, right?

Yes, I may well have done! And another one—a favorite of mine—is the passage also mentioned from Afternoon Raag (1993) about the Bombay Gymkhana.

Right. The bit from A Strange and Sublime Address is: “She would sweep the floor—unending expanses, acres and acres of floor—with a short broom called the jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail, which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless, exotic bird.”

You’ve written wonderfully about what you call the “refutation of the spectacular,” and particularly in relation to a book that in some way shadows—I don’t think your creative work at all, really, but quite a lot of your critical and theoretical work. And that’s Midnight’s Children (1981), or rather, the reception of Midnight’s Children. You’ve talked admiringly about the refutation of the spectacular [in relation to the work of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray] and about a kind of Indian writing in English that might avoid some of the mimetic fallacies of a certain kind of market activism. You write in one essay about how, in a sense, European theory finds in the “Indian novel in English” an image of a desired hybridity. Your own writing refuses these terms, enacts this refutation of the spectacular. When you were starting out, what were your sources? Who did you go to for your examples of this kind of refutation of the spectacular, particularly at a time when there might have been some pressure not to write like that?

What I’ve just read out is one of these moments of stillness, or interruption, within a story, which are there but not very much present. I’m gently making a case for a greater space for interruption than is usually permissible. But it’s not as if I am just sitting down and writing diary pieces about a woman cleaning the floor of the house. The tension created by this space of interruption is important within the experience of the novel. A big part of the experience of the novel is that, yes, there is a story here, but it’s also making a lot of space for other stuff. That’s the tension, I think. You do recognize from the form of the novel that there is a story there, but you also recognize the fact that something odd is happening in terms of a lot of space and time are being given to something else over and above what’s necessary to explain the narrative of the characters, milieu, etc. I am very interested in the lineage of that kind of activity which is invested in that interruption as a form. I’ll come back to that later. I suppose the earliest instance of that is the Bhagavad Gita, which is an interruption in the Mahābhārata. It is a completely different sort of literary text within the Mahābhārata, which is an epic text with a lot of very wonderful sort of stuff going on in it in terms of the completely unpredictable unfolding of destiny as far as humans and gods are concerned. But in the midst of that comes a different kind of text. And one of the things that it is defined by is stasis. That kind of stasis, which is a form of tension, is something that I gravitated towards even without fully knowing what its lineages might be. But now when I look back on it, I think that one of the earliest kind of examples of this is the Gita as an example of that particular form of stasis being approached and addressed and created as a viable form of writing. At the time when I began to write A Strange and Sublime Address, which would have been in 1986, I had taken a gap year between University College London and Oxford, and I began to write this novel. I was writing poetry, and I think I made the move in my poetry first away from the kind of thing which at that point of time I thought was terribly important for writers to address, which was to be in a state of mourning for the loss of something [civilizationally] grand, which was a misreading of, let’s say, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Those were really important texts at that time, and they were important because they could be so productively misread. The stubbornness of it, in fact, [is evident]: on Facebook I saw a post about it. I took a screenshot of it.

I like that you’re screenshotting a stubborn misreading of literary texts!

This suddenly comes up from the group called Classic Literature. I’m sitting on the train to Boston earlier today, and the post says: “‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot is a complex and influential modernist poem published in 1922.” Nothing to debate with over there in terms of the date and the tone; I would have warmed to it when I was 16 years old. And [it goes on]: “It’s known for its fragmented structure, multiple voices,” etc., etc., and then summary. The first point in its critical analysis is fragmentation: “‘The Waste Land’ is known for its fragmented structure, which mirrors the fractured state of modern society. The discontinuous narrative reflects the disintegration of traditional values and beliefs.” You have the kind of narrative, introduced by sociologists like Max Weber—the narrative of disenchantment that [argues that] modernity was a time of fragmentation, of disenchantment, of the loss of a sense of the unitary as far as the Western past was concerned. A disjunction in modernism is a mimetic response to that [disjunction in history], and The Waste Land an example of it par excellence. And when I was 17, I warmed to this and thought that I must now write my own disjunctive epic, where the disjunctions are allegorizing the loss or the fragmenting or the breaking-up of something. I thought, “I’ve been pretty happy all my life”—I mean, I was miserable in school—but [as far as my] civilization [was concerned], I was happy, you know?

This would have been the line also linking that reading of The Waste Land to the large, hybridized, exotic, unfathomable India, the requiring of equivalent forms—

Yes, the big Indian novel was another form of mimesis. The first form of mimesis that I encountered was through readings of The Waste Land and of modernism as a form of disjunctive language which is allegorical, even if it’s not disjunctive. The strangeness that you encounter in, say, Kafka is the strangeness of the 20th century and what happened to [how we think of] it after the Max Weber narrative of disenchantment set in. When that happens, it is actually quite a metaphysical way of looking at things in the sense that you don’t see, you stop seeing, and you only look for the allegorical meaning. I completely ignored the humor in Kafka and the specificities in Kafka. It was only on a rereading much later [of The Metamorphosis] that I discovered this amazing list of things that Gregor Samsa’s sister decides to give to Gregor after having discovered that he has lost his appetite. He’s lost his appetite, and he doesn’t want to eat the kind of stuff that he liked eating. So, she picks up rotten fruit and chicken bones with the white sauce still congealed on them. She picks these up out of the trash. And there is a very telling bit in the list. In Michael Hofmann’s translation, [there is] a piece of cheese, which only last week Gregor had said was “unfit for human consumption.” That is [also] part of the list. It’s such an amazing line and amazing list. And I had completely not “seen” that list, [even though] I had read through the story carefully. The metaphysical reading means you do not see the particular; you do not see the sensuous presentness of things. So, I was gripped by that. I would watch all these films by Bergman, and it would only affirm to me that there was something grand and terrible [about the modern], with a great deal of interiority to allegorize.

Now when I was taking that year off, when my parents had moved to Bandra, this Christian area [of Mumbai], and this street called Saint Cyril Road, I discovered what had always been true in me: that to stand on a third-story balcony and to look out at another two-storied house was more promising to me than the panorama that I had grown up watching from the 12th-story or 25th-story flats in which my parents had lived. And also the fact that in the open window, when I would return from London, the open window in my room, [there was] the constant presence of something else which I couldn’t see, and the distraction [constituted] a stepping out of the self, and the inability of the self to be alone with itself, to have purity, to have the interiority which you associate with the self if you come to it through the West and through a particular kind of novel: that that wasn’t possible seemed to me important, and it allowed me to move away from that particular reading of modernism, that idea of modernism, and also all those words which were circulating at that time, which all had this mimetic and allegorical burden, words like “existentialism” and “the absurd.”

So I moved away from that, and I remember writing a line, or a couple of sentences, in this book in which I began to write A Strange and Sublime Address, which was actually an accounts register, which I went out to the main road in that [area], called Perry Road, off Saint Cyril Road, and I wrote—I think I was rephrasing Lawrence in a way, but I wrote: “Whatever the imagination might come up with, it cannot be as unexpected as reality.” It seemed to me that I wanted to step away from psychology, from interiority. I remember thinking: “I need to go out, outside of myself. And I need to leave behind this search for an allegorical language.” I wanted to leave behind that allegorical language, and that’s how the writing began. I wasn’t very conscious of the fact that five years prior to that, Midnight’s Children was published. Yeah. I was kind of barely aware of this fact, because it had just been five years, and the whole industry [had yet to] consolidate itself and postcolonial theory was [yet] to fully emerge and then invent Rushdie and make the text, as it were, redundant, in the sense that you could speak about Midnight’s Children from then on in detail without having read it.

And then speak about The Satanic Verses without being able to read it.

Yes, without being able to read it. All these curiously now seem tied together. Anyway, that hadn’t happened yet. I was still trying to leave behind that particular sort of mimesis through which I’d misunderstood modernism, from which I needed to emerge to be able to see things again, see things like the chicken bone with the congealed white sauce, which I hadn’t seen [earlier] in Kafka. See things in Bergman, the comedy in Bergman, the life in Bergman, the detail: all of that I’d missed earlier. And then, gradually, I had to deal with another form of mimesis that emerged with the postcolonial novel, with the idea that India’s multiplicity and largeness had to be captured through a means which itself would have obvious and overt markers of multiplicity and largeness in the novel’s language and the form, that it would be a kind of working through markers in a way that Borges rejected in his essay on the Argentine writer and tradition, when he said the Qur’an is a surefire Arabic text because it has no camels in it. If it did have camels, it wouldn’t be an Arabic text. Actually, the Qur’an does have camels, I later discovered, but this doesn’t delegitimize the argument.

I want us to return a little bit later to the question of theory—because theory has been important for you, and you are a theorist as well as a critic and a novelist—but arguably this mimetic fallacy was also a theoretical move along the lines of what used to be called, in literary studies, “writing the difficulty”—the idea that the prose, not just the form, embodied the complexity of what was being described.

Right. That was [the case] with modernism, I think, in terms of people thinking that the prose in Ulysses (1922) is what it is [because of this idea of “difficulty”]. What are the reasons for that? Again, they are mimetic reasons. One might be a way of thinking that the avant-garde or the modernist is doing things to language in order to unsettle language. And the other [idea] might be that stream of consciousness is a mimetic account of the consciousness. And the consciousness doesn’t behave in a way in which complete sentences occur. The consciousness is made up of disjunctive observations and sentences. And en masse and on a large scale, Ulysses is a mimetic account, a photograph of this process. That would be the conventional thinking. And I completely reject that.

Along with mimetic form, you were also doing battle in your mind [with] a certain idea of the sentence mimetically following or embodying complexity. You wanted to do something else.

I want you to amplify a little bit.

I’m interested in what the role of realism is in your work. Because on the one hand, there’s a sort of particularity, detail, and externality that you’ve been talking about, which would fit quite easily into a European or Western notion of realism. In your essay “‘Huge Baggy Monster’: Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel After Rushdie,” you make a slight distinction, though, and this is the distinction you make: you write,

[W]e think that realist art is a profound constituent of the Western tradition, and that fantasy is somehow non-Western. Realism—[which you then define as] the relationship that modes of representation have to the seasons, human life and the universe—has been a fundamental and unquestioned component of Indian art […] On the other hand, in Western culture, realist art, with its special claim to renovate our perception of the world, has always resided somewhat uneasily at the centre, repeatedly called on, like an immigrant, to justify the legitimacy of its existence.

I think that’s absolutely true about the slightly embattled and fraught relationship of realism in Western writing. Talk a little bit about that: the coupling, and the distinction, for you, between that Western notion of realism and this Indian realism that has to do with the seasons, and so on.

So, I think the Western notion of realism emerges from the Enlightenment and humanism. There are Western notions of realism that are closer to what I’m thinking of, before the Enlightenment, which have been subjected to a kind of erasure. So now, when we need to look at alternatives [to the realism created by the Enlightenment], or when Picasso needed to look at alternatives, then he needs to look to Africa, or the Impressionists needed to look at Japan. But I’m sure there is a powerful lineage of [alternative] forms of realism in Europe that they could have looked at as well, but [this lineage] must have been subjected to so thorough an erasure, in terms of forming an intellectual history, that they didn’t look in that direction. I mean, it is true that Clive Bell, in his book … what is the name of the book? With “Art” in the title?

It’s not “Significant Form”?

No, but “Significant Form” occurs in that book. Anyway, he’s articulating his revulsion against illusionist art, or realist art, that which we identify with neoclassicism or the late Renaissance. And he’s saying to look around you and look at other cultures, and he gives us a mix of high art and things which are integrated into buildings, like windows or whatever. And he does mention European instances—it’s not as if he only talks about the Mexican this or the African that or the Indian that. He does mention a few European instances in that list, which he says are so much more vital than this kind of illusionism that has come to dominate our consciousness, and that’s the case he’s making in 1914, or whenever it is. Ordinarily, Europeans who turn away from that kind of painting over there [he points to a portrait in the far corner of the Kresge Room]—that kind of hyperrealistic tradition—don’t invoke, or invoke less than one would expect them to, their own lineages or other ways of looking at reality. Right? They will always mention Japan or India or Africa. I can only assume that those other very rich lineages within Europe have somehow been erased, so that we think of only this [the portrait on the wall] as Europe. Whenever we think of European art, we go back to this and then we go back to classical antiquity, which is also quite precise and realistic. We go back to the sources of realism over there without thinking that maybe other forms of thinking about the real have been edged out. I think Nietzsche is trying to create a schism within how we understand that kind of source, which we call “Greece,” in The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), by making that separation between the early tragedy and the tragedy with and after Euripides. So that’s a very interesting move on Nietzsche’s part, that he’s not invoking something from outside but looking at the source of realism itself and making a kind of division [within] that, a kind of rupture over that.

As far as I was concerned, talking about the 1980s and ’90s, this whole idea that India needed to be identified with epic forms, and that “epic” meant a particular kind of expansiveness, some form of being over the top, casting aside the shackles, the repressed or repressive shackles of bourgeois realism—[this idea of casting aside bourgeois realism through “epic”] that India presented us [with], or other cultures that were emerging then partly through novels, if they came from these [non-Western] parts of the world, had these markers of excess. [That idea was] going back to the Latin American Boom, of course, making it seem to the world that the Latin American novel presents us with a wonderful alternative to realism. I just thought it was untrue to the legacies that had informed the way we thought of representation or the nonrepresentational, and that Indian art was an engagement—not a kind of representational engagement in the sense of the Renaissance or neoclassicism—but an engagement with the “real.” And it was wonderful form of engagement with the real, with the world, where there’s less and less of a distinction made between the world in which the divine beings live and human beings live and the world as text and the world as that which is written about, less and less of a distinction being made over there between these things. But nevertheless, [it was] of the world, [it] engaged with the world. Those forms of realism—and not just realism, but realism through semirepresentational and sometimes even nonrepresentational modes—realism through poetry, through compression, through obliqueness, all of that—

There is a kind of epic lurking in your smaller forms, and it is close to that definition that you give of Indian realism as being the relationship of the modes of representation to the seasons, human life, and the universe. There’s this lovely passage in your first book, A Strange and Sublime Address. If you don’t mind, I’m just going to read a paragraph out. It’s just massive and simple at the same time. It goes like this:

So another season had come. In another corner of the world lay the great continent called Australia, an immense unwieldy mass of land floating on the ocean like a giant makeshift raft on water. Who had been set afloat on that raft? Kangaroos, aborigines and cricketers. And India was touring Australia, and there was a test-match being played between the two teams at Sydney. So Chhotomama would wake up at five o’clock in the morning and try to catch Sydney on the radio. He would spin the rapid knobs, and after an incoherent period of time, when the radio cackled in an evil witch-like way, the voice of the Australian commentator would come through, loud and urgent one moment, weak and distant the other, as if a few words were being carried off, on their passage towards India, by a cormorant crossing the ocean. The room would echo with a strange Australian accent, and an odd and vivid pronunciation of vowels. Everyone would be sleeping, of course; muffled heads and breathing bundles of bodies, because the rains had made the nights cool and relaxed.

And then it goes on. But I just think that’s sort of astonishing: on the one hand, you’re continuing to do your thing of painting a small domestic picture of the middle of the night and then early morning. And on the other hand, it’s actually set in the new season to come: the season of rains. On the other side of the world is going on this … comprehensible thing, which is cricket. But very far away, across the globe! To adjust that aperture like that is extraordinary. I know from time to time you have talked about storytelling in your symposia, and Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller.” You might remember in Benjamin’s essay that he talks about “the chronicler” as opposed to “the historian,” and what the historian does is find causes and motives and data and so on. But the chronicler is just saying: “This thing, then this thing, then this thing, and also while this thing’s happening.” So somewhere else, while ordinary life continues in its ordinary way, the French Revolution is going on. I get that quite powerfully in your work.

That something else historical is happening.

The other thing I want to talk about is, on the one hand, the refutation of the spectacular, and on the other hand, which is so important to your writing, the transfiguration of the mundane, this estranging eye. This wonderful eye—whether it’s Calcutta or Oxford, Bombay or London—everything is to be just magnificently transformed. In Freedom Song (1998), there’s a lovely thing about winter in Calcutta: “Winter came only once a year, and it changed the city. It gave its people, as they wore their sweaters and mufflers, a sense of having gone somewhere else, the slight sense of the wonder and dislocation of being in a foreign city.” Or, say, in Afternoon Raag, where the protagonist, with his estranging eye, for a moment sees the Oxford students, celebrating in their uniforms and carrying bottles of champagne and bouquets of flowers outside the exam halls, as looking a little bit like opera singers being congratulated by a happy audience throwing bouquets at them. Your writing is constantly doing that. I imagine that it is temperamental in some way, but also part of your varied literary inheritance. By the way, you were inventing autofiction 20 years before anyone had coined the term—well, actually, that’s not quite true because it was coined in France in the ’70s, but before it was being talked about in Anglophone words. In Afternoon Raag, estrangement takes on a new valence. Suddenly in Oxford, not in Calcutta, you are not at home in the same way, and the estranging eye is doing something else, where it’s imperative to notice things in order to survive. I think, in one moment in that book, you talk about how, as a foreigner, you need to properly describe and perhaps transfigure magically the furniture in your room, because that room is going to be a very important habitation.

[The room and furniture are] something you [as a student] come back to.

Absolutely. So, estranging takes on a slightly more poignant, or sometimes even desperate valence in the second book.

I recall this word, “estranging,” in your review [in The Guardian] of Afternoon Raag. It’s a moment [now] to sort of remember those moments, besides having this conversation, to do with the movement from A Strange and Sublime Address to Afternoon Raag. I should add that that review you wrote drew attention to my work. But anyway, I’ll compare Afternoon Raag with A Strange and Sublime Address and hope to answer some of the questions, including the ones that I haven’t answered from earlier, when you asked: “What were your sources or resources?” All I knew was that I wanted to write this book about a holiday, about somebody going somewhere else, and I knew what the holiday would be, what it would constitute and comprise, and I did not at all think about the necessity of a plot. And the fact that I didn’t think about it came naturally to me, the fact that I never gave that any thought. The idea of the holiday was going to replace, for me, the external movement that plot signifies. The holiday would again be an interregnum, an interruption of some kind. The interruption is a span in which things are transformed, meaning is transformed, narrative style is transformed. Even going back now retrospectively to the Gita, it is in a completely different style from the Mahābhārata. And Mahābhārata is known as “itihasa,” and that’s the word that that is used now [in Indian languages] for history in day-to-day speech, but one could say that in that case, it meant epic narrative. With the Gita, it could be “kavita” [or “kavya”], or poetry. But certainly, something is happening with this spell of stasis. A different idea of movement and tension comes into play, because conceptual things are being explored in the Gita. It has narrative framework—a battle’s about to begin between the two warring clans of cousins, and Krishna, the charioteer for Arjun, is advising Arjun, who is in a state of despair and saying, “How can I go to war against my relatives?” Krishna then begins to talk about various things and doesn’t seem to answer his question at all. That [providing a clear answer to Arjuna’s question] is not what happens in the Gita. Something happens to language. Krishna, in fact, becomes language, in a way, and claims to be a form of transformation that, as far as we can see, is linguistic. This doesn’t occur in the Mahābhārata, that kind of language as transformation, but it does happen in the Gita. So, we are being asked to conceptually rethink what language and narrative are.

I began to read the Gita again because the Folio Society, for some reason, asked me to write an introduction to it in 2011 or 2012. So I reread the Gita, which I’d only read when I was 18 or [maybe] 17 years old, and one of the things, while addressing this kind of stasis in the Gita, I did say [in the Folio Society introduction] is that it is how we think of a poem in contrast to a narrative, a story: that is, you don’t find out anything more at the end of the poem than you knew at the start of the poem. That is not the point of the poem. You haven’t found out anything more. A shift has taken place, but it’s not to do with what you found out, but [still] a shift has taken place. This experience of receiving no added information, which is still somehow accompanied by our noting that a change has occurred in ourselves as we read, is a paradox that can be revisited immediately by rereading the poem. You can start the poem again, and you can read it again, in a way that you don’t want to do with a narrative. You read the poem, found out nothing; there is a shift. You can reexperience that immediately.

It’s a hermeneutic gain rather than a cognitive gain.

Exactly, it’s not cognitive gain. If it was cognitive gain—as it is to a certain extent even with the most interesting of narratives, as it is with the Mahābhārata—you don’t necessarily think, “Okay, let me read it again.” But with a passage of the kind that the Gita is, and that passage can occur in a novel as well, you want to stay with it. It’s like with V. S. Naipaul, with A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). I encountered him and that book through a passage that was quoted in an essay about the book in an anthology of so-called “Commonwealth literature,” and the passage had to do with Mr. Biswas learning how to be a sign painter. His favorite letters are the S and the R in the alphabet. What could compare with the swing—or something—of the S [says the passage], but then the R, look at the nobility of it. And that, like with the Gita, was something I could read again immediately after I’d finished reading it once. I could read it again. In fact, I thought to myself, “It’s a shame I’ll have to read the entire novel. I only want to read this paragraph.” And so, this stasis is where things get, to use your word, transfigured. Something is changing over there.

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Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of more than a dozen books, several of which are available from NYRB, including the novels Friend of My Youth (2019) and Sojourn (2022); a work of memoir and music criticism, Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music (2021); and the poetry collection Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2023 (2023).