How to write when everything’s in flux

The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Amit Chaudhuri joins Tanjil Rashid to explore the philosophical and literary concept of 'flux,' arguing that capturing life's constant movement is more compelling than

Key takeaways

• Chaudhuri links his literary focus on 'flux' to Buddhist concepts of dependent arising and Derridean difference, rejecting static identities in favor of contingent reality.
• In Chateau Rouge, the narrator finds profound surprise not in Proustian landmarks but in the unembalmed, everyday realities of immigrant neighborhoods like Paris's Chateau Rouge district.

Main topics

• Literary flux versus traditional narrative structure
• Buddhist philosophy and Derridean difference in writing

Notable quotes

"the movement of story is to me less interesting than the movement of life which I call flux."

Conclusion

Chaudhuri's reflections provide a vital framework for understanding co

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) The New Statesman. Speaker 1 (0:06) Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end. Every story needs a setting. But what if that isn't true? Can you write when everything is in flux, when you are unmoored from places and when the time is out of joint? One writer who has been experimenting with these possibilities is Amit Chowdhury. Chowdhury's career has been defined by, in his own words, stopovers. Stopovers in different places. He has moved between India, Britain and increasingly Europe. Also stopovers in different genres of art. A singer, composer, poet and critic, he has spent his longest sojourn as a novelist, publishing nine books, the latest of which is the Paris set Chateau Rouge, where his narrator finds recognition in areas which are not recognisably French. It follows a Berlin novel, a Bombay novel and a London novel. Why this restlessness? I'm Tanjil Rashid and you're listening to The New Society from The New Statesman. In this episode, Amit Chowdhury joins me to discuss how a story is less important and less interesting than the movement of life, the things which he calls flux. Amit Chowdhury, welcome to The New Statesman. Since you began writing 35 years ago, you have established yourself as one of the preeminent literary voices in the English language. You've been garlanded with many of our major literary prizes. Your earlier novels have been reissued with introductions by distinguished writers, which is a sign of your ongoing canonisation. And yet I sense from your recent novels, which seem mostly about a writerly figure such as yourself, who is adrift in a different European city each time, you feel increasingly out of place and your sense of self seems increasingly fragmented and incomplete. In Chateau Rouge, your latest novel, you struggled to get your head around Paris and before that in Sojourn, you were bewildered by Berlin. You've also left what had been your home in England and spend more time in your ancestral hometown, Calcutta. So I want to ask you, I mean, what's going on? Who are you right now? Speaker 2 (2:23) That's a very interesting question because... It kind of speaks to preoccupations I've been having over the last 10 or 15 years, which may have been subterranean earlier on, to do with the nature of reality, which includes, to a large extent, the nature of the self as well. Ordinarily, the default kind of... Speaker 2 (2:57) parameter in which we are educated and which we grew up in and by we I mean human beings since kind of the beginning of recorded time whatever even that is a spurious kind of formulation but believe and this is not only a feature of the enlightenment believe in something like an objective reality and a self that is related to that objective reality in some way. And while this is seen to be a kind of feature of humanism and enlightenment, I think to a certain extent, I mean, it's true of human consciousness, human history, that nobody thinks that they are living in the midst of something that is completely unreliable. Everybody ascribes some sort of reliability to the fact that there is a world in which they live and through which they have to make their way. And that there is a they or themselves Speaker 1 (4:02) that is doing this. So how do you feel though? Because I mean, for the rest of us, we tend to have, most of us tend to have quite a sure sense of ourselves. And for you, it seems increasingly... illusory and elusive judging by your books and what does that feel like? I mean I don't know what it feels like personally Speaker 2 (4:23) I mean in terms of it's not something that I have an experience of in a conventional sense but as a at the moment I write or the moment I am doing some sort of Speaker 2 (4:41) drawn towards some sort of artistic activity, even, you know, like North Indian classical music. I know that what's giving me pleasure is something other than my personal relationship to the world outside and taking that as a given. Those givens open up. They break down and that is what for me from the beginning I now realize is what is associated with a particular kind of joyousness, liberation, freedom. And the thinking about it constitutes thought in terms of what does this mean then? If my job is not to write about or to portray something or report something. Speaker 2 (5:36) But I am writing about Paris, seemingly, or I'm writing about Berlin. I've written earlier about Calcutta or Oxford. But if it is not that that I'm doing, what is happening in terms of really exploring a kind of flux, both in myself and outside myself? Speaker 2 (6:01) I think there has probably been a change. Speaker 2 (6:07) of tone from Friend of My Youth onwards, but the interest in flux was always there. It is what made me a writer, the kind of writer I became when I wrote A Strange and Sublime Address. Speaker 1 (6:21) Which was your first novel. It's interesting you mention Friend of My Youth, which I believe was the first novel in which you employed your own real name as the name of the main character. So there's a strange paradox here in which just as you started to feel the self was more in flux, you started ostensibly portraying yourself directly in your fiction with your name. Why was that? Speaker 2 (6:51) So as I said, I was always drawn to flux, which is what I see as being gripping. absorbing and which is why I reject story in a way the movement of story is to me less interesting than the movement of life which I call flux. Speaker 2 (7:20) But with friend of my youth, I mean... Speaker 2 (7:25) I just couldn't find a name for the person other than the name of this person, you know, and saw it as another mode of distancing, not as it is kind of often confused with a mode of confession that, you know, I'm telling you now that this is this is me. Another mode of distancing, just as, you know. the poets of who wrote bhajans, devotionals and ghazals bring themselves in in the last stanza and refer to themselves in the third person as the author identifying themselves as the author but also saying the last couplet which is Speaker 1 (8:08) usually a pseudonym and Speaker 2 (8:10) it's usually a pseudonym or it's a kind of style that's been created by a number of poets but it also kind of makes visible the kind of contingency of the author's name. It could have been something else. I mean, whether or not you name yourself, we do tend to give the name of the author sometimes even more importance. And this is very much a European inheritance, even more importance than the work itself. The name is the possessor of the work. To bring the name in somehow exposes its contingency, that it just is one of several things that are in a field that is constantly transforming. That field is within the novel. And in that field now is the author's name as well. Speaker 1 (9:10) That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, that using your name is actually a way of estranging your own identity rather than affirming it, as most people would instinctively think. So you're estranging your name. You're also estranging the places in your life. You've spoken of flux. How do you go through life? feeling such flux? I mean, don't you have anchors? I mean, what is home for you? Speaker 2 (9:42) Let me just... Speaker 2 (9:47) let me just say a little bit more about what I mean by flux. I mean, of course, you understand what I'm talking about. But let me just add to why I use that word. Speaker 2 (9:59) The word. was actually kind of thrown at me by somebody when I was a graduate student in Oxford. So I had just about finished writing A Strange and Sublime Address, my