‘I am drawn to the quirky…’

Talking about his latest novel Odysseus Abroad, Amit Chaudhuri talks about why he believes plot is an overrated device.

Published - November 01, 2014 04:22 pm IST

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri

Essayist, novelist, professor, musician… Amit Chaudhuri wears his many hats with a practised ease that is exasperating for those of us who wear one or half with difficulty. When not working on his gentle, oblique prose, the Sahitya Akademi award winner teaches Contemporary Literature at East Anglia University or composes music that is not fusion.

In your retelling of the Odysseus-Telemachus story, the father figure is an uncle. Given the rich emotional possibilities of a father-son relationship, why did you opt for an uncle?

The father figure need not necessarily be the father. In Joyce’s Ulysses , Leopold Bloom plays Odysseus to Stephen’s Telemachus; they are not related but the relationship echoes the father-son one. It’s the same with Jim and Huckleberry Finn where Jim, the escaped slave, is friend and surrogate father to Huck. I am following a literary tradition that explores relationships between pairs of men — older and younger.

In your novel, Rangamama is not really a gallant Odysseus, is he? In fact, Anando talks of his real father much more admiringly.

I think Anando is drawn to irresponsible, older figures who spend their time doing nothing. Older people on the fringes of polite society. Anando’s father, on the other hand, represents hard work, integrity, a kind of socialisation that Anando seems to be rebelling against. In my own reading, I have veered towards irresponsible father figures like Mr. Biswas in (Naipaul’s) A House for Mr. Biswas , a daydreamer with not much status in the family who acts as father to Anand. I love the father in Sons and Lovers … he is a disruptive figure, but he takes great joy in life, he whistles… These fathers are not patrician figures, they are not upright, model fathers but are fathers none the less.

Where is the heroism that one might expect from a retelling of theOdyssey?

Let me refer to Joyce and Ulysses again. I prefer the idiosyncratic and the quirky over the heroic. I am not as drawn to overt forms of heroism as I am to the quirky, the eccentric, the wayward. My interest has always lain here. It is here that the stories lie for me.

In many ways, I thought the book was not about Anando and his uncle at all but about a young Bengali boy discovering London, discovering himself, coming to terms with ‘foreignness’. In that sense, isOdysseus Abroadmore essay than novel?

I have rejected the monumental superstructure of the novel in favour of the everyday rhythms of the day. I focus on the eccentric ways in which the world makes itself known to us. Its sounds, its movements…. The novel is a wide term and I don’t like to conflate it with the 19th century form. It moved on — there was Proust, Joyce, Woolf, others — their work argues against the narrow idea of what a novel is or should do. If I were writing an essay, I would have reflected more. I would have more explicitly explored the theme of the foreigner in a strange land. But here the argument is implicit, it is part of a story. And there is story here. A story of memory; of two men. I have played with the Odysseus-Telemachus tale — brought in Nestor, Warren Street as Ithaca. A lot of play has gone into the telling of the tale.

I find that your writing, even when officially classified as fiction or non-fiction, is really quite sui generis — sort of meandering essay that wanders easily between commentary and story-telling. Is this what you strive for?

Well, it’s for you, really, to say if my work does that. All I can say is that within the ‘novel’ format, I find place and location more important than plot. I have always been interested in the various levels at which a piece of creative writing works. I think plot is fetishised, somewhat like perspective was in Renaissance painting. We are tutored to receive creative writing in a certain way. The novel must be more than the sacred cow of the plot. Take the myths, which are told and retold — everybody knows the plot. You don’t go to a myth for its story but for its art, for the other things it does when it is retold through a Kathak recital, a poem; for the art of the person who does the retelling.

The uncle in your novel is an embodiment of a certain type of Bengali — obsessed with his health, his digestion, Gurudeb. Is he a real person or an amalgamation of various Bengali stereotypes?

He is very real. Let me tell you a bit about how I started to write this story. In 2001, I bought a Souza charcoal of Ulysses. It cost Rs. 55,000, and I could afford it. My uncle came to visit and said ‘I hear you bought a painting for Rs 55,000. You might as well have paid me as much for my farting’, adding that the work of a child and a genius often look the same. Strangely, I began to notice similarities between my uncle and Ulysses, not just physically as in the painting but in the life my uncle led. He lived alone in the U.K. for a decade or more, in a bed-sit in Belsize. I remember going to visit him there when I went to London to study. That’s the story I wanted to tell.

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