In Amit Chaudhuri’s ninth novel, Château Rouge, an Indian writer arriving in Paris for a fellowship finds himself in a sublet apartment in Château Rouge, a dense, multicultural quarter sometimes called “Little Africa.” It is not the storied Paris of “Proust’s house and Baldwin’s digs,” of monuments and cafes, nor does it resemble the kind of Parisian grime popularised across the literature and myth around the city.
Disconcerted, he fusses over the noise and the dirty pavements, and the various faults in the furniture of his apartment.
Though part of him craves a familiar Parisian experience, he is daunted by the prospect of living out clichés, and puts off reading his long-held copy of A Moveable Feast, which is a decades-old present from his wife.
But she hands him another gift: the suggestion that Hemingway had no “Hemingway’s Paris” to fall back on when he was there, and might as well have been living in a place like Château Rouge.
Emboldened by this realisation, he begins to chart a renewed path through Paris, via everyday sights and sounds he encounters whilst loitering in the neighbourhood.
Through these details – comparisons of various French grocery stores, the opinions of Bangladeshi peanut sellers, spats with the fellowship admin – there emerges an unlikely experience of the fabled city.
Château Rouge tussles with the necessity, and the impossibility, of experiencing a place on one’s own terms.
In a conversation with Scroll, Chaudhuri reflected on the limits and possibilities offered by history and form, his own writing practice, and on Château Rouge.
Excerpts from the interview: I wanted to start by asking you about your experience of writing this novel, especially since Château Rouge repeatedly draws attention to the act of writing or recounting a novel much like itself.
I also hear that the idea for the novel came to you during a writing residency you attended.You’re right – it was almost eight years ago.
Not so much a writing residency as a new institute bringing together writers, artists, thinkers, and academics from various parts of the world.
I went there in September 2018, although it seems much more recent than that.
The idea for the novel came to me while I was there, even though I had gone to write something else.
I was working on a book about music, which eventually became Finding the Raga.
Then I began, within a few days of being there, thinking of writing what is now Château Rouge.
How this happens – the act of “writing” – is something I’ve written about before, including in my seventh novel, Friend of My Youth, and in a Paris Review column I wrote called “The Moment.” What I point out there is that, for me, writing doesn't necessarily mean putting words on paper.
Of course, I still write longhand, so literally, for me, it does involve writing words in a notebook.
But writing doesn't necessarily begin at the moment when you start putting those words down.
For me, writing means a change in reality.
It’s the moment when I enter a different kind of textual space, when I enter the act of writing and the transformation of meaning that writing involves.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m thinking about writing anything down.
It means that something has shifted in the reality I’m inhabiting: I begin to think about it differently and experience it differently.
It no longer has only the everyday, unconscious dimensions of life; it also acquires the capacity to create connections and generate meanings specific to a particular kind of work.
Usually, when you say that you’ve written about something you’ve experienced, you imagine a sequential process: you experience something, and then you write about it, or you decide to write about it.
For me, it isn’t sequential.
Something shifts within that reality, and I begin to understand that this is now part of a text or a fiction – not in the sense that it is fictional, but in the sense that the demarcation between reality and representation no longer holds.
There is an alteration in the way I understand what is around me.
I remember becoming aware of this for the first time when I was writing my third novel, Freedom Song.
The Babri Masjid had come down, and it was winter.
I was walking around Kolkata, in the area of South Kolkata where we live, and suddenly the BJP lotus painted on a wall looked different to me.
The Babri Masjid, winter, the leaves that had fallen on the pavement, the BJP symbol on the wall, the differences between Hindus and Muslims, the eating of oranges, my retired father and my mother in that flat – all of these things suddenly began to come together in a way that they come together in a piece of writing.
I knew that something had begun.
I would now look at every detail through this connectedness, this textual connectedness, which gave everything a kind of freshness.
But it wasn’t as if I was gathering experiences in order to write about them.
Because my stories don't have conventional plots as such, it's very easy for me to confuse and conflate the everyday that is lived in with the everyday that is written about.
Those demarcations don't hold; they spill into each other.
As far as this novel is concerned, the moment my wife said, just to calm me down, “This is where the writers would have lived.
Hemingway would have lived here, not in some fancy made-up place,” I began to see everything around me differently.
She said this because I had been thinking about vacating that flat which I had just arrived in in Paris that very evening, or the next day, given the state of disrepair it was in.
The evening came and went, and the next morning I woke up intending to follow through on that impulse.
But the moment she said that, my way of seeing the place changed.
That alteration in seeing, for me, is writing.
It doesn't matter whether it is written down or not.
So I would say the writing began then.
The actual writing, however, would have begun after I completed Sojourn, sometime in 2022.
I was really interested in that particular moment you referred to, when you say that the narrator brings into existence a kind of language by living in Château Rouge – a non-linguistic form of writing or language, as you say in the book.
In fact, this novel seems to be constantly reckoning with the weight of history and with narratives that already exist within us and within particular spaces.
There is, of course, the idea of Hemingway’s Paris, which the narrator is very eager to resist and rail against.
I wanted to return to something you mentioned in your previous answer: that you don’t necessarily experience things knowing that you’re going to write about or narrate them.
I find that distinction fascinating because I wonder how one does that.
Does the knowledge that you might eventually narrate an experience not alter the experience itself? Once you begin to think of an experience as something you will have to gather, shape, and eventually transform into a narrative, does that change the way you experience it in the first place?That is precisely what doesn’t happen.
I’m not collecting experience in order to create a narrative out of it in the future.
I am extending the idea of narrative – I’ll use the word “narrative” sparingly – and extending the idea of writing and language.
Language is not just the letters you type out or write down.
It is a kind of change to the reality in which you exist; it is a field of possible meanings.
That field can exist within a work, but it isn’t confined to a work or to a particular piece of fiction.
It can exist within it, but it can also exist continuously with it, outside it.
It can exist between one book and another, between one book and a very different kind of book, or between one work and another work in a different genre.
It can also be continuous with the actual here and now around me.
The here and now need not be a foil or a background to the work, nor does it need to be its interior or its setting.
It can be continuous with it.
The clearest way of seeing this in terms of a particular genre is the raga, which is why I bring up the raga in a particular section of Château Rouge.
This mention of the raga in the book has partly to do with the laws of verisimilitude that are supposed to be obeyed while composing a novel (in this case, the man is in Paris ostensibly to write a book on music).
I don’t set much store by those laws, though; I wouldn’t obey them if they had nothing to give me as a writer writing that kind of narrative.
But the narrator is writing about music, so I bring the raga in for that reason.
I also bring it in to comment on the remarks scattered throughout the text, and throughout some of my other texts, about how I relate to reality and how I think about writing.
This is something I’ve said in Finding the Raga: a raga has perhaps for the last 600 or 700 years been connected to something in the world – specifically, to a time of day or a season.
Ragas are seasonal, or they are sung at particular times of day.
Because of this, and because we tend to think about language and art in terms of representation – a way of thinking in which we’ve been schooled by the Enlightenment – we tend to assume that an afternoon raga must somehow be about the afternoon.
There must be something in the raga that evokes the afternoon.
But, as I say in Finding the Raga, there is nothing in a raga’s notes that makes it more or less appropriate to a particular time of day.
You can find other ragas with identical notes that are sung at completely different times of day or in different seasons.
So an afternoon raga is not about the afternoon; it is of the afternoon.
It is not about the world; it is of the world.
When you sing an afternoon raga, you do so because singing Madhuvanti would sound as wrong in the evening or at night as using the word “night” for “afternoon.” We are in a kind of interrelationship of words and reality.
One thing is not outside the other, waiting to be represented.
So one of the things that Madhuvanti comprises, besides its notes and its composition, is afternoon.
You sing Madhuvanti – ni sa ga ma pa, pa ma ga re sa, and so on – and those notes are part of its text.
The words of the composition are part of its text.
But afternoon is also part of its text.
This means that it is possible to understand the world as a field of meaning, rather than necessarily as something that needs to be meaningfully represented.
In that sense, I think of fiction, and the novel, as one among a set of things that comprise language.
And in that set is Château Rouge itself.
There is a paragraph in this novel where you refer to Sartre, and you discuss his idea that we become aware of being inside an adventure only when we begin to recount it.
You then go on to suggest that we have become reliant on, and even hungry for, a rather turgid idea of history.
I was curious about this idea of history that you seem to be reckoning with throughout the novel.
There seems to be a kind of hollowed-out version of history that is both accessible and ever-present – the monuments and landmarks scattered throughout Paris, for instance, or the places associated with Hemingway and his fellow writers.
But history also becomes inaccessible for precisely the same reason: because these places have already been so thoroughly marked and narrated as historical.
I’m thinking, for instance, of the copy of A Moveable Feast that has been lying on the narrator’s nightstand.
I was wondering if you could talk a little more about this idea of history, particularly about your resistance to the way history is made available to us through these pre-existing narratives and markers.Sartre, in Nausea, says that for something to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient to recount it.
Something like that, in translation.
What he means is that when you are in the midst of something, you don’t designate it as an adventure.
You are busy trying to plug a leak, fix something, get somewhere after your car has broken down, or stop yourself from falling.
You simply live through it.
It is only later, when you describe it, that you call it an adventure: “I had an amazing adventure.
Thank God I survived it,” or whatever it might be.
I’ve written about this in a short essay, where I suggest that the only time you can become aware that something is an adventure is when you undertake it for no outcome, or at least for no material outcome.
I remember a time when my guitarist in England and I travelled to Edinburgh – or perhaps Glasgow, I can’t remember – to have me sing one of my songs on a BBC programme.
The amount of money they were giving us would barely cover our travel expenses.
My guitarist said, “Makes sense.
It’s an adventure.” And that’s precisely because there was no treasure at the end, no material outcome.
We undertook it enthusiastically, but for no particular purpose.
In that sense, it could be experienced as an adventure.
It is close to the idea of art as “purposefulness without a purpose”: an adventure, in my guitarist’s sense, is something undertaken without a predetermined outcome.
Usually, though, what we call an adventure is a significant episode – something potentially life-changing, full of thrills or danger.
And Sartre suggests that we....
