Modernism in this celebrated Bengali novelist and thinker’s version has poetry, cinematography, painting, and fiction – art of every kind – growing out of the physical, the human, the homely, the unremarkable. It is irresolute and rational, not complete and magical. Ironically, a host of didactic sacred texts sprang up to celebrate it, many in French. Now, like Catholicism in England five hundred years ago, this orthodoxy is in mortal danger of losing its authority. Some might say it is already dead. Whether its take on the universe is convincing or not is beside the point here: beyond a small number of protected enclaves, such as Chaudhuri’s own Department of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, it has lost its sway over us. In its battle with the market, the market has won. If I might misquote Habakkuk, the earth is now filled with the knowledge of the glory of globalisation, not Guattari. Given the avalanche of scriptural quotations in The Origins of Dislike, I think I should be allowed my Habakkuk. From Sontag to Said, Derrida to Deleuze, Barthes to Benjamin (obsessively), the anointed are quoted over and over again. And why not? On occasion they were pithy. (But not always. Here’s Derrida on spirituality: ‘The absence of the transcendental signified extends the play of the signifier to infinity.’ Maybe. And, then again, maybe not.) Still, the unending conga line of ageing, aggrieved authority figures becomes almost self-parodying, even a touch macabre.  I found myself on tenterhooks wondering if Teju Cole and Clarice Lispector would manage to get a mention. Near the end of the book, they do.

In part I enjoyed this book – and there’s much to take pleasure in here – because of another mischievous little Jesuitical device: equivocation. Chaudhuri says one thing but thinks and does another. He performs his deft feints, however, to protect himself from his peers, not the mob, as the Jesuits did. On a visit to the Louvre, for example, he finds he dislikes what he calls ‘Renaissance’ painting, no doubt for reasons as diverse as his Bombay boyhood and the state of his digestive tract on the day. His argument, however, is both diverting and diversionary flimflam: the art is hyper-realist, he avers (although it’s not), and, for ideological reasons supplied by John Berger, hyper-realism is something Chaudhuri can’t abide. In other words, a problem of taste is being solved by the application of a theoretical rule. This is casuistry.

While this whole collection is a love song to good taste and cultural capital, if not capital of the Marxian kind, we’re po-facedly assured that ‘taste’ is a word ‘now hardly used’. This is a Bourdieuan piety, not a fact. Chaudhuri means ‘hardly used by people like us’. Every word of these essays has been weighed fastidiously in the balance of fashion, modishness, and self-preservation. It is true that ‘taste’ is a word impossible to use innocently, but, from a Modernist point of view, so what?

When Chaudhuri claims that Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, and Graham Greene are ‘now largely forgotten or have turned into minor literary-historical facts’, while Henry Green is ‘still among us’, he is again striking a blow for academic orthodoxy on ‘the field of battle’ that he considers all art and writing to be. In the Greene vs Green fight, Greene has come out on top. Greene sells, Green doesn’t.

Amit Chaudhuri (photograph by Geoff Pugh)

Chaudhuri believes in the commonplace and the common man, but not so much, it turns out, in the common reader, whose eyes will glaze over within minutes of opening the book. Faced with any doctrinal pronouncement, the common reader, expecting narrative and closure, can feel disempowered. The ideology itself is focused on empowering the disempowered, but Chaudhuri’s way of writing silences and immobilises the reader. Instead of ‘in my opinion’, ‘I rather think’, or even ‘I am convinced’, we get an assertion followed by ‘as Derrida puts it’ or ‘in Susan Sontag’s words’; first the truth and then its source. It’s a performance and – although ostensibly a collection of personal essays, with asides about the family car in the 1980s or a visit to the Louvre with his wife – it reads more like a series of manifestos. Chaudhuri himself alludes to the fact that Indian English lacks any demotic form of the language, so even a streetsweeper can sound bombastic. Chaudhuri often sounds bombastic.

Paradoxically, I find the doctrine he espouses appealing, if rather old hat. Chaudhuri’s love of modernism and its art in various forms is infectious. Whether he’s writing about his greatly loved Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in 1913, or his dislike of historicism, narrative, and ‘completion’, he displays a learned curiosity and indeed a joy in what is playful, poetic, and fragmentary. This is a book of fragments: Iranian cinema, creative writing courses, V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, sunlight, Jun’Ichirō Tanizaki and his shadows, Picasso, Paul Klee, the Bengali poet Rajiv Mehrotra, literary Pakistan, flânerie, the perniciousness of literary prizes – the range is impressive, the insights numerous. His comments on why Australian writers are of no interest to foreigners at all unless they’re writing about Australia are wounding and spot on. I’d have liked to feel, however, more of the carnality and mischief he so admires in Ingmar Bergman. The text is too monkish and overthought for a writer who wishes above all things to feel spontaneously, joyously alive in the flesh.

Perhaps Chaudhuri needs to follow his own advice on ‘handed-down categorical narratives’: dismantle them. He is aware of the anxiety many artists and writers feel about having come after the masters who are formative to them, yet his prose is stiff with this anxiety, not a syllable is blithe. Postmodernism relieved this angst through irony, but Chaudhuri isn’t good at irony. Perhaps he should just cock a snook and move on. Or is the whole enterprise of these essays actually a ludic extravaganza? Perhaps he really thinks the postmodern superstar Dubravka Ugrešić is the most awful bore. (Only joking.)

All the same, this is a fine performance for a select audience by a master of the English language. The unhurried reader will finish the volume dazed, I suspect, but enriched.