Amit, can you talk a little bit about what it means to you to be a creative
writer who also practices criticism? As a creative writer I embarked on what I
would see as a particular kind of project in writing, which is closer to
modernism but embarked on it in in the age of what might be called you know the
postmodern or the post-colonial novel. And as I was doing this I didn't feel I was
doing something antiquated but I've definitely felt out of place and I was
wondering why I was doing this--what my compulsions were, and whether I had
history and why that history had been obliterated or presented to us only in a
particular way so that we understood the history of modernism as a European
history and a particular kind of European history. Why as an Indian, as I
am, what kind of antecedents to have, and
that's when I first, I think, began to address these things in terms of the
essay but the other thing I have to say over here is, I was also emerging from an
academic background. I was doing a PhD, a DPhil here in Oxford, but I did
not want to write the footnoted kind of academic peer-reviewed essay anymore so
I used the London Review of Books quite often and sometimes the tls
as forums in which to write these essays which were which which I thought
were intellectual explorations to do with questions that have I was
putting to myself, but not scholarly footnoted work but something else which I
thought was urgent and that's when this critical project began into which I was
also putting myself in and necessarily had to put myself in as a writer but
also physically myself as a person who had gone out for a walk that day, was
having a cup of coffee-- that this bit of myself was what overlapped with
the self as writer as creative writer between with with the writer of the
essay with the writer maybe theorizing or thinking about something this was the
overlap. What would you say to somebody really loves reading your novels but
hasn't encountered your criticism-- your critical writings--yet? Well, I would
say that they are not going to be encountering in in in the origins of
dislike something that's just secondary to my creative writing, that
origins of dislike also expresses a kind of creative putting together of
ideas and things which are often critical ideas and which are often ideas
to do with the critical and to do with the imagination and especially in two
of the essays towards the end of the book I think directly about the friend
of my youth, my new novel, and connect ways of reading in connection to
that but to other books that I've read and I have written to this
friend his his real-life prototype and the way he approaches reading so that
gives you a clue as to how the essays and the criticism are part annotation
but also have their own creative life connected to the creative work so you
know what once trying to move a little bit beyond both in the in the so-called
creative work and the critical work beyond genre and and make these sort
of boundaries more fluid. Could you say something about the title of the book
that you've chosen? I know it's also the title of the lead essay. Say
something about that, and about the word dislike. The title, I thought it was a
good title for it and for an essay, and for the book as well, so I went for it
but also it's a detailed exploration of some of my own dislikes
and then you'll say what kind of dislike are you talking about?
So are you talking about disliking somebody or a kind of behavioral kind of trait or
something to do with fashion or food and I would say that it looks like that what
I dislike is completeness so even if I'm
talking about Renaissance painting, I'm making a generalization over
there to talk about the urge to reproduce life in its completeness and
the taste that's fostered in us to give that kind
of urge and that kind of replication respect and I'm saying I want to look at
the opposite: I want to look at how the dismantling of things is interesting
So I'm saying I then dislike this monumental kind of ambition true to present things
in their completeness, and this I think runs through much of my creative work
and my critical writings you know, and not only that, I think one is in a state
of tension in that if one belongs to culture to Western culture or any modern
cultures so one has a particular relationship of either privilege in
completeness or as an artist saying that no, this is not the path I want to go
down. There is something that that I'm uneasy with about this ambition towards
completeness so just just one kind of example of this which is not an
aesthetic example is the idea of the developed society for instance you know
the idea that everything needs to be a kind of in a state of utopian
perfectionism and so I think the Laurentian in me would
reject the the perfection. It goes back a long way my love for Lawrence
also is connected with his affinity, I feel for his impatience with perfection
which he sees as an ambition of Western culture and Western art so it's
kind of meditation on not only why perfection is privileged but what
it is about ourselves that is unable to privilege it so I mean I would as I've
often said I would rather be doing what everybody else is doing,
it's nice to fit in then if one doesn't fit in--why? Why doesn't one fit in? It's
also trying to address that.