The Old Men and the Sea

On re-reading Ernest Hemingway's classic swansong (the title of the post is a clever take on this work if you've already identified it) I was reminded of our heroic struggle with the elusive maiden-in-a-red-dress who went by the name of Literary Theory in the final year of my undergraduate study. Old, because, as mentioned before, we were experienced campaigners in our final year surviving arbitrary marking schemes, awkward student to staff co-ordination, confusing administrative changes and bland food. Men, I admit, is a hasty generalization as there was one woman in our small group (It was Feminism, really, that made Man human, we learnt) and Sea, because, well, that is what Literary Theory turned out to resemble by the end: the endless, ruthless, belligerent, heaving, yet promising, exciting, beautiful and sustaining Sea in Hemingway. We were promised great things and we found Lit Theory to be like this great, heaving sea promising us mysteries of a magnitude that we could never completely comprehend. The delights were like sprays of salty sea-water, mixed with a glorious sunset- a cocktail of subaltern studies and Malevich's square, 'differance' and hysteria, modernity and sublime, will to power and self-fashioning, etc. and etc.- all magical terms to us greenhorns, led to believe in the quiet majesty of all this.

Soon, peripatetic professors stitched Foucault to our souls, much like the Holy Word, smirked Spivak away, recited Derrida in a frenzy and upbraided our bourgeois acceptance of a language that was inherently phallocentric. However, the inglourious basterds, meaning us, met them half-way with a campaign that was apparently uneventful but only we could feel the sea that raged in our souls and minds. The magical terms were laid down on the table, stripped of the glitter, and we were finally expected to make sense of it. And we did. We condescended to our rival group who were studying European Drama and never failed to laugh at their modest ambitions- Ibsen! who studies Ibsen?!- and were ecstatic to discover at the end of the year that Frankenstein's narrative structure attempts to put the monster into the center, which, needlessly to say, being ever-elusive, hovers right outside the text and, adding Spivak, therefore, arriving at the reason why he (the Other) can never be selfed by Victor. It was an intellectual achievement that was similar to the one experienced by Jackson Pollock when he discovered that he wasn't just dripping paint on the canvas, but starting a movement. It could also feel, at times disarmingly, like watching golf on television with background sound edited in from a snuff video.

We became veritable steppenwolves roaming the nights between two rooms across a landing, swooping at buttered parathas and wondering if we really must include someone like Althusser into Marxism when he is really, just a brilliant structuralist at heart? It was a heated debate until, due to lack of some essential facts (and wikipedia) deep into the night, it ran into the sand like a beached whale. There, I'm back to The Old Man and the Sea again.

Among the first ones to bring sparseness into prose- long before Coetzee- the most beautiful half-sentence in Hemingway's novel that resonated with me and my memories was: "Bed is my friend." Without making it sound unsavoury, it'll suffice to say that the bed was the churner where most of my ideas found substance. As the fish dragged the old man around, promising him a bulk he could barely measure, Lit Theory tied a rope around our neck and made us believe that although it is impossible to look from outside the structure, an outside-inside view can be attempted nonetheless. If the language of one culture is impossible to create perfectly in another culture, how does translation affect us so much? Everybody loves The Little Prince, without having a mastery over French Resistance politics. The problem is, I tried to suggest to myself (talking to myself was another severe side-effect of Lit Theory), that if one has read Borges- none of these issues seem new. But I shut up, because I couldn't claim to understand everything Borges said anyway. Translation issues always reminds me of my Bengali friend who translated Tagore's title- Chaturanga as 'The Wise Body-part' and passed out laughing. Or when I automatically tend to think of Jhumpa Lahiri as translated from Bengali (I don't do this with any other writer including, say, Amitav Ghosh or Amit Chaudhuri)- although I consciously check myself all the time.

Meanwhile- falling into disuse, I tend to apply Lit Theory at random now. Even films. 'Fallen Angels' shows a terribly lonely postmodern state where people long to make themselves known by being ridiculous, or withdraw into a walkman inside a crowd. On watching 'Gunda' I was tempted to impose Fredric Jameson's idea of fetishism in late-capitalist societies. Then I realized it was a Mithun movie. So human voices woke us, and we drowned. The tragedy would be complete if I fought off the sharks from my skiff and realized, in the end, that I was only bringing in a majestic skeleton.