Hidden Variables

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Warning: This post is only for simpleton adult males

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RKN was advised by his senior not to apply for a degree in Eng Lit if he wanted to enjoy literature and he wisely took the advice and tore up his application form.

Otherwise he would have to answer questions like:

"What is the hidden significance of Atticus killing the mad dog?"

I am told that there is no unique answer to this. They range from the mad dog symbolizing racism, vicious alive or dead...to Atticus being in love with his maid, and killing the mad dog symbolizes killing his libido.

Take your pick.

When I read this gripping novel in my twenties at KGP, it never occurred to me that there is anything hidden in this wonderful episode that changes the attitude of his kids to him and makes them proud of their old daddy.

Phew!

We had a Shaw Play called Candida as our prescribed drama in our University. It is about a silly love triangle between an old and stuffy parson called Morell, a young and goofy poet called Marchbanks and Morell's wife Candida who wants to be enigmatic, but fails. The play was as good or as bad as any of Shaw, full of arguments and stuff. Marchbanks, the idiot, thinks that Candida ought to be in love with him and his poetry rather than her old and shopworn hubby, but in the final scene he is disillusioned and leaves, saying enigmatically that he finally has a secret in his heart that is far more important than Candida to him. And the standard university question we had to answer was:

"What is the secret in the poet's heart?"

Can anything be worse than this? I asked our beautiful Lady Teacher: "Ma'am, what is your answer to this question?" And she almost blushed as if she were Candida and I the young poet.

Thurber, bless his soul, tears this sort of idiocy to pieces in his piece: "What Cocktail Party?" It is a spoof on the hidden meanings in Eliot's laboriously intriguing play of that name. Thurber describes the spurious discussions on it in an actual cocktail party of literary folks. And when Grace Sheldon corners him saying:

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'You still haven't told me what you think of The Cocktail Party.'

I laughed a laugh that was not actually a laugh.

'What don't you think it means, then? she put in helpfully.

I circled around this for a moment. 'Do you mean what Eliot is intentionally not saying, or what he just happens to have not said?' I asked, with enormous tidiness. She looked bewildered and I tried to clear it up for her, and for me. 'Let me put it this way,' I said. 'No playwright has ever deliberately said, "Kings wear oysters in their shoes". This line has not been left out, however, in the sense that it has been rejected. It is certainly not what Eliot is not saying. If we charged him with it, he might quite properly reply, "I would never not say that!' '

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Aniket, long long ago showed me his M Sc Project Thesis, on the first inner page of which was an Eliot quote. I then remembered this Thurber piece, and xeroxed it and gave him and Kedar a copy each. A couple of months later, we were being feted by Kedar Khares in his Bombay home and I chanced upon a Thurber book in his bookshelf borrowed from a Library. I fancied there was a connection.

Symbolism is the bread'n'butter vocation of psychoanalysts Freud on. There was this Readers Digest joke that a psychoanalyst draws a straight line on the board and asks his patient:

"What is the meaning of this?"

"Sex"

He then draws a circle, an ellipse, a parabola and a hyperbola and asks the same question and gets the same answer.

"Can't you see anything other than sex?"

"Can't you draw anything other than sex?"

And then there is this female reporter interviewing the Vice President of Boots & Soots about the sexual harassment prevailing in their firm.

The MCP says bluntly:

"If I get a beautiful secretary working for me I would certainly love to patao her"

"What if you get an ugly secretary?"

The VP thinks for a moment and says:

"Why, I would love to patao her too!"



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