Anyway, back last year when they released the remastered box set with all The Beatles' albums, I bought it for my dad for Christmas. Back then, I was familiar with most of the songs that we all seem to know at birth, but beyond that, well, I wasn't familiar with anything at all. So when we finally opened up the box and listened to all those amazing tracks, I finally discovered what millions before me already had: that they weren't "one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music," as Wikipedia so simply puts it, for nothing.
So you know I must have been REALLY excited when Gogol put on The Beatles (better known as The White Album) in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake in Chapter 4 (top of page 74, middle of the continued paragraph from the previous page, just in case you're following along...). After first overcoming my elation at the fact that Lahiri was alluding to one of my favorite albums of all time, I took a step back and tried to analyze the allusion like the good AP English student I am...
Like any good Beatles fanatic, I can tell you that the the Fab Four wrote most of the material for this album in 1968 during a transcendental meditation course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, in an attempt to get away from it all as the saying goes. Nonetheless, they still found themselves writing songs. Upon leaving India and returning to Abbey Road Studios in London, they got to work on this next record, which included many of these compositions along with a few new ones.
Yeah, that's right, I said India. You know, that place where the Ganguli family is from? Let's just say "REALLY excited" was an understatement for how I reacted when I remembered this factoid. So what could you conclude with this knowledge? One thing I drew from the allusion was situational irony, that here he is, being all cool and American and what not, listening to The Beatles, only to be unaware of the fact that most of the material on this album was written in his parent's native country. Meanwhile, "a cassette of classical Indian music" Ashoke bought for Gogol lies in his room, still in its wrapper (78). This irony, indirectly nonetheless, further stirs up Gogol's internal conflict over his identity and cultural attachments, whether he knows it or not. He tries to push his heritage away, but subtly, it sticks with him.
Do you have any other impressions of or ideas about this allusion now that I have so generously enlightened you?
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