Colonizing Cynicism in the Works of Rudyard Kipling

Daniel Nyikos Colonizing Cynicism in the Works of Rudyard Kipling Ph.D.dissertation Témavezető/Supervisor Cristian Réka, Ph.D., dr. habil. Kérchy Anna, Ph.D., dr. habil. Szeged, 2019 University of Szeged (SZTE) Faculty of Arts Doctoral School for Literary Studies Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in Europe and North America Program Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1 1. Introduction: The Ghost of Ruddy Baba 2 2.1. The Construction of Imperial Otherness 25 2.2. The Construction of Imperial Subjectivity 40 3. Kipling‘s Cynicism of Empire 54 3.1. Plain Tales from the Hills 63 3.2. The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales 74 3.3. Wee Willie Winkie 95 3.4. In Black and White 98 3.5. The Light That Failed 117 3.6. Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People 120 3.7. Departmental Ditties Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses 134 3.8. The Jungle Books 145 3.9. Kim 157 4. Conclusion: Deconstructing Kipling‘s Colonizing World 177 Bibliography 187 Acknowledgements I would like to extend special thanks to my supervisors, Dr. Kérchy Anna and Dr. Cristian Réka, for their support, time, and advice. I am grateful for the prompt, detailed, and helpful criticism they offered, and this dissertation is far better for their diligent and expert guidance. I also very much appreciate their assistance in providing secondary sources and suggesting new lines of inquiry. Special thanks also go to Dr. Fenyvesi Anna and Dr. Kiss Attila for their guidance and support. I would not be here if it were not for you. I would also like to thank my family for everything. There is no way I can fully express how very grateful I am for whatthey have done for me over the last three years or thirty-four. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. 1 1. Introduction:The Ghost of Ruddy Baba Eighty years ago, English-American poet W. H. Auden described a shift in the way people read Rudyard Kipling‘s work in the poem ―In Memory of W. B. Yeats‖ (1939), written three years after Kipling‘s own death: Time that is intolerant Of the brave and the innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet. Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well. (44-45) Even after all this time, the critical literature about his work shows the world has certainly not ―pardoned Kipling and his views.‖ There is the rare voice who would whitewash Kipling‘s colonial attitudes completely, such as John Derbyshire (2000), who ascribes the criticism of Kipling to ―changes in public taste‖ (6), dismisses Kipling‘s anti-Semitism as ―ordinary everyday hypocrisy‖ (9), and writes that ―if he sometimes used the ‗n‘ word in private to refer to those whose sensibilities he so watchfully guarded in his work at the War Graves Commission, I see no reason to think any the less of him for it‖ (9). Setting aside such exceptions, the critical response has been steadily ambivalent, struggling to resolve the contradiction between Kipling‘s frank exposure of the limits and failures of the empire in his writing and his unflagging support for its endeavors. The critical conversation about Rudyard Kipling has undergone numerous shifts. He was first celebrated as a reporter, though his years as a newspaper writer have now been largely left out of criticism, with notable recent exceptions demonstrating a trend towards broader context for considering his other work and cultural impact (Gilmour 2002, Allen 2007, Scott 2011, Belliapa 2015). Although some of his most popular texts, during his lifetime and at the time of this writing, are his children‘s poems and stories, Kipling has not been widely studied as a children‘s writer, though one issue of Children’s Literature (2012) was devoted to Kipling, and one chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Kipling Studies is given to The Jungle Books and his other children‘s writings (Montefiore 2011).In this chapter, 2 Jan Montefiore (2011) notes that ―Kipling is neglected as a children‘s writer because his reputation for imperialist racism and more recently, for warmongering makes him unpopular‖ with those who control canon for children (95). Charles Allen (2007) describes that contemporaries found Kipling to be first promising, then triumphant, as a fiction writer and described him as a new Dickens (127). Among later scholars, Bényei (2011) describes a movement from first reading Kipling in terms of the modernist mode of his work, then holding him up for censure as a mouthpiece of the imperial regime with the rise of postcolonial criticism, and then later reassessing this conclusion by identifying ideological contradictions and depth in his work (42). This has created a renewed interest in Kipling‘s texts as providing insight into the intellectual framework of the colonialist enterprise and its interaction with the colonizer‘s psyche, though these studies also tend to minimize Kipling‘s importance in perpetuating imperialism. The current work will demonstrate that the two positions, that of the Kipling who lays bare the gaps in ideology and the Kipling who unflaggingly supports the British Empire, are not opposed but rather both serve to perpetuate colonizing work. Postcolonial scholars identify what they describe as a jarring distinction between Rudyard Kipling‘s fascination with transgressing the strict racial boundaries of colonizer and colonized and his unwavering support for the British Empire and its strict separation of those identities. It can be baffling that the same writer who produced ―The White Man‘s Burden‖ in 1899, with its exhortation to the colonizer to ―Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives‘ need‖ (2-4) had imagined an English soldier telling a low-caste Indian water carrier ―Though I‘ve belted you and flayed you, / By the livin‘ Gawd that made you, / You‘re a better man than I am‖ in 1890‘s ―Gunga Din‖ (83-85). When examined closely, this proves to be not a contradiction but rather a sign and result of ideological cynicism. Not only do ―Gunga Din‖ and Kipling‘s other literary output not threaten to destabilize imperial ideology, they are essential elements of it. In the context of this study, ideology will be imagined the ways of understanding it that Slavoj Žižek (2013) offers. He presents several ways of thinking about the term, noting that its meanings range from a contemplative attitude that misrecognises its dependence on social reality to an action-orientated set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals 3 live out their relations to a social structure to false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power.1 (3) While the last speaks the most directly to postcolonial criticism, each of these functions can be readily identified working in the British Empire and appearing, presented with obfuscations and misdirections, in the work of Rudyard Kipling. Both the lived experience within the doubly-constituted structure of the colony and the ideas that legitimate the presence of the colonizer in that space shape and inform the British colonizer's actions in the colonized space. This study has chosen Kipling for his unequaled importance in serving the British Empire's imperial ambitions through poetry and fiction. David Gilmour (2003) emphasizes the importance of Kipling for the British Empire, recounting that ―Lord Esher . argued that Kipling had earned the Order of Merit for having accomplished as much for the British Empire as Kitchener or Lord Cromer, who had ruled Egypt for twenty-four years‖ (Kindle location 36-38). Kipling was the first English recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and remains its youngest recipient. He played a unique role in the public life of the British Empire, and it is difficult to overstate his influence on the ideology of the colonizers. Andrew Hagiioannu (2003) stresses the central role of the creator of literature in shaping the world of readers in the colonial space, as to ―be a writer in Victorian India was to exert a powerful influence upon administrative policy, but only at the cost of denying the normative constructs of European thought and representation that lay beneath the act of writing itself‖ (31). This, perhaps, is what many readers forget, as Kipling represses it through a carefully crafted impression of authoritative knowledge of India: that Kipling is an Englishman, and a diehard imperialist, and this subject position informs everything he writes about the colony. Medical, anthropological, and geographical publications2, texts that have been associated with the colonization process by postcolonial thinkers, turned the wheels of the colony for readers in Great Britain, but it required writers like Kipling to provide the cognitive tools necessary for the individual colonizer to function in the colonized space itself. 1 This develops a more nuanced version of Louis Althusser's definition, as outlined in his essay ―Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses‖ (1971). He describes ideology as ―the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live‖ (165). 2 Robert J. Young (1994) provides an exhaustive overview of medical and anthropological texts from the 19th century, including such titles as An Investigation of the Theories of the Natural History of Man, The Races of Men (112), ‗Occasional Discourse on the N— Question‘ (113, one word censored by me), Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races (117), and the competing Journal of the Ethnological Society of London and Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (63).

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