Then there’s whatever claim you might care to make for Kim as a novel. I prefer to set aside any potential political and cultural objections, which I shall argue are largely irrelevant to the work as literature, and try to deal with Kim as a novel, but they cannot be ignored.
Yes, the imperialist attitudes which suffuse Kim throughout the book cannot be ignored, but what also cannot be ignored is the lens through which we choose view them and are broadly inclined to condemn them. But first, perhaps, set aside the ‘imperialism’ and look at Kim as a novel
It is routinely described as ‘picaresque’, which sounds literary enough, and if you have or, like me emerged, perhaps rather late in life, from a somewhat overly deferential relationship with ‘literature’ that description might
As for being ‘on one’s guard’, I should confess it is only – comparatively – recently that I have gained the courage no longer to doff my cap when presented with ‘a classic’ or ‘a masterpiece’ or, as here, a piece of writing that is described as ‘multi-layered’ but instead to look ‘literature’ squarely in the eye and demand ‘OK, what have you got for me?’
So rather than describing Kipling’s Kim as ‘picaresque’ and thus seeming obliquely to hint at gems, I prefer to describe it as amorphous and somehow inconsequential. At the end of the day it meanders just a little too much with often no apparent purpose stitching the incidental parts together.
Those were some of my thoughts when I finished reading Kim, but feeling a little underwhelmed and oddly confused by the novel, I did what I’ve now done several times before with other books: I turned to the first page and read it all over again.
Though I was a little less confused when I finished the book for a second time, I found my initial impressions had not changed.
The introduction to my volume, by a Cedric Watts, a former professor of English literature at Sussex University, tells us that the novel is multi-layered. Once again that sounds rather impressive and should warn us amateurs in literature to raise our guard. But I chose not to as this most recent iteration of me is less inclined to assume ‘being multi-layered’ is necessarily a good thing.
For example, for years when I read a work described as ‘experimental’, I assumed that implied it was somehow daring and probably admirable. In fact, ‘experiments’ can either succeed or fail and simply being ‘experimental’ tells us nothing, except perhaps that we are reading a review on one of the more respectable and series jounrals.
It was only recently when I was writing my take on Ernest Hemingway and wondering just why he was – probably still is by some – spoken of a ‘a genius’ and ‘one of the leading writers of the 20th century that I became a lot more sceptical.
One biographer described some of Hemingway’s work as ‘experimental’, and as I had decided the work he was talking about was not at all very ‘good’, I realised the point I made above: that ‘experiments’ can succeed or they can fail. Simply being ‘experimental’ means next to nothing when evaluating a writer’s work.
Similarly with being ‘multi-layered’: in itself that means little and we can only decide for ourselves whether there is substance to the description or whether it is little more than critics’ hyperbole once we have read the work. In short, it depends on the result of the ‘multi-layering’ as to whether or not it has paid off.
In my view the ‘multi-layering’ in Kim Watts claims to have spotted – if Watts is correct and Kipling did indeed attempt it – does nothing much and achieves less. Frankly, after reading Kim – twice – I’m inclined to store it in the basket of odd bedfellows labeled ‘critics’ hyperbole’.
I was also less than impressed by the number of coincidental meetings in Kim. All too often one or two of the five or six protagonists in the novel bump into each which, given the size of India, is more than a little difficult to swallow.
Watts loyally attributes these series of coincidences to ‘diving ordinance’ and he also insists there is a ‘mystical’ dimension to Kipling’s novel, one in keeping with the spiritual quest on which the Buddhist lama Kim teams up with has embarked. Well, perhaps there is, but I somehow missed it. Perhaps I should be more careful.
The almost episodic nature of Kim is perhaps explained by the fact is was initially published in monthly magazine instalments. That raises the question of whether Kipling had completed the novel before the first instalment was published or whether, more likely, I suggest, each new instalment was written as and when it was due and in time to be published.
To give Kipling his due, some of his scenes, for example, the first scene that takes place in a train, are rather entertaining. Other scenes, however, tend to overstay their welcome to some extent.
Not least worrying was a certain kind of sloppiness in Kipling’s writing. More than occasionally in a scene of dialogue, it is not at all clear who is speaking.
And although Kipling provides several lush descriptive passages, where some writers can easily, almost magically, spark the reader’s imagination to conjure up an visible scenes, I find none of that in Kim: too many scenes, despite quite detailed writing, remained resolutely flat and two-dimensional. Perhaps that is my failing. And perhaps it isn’t.
As for the ‘imperialist’ Kipling and the overt imperialism in Kim, I suggest we examine both with a nuanced touch, though I shall try to make clear I do not and do not intend to pass judgment either way. But it is a question that must be addressed as for many modern readers it ’spoils’ the novel.
Call me a relativist if you like – and it is not a term much used in admiration – but just as Archimedes complained that he didn’t have a fixed point or else he could move the world, none of us – and no moral system and or ideology – has first dibs on ‘what is right’ and ‘what is wrong’ and is thus in a position to have the final say on anything.
Thus pointing out that pretty much all moral judgments are ‘relative’ might not quite be the cop-out some will might insist it is. The trouble is that is in the nature of all moral systems to regard themselves as ‘the correct one’.
So, for example, we like to preach the existence of ‘universal human rights’, but unfortunately, when push comes to shove, the ‘human rights’ we declare to be, beyond all possible argument, ‘universal’ are simply not ‘universal’.
Why not? Simply because in many parts of the world they are either not thought to be ‘rights’ at all or a cultures accepts that such alleged rights are trumped by other, usually religious, principles and precepts. An example would be those who – sincerely – believe that the principles and precepts of Islamic sharia law trump some of our ‘universal’ human rights’.
You might acknowledge that point but counter that in that case sharia law is ‘wrong’. And so we come full circle and arrive at nowhere very soon: ‘wrong’? On what moral metric? Don’t some Muslims – and even many Christians – insist that much we liberals value and proclaim is in itself ‘wrong’? Well, yes they do. Difficult, eh?
I also hear you object that the ‘universal’ as in ‘universal human rights’ is not at all what we might paraphrase as ‘worldwide’. What we mean by ‘universal’ is that such rights are the ‘right’ of every man and woman alive and still to be born, irrespective of where and in which culture they live and which religious faith they adopt.
Point taken, but now take my points. Certainly, we ‘feel’ such rights should be universal and unassailable in the sense you choose to understand the words. Furthermore, our ‘feeling’ is so strong that we might even convince ourselves that we are prepared to sacrifice our lives to protect and enforce those rights.
But for centuries, since ‘God died’ and the Enlightenment took off and over, some of our best minds have tried and failed to establish a rock-solid intellectual basis – a philosophical version of Archimedes’ fixed point – for such feelings which would ‘prove’ our moral systems and it set of principles to be the only valid ones.
What about ‘imperialism, the impatient among you are asking? Well, I’ll get there, but hang tight.
Such a ‘fixed point’ – and thus that ‘human rights’ are ‘universal’ in more than a geographic sense – will only be valid if we can show that, for example, they would exist whether or not human kind is around to acknowledge and benefit from them.
Thus, just as we like to be supremely confident that ‘two and two equals four’ even in the furthest corners of the universe – and assuming the universe does have ‘corners’ but let’s not muddy the waters too much, the phrase is intended to be understood metaphorically – a ‘universal’ right must be a right everywhere and for ever and always.
The sharp minds reading this – hi there, sharpies! – might at this point be recalling the hoary philosophical question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is around to hear it. Similarly, would a human right exist if there were no humans to enjoy it? And so it could not be ‘universal’? Purists are obliged to insist that, yes, it does. Me? I’ll bow out of that discussion as I prefer to waste my time in other, more interesting, ways.
The sad truth is that what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ and what is ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ is, at the end of the day and lacking any other viable conclusion, what we want to accept as ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’.
Certainly, many aspects of human behaviour, for example, incest and, at present topically, paedophilia, almost universally appal us. But it is still an impossible task to argue from such overwhelming revulsion to an establish copper-bottomed truth that is somehow eternal and beyond question.
Why not? The answer is simple and banal: because our intellectual habits and protocols don’t allow it: the same dilemma – the same irritating dilemma – is at the heart of many ‘philosophical problems’, whether in moral philosophy – attempting to move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ – in epistemology – distinguishing between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’, as in ‘what do we mean by “knowing” and why is it different to believing? – and ontology – what does it mean ‘to be’?
So after something of detour, to get back to Rudyard, his novel Kim, his take on India and on British imperialism, that same irritating dilemma presents itself in what the curse of relativism: was and is imperialism in any stripe or form a ‘bad thing’ or a ‘good thing’? Answer, unhelpfully it has to be said: well, it depends (which is where the relativism comes in).
If, like Rudyard Kipling, you were born in the middle of the 19th century – he was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay – when Britain’s imperial might was at its height and seemed unassailable, unlike a century later when it was on its last legs and assailed on all sides, not least by the ‘young boomer generation’ in Old Blighty – it would have been almost wilfully perverse to have questioned the legitimacy of the British empire and Britannia’s ‘rule’ over an estimated one-quarter of the world and its peoples.
A few did question it at the time, of course, but they were written off as ne’er-do-wells, who were at best stupid and benighted and at worst treasonous.
I suggest it is wholly understandable that Kipling was one of the millions of Brits who cheered on the Empire and all Britannia’s work. Furthermore, in his novel Kim he even portrays ‘Indians’ as loyal imperialists only too grateful for Britannia’s rule over them.
Kipling was aware of the Indian Mutiny which had broken out eight years before he was born and he refers to it in his novel. But he stuck to the party line – and I suggest this was sincere and wholly in keeping with how he had been raised and educated – that the mutineers were akin to wild troublemakers and nothing more. That they, as proud ‘Indians’, objected to British rule might not even have occurred to him.
Some of the above has been covered recently in this blog and you can find it here. But I shall consciously repeat one point: that Kipling’s take on India and the ‘Indians’ was arguably more nuanced than that of a great many, probably almost all, of his Anglo-Indian contemporaries.
Thus he did not lump all of India’s peoples together as ‘Indians’ as other would do: he distinguished between different, sometimes very different, ethnicities and cultures and – I at least – detect more than a little fondness for the variety of ‘Indians’ he encountered and mixed with.
It happened that after five years in Bombay, where his first language was Urdu, learnt from domestic staff, and where he had to be told to speak English with his parents, he and his three-year-old sister Alice were packed off to Britain to be lodged with a family in Portsmouth.
Six years later he was again packed off again, this time to a boarding school in North Devon where most boys were intended to join the British army.
I shall indulge in a little amateur psychology here: at the house in Portsmouth where the couple he lodged with treated him badly, Kipling was very, very unhappy. Then went he went on to his boarding school, at first he was equally unhappy, but once he had made friends he did enjoy himself.
More to the point is that it is not unlikely that he looked back on the first five years of his life in Bombay though nostalgic lenses, and when he finally went did return to India, he landed a reporter’s job on a newspaper and loved it.
Certainly, Kipling was a convinced imperialist: it would be dimwitted to describe him as an ‘unashamed’ imperialist as for him and the many thousands of Anglo-Indians around him there was nothing to be ‘ashamed’ about. He did think the British Empire was serving India and her people, a conviction shines throughout is novel Kim.
Whether or not that will spoil your reading of Kim, I can’t say. I, who am not ‘an imperialist’ and, very oddly, lean ever more to the left as I grow older – though I take great care not to align myself with any political party as I value being able to speak my mind come what may – did not find it spoiled my reading of the novel at all.
The introduction to my volume, by a Cedric Watts, a former professor of English literature at Sussex University, tells us that the novel is multi-layered. Once again that sounds rather impressive and should warn us amateurs in literature to raise our guard. But I chose not to as this most recent iteration of me is less inclined to assume ‘being multi-layered’ is necessarily a good thing.
For example, for years when I read a work described as ‘experimental’, I assumed that implied it was somehow daring and probably admirable. In fact, ‘experiments’ can either succeed or fail and simply being ‘experimental’ tells us nothing, except perhaps that we are reading a review on one of the more respectable and series jounrals.
It was only recently when I was writing my take on Ernest Hemingway and wondering just why he was – probably still is by some – spoken of a ‘a genius’ and ‘one of the leading writers of the 20th century that I became a lot more sceptical.
One biographer described some of Hemingway’s work as ‘experimental’, and as I had decided the work he was talking about was not at all very ‘good’, I realised the point I made above: that ‘experiments’ can succeed or they can fail. Simply being ‘experimental’ means next to nothing when evaluating a writer’s work.
Similarly with being ‘multi-layered’: in itself that means little and we can only decide for ourselves whether there is substance to the description or whether it is little more than critics’ hyperbole once we have read the work. In short, it depends on the result of the ‘multi-layering’ as to whether or not it has paid off.
In my view the ‘multi-layering’ in Kim Watts claims to have spotted – if Watts is correct and Kipling did indeed attempt it – does nothing much and achieves less. Frankly, after reading Kim – twice – I’m inclined to store it in the basket of odd bedfellows labeled ‘critics’ hyperbole’.
I was also less than impressed by the number of coincidental meetings in Kim. All too often one or two of the five or six protagonists in the novel bump into each which, given the size of India, is more than a little difficult to swallow.
Watts loyally attributes these series of coincidences to ‘diving ordinance’ and he also insists there is a ‘mystical’ dimension to Kipling’s novel, one in keeping with the spiritual quest on which the Buddhist lama Kim teams up with has embarked. Well, perhaps there is, but I somehow missed it. Perhaps I should be more careful.
The almost episodic nature of Kim is perhaps explained by the fact is was initially published in monthly magazine instalments. That raises the question of whether Kipling had completed the novel before the first instalment was published or whether, more likely, I suggest, each new instalment was written as and when it was due and in time to be published.
To give Kipling his due, some of his scenes, for example, the first scene that takes place in a train, are rather entertaining. Other scenes, however, tend to overstay their welcome to some extent.
Not least worrying was a certain kind of sloppiness in Kipling’s writing. More than occasionally in a scene of dialogue, it is not at all clear who is speaking.
And although Kipling provides several lush descriptive passages, where some writers can easily, almost magically, spark the reader’s imagination to conjure up an visible scenes, I find none of that in Kim: too many scenes, despite quite detailed writing, remained resolutely flat and two-dimensional. Perhaps that is my failing. And perhaps it isn’t.
As for the ‘imperialist’ Kipling and the overt imperialism in Kim, I suggest we examine both with a nuanced touch, though I shall try to make clear I do not and do not intend to pass judgment either way. But it is a question that must be addressed as for many modern readers it ’spoils’ the novel.
Call me a relativist if you like – and it is not a term much used in admiration – but just as Archimedes complained that he didn’t have a fixed point or else he could move the world, none of us – and no moral system and or ideology – has first dibs on ‘what is right’ and ‘what is wrong’ and is thus in a position to have the final say on anything.
Thus pointing out that pretty much all moral judgments are ‘relative’ might not quite be the cop-out some will might insist it is. The trouble is that is in the nature of all moral systems to regard themselves as ‘the correct one’.
So, for example, we like to preach the existence of ‘universal human rights’, but unfortunately, when push comes to shove, the ‘human rights’ we declare to be, beyond all possible argument, ‘universal’ are simply not ‘universal’.
Why not? Simply because in many parts of the world they are either not thought to be ‘rights’ at all or a cultures accepts that such alleged rights are trumped by other, usually religious, principles and precepts. An example would be those who – sincerely – believe that the principles and precepts of Islamic sharia law trump some of our ‘universal’ human rights’.
You might acknowledge that point but counter that in that case sharia law is ‘wrong’. And so we come full circle and arrive at nowhere very soon: ‘wrong’? On what moral metric? Don’t some Muslims – and even many Christians – insist that much we liberals value and proclaim is in itself ‘wrong’? Well, yes they do. Difficult, eh?
I also hear you object that the ‘universal’ as in ‘universal human rights’ is not at all what we might paraphrase as ‘worldwide’. What we mean by ‘universal’ is that such rights are the ‘right’ of every man and woman alive and still to be born, irrespective of where and in which culture they live and which religious faith they adopt.
Point taken, but now take my points. Certainly, we ‘feel’ such rights should be universal and unassailable in the sense you choose to understand the words. Furthermore, our ‘feeling’ is so strong that we might even convince ourselves that we are prepared to sacrifice our lives to protect and enforce those rights.
But for centuries, since ‘God died’ and the Enlightenment took off and over, some of our best minds have tried and failed to establish a rock-solid intellectual basis – a philosophical version of Archimedes’ fixed point – for such feelings which would ‘prove’ our moral systems and it set of principles to be the only valid ones.
What about ‘imperialism, the impatient among you are asking? Well, I’ll get there, but hang tight.
Such a ‘fixed point’ – and thus that ‘human rights’ are ‘universal’ in more than a geographic sense – will only be valid if we can show that, for example, they would exist whether or not human kind is around to acknowledge and benefit from them.
Thus, just as we like to be supremely confident that ‘two and two equals four’ even in the furthest corners of the universe – and assuming the universe does have ‘corners’ but let’s not muddy the waters too much, the phrase is intended to be understood metaphorically – a ‘universal’ right must be a right everywhere and for ever and always.
The sharp minds reading this – hi there, sharpies! – might at this point be recalling the hoary philosophical question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is around to hear it. Similarly, would a human right exist if there were no humans to enjoy it? And so it could not be ‘universal’? Purists are obliged to insist that, yes, it does. Me? I’ll bow out of that discussion as I prefer to waste my time in other, more interesting, ways.
The sad truth is that what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ and what is ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ is, at the end of the day and lacking any other viable conclusion, what we want to accept as ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’.
Certainly, many aspects of human behaviour, for example, incest and, at present topically, paedophilia, almost universally appal us. But it is still an impossible task to argue from such overwhelming revulsion to an establish copper-bottomed truth that is somehow eternal and beyond question.
Why not? The answer is simple and banal: because our intellectual habits and protocols don’t allow it: the same dilemma – the same irritating dilemma – is at the heart of many ‘philosophical problems’, whether in moral philosophy – attempting to move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ – in epistemology – distinguishing between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’, as in ‘what do we mean by “knowing” and why is it different to believing? – and ontology – what does it mean ‘to be’?
So after something of detour, to get back to Rudyard, his novel Kim, his take on India and on British imperialism, that same irritating dilemma presents itself in what the curse of relativism: was and is imperialism in any stripe or form a ‘bad thing’ or a ‘good thing’? Answer, unhelpfully it has to be said: well, it depends (which is where the relativism comes in).
If, like Rudyard Kipling, you were born in the middle of the 19th century – he was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay – when Britain’s imperial might was at its height and seemed unassailable, unlike a century later when it was on its last legs and assailed on all sides, not least by the ‘young boomer generation’ in Old Blighty – it would have been almost wilfully perverse to have questioned the legitimacy of the British empire and Britannia’s ‘rule’ over an estimated one-quarter of the world and its peoples.
A few did question it at the time, of course, but they were written off as ne’er-do-wells, who were at best stupid and benighted and at worst treasonous.
I suggest it is wholly understandable that Kipling was one of the millions of Brits who cheered on the Empire and all Britannia’s work. Furthermore, in his novel Kim he even portrays ‘Indians’ as loyal imperialists only too grateful for Britannia’s rule over them.
Kipling was aware of the Indian Mutiny which had broken out eight years before he was born and he refers to it in his novel. But he stuck to the party line – and I suggest this was sincere and wholly in keeping with how he had been raised and educated – that the mutineers were akin to wild troublemakers and nothing more. That they, as proud ‘Indians’, objected to British rule might not even have occurred to him.
Some of the above has been covered recently in this blog and you can find it here. But I shall consciously repeat one point: that Kipling’s take on India and the ‘Indians’ was arguably more nuanced than that of a great many, probably almost all, of his Anglo-Indian contemporaries.
Thus he did not lump all of India’s peoples together as ‘Indians’ as other would do: he distinguished between different, sometimes very different, ethnicities and cultures and – I at least – detect more than a little fondness for the variety of ‘Indians’ he encountered and mixed with.
It happened that after five years in Bombay, where his first language was Urdu, learnt from domestic staff, and where he had to be told to speak English with his parents, he and his three-year-old sister Alice were packed off to Britain to be lodged with a family in Portsmouth.
Six years later he was again packed off again, this time to a boarding school in North Devon where most boys were intended to join the British army.
I shall indulge in a little amateur psychology here: at the house in Portsmouth where the couple he lodged with treated him badly, Kipling was very, very unhappy. Then went he went on to his boarding school, at first he was equally unhappy, but once he had made friends he did enjoy himself.
More to the point is that it is not unlikely that he looked back on the first five years of his life in Bombay though nostalgic lenses, and when he finally went did return to India, he landed a reporter’s job on a newspaper and loved it.
Certainly, Kipling was a convinced imperialist: it would be dimwitted to describe him as an ‘unashamed’ imperialist as for him and the many thousands of Anglo-Indians around him there was nothing to be ‘ashamed’ about. He did think the British Empire was serving India and her people, a conviction shines throughout is novel Kim.
Whether or not that will spoil your reading of Kim, I can’t say. I, who am not ‘an imperialist’ and, very oddly, lean ever more to the left as I grow older – though I take great care not to align myself with any political party as I value being able to speak my mind come what may – did not find it spoiled my reading of the novel at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment