Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction

Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction by Helen Pike Bauer. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. xix + 162 pages. $23.95.

Criticism of Rudyard Kipling has long been notoriously polarized. Only two choices seem readily available to Kipling's critics: while some work to preserve what Hemingway once called "the good Kipling," others laboriously reproach Kipling for what they consider to be his less-than-good politics. Those who regard Kipling primarily as a literary figure are inclined to canonize him; those who see him as a political mouthpiece arc just as likely to demonize him.

Helen Pike Bauer's study of the short fiction firmly puts its faith in the good Kipling. Following the Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction format, Bauer's book is divided into three parts, "The Short Fiction," "The Writer," and "The Critics." In the long opening section, Bauer's own survey of Kipling's stories, she considers a series of Kipling's characteristic themes: existential isolation; the exaltation of work; allegiance to Empire; the magic of childhood; the validity of non-rational phenomena; and the celebration of Art. Part 2 consists of some of Kipling's own remarks about writing, taken from his 1906 address to the Royal Academy, from his 1926 speech to the Royal Literary Society, and from his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself. The closing section juxtaposes brief excerpts from two quite different 1980s treatments of Kipling, John A. McClure's psychopolitical Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction, and Clare Hanson's chapter on Kipling from her formalist Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980.

The beginning student of Kipling will profit from Bauer's admirably lucid expositions of a representative range from Kipling's vast short-story oeuvre--he wrote more than 400 stories over a 40-year period--and from her compilation of his seldom reprinted statements about literary art. Of the critical opinions Bauer includes in Part 3, Clare Hanson's discussion of Kipling's fictional strategies is instructive, distinguishing between modernist ellipsis, based on metaphor, and Kipling's ellipsis, which relies on metonymy. John A. McClure's close reading of a single Kipling story, "The Return of Imray," appears an odd choice on Bauer's part, since it has been extracted from a far more polemical argument than Bauer's selection suggests, in which Kipling is said to represent the totalitarian personality.

Overall, Bauer's interest in producing a thematically coherent Kipling often leads her to blur chronology and omit context. Thus, an 1880s story, written at the precocious beginning of Kipling's career, is explicated alongside one from the 1930s, the very end of his career, with not so much as a parenthetical date to orient the reader. This critical style prevents Bauer from registering the sharp shifts in Kipling's modes--from ironic-realist to fabulist to idealizing pastoral. The Kipling who emerges from Bauer's pages is curiously static, flattened into a finite set of prefabricated themes. And Bauer has a mystifying tendency to view Kipling through the lens of French existentialism: his stories, she claims, "demonstrate Sartre's vision of hell, other people." Surely Sartre would not have credited Kipling's imperial administrator with existential responsibility.

Bauer's ahistorical method is most evident in her approach to imperialism--the subject of several recent postcolonial readings of Kipling. Bauer correctly points out that Kipling's imperialism (too often conflated by her with the anachronistic "racism"), which must seem to us at best embarrassingly outmoded and at worst indefensible, was for him charged with the positive values of work, discipline, and transcendence of self. She sensibly takes pains to demonstrate the instability and ambivalence of Kipling's imperialist attitudes--but all this without once establishing what might have been at stake in the historical enterprise of "imperialism." The final effect is to let Kipling off an invisible hook. Bauer stops short of canonizing Kipling; she seems dedicated, however, to sanitizing him. Not surprisingly, two of Kipling's most pertinent postcolonial critics, Ashis Nandy and Zohreh T. Sullivan, are absent from Bauer's bibliography.

Bauer's book is a welcome sign of the resurgence in Kipling studies. But Kipling's imperial context cannot accurately be relegated to one of his themes; rather, it was the founding and shaping fact of his life and literary career. Born in Bombay in 1865, he spent formative childhood years in British India, became an "Anglo-Indian" writer at the apogee of Empire, and remained publicly identified with imperialist policy until his death in 1936. Many of his most powerful stories attest to this affiliation. Kipling cannot be saved from his own imperialism; nor need he be utterly damned for it. If he is now a challenging writer to study, it is precisely because he presses us to question our customary distinctions between politics and aesthetics.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Studies in Short Fiction
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