Kipling's Imperial Aestheticism: Epistemologies of Art and Empire in Kim

Recent critical response to Kim, emerging from the boom in postcolonial studies, has engaged primarily with the imperial context of the novel, finding in Kipling fertile, if at times surprising, ground for analysis of the dynamics of imperialism through the eyes of a forebear from across the ideological divide. However, despite the degree to which Kipling's work seems almost the archetype of the hand-in-glove cohesion of cultural production and imperial rule, it also eludes such easy characterization. While certainly not stepping away from the vital importance of imperialism and its ideological import, this article presents imperial ideology as leading to an aesthetic crisis in Kim that points to the linkages Kipling traces between perception and situated identity, especially in terms of aesthetic response, and draws comparisons between the robust masculine imperialism with which Kipling is often associated and the more dissident masculinities associated with the dandy, the aesthete, and the flâneur.

Writing of Kipling's relation to the aesthetic Decadence movement of the 1890s, Harold Bloom asserts that

Kipling, with his burly imperialism and his indulgences in anti-intellectualism, would seem at first out of place in the company of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats. Nevertheless, Kipling writes in the rhetorical stance of an aesthete, and is very much a Paterian in the metaphysical sense.… What Kipling finally shares with Pater is a deep conviction that we are caught always in a vortex of sensations, a solipsistic concourse of impressions piling upon one another, with great vividness but little consequence.¹

What follows will situate Kipling in relation to the tradition discussed by Bloom, but with a different set of concerns, relating to the forms of knowledge produced by the aesthetic and the ways in which these are conditioned by situated identity. Kipling and Pater do not easily share the view of "art for art's sake," or the absence of referentiality suggested by Bloom, but these ideas fascinate Kipling, their implications both enticing and terrifying him. The key divide between Bloom's stance and that of many recent Kipling scholars has to do with the position of Kipling and his art in relation to the project of empire. Kipling's writing is "of little consequence"? Quite the opposite, it serves as a clear example of the cultural rubric of the imperial project, even serving to construct that project in a material sense rare in literary works of any persuasion. As Leonard Woolf famously recalls of Ceylon, "I could later never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story."² Thus, Kipling's work holds out the possibility not only to depict, but also to create the empire and the men who ruled it. On the face of it, it would be difficult to imagine an aesthetic further from that of the aesthete. Yet Kim, arguably Kipling's most enduring character, bears strong affinities to the dissident imperial masculinities embodied in the dandies and aesthetes of the fin de siècle. This tension is pushed to the breaking point. Kim, like Kipling before him, is inevitably pressed to choose empire over art.

The "Wonder House" & Conflicting Epistemologies

Early in Kim, we see Teshoo lama entering the "Wonder House" of the Lahore Museum to consult with the "Fountain of Wisdom," the Curator modeled on Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. The interaction between lama and Curator takes the form of looking at a series of images and objects, with the differences between the two old men reduced as nearly as possible to the manner in which they interact with these materials.³ The Curator's greeting establishes this dynamic: "'Welcome then, O lama from Tibet. Here be the images, and I am here,'—he glanced at the lama's face—'to gain knowledge.'"⁴ The reason for his presence in India (and by extension in the text) is presented purely as an interest in gaining knowledge. The lama's mission is, of...