In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Kipling's Portraits of the Artist By David H. Stewart Texas A&M University Lest we should hear too clear, too clear, And unto madness see. "The Prayer of Miriam Cohen" Kipling has a reputation for reticence about many things, including his own craft. His autobiography hedges, and critics often complain that he suppresses more than he discloses. Over the course of his long career, however, he frequently described writers and artists in both public statements and fiction. Far from saying too little, he said so much about the subject that his reputed reticence seems ill-founded. To be sure, he never provided readers with prefaces and notebooks as Henry James did. The creative process mystified him. Moreover, his hero was the strong, silent man of action for whom words are deeds, not aesthetic toys. He faced the age-old dilemma that Plato described: once you textualize the living voice, it may acquire precision but it loses force. It becomes carrion—nutriment for creatures lower on the food-chain. This problem is the focal point of the opposition between orality and literacy, a distinction that has lately gained scholarly attention and that seems especially pertinent to Kipling. After all, he was a journalist, a master of printed texts; but at the same time, his process for composing fiction and verse was oral. His career straddles the moment in literary history when writers stopped trying to be oral tale-tellers or singers and became textual fabricators. His psychological make-up inherited from his family and reinforced by his childhood environment led him to exploit his facility with language yet to beware of it. Sometimes garrulous, sometimes silent, he crossed the threshold into the language crisis of our century when some call words autonomous, others weapons and still others meaningless. He is like a man laying mines at night in a field already laid. Kipling's prose and verse are usually "noisy." He wrote to his Aunt Louis (Mrs. Alfred Baldwin, 13 September 1909) that "in your own drawing room your own piano is all right—for an audience in a larger room it must be a concert grand, tuned to concert pitch. And yet the notes you play are the same."1 Conceding that he is "loud," we at the same time recognize his silences and pianissimo notes. Probably no major writer pruned his work so severely. Kim was reduced by nine-tenths.2 So rigorous was he in erasing superfluous words, especially in his later work, that some readers have difficulty with the ellipses and admit to being mystified by, for example, "Mrs. Bathurst" or "Dayspring Mishandled." He learned to "write short" as a journalist, so that his tales 265 Stewart: Kipling's Portraits of the Artist could squeeze into limited inches of print. His one experiment with "writing long" produced The Light that Failed (1891), a disappointing book; and he never repeated the mistake. Instead, he became a master of compression, of silences, as we recognize by what is not said in "The Gardener" (1926) about its heroine 's tormented life and the war-tormented life of Europe. It is the unvocalized hum or roar of words in the reader's mind that transforms this miniature tale into a major statement. J. M. S. Tompkins notes that Kipling's silences involve more than stylistic strategy. Understatement, abstention, abbreviation and euphemism were national "temperamental traits."3 They expressed the Englishman's "stiff upper lip." By contrast, the loose-mouthed Bandar-Log are intolerable. To this social explanation, Elliot L. Gilbert adds a psychological dimension. Expression is risky because it discloses the self and makes one vulnerable. As a child, Kipling was punished for lying but also for telling the truth. The lovers in "Without Benefit of Clergy" (1890) are afraid to speak of their joy because it might antagonize the gods. Silent obedience to Authority is safest. The end result is that Kipling erased as if he were pre-deconstructing his work, and this is one reason why readers feel that there is more going on in his narratives than meets the eye: "A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does...

pdf

Share