Suppression, Textuality, Entanglement, and Revenge in Kipling's "Dayspring Mishandled"

SUPPRESSION, TEXTUALITY, ENTANGLEMENT, AND REVENGE IN KIPLING'S "DAYSPRING MISHANDLED" By Terry Caesar (Clarion University) Kiphng's "Dayspring Mishandled" is a compelling text. Its inclusion in Irving Howe's Portable Kipling seems to certify a canonical status. Certainly Kipling's major critics have offered it a chorus of praise. "Remarkable,' wntes Norman Page.1 "Among Kiphng's very best stories," asserts Philip Mason; "it is complex and highly finished, with many recurring details and interlocking minor themes."2 Still, there is something unsettled, indeed quite unsettling m that chorus. As Page admits, "the story ... has been widely misunderstood"—a view echoed by Charles Carrington, who terms it "an astonishing performance, a profound, obscure, and singularly unpleasant story."3 This essay focuses on the misunderstanding and attempts to interpret a very specific omission in a text filled with other texts, as well as such features as rhetorical overdeterminations and displaced narrative patterns. In truth, "Dayspring Mishandled" is not simply compelling but difficult, and perhaps it fairly offers itself to be misunderstood because of its peculiarly dislocating energies. I beheve the central omission is at least its most puzzling feature, and that Kiphng's text is generated because of a certain kind of silence about itself, a silence which is continually reinscribed since there is nothing to sponsor it—save an act of revenge upon the very notion of some sponsoring presence. Before we examine the story, however, it is necessary to provide a brief summary of the narrative. "Dayspring Mishandled" is a story about two men: the one, James Andrew Manallace, a hack writer capable of inspired pastiche, and the other, Alured Castorley, a more refined critical type who eventually becomes the world's leading expert on Chaucer. Manallace and Castorley meet, early in their respective careers, while each is a member of a "syndicate" of hacks in Nineties London turning out potboilers for a weekly publication. During this time, both love a woman who is only identified as Vidal's (or VaTs) mother. Castorley comes into an inheritance. He withdraws from his hackwork, though not before proposing to Val's mother, who declines. She becomes paralyzed and dies, all the while nursed by Manallace. Later, during the War, Manallace and Castorley meet again. An air raid prompts them to relax into reminiscence. Castorley says something so offensive about Vidal's mother to Manallace that he vows to dedicate his life to revenge. After the War Castorley becomes "the Supreme Pontiff on Chaucer.4 Subsequently 107 hnes of a hitherto unknown Canterbury Tale, the copy work of a medieval Belgian monk, come into his hands. The ferociously ambitious Castorley pronounces the fragment genuine and expects a Knighthood. Manallace, however, reveals to an unnamed narrator that the fragment is actually his own elaborate forgery, the product of years of reconstruction. His purpose? To expose Castorley's authority in "the baser Press" by revealing the fraud. His motive? To revenge what Castorly had said years before about Vidal's mother. 54 But there are two conditions Manallace has not anticipated: Castorley's worsening, dyseptic condition, and his seemingly designing, even murderous young wife. Manallace temporizes. He insists that he wants his revenge to be complete. Meanwhile, an enfeebled Castorley enlists ManaUace's help in planning one last, consummate Chaucerian volume, while an eager Lady Castorley urges Manallace to be quick about its publication so that, as Manallace suspects, she can hasten her husband's death. Manallace, though, delays further. The liaison between Lady Castorley and her lover, Castorley's physician, becomes more obvious. Castorley grows more ill, though not before naming Manallace as the executor of his estate. At the end Castorley dies, while Manallace and the narrator are left at the funeral to stare at the spectacle of Lady Castorley's eyes turning toward her lover. Angus Wilson is yet another of many readers who finds "Dayspring Mishandled" one of Kipling's "best and most onginal stories." But there is one weakness: "our not knowing what enormity Castorley said, for we are not allowed to be judge of ManaUace's justification, which is a centre to the story."5 Wilson supplies a reason, at once historical and biographical: Vidal s paralyzed mother...