Monsieur Voiron in Kipling's "The Bull That Thought": What the Critics Missed

During a motoring tour of southern France in early March of 1914, Rudyard Kipling met and had lunch with a wealthy French winemaker named Viollet. More than likely that meeting figured in the writing of his story "The Bull That Thought," for a person at least superficially like Monsieur Viollet—a rich wine merchant—appears in the work as the central character, André Voiron. Kipling composed the story in May of 1924, soon after another automobile tour of France that included the town of Voiron and published it in magazine form in December of that year. It was the product of an unusual burst of creative energy that in a relatively short period resulted in other such complex and profound stories as "A Madonna of the Trenches," "The Wish House," and "The Eye of Allah."¹ Commenting on this highly productive period of writing and on the stories that emerged from it, he wrote Brander Matthews, an American professor and literary critic, that all of these works (which would include "The Bull That Thought") "came by themselves," his way of saying that they were inspired, that his "Daemon" was in charge.²

Despite Kipling's own intriguing appraisal of "The Bull That Thought," for the first forty years after its initial publication, critics were mostly silent on the story as if they judged it as a fairly simple tale of but secondary importance. It was C. A. Bodelsen who found "esoteric meaning" in it, and his extended analysis, published in 1964, greatly changed the general attitude toward the story.³ It became known as one of Kipling's most important sources of insight into the author's thoughts on the subjects of writing (or "art") and the writer ("the artist"), and it was deemed indispensable to an understanding of how Kipling viewed his later stories and the public's response to them. "The Bull That Thought," Bodelsen argued, is "perhaps Kipling's most remarkable disquisition on the theme of the Artist."⁴ His opinion was that the story is "an allegory on art and the artist."⁵ In this allegory, the bullfight stands for "the way in which the artist reduces the chaos of reality to an ordered pattern in his work of art."⁶ The bullfight also stands for the First World War, which "inspired Kipling … to do his best work."⁷ The mediocre bullfighter turned hero, Chisto, is "the genuine artist."⁸ The bull Apis represents, among other things, "the principle of art" as well as "the artist."⁹

Just how "The Bull That Thought" could be both a "disquisition" and an "allegory" Bodelsen never makes entirely clear, but at any rate he finds the work highly autobiographical. He states that Kipling poured himself into the second-rate bullfighter Chisto: "Kipling identifies himself with the middle-aged bullfighter who is overshadowed by a younger and more popular rival."¹⁰ In other words, "Kipling is here trying to tell us, in his usual cryptic language," continues Bodelsen, "something about his own situation, his pride in the stories of his late period, and his reaction to their unfavourable reception."¹¹

With the publication of Bodelsen's study, a hitherto neglected story about which critics had simply felt there was not much to say suddenly became Kipling's definitive statement about art, the artist, and himself. In his much briefer commentary on the story, which was published just three years after the appearance of Bodelsen's study, Bonamy Dobrée followed closely Bodelsen's interpretation except that he substituted the term "fable" for Bodelsen's "allegory." He writes that "The Bull That Thought" is "Kipling's great triumph in the genre of concealed fable, about art, the artist, and the public."¹² The bullfighting story thus was not only being taken seriously; it was being repositioned in the Kipling canon to a place of eminence.

Greatly influential in this undertaking was Elliot L. Gilbert, whose book followed Bodelsen's by six years and Dobrée's by three. His argument is fundamentally the same as Bodelsen's though he seems to have...