Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling's Fiction (review)

Never sounding a shrill or polemical note in this important book, Peter Havholm tries to reconcile an ethical with an aesthetic appreciation of Rudyard Kipling's stories. The questions he poses and the issues he (perhaps unintentionally) raises in the process will make this study unavoidable reading for all serious students of Kipling.

Kipling's 1886–88 Indian tales, which take up more than half of the book—later tales, The Light that Failed (1890) and Kim (1901) receive surprisingly cursory treatment—serve mainly to illustrate Kipling's lifelong adherence to a set of "fundamental ethical ideas about humanity" instilled into him in 1883, when he was eighteen (15). The chronological organization is deceivingly straightforward: the theoretical and historical-biographical arguments Havholm sets forth in the introduction and first chapter provide a more dynamic structure. The book's originality lies in the interplay between these two.

Havholm's critical method is based on lessons derived mainly from Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum's defense of "ethical criticism" in two 1998 essays published in Philosophy & Literature. In importing "ethical criticism" into Kipling studies, however, he ends up treating political convictions as ethical ones—a risky enterprise at best, which becomes temerarious when he cites Hannah Arendt but not her memorable portrait of the Anglo-Indian weltanschauung in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Still, the method is both subtle and illuminating. Following Nussbaum's suggestion that certain "emotional responses" are also "ethical judgments," he traces back to "awe" and "wonder" the origin of the "Guilty Pleasures" (the introduction's title) peculiar to Kipling's stories. These same emotions serve as central components of a reader-response model that posits an "attuned" (rather than Booth's "implied") reader.

His use of "wonder" as a critical term is perhaps Havholm's most important contribution to an understanding of Kipling's art. Especially convincing is the way he reconfigures the Indian corpus by dividing it into two "heuristic rather than hermetic" categories, based on the notion that his "presentation of the unusual" led him to create either "serious and comic tales of wonder" striving for a certain climax or surprise, or others aimed at "the pleasures of wonderful adventures" (119). Even more intriguing is his suggestion that the author's "affection for the wondrous and the effects he could achieve with its deployment" can help explain the shift in Kipling's writing once he returned to England in 1889 (115). It was a new, politically motivated kind of "wonder," Havholm argues, that led a writer "who was praised in 1890 for his stark realism" to write "nearly half his stories between 1892 and 1935 for children" (115). What British readers found appealing in his Indian writings was the peculiar effect of reality evoked by "stories in which the extraordinary is commonplace" (119). Once the Anglo-Indian writer started addressing the entire English-speaking world, however, he soon realized how unimpressed his readers were by the glories of empire, and this was why he chose to elaborate instead "the wondrous paradox he found at the heart of imperial politics": that awe-inspiring "benign tyranny" that became the subject of his imperial anthems and much of his later Indian fiction (118). An "understanding of humanity, taken from his parents" allowed Kipling to "imagine fictional actions so powerfully humane" that, Havholm states, "I cannot help but give them the awe they invite" (15). It is this suspension of (historico-political) disbelief that makes the critic "determined . . . to imagine a sympathetic understanding of imperialism in the nineteenth century" (15).

Havholm's case for including British imperialists among those deserving of "sympathetic understanding" is based on a biographical rather than historical contextualization of Kipling's most controversial imperialistic and racist ideas, whose origins he traces back to slogans used during the ferocious 1883 media campaign orchestrated in Bengal against the Ilbert Bill, legislation introduced by a liberal viceroy that would have allowed Indian judges to try white people. Havholm finds that these slogans...