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  • The Day’s Work: Kipling and the Idea of Sacrifice
  • Corinne McCutchan (bio)
The Day’s Work: Kipling and the Idea of Sacrifice, by John Coates; pp. 136. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997, $29.50, £24.50.

From the outset of his excellent book, John Coates proposes a view of Kipling “different from others currently on offer, which sees Kipling’s writing as the search for meaning, value, and significance [. . .] on political, moral, and religious planes, through original and highly sophisticated explorations of history and myth” (27). Coates questions the reduction [End Page 362] of Rudyard Kipling’s writing to “discourse” and “ideology” (18) and looks beyond the definition of history itself as myth and ideology (18) to broader bases of comparison and informing antecedents, such as Thucydides and Edward Gibbon or the Mogul Empire and the Sultanate of Delhi. Coates does not dismiss other readings of Kipling, but does seek to redress what he feels is “a certain lack of range, depth and magnanimity in the historical frame of reference in which Kipling is often judged” (21). Coates’s historical frame centers on the intellectual history of the 1890s and early 1900s, to which Kipling both responded and contributed, particularly “the perennial need to envisage social and moral degeneration in the age in which one lives” (23), augmented by evolutionary determinism and dread of biological retrogression. Coates issues the perennially needed reminder that Kipling’s sense of cracks in the imperial fabric was “overt” and that his “concern with pain, disintegration, with loss of hope or meaning” was “open” (23), a sense and a concern that put him shoulder to shoulder, if not eye to eye, with the Aesthetes. For a neat demonstration of his thesis, Coates delivers a refined and scholarly reading of “The Mark of the Beast” (Life’s Handicap, 1891) which shows that Kipling was long aware of the problems of maintaining and legitimizing rule and order at the same time that he was aware of “the darkness and horror that wait if those problems are not solved” (36).

Coates engages in no whitewash of Kipling’s life and work. He honorably depicts Kipling’s position as “an Edwardian imperialist and right-wing Tory” brought to a “state bordering on chronic fury” (62) by political events that were potent at the time, but are now obscure to most Kipling readers. Principally, Kipling was alarmed into a firm belief in an impending catastrophe that he blamed on the ruling class. The elite were not only failing to do their own work of political leadership, but also hampering science, technology, and any other work that betrayed signs of being efficient. Kipling saw his world as ripe for a reformation in which the privileged class would earn its privileges “by service, self-sacrifice, efficiency, and loyalty extending even to death” (64).

Polity, according to Kipling, can survive only if it conciliates “the weak, defeated, and alien” and affiliates them willingly to its institutions (45). Because Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) matriculate and articulate Kipling’s maturing thinking with his mature art, Coates argues that they comprise the principal turning point in Kipling’s career. That the Puck books represent “new moral and psychological perceptions that [Kipling] wishes to set against what he previously stressed” (60) is compellingly demonstrated throughout Coates’s discussion. In other hands, these topics might have ended in pompous, simplistic, embarrassing moralizing, but Coates shows Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies to be “an outstanding example of literary tact, the skillful handling of a potentially intractable theme” (64), preserving a sense of reality and morality while recognizing the paradoxes and outright dangers of his own ideal.

For example, the two stories about George Washington and Talleyrand take up the need for leadership, but instantly ask “Why?” and “To whom?” and “For what?” The answers are left to one of the vulnerable and marginalized figures so often central in Puck of Pook’s Hill, an Anglo-French Gypsy who ultimately roots his allegiance “in his own aesthetic and moral sense” which sees the elite “greatness” of both statesmen, but prefers the “sad, determined sanity...

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