Kipling & Sacrifice

ELT 42 : 2 1999 To these virtues should be added a note on one more: Daleski's wideranging engagement with the comments of previous critics and the tact with which he so often either draws upon and develops their insights or, by reference to Hardy's texts, persuasively reveals the weaknesses in their views. In spite of some very real flaws, then, Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love makes a solid contribution to the criticism of Hardy's fiction. Robert Schweik ______________ SUNY at Fredonia Kipling & Sacrifice John Coates. The Day's Work: Kipling and the Idea of Sacrifice. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. 136 pp. $29.50 THIS BOOK collects seven articles, all of which have been previously published: one in ELT (29:1,1986); one in the Modern Language Review (85: 3, 1990); and the rest in the Kipling Journal. The detailed readings of various texts are never less than interesting, informed as they are by depth of scholarship. As with Kipling's short story collections , assembling these pieces between hard covers reveals that they are linked together by continuous, if sometimes meandering, trains of thought. The introduction serves rather the same purpose as Kipling's poems, setting the tone, filling in background, and establishing connections . It looks at some recent Kipling criticism and describes the linking ideas in the ensuing chapters, arguing that Kipling has "a highly sophisticated awareness of the problems of maintaining, and of giving some kind of legitimacy to rule and order and of the darkness and horror that wait if those problems are not solved." As overall title, The Day's Work is confusing, since it is also the name of a Kipling collection, but no stories from that volume are considered here. The subtitle better conveys the critical idea at the book's core. Coates is concerned with a recurrent theme in Kipling's fiction, the transmission of culture and civilization through the ages, in spite of changes in regimes or climates of thought. A typical Kipling hero is one who sacrifices his own comfort or credit to preserve the values he believes in for posterity. Coates suggests that one reason for Kipling's appeal to his large and faithful readership was that, in an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle nerves and melancholy, the answer he offers to chaos and pain is "the idea of sacrifice," an idea rooted in the "specific historical climate " of the time. 202 BOOK REVIEWS Coates suggests that the chief weakness of much recent Kipling criticism lies in a simplistic view of history that accepts certain tenets without question: imperialism is seen as masculinist and paternalist, a pretence of benevolence as cover for exploitation. Elements OfKiPIiUg1S writing that contradict this view are seen as signs of his own unacknowledged anxieties. Coates feels that these readings, while not without value, are being too rigidly applied and so become "one-sided" and "disabling ." He illustrates this argument in the introduction, by taking an early horror story, "The Mark of the Beast" (Life's Handicap, 1891). The tale is examined here in the context of Hindu myth as well as contexts of imperialism and gender. Coates points out that Fleete, the drunken Englishman who grinds out his cigar on a Hindu god's statue, is not typical of the imperial rulers, but "a very specific social type within British India," an ignorant new arrival who has inherited some property; as such, he is not fully accepted by "old India hands." The story of Hanuman the monkey-god, whose statue it is, "embodies a spiritual progress and an ascent from a lower to a higher form of life." When Fleete defiles Hanuman 's image, he is "denying the spiritual content of Hinduism— Appropriately , his punishment is a reversal of the spiritual progress Hanuman represents," since Fleete is reduced to the status of an animal. The narrator would have put Fleete on trial; it is the Indian priests who cover up the incident. Coates also finds the hints of homosexuality in the story sufficiently obvious to be "explicit" by the standards of the time. Readings of the story that ignore these factors, Coates suggests, are limited and unhelpful. The texts...