Kipling's Short Fiction

ELT 38:4 1995 her as." More characteristic of the essays in this volume is Charles Pettit's lucid and humane study, "The Individual in Tess of the d'Urbervilles ," which, while acknowledging that "the multifaceted perspectives of the novel eventually defy expository summary," at the same time sensitively describes Hardy's use of narrative perspective to reveal some of the complex strategies by which he "forces the reader to make that effort of the imagination to feel both the individuality and the otherness" of his characters. Unfortunately, the editor has chosen to present these papers primarily in the order in which they were delivered rather than to arrange them in some more coherent way; hence the reader is jumped about from a commentary on Hardy's poetry to a piece on Tess and Jude, then to another essay on Hardy's poetry, then back to another study of Tess, then on to essays on various subjects, then back again to Tess—and so forth. For a conference, this arrangement of—given such considerations as speakers' timetables and subject variety—is, of course, appropriate; for presentation in print, however, the same arrangement simply avoids the editorial responsibility of choosing an organization that would enhance the coherence of the volume. Fortunately, a detailed author/title /subject index helps to compensate for this haphazard arrangement. Robert Schweik SUNY at Predonia Kipling's Short Fiction Helen Pike Bauer. Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. xix + 168 pp. $23.95 THERE ARE MANY CONTEXTS in which a student traversing late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature may find Kipling sprawled across the path. Besides being an important witness for one period of the British Empire, he is poet, novelist, travel-writer, author of several children's classics, and an innovative writer of short stories; within this genre, he has been variously seen as proto-modernist, magic realist, experimenter in science fiction, historical, ghost and horror stories. The size of his oeuvre is daunting (35 volumes in the Sussex edition); even more so is the vast suburbia of comment and criticism that has grown up around it. Helen Pike Bauer shows an easy familiarity with this complex terrain and here provides, for the short fiction at least, a useful road-map. The book has three main sections: a critical essay, some quotations from Kipling's metacritical writings, and excerpts from 520 BOOK REVIEWS two critical works, John A. McClure's Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (1981), and Clare Hanson's Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (1985). It also includes a well-chosen and up-to-date bibliography . Bauer has organised her essay thematically, following the example of J.M.S. Tompkins. She stresses what is lasting in Kipling: his artistry, his studies of human loneliness, his use of myth and fable, rather than his political views that now seem so dated. She summarises the current state of Kipling scholarship, including just enough to disagree with to make it interesting. In discussing the Indian tales, Bauer admits that they are sometimes obnoxious, but brings out their value as studies of humanity under stress, or of the clashes and rubs between two widely different cultures living side by side. She makes a useful distinction between stories written in India, describing life as Kipling and his readers were seeing it, and those written after he left. Two of the Ptän Tales from the Hills (1888) bear out Bauer's remarks on the variations in Kipling's authorial stance while he was writing for English-language newspapers in India. The narrator of "His Chance in Life" takes an unforgivable racist tone. But the narrator of "Lispeth" is less intrusive, and here the same kind of racist remark is put into the mouth of the least sympathetic character in the story, whose injustice towards the Indian heroine is central to the plot. Writing about the later collections, Bauer shows how the Indian stories in The Day's Work (1898), written in New England among neighbours who were critical of the British Empire, seek to justify it in terms of bridge-building or inoculation against disease. The section on the...