The Imperial Posture and the Shrine of Darkness: Kipling's The Naulahka and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

THE IMPERIAL POSTURE AND THE SHRINE OF DARKNESS: KIPLING'S THE NAULAHKA AND E. M. FORSTER'S A PASSAGE TO INDIA By Stanley Cooperman (University of Oregon) A comparative study of two works such as E. M. Forster's A PASSAGE TO INDIA (1924) and Rudyard Kipling's THE NAULAHKA1 would seem to be a sort of aesthetic blasphemy. Kipling's obscure novel, however, uses almost precisely the same crisis in plot mechanism as the ramous Marabar Caves episode in Forster's more recent and (deservedly) more widely read work. For Kipling, the "Cow's Mouth" provides a major point of negation no less explicitly than do Forster's Caves; the preoccupation of both writers with the resolution of negation, in philosophical and structural terms, is itself the definition of an age. Here are two books which focus upon identical crises — those of total negation; yet THE NAULAHKA could not have been written in 1924, when Forster published A PASSAGE TO INDIA, nor could Forster's novel have appeared in I89I, when the Empress of India occupied the throne of England, and Kipling had already embarked upon his career as laureate of the White Man's Burden. The values of Kipling, in so many v.-ays like those of the Anglo-Indians in Forster's novel, appear simple, self-righteous and confident. Another world speaks to us from the pages of THE NAULAHKA and the arrogance of Forster's Anglo-India: a world where heroes are doers rather than analysts, where time is the raw material of progress and the imperatives of religion have not yet degenerated into a cosmic shrug. Such affirmation may be alien to many modern readers, but the assumption is too easily made that the affirmation itself was the result of crippled perception , or that it came easily to the men who held it. The difference between Forster's beautiful penetration into complexity, futility and nothingness, and Kipling's defiance of all three, is a difference in values and will rather than intelligence. Action is not always made absurd by awareness, and Kipling's hero — man of action though he is — confronts the very same ultimate jiada in the shrine of the "Cow's Mouth" as Forster's Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested do in the Marabar Caves; in both books there is the sudden intrusion of timelessness, the horror of absolute vacuum in which human ambition, love, hate, even religion vanish as undifferentiated particles down an eternal drain. As a result of this confrontation Mrs. Moore cuts herself off completely from all humanity, mocks her own "talkative Christianity," and refuses to testify at the trial of an innocent man. Indeed, she makes the same total disengagement that so perplexes Forster's libérai, Fielding, when Dr. Godbole (a Brahmin) refuses to commit himself to the cause of clearing Aziz' name on the incomprehensIWe ground that no cause is worth the effort. Mrs. Moore, in short, is swallowed by the Caves; "nothing was in the cave" develops as the theme — and terrible pun ■» of Forster's novel, which in every description and every chapter builds upon negation, the concept of the world as a series of concentric circles vanishing Into a non-human horizon. One might say that before her death Mrs. Moore actually becomes a Brahmin, worshipping fhe "nothing" Forster uses with such delicate ambiguity throughout his novel. Tarvin, however, as Klp'ing's hero, reacts quite 10 differently to his experience before the shrine of darkness. It is this difference in attitude toward perception, rather than his ability to perceive, which sets Tarvin off from Forster's characters, and indeed explains much of the determinedly arrogant posture of Imperial rule. The visit to the Marabar Caves ·■■- the confrontation of ultimata negation — comes at the precise center of Forster's book, just as Tarvin's visit to the "Cow's Mouth" comes at the center of Kipling's. In a sense, both novels build to this confrontation; in subsequent action, furthermore, they clarify the values which are held, or which can be held as a response. Despite the fact ihat they are both "Stories of West and East" and so may be labelled perhaps too...