Kipling's Animal Worlds: Muteness, Speech, and Survival

Rudyard kipling has previously been recognized for dramatizing the psychology of animals by satirizing, yet drawing upon, Lamarckian theory and building on the morphological work of Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).¹ As early as 1898, a review of the Jungle Books hailed Kipling as a "Comparative Psychologist" who juxtaposed the brains of man and animal: "Mr. Kipling, indeed, has expounded relationships in the psychology of the animal world as far-reaching as those which Darwin discovered in its morphology" ("R. Kipling: Comparative Psychologist"; see also Barber). The reviewer further claimed that Kipling's animal tales radically differed from the Grimms' fairy tales or Greek myths.² Indeed, his approach also differed from the ethological-sociological emphasis adopted by his father, mentor, and collaborator John Lockwood Kipling in Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People (1891).³ Yet, whereas numerous scholars have discussed Kipling's representations of animals and humans, few have explored his lifelong fascination with animal language and none have discussed his complex depiction of muteness.⁴

Moreover, the majority of critics who treat Kipling have concentrated on the Mowgli stories, in which a human child learns a lingua franca spoken by wolves, panthers, tigers, bears, and monkeys.⁵ While some critics still read Kipling's works through racist, imperialist, and sexist ideologies, the most acute readers of Kipling, such as Daniel Karlin and J.M.S. Tomkins, complicate reductions. More recently, Sue Walsh has noted about the Mowgli stories: "These animal tales call into question the borders between child and adult, human and animal, 'native' and 'white,' troubling any notions of essentiality" (63).⁶ However, as this essay argues, not only does Kipling dismantle while retaining binaries, but he also respects silent forms of communication that connect the unspeaking parts of all animals.

Although a silencing of speech is defined in terms of language, as Jacques Derrida holds (32–33), and thus keeps in place the binaries of human/animal, Kipling's frequent reliance on muteness carries a variety of meanings and values. He depicts the silencing of non-human animal sounds by instinct; silent animal gestures and movements, as well as a chosen human quietude; the muting of sounds by sleep or by maternal caresses; and the silence that follows individual deaths, mass killings, and extinctions. Kipling also considers, well in advance of animal studies, not just the psychology and abilities of animals but also the kinds of finiteness and the spaces beyond reason we share. For it is through silences that Kipling locates us in the animal and the animal in us.⁷

This essay will closely analyze the sophisticated handling of differing language/muteness relations between animals and humans in three of Kipling's non-Mowgli stories: "The White Seal" and "Toomai of the Elephants," from the 1894 Jungle Book; and "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," from the 1895 The Second Jungle Book. Each of the narratives dissolves human/non-human binaries in part by relying on subtle analogies with realms of seemingly miraculous human self-dissolution. In particular, Kipling features the blending of identities between a caressing mother and child and the reaching beyond self between a trusting human and beast.⁸

Kipling continues to explore how and why creatures communicate or remain silent in his brilliant illustrated collection Just So Stories for Little Children (1902). While almost any tale in the collection adds important insights, "The Cat That Walked by Himself" is particularly relevant. Still later in his career, Kipling continues investigating language and silence. He creates in Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots (1930) an animal mind, akin to a toddler's, trying to process human speech, and highlights an Aberdeen terrier's attempt to create its own meanings and memorials.

In the cultural and scientific debates of the nineteenth century, as well as in Western traditions of philosophy, language was often used to support the superiority of humans to non-human animals (see Esmail 105–06 on Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen; Ryan 5...