Kipling's Kim

These comments come from my teaching note for a graduate seminar on Kipling's Kim that I taught yesterday. Didn't actually get to say any of this (these kind of summary and ambitious position-taking declarations aren't actually appropriate to a grad seminar), but they push in a direction I want to consider further.

For me ‘interpretation’ and close reading not the focus of professional literary studies in regard to individual texts. Nor taking philosophical or political meanings from them, nor primarily assessing them morally or politically. I'm interested, rather, in describing a text’s project from within the thickness of its historical moment, which includes the terms on which it chooses genre and form, attaches to (the history of) the literary world, and the ways it relates to a writer’s life and career. (After all, the larger interest of literature, looked at backwards, consists largely of that last.) And then, if possible, relating that project to a contemporary problematic: thus for instance, Conrad's Nostromo in relation to finance capitalism as a motor of contemporary globalization.

The vehicle for this kind of criticism is usually the paratactical essay: doesn’t involve a centralized argument necessarily.

And so more particularly to Kim
1. the novel represents a quite specific fantasy of India (a rich, magical, free, cross-cultural everyday life crammed with ‘sentimental journeys’) basically to resist liberal utilitarian modernity on one side; Schopenhaurian ‘pessimism’ on another, missionary imperialism on yet another (it’s a secular and effectively anti-Christian novel) and various forms of native anti-colonialist stuggle on the last. The space that remains for Kipling is the secular and sacrifical ‘white man’s burden’ (really the British burden with racist underpinnings) and a metaphysico-literary engagement with empire, that is to say, empire as a theme and setting for questionings about Being enabling and enabled by experiments and triumphs of literary style and form.
2. At one level, the novel's problematic is the limitations that racism entails for sympathetic imagination. At another level it is the politico-cultural predicament of the Indian settler colonial, understood and invested in from within.
3. The Orient for Kipling is both eternally deceitful and undisciplined (which is why it requires the white man’s burden) but it also provides a strengthening riposte to Western state-formation. One of the novel’s lessons is that to govern India in British terms requires law breaking, going native etc simultaneously to the utmost respect for the law and for whiteness.
4. Empire also a theatre of intelligence to which, in end, the novel belongs alongside the surveying, ethnography, and spying that it describes. It is in these terms that the ethnographer and spymaster, Creighton is closest to ‘us’ and yet almost absent from the narrative.
5. The novel is written in a particular moment in book history, namely the globalizing of the peripheries through thickly descriptive forms of journalism and short fiction mainly designed for periodicals, often to be read in new kinds of times and spaces (especially the rail trip). This involves a masculinising of the fiction reader (decline of the marriage plot). Hart Crane, Brett Hart, Mark Twain, Henry Lawson, Rolf Boldrewood, Blackwoods Magazine. Clearly Kipling is not writing ‘art-literature’ like James Joyce or Henry James, or Flaubert, or Virginia Woolf , and this allows him to amalgamate genres: Bildungsroman, imperial romance, sentimental journey, spiritual quest story, even naturalism (relation between characters and narration is ‘naturalistic’ in so far as no real possibilities for emulation by readers of characters). And certainly not written for the anti and now postcolonial ‘native’ reader, that is doesn’t imply that reader.
6. For all that Kim has a short story’s ‘gimmicky’ closure. What its famous, unresolved (or partly resolved) ending means is that Kim is finally sacrificable. He wont necessarily become an agent; he will never grow into ‘one of us’, he is too marked by his origins.
7. And yet in his capacity to lose identity, to go with the flow, he is a mimesis of a form of modern literary subjectivity. After all, his lived relation to India is the reader’s to the fiction.