Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction: Two Separate Sides to His Head – Kipling's Ambivalent India
- 1 Paradise Lost: Kipling's Southsea Years
- 2 Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co.
- 3 Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother India in Kim
- 4 The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling's Adults in India
- 5 The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day's Work
- Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day's Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction: Two Separate Sides to His Head – Kipling's Ambivalent India
- 1 Paradise Lost: Kipling's Southsea Years
- 2 Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co.
- 3 Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother India in Kim
- 4 The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling's Adults in India
- 5 The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day's Work
- Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A stone's throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange:
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.
Not for Voices, Harps or Wings or rapt illumination,
But the grosser Self that springs of use or occupation,
Unto which the Spirit clings as her last salvation.
Heart may fail, and strength outwear, and Purpose turn to Loathing
But the everyday affair of business, meals and clothing,
Builds a bulkhead ‘twixt Despair and the Edge of Nothing’.
Kipling, the artist, perceived with great clarity the physical and mental strains that were part and parcel of the lives of administrators carrying out the quotidian work of the Empire. In his fiction, he went some way toward addressing their difficulties by imaginatively cataloguing their apprehensions, frustrations, illnesses and fatigues. The stories in Plain Tales and the best of the tales in Life's Handicap, written whilst Kipling was in India and newly arrived in London, detail empire builders who are psychologically battered, worn down and wretched. The overall quality of the Life's Handicap collection is uneven; David Sergeant argues that Kipling's success pressured the writer into bulking out the collection with previously uncollected material to ‘release [the London stories] in volume form as soon as possible’. His characters confront an imperial landscape that is bereft of the moral values of the metropolis. In these collections Kipling is frequently damning in his appraisal of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) as an administrative body, and of the effect its oftentimes unnecessary bureaucracy had on the lives of its foot soldiers. Men sent out by the military or the Indian Office in London were reduced to anonymous disposable quotas, summed up by Private Ortheris: ‘I'm a Tommy – a bloomin’, eight-anna, dog-stealin’ Tommy, with a number instead of a decent name’ (PT, p. 215).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rudyard Kipling's FictionMapping Psychic Spaces, pp. 166 - 195Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015