Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Kipling’s Ex-patriotism and the Nostalgia of Likeness



Kipling’s Ex-patriotism and the Nostalgia of Likeness


I.

     To write about Rudyard Kipling is a temptation or an invitation to rehearse the stock postcolonial critiques that have piled up around his name. Without denying his status as the “Bard of the Empire” at the height of British imperialism (especially of India in the late 19th up to the early decades of the 20th), some recent reviews of Kipling’s full literary output have shed light on a side of his work that is framed as carrying a simultaneous critical regard of the imperial project. As Rashna B. Singh puts it: 1

But what all the debate and dissension most clearly indicate is that Kipling’s writings are bipolar in nature, veering between an exaltation of empire that was often extreme, mawkish and certainly jingoistic, and a recognition that the essence of empire is constituted in power, and power can be dangerous and destructive not only for those on whom it is exercised but also for those who wield it.

     Given the continued interest in Kipling in postcolonial studies as the site of these contradictory concerns, starting with Homi Bhabha’s “reading [of] Kipling’s texts as sites of colonial ambivalence and hybridity” to seeing colonial space as “containing moments of crisis, and as a place wherein can be found examples of the white man’s panic as well as of subaltern agency undermining colonial authority,” it would only take another step to pose the Kiplingian oeuvre as an overall “allegory of the postcolonial condition,” provoking “imperial” and “post-imperial” nostalgia for some, a revival for others after 9/11, and a state of debate for the rest within various postcolonial study communities assessing the ambivalent place and role of Kipling in the canons of literary histories.2 This is not surprising since, even at the height of British expansion in India and elsewhere, the imperial mission had internal English dissenters, however marginalized their voices may have been.3

     If we treat Kipling as an “author” after the demise of this romantic hermeneutic faculty, then Kipling’s hybrid discourse would also not surprise us, being the textual intersection of the dominant and marginal discourses of the English 19th century, whose period examination today is making us see the greater extent of the interplays of British Romantic literary traditions with Imperialistic rhetorical effusions. For example, Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture (1996) note that “the mainstays of English Romantic tradition as the imagination, the sublime, the self-possessed individual, the notion of Englishness itself, are linked to the material and ideological operation of a burgeoning empire” where we can see the “beginnings of the cultural codes that will frame British hegemony through the nineteenth century even as we recognize the ways in which that hegemony is tested, resisted, and revised in its early, Romantic formulations.”4

     These readings of mixed currents in Kipling’s work would at least alert us to the different modalities of his literary output. For example, in an early short story published in 1887, "On the Strength of a Likeness," the imperial codes are not explicitly drawn large, since the focus was primarily Hannasyde’s sentimentalist preoccupation with his unrequited love for Alice Chisane. The few instances that we catch any glimpse of the Indian populace of Simla are when Hannasyde spots Mrs. Landys-Haggert for the first time riding a rickshaw and when, at the end of the story, he takes out his love-crushed mood by abusing the coolies who were carrying the departing Mrs. Landys-Haggert’s luggage in the train station.

     It is a common fashion to connect Hannasyde’s predicament to Kipling’s own unrequited love for Florence Garrard whom he met during his stay in Southsea in Portsmouth, and upon which his not-so-celebrated first novel The Light That Failed was supposedly composed.5 After his return to India, the distance from Portsmouth and from Ms. Garrard could have occasioned the more self-critical regard that the diagnostical or clinical portrayal of Hannasyde’s “monomania” and “madness” represented. This counter-sentimentalist, if not antisentimentalist, portrait of Hannasyde could be argued from the very start as a kind of Kipling’s self-analysis of his own passion and as part of the generally acknowledged antisentimentalist strand in post-Austen narratology in the 19th century about which Kipling must have had some level of acquaintance as a reader and admirer of Austen himself.6 

     The play of likenesses that Kipling installs between him and Hannasyde on one end and between Florence Garrard, Alice Chisane, and Mrs. Landys-Haggert on the other cannot but instigate a self-mocking posture that he reinforces all throughout the story in lexical and stylistic fashion. Even without going through an intensive linguistic analysis of the ironic stylistics of the text, we can already detect the comic and derisory presentation of Hannasyde’s sentimentalist quandary in the contrastingly absurd truism of “requited” and “unrequited attachments” being able to produce any possibility of a feeling of self-importance or “businesslike” composure in a man’s life. There is a quixotic touch on his amorous flight of fancy, culminating in the central collision in the text of the forced identification between distant model (Alice Chisane) and proximate object (Mrs. Landys-Haggert). The enumeration via bullet points of comparison between the two ladies is the pinnacle of the parodic deployment of rhetorical parallelisms to both hide and highlight the emotional incoherence of the imagined likenesses. The tricolonial “He wanted to be deceived, he meant to be deceived, and he deceived himself very thoroughly,” apart from echoing the “Rule of 3’s” (and reminding us of examples like Julius Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici or “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” but with a full reversal in value here), amusingly encapsulates the excessive self-absorption of Hannasyde’s “god-sent” sentimentalism through the contrast between the highly structured form of its vehicle and the abandonment of reason that its content describes.


II.

     Going beyond the antisentimentalist aspects of Hannasyde’s portraiture, I would like to shift the discussion to the question of the function of the relocation of such a “comedy of sentiments” from its 19th century British habitat onto the holiday and summer capital of British India called Simla (or Shimla). Located in the south-western ranges of the Himalayas in northern India and at an elevation of 2,276 meters, the town quickly became the vacation destination of British officers because of its subtropical highland climate with an average summer temperature of 19 and 28 °C and −1 and 10 °C during the winter season. This made the town an ideal place for many British expatriates and the Indian upper classes to escape the Indian plains during the summer.

It was to escape both such minor annoyances and the heat of the Indian summer that people came to Anglo-India's pleasure resort and summer capital, Simla. It was at Simla that the Viceroy conducted his government during the summer months when the climate in Calcutta was regarded as unbearable, and it was to Simla that Anglo-Indians who could afford it sent their wives and daughters from the heat of the Indian plains and where, inevitably, army officers on leave made their way in search of entertainment. It was situated in the Himalayan foothills, steep terrain to which the scented deodar forests, magnificent views, and the use of high-wheeled tongas, horses or litters as transport gave it a special, almost Alpine charm. There were other, similar hill-stations, like Mussoorie; but anyone who wanted to be anyone tried to get to Simla and its social whirl. It was in Simla that various rumours of scandal went the rounds, concerning the flirtations and suspected adulteries of wives who had left their husbands behind at their work, like the Jack Barrett of Kipling's grim ditty. What went on in Simla was probably exaggerated by gossip, but at the same time Simla society offered a rare opportunity to frustrated individuals that was bound to be taken by some: for those with the means it was the safety-valve of an overly impersonal and duty-bound life.7

     The reputation of Simla both as a social center and as a place whirling with "frivolity, gossip and intrigue" (Kipling) made it one of the best candidates as a setting for a sentimental plot, for the town’s picturesque and picaresque image gave it an air of literary plausibility especially among those in the know. "On the Strength of a Likeness," however, was an exercise in authorial circumspection, and cast our poor Hannasyde in the role of a (lowly) Knight serving and adoring an unattainable Lady. But like in the tradition of l’amour courtois, the devoted Hannasyde’s object of affection is elsewhere, and he makes love “through” the lady (using Kipling’s word play) and not “to” the lady. If during the medieval ages we understood why the culture of love had to express itself in the language of soaring idealism, faithful devotion, and dedicated deeds to re-establish it as a worthy ethos among more centrally valorized cultural norms and forms, the unrequited devotion of a Hannasyde cannot however be redeemed by any ennobling virtue and instead is presented as nothing but the excessive application of the amorous imagination. It would be easy to suggest that the reigning Orientalist ideas of the day of an India as the romanticized land of Dream, Imagination, and Mysticism had a role in motivating Kipling to relocate the motif of the folly of sentiment in Simla. Craft-wise, this would be a fitting unification of theme and context, one element poetically reinforcing the other, and confirming, by another stretch of imagination no doubt, the orientalist charge against Kipling.

     By yet another stretch of imagination, however, we can also look at the way the Anglicization of Simla (in geographic and literary terms) functions as a general hybridization of English literary history itself, a double facialization that we could say British Romanticism, by way of the themes of the exotic and the faraway, either began or amplified, and this interestingly during the very fervent period of English nationalistic self-construction. In other words—if only to anticipate the thrust of my own arguments here, the colonization of India in politico-geographical and literary terms not only transformed whatever India was but also created a feedback loop by which English history and culture itself made it impossible to remain unscathed and unmarked by the other it wanted to circumscribe, contain, or quarantine.

     In a border-breaking essay entitled “Ex-patriotism,” Ben Grant and Kaori Nagai elucidate the ambiguity in the status of Anglo-Indians like Kipling himself who was born in Bombay, and the resulting displacement of the concept of the patria as an idealized Home that this in return produces. Tracing the older meaning of the term “expatriate” to someone exiled and banned from ever returning to the patria or homeland, a meaning that we no longer retain today, and yet a meaning that still haunts it in relation to the “national” status of Anglo-Indian figures like Kipling, Ben Grant and Kaori Nagai underline the reconstructive labor of imagination involved in the retention of a sense of cultural or even “personal” identity among dislocated individuals. Calling the condition of trans-nationals like Kipling as “ex-patriotism,” they argue that it is a form of “love, which recognises the necessary absence of the patria, the impossibility of returning there once and for all, and which, in order to postpone its death, mimes its departure and return. For Kipling, this is the foundation of colonialism, as an act of love for England, and the colony is the site where this miming is staged.”8 Furthermore,

It is this which distinguishes exiles from expatriates, whose residence abroad is ‘voluntary’. In Kipling’s characterization of the Anglo-Indians as ‘India’s exiles’, this distinction is not so clear. These ‘exiles’ are not only free to return to England, but bound to do so. However, at the same time, their ties to India prevent them from becoming, once more, part of the patria, from which they are held apart, even as they are tethered to it. Therefore, while they are defined in terms of their relationship to England, they do not identify with it. Rather, Home comes into being for them as something both familiar and foreign, an absent presence which they can only love from afar…. So it is only by expatriating themselves that these Anglo-Indian ex-patriots can truly love England, however painful that love might be. India is the ground on which this England comes into being, and this imperial patriotism, this ex-patriotism, cannot easily be reconciled with national identification (‘I’m not an Englishman, you know; I’m a colonial!’). These are, however, two sides of the same coin, neither possible without the other.9

     The Kiplingian colonial Odyssey is therefore framed as a nostos to and from a reconstructed Home outside of the patria, the terrain or ground of a personal or collective memory, re-imagined on foreign soil to compensate for the threat of the loss of self identity. As “colonials” or trans-nationals, however, Kipling and Anglo-Indians are neither here nor there, do not fully identify with the imperial center from which they are “held apart” and yet “tethered,” but at the same time recognize their own displaced expatriated status, a fact that they try to remedy by importing (or miming) familiar British cultural forms (hence “[the] garden-parties, and tennis-parties, and picnics, and luncheons at Annandale, and rifle-matches, and dinners and balls” etc.). Thus, by retaining an image on foreign soil of “England as the absent centre which founds the imperial domain, and love of which unites the Empire, it is, paradoxically, kept alive, and present. England itself, therefore, however unhomely it might be, uncannily signifies Home, and is therefore indispensable.” 10

     Despite it being merely the “theatrical façade” of the patria, the importation of cultural forms is “fundamental to colonialism and to the identity of the colonising nation11 in that it instigates the necessary relocalisation of cultural memory and identity via a reconstructive performance of English “likeness,” a relocalisation that does not truly recuperate identity but instead effectuates a delocalization into the realm of the imaginary and the ideal; that is, in the re-memorization of the model and the misrecognition of the patria existing outside of itself. The emotional intensity of patriotism, as we know, is nowhere near more fervent than when we find ourselves lost among strangers in another country. As a form of passion recoded by a romantic notion of natural origins, ex-patriotism “replicate[s] and multipl[ies] homes outside, periodically returning to recreate the national space,” a movement that deploys the problematic relationship between a distant home held as an inviolable space of national origin and the multiple reincarnations of such an original identity in the delocalized space of the image of home. In the same way that the importation of the romantic excesses of a Hannasyde (even if it is framed within an antisentimentalist narrative) required the examination of the Desire of the Same and the Familiar as a self-deceiving misrecognition of the Different through the maintenance of the impossible image of the absent or distant model, the ex-patriot’s “monomania” to generate likenesses in exile as a form of homecoming also “ended by doing much more.”

     That is, the importation of English romantic artifacts— which is not a simple transportation of a luggage of styles, imaginary affects, and sensibilities— also altered the landscape on which British identity plays itself out, becoming a space fraught with a self-conscious questioning of the sentimentality of patriotism itself and its capacity to regenerate anywhere as a perfect likeness without any threat of anomaly. Among ex-patriots, however, it shows itself now as a nostalgia for a model whose objective correlative always falls over or below fidelity, and shows us the suspension held between the proximate object and the distant model whose unified identification can only be a form of madness and self-deception. In the disjuncture between the absent model that Desire recycles as reproducible presence, and the proximate object which reveals itself recalcitrant to such domestication, we witness the ex-patriot’s “nostalgia for an entity that could never, by its very nature, become a particularized presence.”12

     From here we have an opening where the primacy of the Romantic image, founded on the dominance of origins and identity—and upon which depended the strength of a nostalgia for a likeness, begins to flounder.



Notes

1. Rashna B. Singh, “Kipling’s Other Burden: Counter-Narrating Empire,” in Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism, eds. Caroline Rooney & Kaori Nagai (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 102.

2. See Caroline Rooney & Kaori Nagai, “Introduction,” op. cit., pp. 1-15.

3. See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press: 2006). Just to cite the opening pages where she presents the intention of the book:

Over the last few decades  postcolonial scholarship has tended to designate anti-imperialism “proper” as an action performed solely by the putative non-West upon the putative West, through gestures of either oppositionality (culturalism, nativism, fundamentalism) or infiltration (hybridity, mimicry, reactive interpellation, “the journey in”). Supplying us with complex theoretical means through which to diagnose the oppositional energies of nonwestern anti-imperialism, especially when expressed in the form of anticolonial nationalism, postcolonialism has however remained tentative in its appreciation of individuals and groups that have renounced the privileges of imperialism and elected affinity with victims of their own expansionist cultures. It is to such western “nonplayers” in the drama of imperialism that this book devotes its attention, thus seeking to shed greater light on some “minor” forms of anti-imperialism that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century.

The exhumation of these “internal” and subjugated forms of anti-imperialism, I submit, productively complicates our perspective on colonial encounter.

4. In Alan Richardson & Sonia Hofkosh, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 8-9.

5. The biographical details of Kipling’s unresolved love for Florence Garrard and its relationship with The Light That Failed are well known. An article intimating the possibility of Garrard’s lesbianism can be read here: Jad Adams, “The girl he left behind,” in The Guardian, 28 January 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jan/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview33.

6. The question of the antisentimentalist reading of Jane Austen is part of the huge scholarship in Austen studies. I will confine myself to remarks such as the one we can read from Miranda Burgess:

Her novels are now routinely included in discussions of emotion in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, while readers who view them as antisentimental works are apt to see them as “a specific form within the genre of sentiment and sensibility” rather than as outside agents of generic and moral reform. Though Austen’s novels do not belong to the mainstream of novels of sensibility, they participate in the same conversation.

In “Sentiment and Sensibility: Austen, Feeling, and Print Culture,” A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009), p. 226.

Or another from Isobel Grondy:

For failure of original thought, for re-hashing of stereotypes (by writers of either sex), she has no mercy. In fiction she reprobates 'thorough novel slang', 'the common Novel style': diction like 'vortex of Dissipation', characters like the handsome, amiable young man who loves desperately and in vain.

In “Jane Austen and Literary Traditions,The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Edward Copeland & Juliet McMaster (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp 200-01.

7. In Mark Paffard, Kipling's Indian Fiction (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 25-26.

The popularity of the ideal climate of Simla made the Viceroy of India, John Lawrence, to move the summer capital of the British Raj to Shimla in 1863.

8. Ben Grant & Kaori Nagai, “Ex-patriotism,” in Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism, eds. Caroline Rooney & Kaori Nagai (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 195. Italics mine.

9. Ibid., p. 192.

10. Ibid., p. 197.

11. Ibid., 190.

12. From Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1983). The Romantic desire for identity such as the one we see in Hannasyde is the same tension that de Man expounds on concerning the idea of the poetic image in romanticism: “At times, romantic thought and romantic poetry seem to come so close to giving in completely to the nostalgia for the object that it becomes difficult to distinguish between object and image, between imagination and perception, between an expressive or constitutive and a mimetic or literal language.” What is missing, of course, in this dialectic, is the function of an implicit, unannounced, third term.

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