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 nation”11 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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