For those interested in what in the classicist and literary critic Mark Payne calls “the transactional nature of the encounter” between humans and non-humans, four of Rudyard Kipling’s earlier short stories offer insights into artistic aspects of this encounter in terms distinct from the humanist approach typical of most European literature up to his time. Unrelated to Kipling’s later and much better known Just So Stories, his “Moti Guj-Mutineer” (1891), “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” (1893), “The Undertakers” (1894), and “The Maltese Cat” (1895) reveal his efforts to cross the boundaries between the human and non-human experience in ways that can seem astonishingly contemporary to readers willing to set aside for a time strict notions of what we now call “genre” versus “literary” writing.
This thesis may seem odd to those who know Kipling only by his complicated reputation as a never-out-of-print writer of children’s stories, strident advocate for Empire, and, in 1908, the first English language recipient, and still the youngest, of the Nobel Prize for literature. The dates are important. Had the Nobel committee waited a few years, the vitriol1 of Kipling’s output against Germany and his loss of control over some of the finest aspects of what he called his “Daemon” might have put them off. As it was, by 1908, Kipling had already published his cross-cultural masterpiece, Kim, (1902) and been a world literary phenomenon for twenty years. His first three short story collections, released in 1888, when he was twenty-three, totaled 104 stories. Some are puerile, but many more are startling for the power and modernism of their craft and the acuity and acerbity of their observation of India under the British. In an essay sparked by T. S. Eliot’s 1943 publication and controversial defense of a selection of Kipling’s poetry, George Orwell wrote of Kipling: “During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time, nine-tenths of those people are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there…. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that and then try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.” 2 Orwell is not a Kipling apologist. He goes on, writing of Kipling’s view of Imperial India: “…it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have….It is a crude, vulgar picture in which a patriotic music hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola’s gorier passages…” Orwell does note the pervasive problem of reading Kipling out of context: “Quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning.” 3 The effect of this is to miss at least the irony and often the exactly opposite social point Kipling was trying to make—classic examples being racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. However, for one interested in examining Kipling’s animal stories, Orwell’s key point comes as he explores Kipling’s ability to portray the diversity of life that he did: “…one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half-civilized.”
Some of Orwell’s view of Kipling as “half-civilized” may derive from Orwell’s never really having doubted his own place in his own culture, however much he challenged that culture. In contrast, Kipling’s poetry and fiction, coupled with what is known of his life, suggest that, for all of his bombast about the sacred Anglo-Saxon mission, he was never quite comfortable among his fellow Britons and never fully believed that he was one of them. Born in Mumbai/Bombay in 1865, he was the first child and only son of artistically gifted and intellectually active English middle-class parents in a colonial society that rather despised all of those qualities. As appalling as the practice seems to modern sensibilities, the Kiplings chose, in keeping with contemporary practice, to send their two children, Rudyard, then 6, and his 3-year-old sister back to England for early schooling. In addition to notions about the potential evils of growing up among native servants (Kipling’s first language was “the vernacular,” presumably a mix of Urdu and Hindi), infant and child mortality in India, even among the relatively well-to-do, was appalling; sending children “home” was also viewed as a health/safety measure.
Even by the standards of the time, however, this separation of the Kipling children from their parents is generally agreed by biographers to have been handled badly. Kipling acknowledges, both in Something of Myself and the story “Baa Baa Black Sheep” that he was a difficult child and that his separation from his parents and India was for him cataclysmic. His sister, as an adult, confirmed that their six years, 1871-1877, in Southsea with a family who boarded such children, was for Rudyard a time of significant emotional abuse (and, by modern standards, physical abuse as well), while she was relatively petted and sheltered. Kipling summarized this period in his life in terms that are chillingly familiar to anyone who has experienced the like:
“…often afterwards, [my] beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.”
Also, badly treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of the prison-house before they are clear of it.4
What brought this period to a halt, finally, was the recognition by the “beloved aunt” and others with whom the children visited occasionally that during this period Rudyard had become significantly nearsighted. (He wore thick spectacles for the rest of his life.)
This period in Kipling’s life appears to have fostered in him a permanent sense of alienation and loss and set him up for the extraordinary gift that he developed as a young man for seeking shelter in lives and experiences very different from his own. Many children experience a cataclysmic loss of faith in adults and do not go on to be great writers, but it is curious how common that history is in the great fantasy writers of the 20th century. J. R. R. Tolkien and Phillip Pullman lost their fathers and C. S. Lewis, his mother, at roughly the same age as Kipling. All then went through difficult periods as the remaining parents coped (or did not cope). Certainly Tolkien and Lewis, like Kipling, were lifelong strangers from the comfortable expectations of their peers, remaining “half-civilized.” (Conversely, arguably the greatest of them, Terry Pratchett, claimed to have had quite an ordinary childhood.)
A modern marketplace commonality for all of them, Tolkien, Lewis, Pullman, Pratchett, and Kipling, is that their work is categorized as “genre,” rather than “literary,” and often not only as “fantasy” but also as “young adult.” This tends to remove their work from serious critical consideration. For Kipling and Lewis, at least, this bland, modern re-invention has the effect of side-stepping the reasonable critical questions about the nature of their thought and work that were raised at a time when they were both taken seriously. 5 Such labels also come at the cost of missing something important about the psychological underpinnings and potential range of some individuals’ creativity, particularly that of fiction writers. Even among those who are now loosely called post-humanist critics, recognizing the special gift of the adolescent or “young adult” sensibility to explore the spaces between worlds—be that among cultures or life forms—is absent. Twentieth-century thought—“modernist” and “post-modernist”—came to focus so overwhelmingly on “coming of age” as sexual development that we have lost sight of much of the additional importance of adolescence in establishing the bases of functional adulthood.
Along with this increasingly limited definition of coming of age has been the relegation of “fantasy” to the role of individual psychological manifestation—positive or negative depending on the analyst and the situation. But adolescence is also the contiguous window between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, and that capacity to reach between worlds is a key element in young adult literary fantasy, a capacity that closes down and scars over for most of us as we become—with greater or lesser success—fully developed adult personalities. Along with that closure, much of what is called “literary” fiction (but which could as well be called “adult”, wresting the term back from its usual euphemistic usage) focuses increasingly on the “I/me” and loses binocular focus—and thus depth perception—on the possibility of alternative worlds, however one chooses to define those worlds. Kipling at his best never lost that focus, and his “young adult” animal stories expose basic structural elements that reproduce that effect for the reader and can be considered as possible modalities by those of the rest of us with similar artistic interests.
Just before his seventeenth birthday, in the fall of 1882, Kipling returned to India to take up a job as a cub reporter for the Civil and Military Gazette, the major Anglo-Indian newspaper, in Lahore, now Pakistan but then part of Upper India, and to live with his family again. The bulk of his earliest work, on which much of his positive creative reputation rests, is the product of this peculiar time in his life, of being at once out in the world and still very much living at home: young adulthood with a vengeance. Reading Kipling’s short stories collected through 1891, whatever else one thinks of them, is to recognize a writer who neither holds himself back nor is separate from the world he describes.
This can make the reader morally and aesthetically—to use Orwell’s criteria—uncomfortable, but one must at least recognize the skill of his images, the subtlety of his poetics, and the power of their deployment in scenes of visible action. “The Return of Imray,” one of the stories of this period, displays all of these things and what drives people crazy about Kipling. The first person narrator is the guest in a bungalow taken over as a temporary residence by his friend Strickland, the district police commissioner. (Strickland is a recurring character in these early stories, first appearing the same year as Sherlock Holmes and very much in that mold, being all and knowing all. 6 ) The two men find the former tenant of the bungalow semi-mummified in the rafters in a nest of snakes. The narrator describes himself as they start to explore the rafter space:
I hate and fear snakes, because if you look into the eyes of any snake you will see that it knows all and more of the mystery of man’s fall, and that it feels all the contempt that the Devil felt when Adam was evicted from Eden. Besides which, its bite is usually fatal, and it twists up trouser legs.
To which Strickland responds:“Nonsense,” said Strickland. “They’re sure to hide near the walls by the cloth. The bricks are too cold for ‘em, and the heat of the room is just what they like.” 7 The narrator speaks allusively, opening a gold mine of potential symbolist interpretation; his words are multi-syllabic and end with a wry cascade of ‘s’s. Strickland is—and the name that is half-pun, half serious, the clang associations, and verbal mirrors are classic Kipling—strictly no-nonsense, a rattle of single syllables and spikey consonants. We have no idea what Kipling’s intentions were regarding passages like this, nor how aware he was of what he had done, because all of his most intimate writing about himself and his work was destroyed after his death by his wife and his then adult daughter. 8 Given this lack of documentation, we have no idea if deep self-examination frightened him, or if, “half-civilized” post-adolescent that he was, he did not have the conscious psychological tools even to try. Or perhaps was just trying to see if he could get readers to care enough to meet him half way. All we have is his work.
Kipling left India in February, 1889, for essentially the last time. India was the heart of Kipling’s creativity, unequalled and gradually, tragically, failing over the remaining forty-eight years of his life. But for a young man of twenty-three with a quirky view of his peers and no official position or prospects in the power structure of the British Raj, he may have felt that he had no choice. In this decision, sexuality probably did play a major role. Just short of three years later, in late January, 1892, he married the sister of his American literary agent; 9 by that summer they had settled among his wife’s family in Vermont, and their first child was born in December.
Compared to his meteoric arrival on the English language literary scene in 1888, 1889 –1893 saw a slowing in his output but an increase in its emotional complexity and a suggestion of willingness to reveal himself. At least one of the stories from this period, “Without Benefit of Clergy,” the story of doomed love between an Englishman and an Indian Muslim girl, is rightfully considered one of his best. 10 “Imray,” noted above, is disquieting but fascinating. “The Mark of the Beast,” taken alone, would make a reader believe all the worst said of Kipling; “Jews of Sushan” is heartbreakingly beautiful; and “The City of Dreadful Night” is a free verse lyric poem.
Amidst this complex array is “Moti Guj – Mutineer,” the story of a drunken mahout and an elephant, the first of what can be thought of as Kipling’s serious animal stories. This story establishes three structural elements from which it and the three others like it can be viewed and which set them apart from his other work and that of most other writers who have tried to do similar things. These elements are: the stance of the narrator, how anthropomorphosis is handled, and the nature of the relationship between the humans and the non-humans.
The narrative voice established in the opening of “Moti Guj” is curiously deflective and sets off a warning bell that all may not be as it seems. The first sentence reads: “Once upon a time, there was a coffee planter in India who wished to clear some forest for coffee planting.” The next five sentences are short, tidy, rhythmic, and set out basic issues of forest clearance and the use of elephants in this process in the time and place of the story. The voice is third person, cool, dry, and uninvolved, radically different from the semi-omniscient, semi-involved, mildly smart-alecky, first person narrator who characterizes much of Kipling’s earlier work.
And then, in the middle of this rather long opening paragraph, Moti Guj, the titular character, is introduced, and he is an elephant. The same dry voice then describes Moti Guj and his mahout, Deesa, and the basics of what, with a human couple, would be called their dysfunctional relationship. It also establishes the concerns, power, and actions of the elephant as at least equal to that of the man. The plot of the story evolves around Moti Guj dealing with being abandoned at the plantation while Deesa goes off on a drunk. By the time Deesa returns and they take up their mutual working life, Moti Guj has clearly demonstrated his primacy over the other mahouts, the other elephants, and the English planter.
In “Moti Guj,” the use of anthropomorphosis is minor, appearing only twice. In the first, the touch is feather light: “Moti Guj, in all of his thirty-nine years, had never been whipped, and he did not intend to open up new experiences.” In the second, Kipling’s hand is heavier and gives a taste of his politics but also shows his ability to use that wry, dry, narrative voice—here, just the word “demoralized”—to shift at the last moments into something unexpectedly sympathetic:
An elephant who will not work, and is not tied up, is not quite so manageable as an eighty-one ton gun loose in a heavy sea-way. He slapped old friends on the back and asked them if the stumps were coming away easily; he talked nonsense concerning labour and the inalienable rights of elephants to a long ‘nooning’; and, wandering to and fro, thoroughly demoralized the garden until sundown, when he returned to his pickets for food.
Deesa returns, and they get back to work, but the ground has shifted: Moti Guj comes back to Deesa voluntarily and because Deesa has spoken to him “in the mysterious elephant-language that some mahouts believe came from China at the birth of the world, when elephants and not men were masters.” In the final line of the story, the planter recognizes that he has no idea what has just happened: this is not a world he understands: “The planter was too astonished to be angry.”
An interesting metric of Kipling’s intention in this story is the use of the pronoun “who” when describing Moti Guj, rather than “that” or “which”, as one might expect for an animal with no agency. I do not believe that Kipling’s use of the personalized pronoun was an oversight. One can certainly impose reasonable humanist socio-political interpretations on this story—the forcing of an imperial cash-crop economy onto a traditional society, the vast social difference between the planter and the mahouts—but marginalization of the concerns of humans is also there. The Indians and the planter do occupy very different places on the power scale, but Moti Guj is bigger than all of them. Like Kipling’s use of the personal pronoun “who” for Moti Guj, his image of this massive creature on a scale of what he views as important in the world is telling. Our post-millennial world sees that forest as almost gone and elephants as a desperately protected species, negating Moti Guj’s weight on the scale. Kipling may have been prescient or he may have been stating what his imperial colleagues could not see, but he did care.
In “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and “The Undertakers,” the narrative stance is similar to that of “Moti Guj,” though the otherwise third-person omniscient point of view slips occasionally into addressing the reader as “you.” This is not the relentlessly avuncular voice characteristic of much of 19th century fiction writing in English (which unfortunately persists, possibly owing to Kipling’s subsequent influence via Just So Stories in much of modern writing for children). However, it is also not the natural syntactical use of second person in a first person or close third person stream of consciousness, and it can make a careful reader uncomfortable about Kipling’s seriousness, particularly given the dominance of anthropomorphosis as a structural element in these two stories.
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is a coming-of-age heroism tale. Rikki-tikki is a half-grown mongoose who loses his family in a flood, is washed into the garden of an English family living in India, is saved by them, and ultimately saves them from being purposely killed by a pair of nesting cobras. For some biographers, Harry Rickets in particular, the anthropomorphosis in all of the animal stories of this period reduces these stories to lesser products. Certainly, the animals in these stories do have articulated thoughts and, at least in “Rikki-tikki” and “The Undertakers,” cross-species conversations. Even without the extra burdens of post-humanist sensibilities, 11 this can make those of us who were raised on the strict humanist diet that limits “communication” and “thought” to voiced language edgy. However, if one can set aside this adult (and distinctly Euro/American) point of view, Kipling’s anthropomorphosis in these stories can also be seen as an attempt to extrapolate observable behavior and can be internalized with the same kind of suspension of disbelief that makes enjoyment of live theatre possible. Even so, this evocation of species-specific cerebration is a very hard trick to pull off and requires the same skill at defining unique personalities that is required to differentiate human characters. Tolkien does not handle this particularly well, and C. S. Lewis’ attempts are worse. In contrast, a large measure of what makes Terry Pratchett’s work so appreciable is that ability to characterize across species (and life forms) in a manner both believable and illuminating. 12 In contrast to the use of anthropomorphosis, the relationship between human and non-human characters in “Rikki-tikki,” in comparison to “Moti Guj,” is much less important. Angus Wilson, in his exceptionally thoughtful and painstaking critical biography, calls the inclusion of the human family in Rikki “whimsical” and “an intrusion,” feeling that the story involving the garden world of the animals is sufficient unto itself. I disagree. “Rikki-tikki” is not a Garden-of-Eden allegory, and ignoring the role of the human family would leave open the question of who is actually in control and where Kipling’s loyalties ultimately lie. A major thrust of all of the stories of this period that interweave humans and non-humans, even when, as in the Mowgli stories or “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” the principal point of view is human rather than non-human, is to show humans and animals as members of an interdependent world.
A surprisingly modern, yet rarely recognized, aspect of Kipling’s art that is his skill with dialogue. 13 In the following passage, Darzee, one of the garden birds who have lost babies to the cobras, has been singing ecstatically for about half a page of the death of the male cobra, Nag, while Rikki has been trying to get information from him about Nag’s wife, Nagaina:
“…Let us sing about the great, the red-eyed Rikki-tikki….”“If I could get up to your nest, I’d roll all your babies out!” said Rikki-tikki. “…You’re safe enough in your nest up there, but it’s war for me down here. Stop singing a minute, Darzee.”“For the great, the beautiful Rikki-tikki’s sake I will stop,” said Darzee. “What is it, O Killer of the terrible Nag?”“Where is Nagaina, for the third time?”“On the rubbish-heap by the stables, mourning for Nag. Great is Rikki-tikki with the white teeth.”“Bother my white teeth! Have you ever heard where she keeps her eggs?”“In the melon bed, on the end nearest the wall, where the sun strikes nearly all day. She hid them there three weeks ago.”“And you never thought it worthwhile to tell me? The end nearest the wall, you said?”“Rikki-tikki, you are not going to eat her eggs?”
This kind of rapid interchange, conveying everything it needs to with no more than the occasional “said” to orient the reader, still eludes many writers. The possibilities of dialogue as a superstructure for narrative and a substitute for the historically conventional narrator is a key achievement of “The Undertakers.” The story starts, almost uniquely in Kipling’s fiction, with a line of dialogue: “Respect the aged!” The next sentence stumbles over a narrative over-voice but then rights itself:
It was a thick voice—a muddy voice that would have made you shudder—a voice like something soft breaking in two. There was a quaver in it, a croak and a whine.“Respect the aged! O companions of the river—respect the aged!”
This is followed by what is essentially a play setting, from which a conventional narrator is absent and remains absent, except for a few stage directions, for the rest of the story. Human boatmen in the river recognize and steer clear of, with obvious loathing, the sand-bar from which this voice has emerged. On one riverbank is a village with a railway bridge arching above it and, on the shore, “a sort of rude brick pier-head where people who wanted to wash could wade in step by step. This was the Ghaut of Mugger-Ghaut.” Readers with even a National Geographic familiarity with India will recognize ghauts, particularly along the Ganges, as the site of traditional Hindu funeral pyres. A few pages later, Kipling reprises this phrase in introducing the story’s main character, a huge crocodile who harvests villagers from the ghaut, the “Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, older than any man in the village, who had given his name to the village….” The other two main speaking parts in this play are a jackal, its anti-hero and jester, and an adjutant crane, its chorus.
From the Mugger’s point of view, he is hero and god rolled into one, adored by his village, ever looking out for their welfare, and now gently aggrieved that the newly railway bridge is causing them the hardship of having to climb a long flight of stairs to cross high above the river (thus, obviously to the reader, avoiding him). The story’s short time frame, less than an hour, and play-like structure absolutely require anthropomorphosis: the characters must talk, and the dialogue is between species. Anthropomorphosis, then, even more than in “Rikki-tikki,” is a palpable framing element in this story. Field biologists may well question Kipling’s interpretations of the behaviors of the three animal species projected here as thought and conversation. However, my own experiences watching big game in East African parks as a child suggests that Kipling was not that far off, and laboratory biologists might be surprisingly supportive of the portrayal of the potential range of vertebrate memory.
But Kipling is not in this for the biology. In “The Undertakers,” far more than in “Rikki-tikki” and approaching, but quite distinct from, “Moti Guj,” the issue is the relationship between the characters: between the non-human characters and between them and the humans around them. In this economical prologue/Act I, the balance scales of judgment are set up: an ancient way of life interpreted variously by those caught up in living it versus the imposition of something new, the railway bridge—certainly evidence of the British presence but also of a changing landscape and a changing India. In what is in effect Act II, the jackal and the crane prompt the Mugger, with a series of one-liner trade-offs, through an increasingly self-aggrandizing exposition of his relationship with the local human population. A humanist reads this with pity and horror (and a post-humanist with disgust at the heaping onto the crocodile of the atavistic terrors of thousands of years of human sub-conscious—both of which points of view are defensible), but the crane and the jackal also internally process the recitation in their own quite plausible ways.
Act III, the crisis moment of the play, is the response of the three to the passing of a train on the bridge. The Mugger speaks:
“It is, past any doubt, a new breed of bullock. Some day it will not be able to keep its foothold up yonder, and will fall as the men did. The old Mugger will then be ready.”
The Jackal looked at the Adjutant and the Adjutant looked at the Jackal. If there was one thing they were more certain of than another, it was that the engine was everything in the wide world except a bullock. The Jackal had watched it time and again from the aloe hedges by the side of the line, and the Adjutant had seen engines since the first locomotive ran in India. But the Mugger had only looked up at the thing from below, where the brass dome seemed rather like a bullock’s hump.
In this passage, the crane and the jackal are objective observers, willing to admit what they do not know and willing to try to understand. The Mugger has never known any power greater than himself and therefore cannot imagine it. At this moment in the story, however, all three animals recognize that something has happened, and their characters begin to shift. The jackal becomes increasingly bold and confrontational. The crane becomes thoughtful and something of a peacemaker. The Mugger, trying to regain his status, launches into a long story about why he knows more about “the white faces” than do the other two, a story that anyone familiar with 19th century British history would recognize as a meat-eating scavenger’s history of “The Mutiny,” the uprising through the summer of 1857 of various Indian military and civilian sectors against the British. Throughout, Kipling only uses the word “mutiny” once, in an interpolation that seems more like something demanded by an American editor than part of the original. It is difficult to read this without wondering what exploring the Watts or Rodney King “riots” (as they are known in Euro-American but not African-American society) in Los Angeles from the point of view of a sewer rat, a coyote, and a buzzard might reveal to us about our own obsessions.
Kipling’s purposes for “The Undertakers” were possibly, in the end, overly complex to produce a perfectly satisfactory story. As the drama moves toward denouement, anthropo-morphosis again becomes dominant but in a somewhat different form, to introduce the stuff of human tragedy and the demise of the Mugger. At the end of his description of feasting on the outpouring of Indian corpses after the Mutiny, as the outraged British Raj revenged itself, the Mugger declares that even he is sometimes satisfied. But a few lines later, he confesses that this is not perfectly true. In his reminiscence of the massacres, he had described a moment when, as he followed a boat of English refugee women and children drifting down the river, a child was dabbling his hands in the water, but when the Mugger rose to grab the child’s arm, the tiny hand slipped between his teeth. Now the old Mugger laments that he has never had the pleasure of killing and eating a white child: “I am old now, but before I die it is my desire to try one new thing.” A page and a half later, the Mugger is killed by an elephant-gun blast by the English bridge engineer known to be hunting the Mugger for his toll on the bridge-building crews and who turns out to have been that tiny boy who escaped from the Mugger of old.
This shift in the story, with its intrusion of a Last Tango in Paris desire to satisfy a rapacious personal dream and the imposition of what appears to be a human moral perspective, almost undoes everything that Kipling has achieved in this story. It also raises the question of why he did that. Kipling’s work can be untidy enough psychologically that questions of this sort often do not have good answers. One possible explanation for Kipling taking aim at the Mugger is that, in the end, the human figure who moves in to share equal billing with the crane and the jackal is a refugee English boy now grown and returning to serve his adopted people and conquer his childhood terror, the Mugger, a terror that has spent the entire so far story calmly rationalizing his continued torment of the child/man’s adopted people. If this interpretation is valid, even without its overtones of Kipling taking aim at his childhood experiences locked in a cellar in Southsea, it also suggests that Kipling’s engineer can be seen not so much as the all-conquering (and English) human with the big gun as an English human who has taken a position with, rather than over, the non-English and non-human world.
In “The Undertakers,” Kipling explores epic junctures in the history of the British occupation of India and the playing out of violence within and across species. His next work, “The Maltese Cat,” published a year later in 1895 and subsequently collected in The Day’s Work, (1898) is about a polo game. 14 From the near sublime, Kipling seems to have retreated into classist trivia, an allegory of the glories of the British Raj (or any power structure where half the creatures carry whips and mallets and the other half wear bridles and saddles), or, more charitably, a chocolate truffle for horse-lovers. The only serious critical mention of “The Maltese Cat” that I have found is a side-swipe in Boris Ford’s “A Case for Kipling?” Like Orwell’s essay, this was a response to the Elliot collection, published at roughly the same time. Unlike Orwell’s measured tones, Ford seems infuriated with Kipling:
…Kipling appears to have had not much more interest in the thoughts and feelings of human beings than of animals and machines…If one readily admits the virtuosity of the performance…one is still baffled to explain the interest in such stories as “The Maltese Cat”…. 15 Ford goes on to assert that Kipling knew nothing “of machines or animals.” Ford is wrong about Kipling and polo, 16 but he does raise an interesting problem for peri-millennial creative writing pedagogy: imagination may not be enough. The ability to make the experiential leap from what one does know to what one does not, and make the result both plausible and psychologically true, can be elusive, never more so when trying to access the thoughts and motivations of other species. However, as one whom the critic Angus Wilson would surely classify as a “specialist” with regard to horses, 17 I will say that “The Maltese Cat” works for “horse people.” This is not just romanticism. Horses and humans work and play together at a level approached only by humans and dogs, and while many of these relationships are profoundly hierarchical (and susceptible to interpretation on that basis), some are not. Polo is unique among animal/human sports in that it is a traditional team sport involving more than a single human/non-human dyad, and killing is not an intentional variable.
An important aspect of the choice of polo for a story about teamwork is that, for all that polo is, to the modern eye, an icon of frivolous wealth and privilege, that is a 20th century Anglo-American point of view. Polo is native to central/south-western Asia, where forms of the game have been played for at least two thousand years. At times polo games in India were more like small-town America drag racing down Main Street on Saturday night than Sunday afternoon in The Hamptons. Further, in this story, Kipling goes out of his way to differentiate not only the two teams’ human and equine players and playing styles from each other but also the military castes each represents. The Skidars are “a poor but honest native regiment,” that is, Indian troops and non-commissioned officers and English officers from a unit that stayed loyal to the Raj during The Mutiny, and, moreover, of a type whose specialty was not only fighting but being able to move in to repair bridges and roads in an emergency.16 Specifics of the Archangels’ units are not provided, but Kipling implies that that the team is culled from British cavalry regiments, very much higher up the social scale.
“The Maltese Cat,” like “Rikki-Tikki” and “The Undertakers,” again employs anthropomorphosis as a primary tool. The polo ponies talk to each other and have independent thoughts and points of view. However, Kipling’s key structural elements—narrative stance, anthropomorphism, and human/non-human relationships—are much more evenly deployed and, with the simple, verb-driven syntax, create quite a different effect. The narrator in the opening paragraph is familiar from “Moti Guj:” wry, omniscient, informative only to the degree necessary, revealing only at the beginning of the third and last sentence in the paragraph a stance that will otherwise remain primarily among the ponies. From there, the narrator reappears only in brief passages of explanation or in those that tap the action along through most of the rest of the story, intercalated chiefly, until the last pages, with the conversations and thoughts of the ponies. The first appearance of a human point of view is at roughly the mid-point of the story, as Lutyens, the team Captain and the Cat’s rider, prepares take the Cat into the game for the first time: “Lutyens took over The Maltese Cat with a pat and a hug, for Lutyens valued him more than anything else in the world….” This tiny flash of emotion is the first of four independent clauses in this sentence, linked by semi-colons and describing each of the four horse/man dyads of the Skidars’ team headed into this game period. Whatever the personal feelings involved, the team, the game, comes first.
This focus on the game, on team play, would seem a purely human concern. It invites allegory and threatens the notion of anthropomorphosis as a simple theatrical tool for translating observable non-human behavior into plausible current thought and conversation for the purposes of accessing non-human points of view. However, the idea of horses and team play may have been less difficult for Kipling’s contemporaries than for modern readers. Even with no knowledge of polo, these readers would have been much more familiar with horses’ daily behavior, with horses’ preference for functioning in groups and the capacity, particularly among geldings, for forming intense one-on-one relationships. 18 Readers who are also riders would also recognize horses’ eerie ability to register and process human physical response, thought, and emotion. In all four of the stories under consideration, overtly or by implication, the non-humans understand human speech. In “Rikki-tikki” and “The Undertakers,” the two stories most dependent for their effects on anthropomorphosis, curiously, the communications gap between humans and non-humans is the widest, limited to a mutual kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten, existence. Both of these stories involve non-humans doing their natural “work” and that work involves humans only tangentially. In “Moti-Guj” and “The Maltese Cat,” the non-human work/play and the human work/play are interdependent. Communication between elephants and humans or polo ponies and humans is vital and takes place by touch and sight, the reading of body language, even as both species, especially in “The Maltese Cat,” are engaging in story dialogue. This communication between species is, I believe, central to Kipling’s purposes in both “Moti Guj” and “The Maltese Cat.” In “Moti Guj,” he is able to achieve this almost, but not entirely, without anthropomorphosis (and one can imagine with just a few tweaks how he could have avoided anthropomorphosis altogether). In “Moti Guj,” Kipling’s purposes are more to reset human notions of the balance in the human/non-human dialectic. In “The Maltese Cat,” that balance is established from the beginning. Kipling seems to ask, given that balance, what this kind of interspecies communication could achieve and sets out his answer in an ending worthy of a Handel oratorio. In the second half of the story, what were the melody and alto parts, narrator and ponies, are joined by the tenors, the human players, the voices swell to a final glorious chorus as men and ponies rush to the final goal of the game, and the Indian and British Cavalry bands then stream onto the polo field together to hail the winners and play derisive music hall ditties to the losers.
In “Moti Guj” and “The Maltese Cat,” Kipling lifts the encounter between humans and non-humans to something beyond altruistic to transcendently mutual. For post-humanist critics, of course, the fly in this Scout’s Own glorious ointment is that we have only guesses and extrapolations about the horses’ feelings in all of this. Kipling gives them the right to complain about their gear but no choice about being saddled up. Kittiwink jeers at how the Archangel riders hold their whips, but all the riders carry them. None of the ponies ask poor little Faiz Ullah, the sorrel arab, why he plays so badly in the second period; they just castigate and threaten him. (He redeems himself by playing quite well when he goes out again in the fourth.) Any form of fictional treatment of a purported non-human point of view, with or without anthropomorphosis, is still a projection of the human mind.
This is, in the end, where post-humanist thought seems to run into the same glass wall that humanist thought does. We cannot ever really know each other, whether the “other” is “one of us” or one of “them.” The artist is left with shriveling up entirely to the “I/me” and depending on that to matter to anyone else or trying to reach out into legitimate communication, however imperfect. To the extent that the current obsession in creative writing pedagogy with “voice” is in fact sidling up to this question of the role of communication in art, the most useful definition of the concept of “voice” in writing that I have found is that of Steven Schwartz: “…the writer’s voice emerges that the place where her unique experience meets the larger culture.” 19 Eric Griffiths, likewise, in his lectures collected by Freya Johnston, identifies this charged space between the “instance” and the “rule” as being central to literature. 20 Withal, the most consistent complaint about Kipling, over a century of the best of humanist criticism, and even from those who are positively disposed toward his creative work, is that, in the end, he lacks some final degree of “feeling.” This complaint is expressed in various ways, in the subtle jargon of each writer’s times and focus, but all seem concerned with the same issue, as if some emotional limb was amputated young—as if the Mugger had indeed taken off the child’s arm—or insufficiently developed, genetically or environmentally, such that he was only able to function in the exteriorized, visible, landscape that he was so remarkably skilled at depicting.
Certainly, the facts of Kipling’s life (along with whatever unresolved childhood trauma and sexual issues he may have had, he would then go on, in 1899, to lose his beloved daughter Josephine to pertussis and then his son Jack in World War I) provide plenty of basis for why an aggressively defended, unexamined life may have seemed his only way to get from day to day.
Perhaps, though, however difficult it is for conventional literary criticism to “read the body language” of much of Kipling’s best work, that in the four stories I have discussed here, he took his own ability to read body language and turned that gift into an unprecedented approach to human/non-human communication. To take this conclusion from a slightly different angle, perhaps, if communication across species—or cultures—is the issue, the “I/me” central to humanist art and thought should be muted and the “we/us” amplified.
1. Kipling’s overall output was vast. For a complete listing, see the Kipling Society: [http://www.kipling.org.uk][2]. For this and other references to Kipling’s life, my chief sources are Kipling’s own Something of Myself, Penguin Modern Classics edition, 1977; Angus Wilson’s The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling,Viking, 1977; Martin Seymour-Smith’s Rudyard Kipling, St. Martin’s, 1989; Harry Rickett’s Rudyard Kipling, A Life; Carroll & Graf, 1999; David Gilmour’s The Long Recessional, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002; and Lisa Lewis’s “Kipling’s Biographers,” ibid: Kipling website, January 16, 2008, accessed June/July 2012 2. “Rudyard Kipling,” reprinted in Kipling and the Critics, E. L. Gilbert, ed., NYU, 1965 3. Ibid, p. 75 4. Op cit, p.17 5. Gilbert’s Kipling and the Critics, op cit, is an excellent compendium of serious Kipling criticism. Trained as a physician myself, I tend to be mystified by many of the arguments presented, but they are worth reading. In addition, the Kipling society website, op cit, includes a sampler of critical response, where it exists, for each of the short stories. Finally, Angus Wilson’s critical biography, op cit, is unequalled in its exploration of Kipling and his work (though its editorial limitations highlighted by Lisa Lewis, op cit, are also worth noting.) 6. Ronald Merrick, bête noir of Paul Smith’s The Raj Quartet, and in particular the setting and story of his murder in Division of the Spoils, is powerfully harmonic with the character of Strickland and of this story. 7. All quoted passages are public domain access, [http://www.readbookonline.net][3]. 8. For the most egregious example of the speculation this act has engendered, see Seymour-Smith, op cit. 9. Wolcott Balestier. Much of the above speculation centers on the relationship between the two men; Wolcott died of tuberculosis six weeks before Kipling and Caroline Balestier were married. 10. See especially Elliot Gilbert, “Without Benefit of Clergy,” in Kipling and the Critics, op. cit. 11. The opening chapters of Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, U Minn, 2008, particularly her discussion of Jacques Dérrida, is an excellent introduction to some of these issues. 12. All of Pratchett’s work does this to some extent, but see especially Moving Pictures, Men at Arms, or Maurice and his Amazing Rodents. 13. This skill, as much as Kipling’s ability to describe action and his apotheosis of “manly pursuits,” may have been what attracted both Faulkner and Hemingway to his early work. See Jay Parini; One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, Harper, 2004, and Jeffrey Meyers “Kipling and Hemingway: the Lesson of the Master” American Literature, 1984; 56(1):88-99. 14. “The Maltese Cat” is the name of the story’s chief point of view, a polo pony who started life pulling a vegetable cart in Malta and “drifted into India on a troop-ship, taken, with an old rifle, as part payment for a racing debt….” 15. The quotes here are from Ford, in Kipling and the Critics, op. cit., p.68. 16. See Alastair Wilson’s introduction and page notes for “The Maltese Cat,” on the Kipling Society website, op cit. This also contains much useful information on polo in general and as it relates to the story, and on contemporary Imperial military organization. 17. Angus Wilson, op. cit., p.186. Considerably less virulently than Ford, Angus Wilson also expresses bafflement about this group of stories but that they appear to have a kind of magical appeal for “specialists” that they don’t have for the ordinary reader. 18. This is not an essay about Kipling’s sexuality, but it is no accident that all of the Skidars ponies are geldings with the exception of the little mouse-colored mare, Kittiwink. The message—and Kipling is not unique in this observation—is that you can’t be thinking about sex and play good team sports. 19. Schwartz S. “Finding a voice in America” in Bringing the Devil to His Knees, C. Baxter and P. Turchi, eds. Ann Arbor: U Michigan Press, 2004: 45. 20. Johnston F. If Not Critical. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2018.