Still Controversial After All These Years

[poliphilo]

Kipling is in the news because someone decorated the students union in Manchester with a mural rendition of Kipling's "If" and the student politicians (who hadn't been consulted) painted it out and substituted Maya Angelou's "And I Rise"- because Kipling was "a racist" and "an imperialist".

This revives a controversy that has been going on since Kipling's own day. And those of us who love Kipling should probably welcome it on the grounds that there's no such thing as bad publicity. If he has survived the satire of Max Beerbohm, the wilful misinterpretation of G.K Chesterton and the patronage of T.S. Eliot he will most probably survive the disapproval of Manchester Students Union.

As Orwell notes in his 1942 review of Eliot's snooty edition of Kipling's "Selected Poems", most of Kipling's critics- and perhaps many of his admirers too- haven't actually read him.  Those of us who have read him know he has many voices-  many personae. 

I re-read Orwell's essay this morning- and I don't believe he'd read Kipling either- or at least, not the whole of him. He's perceptive about the imperial Kipling of the 1890s (which isn't to say I agree with all the points he makes) but ignores anything that isn't about Empire or the army- and that's a large body of work. Kipling didn't go into a sulk after the Great War and no-one who had read the great stories about love, healing and forgiveness that date from those years could possibly claim that he did. 

Comments

[cmcmck]

'If' is certainly sexist, but racist? Hardly!

I just wish people would get it through their overprivileged white middle class noddles that that was then and this is now!

Don't see them whingeing about the grossly bad treatment and exclusion of the white working class I have to say..........

[poliphilo]

I'd prefer "masculinist" to "sexist". It's an older man talking to a younger man. It doesn't put women down; they just don't come into the picture.

Yes, it's a text from the early 20th century. To expect it to display a 21st century sensibility is asking rather too much of it.

Kipling wrote symathetically of the white working class- soldiers and sailors of course plus their wives and girlfriends, but also rural labourers, servants- and there's a great poem from the Great War which is voiced by a female worker in an armaments factory. I can think of few writers who operate in such a large world.

[cmcmck]

And he had a deep respect for Indian soldiers.

'Stalky IS a Sikh'

Racist? Maybe they need to read 'Gunga Din' with an attentive eye to detail...........

Even 'The White Man's Burden' is suggesting to Americans that empire mightn't be so easy after all.

[poliphilo]

Most writers of his period simply ignored the existence of non-Europeans. How many Indians are there in the works of Henry James or Thomas Hardy? Even Conrad- who wrote about the far East- foregrounded white characters. Kipling may not always have shown a 21st century sensitivity in his treatment of people of colour, but his fiction is full of them. His most famous character- Mowgli- is Indian.

[cmcmck]

And then there's someone really complex like Kim.

[poliphilo]

Of course.

And many of the short stories have a similar complexity.

[oakmouse]

OH MY GODS THANK YOU. Exactly the same problem is common on this side of the pond --- the white working class couldn't possibly suffer because they're white and anyway if they do suffer, which of course they don't, they deserve it because all white working class people are racist sexist homophobic transphobic Bible-thumping gun-toting etc etc etc etc blah blah blah blah evil evil evil evil villains. Makes my blood boil, because it's stereotyping and bigotry run wild.

[cmcmck]

Especially when you consider that I still have friends on the council estate where I grew up and who know about my 'interesting' past and who are still good friends.

[oakmouse]

*nods* I have working class friends, neighbors, and relatives who are excellent people, completely unlike the social justice bunny stereotype of the working class. When we lived in Maryland, all of our redneck neighbors voted to legalize gay marriage and supported allowing trans folk to change their birth certificates, drivers' licenses, etc so they could be fully, legally, their trans gender. Also, if you walked through our neighborhood streets on a hot summer night when everybody was out on the porch drinking beer and cooling off, not one porch would have all the faces the same color. Not one. So much for racism!

[oakmouse]

I've seen a lot of social justice bunnies protest about Kipling being insular and prejudiced. Projection, much?

(Kipling has his problems, but he also has his good points, and IMO the latter far outweigh the former. I like Kipling.)

[poliphilo]

Kipling was more forthright than most writers are about pushing his political views- and his views are out of date- because the British Empire- which he believed in as a force for good- no longer exists.

In his own rather clumsy way he was an internationalist. He wanted a society in which differences of race, religion and politics were abolished- and he found the models for that in (a) the Empire and (b) Freemasonry. Insular was just about the last thing he was.

[oakmouse]

Bingo.