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

[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!