Kipling and the Hoax

Abstract

Kipling, to borrow the distinction made by Clare Hanson, wrote short stories rather than short fictions: that is to say, he was drawn towards stories with a strong narrative line, dealing with extreme situations and the limits of human behaviour, rather than towards the exploration of mood and psychology, those ‘moments of being’ which were to concern modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf.¹ In the early stories especially this narrative bias leads Kipling towards the anecdote, typically with the suggestion that the writer knows and shares the values of the community to which it is addressed, in this case Kipling’s primary audience of Anglo-Indians. When we are told in ‘The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case’ that Biel was ‘quietly and without scandal’ cutting to pieces with a whip the man who had insulted him, the sentence itself is manifestly not quiet, but calculated to make us declare ourselves; we are in effect being asked to align ourselves with the group or caste Kipling addresses, or to admit that we have no place within it (PTH, p. 329). We are either in, or out; there is no room for hesitation or equivocation. The anecdote depends for its success on the pretence that there is one uniquely understanding audience, but Kipling’s apparent unawareness of those outside the group is so flagrant as to be provocative; we are driven to question his values, and the sensibility to which they bear witness, just where Kipling himself seems most ready to deride such questions.