Yeats
and Kipling: Retrospectives, Perspectives
An inter-disciplinary international conference commemorating the 150th
birth anniversary of William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling.
Organised by
the Department of English,
Bharati College, University of Delhi, Delhi
in collaboration with
the Department of English,
Saurashtra University, Rajkot
and
The Oberoi Cecil, Shimla,
in
Bharati College,
C – 4, Janakpuri, Delhi – 58
from
Tuesday, 10th March 2014 to Thursday, 12th March
2014.
List of abstracts
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‘The Passionless Passion of Slaughter’: Heroism and the Aesthetics of Violence
This paper will set out the premise for my new
comparative study of Kipling and Yeats, which will be published by Oxford
University Press in 2015, before discussing one particular aspect of the
comparison. Titled Meeting Without
Knowing It: the Entangled Lives of Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats, the book
is structured as a parallel biography and attempts to re-establish the two
poets as literary contemporaries. Its narrative is focused, however around several
close comparative readings of their poetry, short fiction and political
rhetoric. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive
echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts,
with folklore, balladry and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and
made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered
the ‘mythopoeic’ impulse in fin de siècle culture.
My study traces these shared concerns principally to
their late nineteenth-century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked
social circles which they inhabited in fin de siècle London. It is, in fact,
their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancour to their ideological
division during the Boer War. After 1903 Yeats denounced Kipling in the press,
and when the latter became increasingly involved in Irish politics the two men
became, effectively, political enemies. However, acrimony and recrimination
only served to bind together all the more intimately, in an argumentative
spiral of revolving discourses, two men who were often proximate but who
actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.
Following this introduction to my method, the
particular axis of comparison that I would like to discuss is Yeats and
Kipling’s mutual concern with heroism and violence. As Robert d’Humières once
remarked of Kipling, both men tend to prioritize the aesthetic potential in a
decisive or violent action over its ethical ramifications. This tendency manifests
itself early in the 1890s, in such poems as Kipling’s “The Ballad of Boh Da
Thone” and in Yeats’s early literary criticism of Samuel Ferguson and Standish
O’Grady. Both saw conflict as a regenerative process, and long predicted the
approach of a cataclysmic European war. In addition, both poets’ political
commitments compelled them to emphasise blood-bonds, heroic narratives and
native ties to the land—indeed, mutual echoing of imperialist and anti-colonial
voices, as they dispute a common ground, is something that becomes startlingly
clear when comparing Kipling and Yeats. In the ten years from the 1912 Ulster
Crisis, through the Great War to the Irish Civil War, the sanguinary discourses
they had set in motion during the fin de siècle also rebounded upon them
destructively. Kipling’s son was killed on the Western Front, while Yeats
feared his mythic drama had inspired the Easter Rising. Both poets spent the
remainder of their lives harbouring a self-accusatory remorse, and issuing grim
prophecies for the future of European civilization. This aggressive legacy has
continued to challenge and disturb their poetic successors.
Dr. Alexander Bubb is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London. His current project concerns the popularization of Middle Eastern and South Asian classics by the mid-Victorian publishing world. His interest in the European encounter with India is historical as well as literary, and he spent last year as a postdoctoral researcher at Linnaeus University in Sweden, working on the archive of a colonial railway contractor. He is shortly to publish his first monograph, a comparative biography of Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats entitled Meeting Without Knowing It. He may be contacted at alexander.bubb@kcl.ac.uk.
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Kipling and Yeats as Men and Writers: a study in relationship
Almost a century ago, T.S. Eliot had made a pertinent
remark about the writer’s relationship with the man, which, like any other
serious statement, is not an absolute truth, and yet touches upon a fundamental
point compelling serious consideration. The statement in question is the
following: the poet has not a “personality” to express, but a particular
medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and
experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry,
and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part
in the man, the personality. Clarifying his statement further, Eliot elaborates
as follows:
We can only say that a poem, in some sense, has its
own life; that its parts form something quite different from a body of neatly
ordered biographical data; that the feeling, or emotion, or vision, resulting from
the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the
mind of the poet.
The question that Eliot’s statement intends to answer
may, or may not, be acceptable to all of us, but all of us would agree that the
question about the relationship between the man and the writer is a fundamental
one, compelling our critical attention, more so in the case of Kipling and
Yeats as both of them are often viewed as autobiographical writers whose
personalities inform their poems as much as their public statements related to
subjects such as nations and cultures, races and ethnicity. With the passage of
time that followed the period of these two prominent poets, we are now better
placed to make a more mature, that is more dispassionate, estimate of the
relationship in their cases between the man and the artist.
This paper intends to work out in the cases of Kipling
and Yeats the dynamics of relationship between their personalities and their
poetical works. In the writings of both Yeats and Kipling there are moments
when the poet oversteps the personality, but there are also moments when the
personality overrules the poet, leaving no ambiguity about the fact that in all
moments the poet and the personality are inseparable. The high and the low in each
shows that, after all, poets are humans too, and as such vulnerable to cultural
biases and prejudices inherited from the social environment. As Northrop Frye
has remarked:
It’s not surprising if writers are often rather simple
people, not always what we think of as intellectuals, and certainly not always
any freer of silliness or perversity than anyone else. What concerns us is what
they produce, not what they are, and poetry, according to Milton, who ought to
have known, is “more simple, sensuous, and passionate” than philosophy or
science.
Frye’s observation seems to have greater pertinence in
the cases of Yeats and Kipling than in the case of any other poet. So even if
the poet’s personality is not always absent from his poetry, it is finally what
these poets have produced that should engage us rather than their statements
outside the bounds of poetry.
Prof. Bhim S. Dahiya is retired from the Department of English, Kurukshetra University, India. He may be contacted at bhimsdahiya@gmail.com.
Prof. Bhim S. Dahiya is retired from the Department of English, Kurukshetra University, India. He may be contacted at bhimsdahiya@gmail.com.
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Orientalism and Imperialism: Yeats, Kipling and India
Only some writers who share a year of birth turn out
to be similar in their literary productions: for example, Virginia Woolf and
James Joyce, both of whom were born in 1882 and, in a double coincidence, died
in 1941. Rather more often, birth-anniversary celebrations make for strange
bed-fellows as in the case of W. B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling – whom even the
most metaphysical of critics may find it hard to yoke together.
But the zeitgeist finds its own subtle manifestations.
I argue in this paper that while Kipling was notoriously a high imperialist,
Yeats was an arch Orientalist too in his own right, especially in how he viewed
India, and it may be indeed be difficult to adjudge whose prejudices were the
deeper-seated. Further, both Kipling and Yeats were in the beginning more of
Orientalists in their observations about India while the attitude of each
hardened later into varieties of imperialism. Again, while India was a late
interest of Yeats’s and remained marginal for him throughout, the pre-eminence
of India in Kipling’s early life and work gave way to his increasing
disinterest in the country. On the whole, while these coevals were like chalk
and cheese from every other point of view, India provided probably the one area
of common interest for them, though not quite a meeting ground. The primary
texts to be examined in this comparative postcolonial evaluation will be Kim, Life’s
Handicap, and some selected poems by Kipling, and a few poems, the “Introduction”
to Gitanjali, and the co-translation
of the Upanishads by Yeats.
Prof. Harish Trivedi, is retired from the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. He may be contacted at harish.trivedi@gmail.com.
Prof. Harish Trivedi, is retired from the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. He may be contacted at harish.trivedi@gmail.com.
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W. B. Yeats’s Later Poetry on Old Age and Death: A Saidian Reading
W. B. Yeats’s obsession with old age remained one of
his main concerns throughout his literary career. The association of old age
with death and physical decay is central in early poems like “When You Are Old”
(1891) and “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in Water” (1903). The theme of old
age grew in importance in his late poetry as the poet began actually living the
experience. This paper makes an attempt to read Yeats’ late poetry concerning
issues like old age, ageing, death and regeneration in the light of Edward
Said’s idea on “late style.” In the collection of essays On Late Style, Said explores the idea that late works of great
artists, musicians, writers and poets such as Beethoven, Strauss, Mozart, Jean
Genet, Cavafy, Ibsen, Lampedusa, and Adorno are not always serene and
transcendent but, on the contrary, sometimes unresolved and contradictory. Said
discerns in all a stubborn refusal to unite things which ultimately could not
be reconciled. In the last or late period of life, the decay of the body and the onset of ill health instilled in their works a new idiom -- what Said calls a “late style”. Said finds these works representative of late style: an artist believes that the tradition had been exhausted, it's weight cannot be overcome, so it is struggled against, without hope of resolution. In exploring late style, Said isn’t really
interested in lateness that brings wisdom, harmony and serenity. Here, lateness
is not a reflection of hard-earned knowledge; lateness in these artistic
figures is opposition, lateness is “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved
contradiction.”
I read a number of Yeats’ later poems such as “Among
School Children” (1927), “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), “A Prayer for Old Age”
(1935), “The Black Tower” (1939), “The Tower” (1925) “At Algeciras, A Meditation
on Death” (1928), “Mad as the Mist and Snow” (1929), “The Apparitions” (1938), “Why
Should Not Old Men Be Mad” (1936), “Under Ben Bulben” (1938) and others in the
light of Said’s idea to see how Yeats deals with the problem of old age, of
death and of regeneration. At certain moments of despair, Yeats refuses the
wisdom that comes with old age and its intellectual gain and defends passion,
but more often he hopes to keep his soul and intellect strong and
uncompromising against the tides of time and impending death. As a poet he
continued to re-invent himself, never being content, always resltess, refusing to bow down to age and tradition, Like Sophocles, Goethe and Milton, Yeats is a poet who, even in age, shows no impoverishment of spirit of weakening of intention. I argue that as
exemplifying the characteristics of “late style” these later poems of Yeats on
old age, ageing, death, decay, memories and mourning give expression to tragic
anxiety, intransigence, contradiction, scrupulous self-reflection, and daring
revisiting and revising of artistic idioms and personal and intellectual
selves.
Dr. Arindam Sarma is an Assistant Professor with the Department of English, Chaiduar College, Assam. He may be contacted at arindam.sarma@rediffmail.com.
Dr. Arindam Sarma is an Assistant Professor with the Department of English, Chaiduar College, Assam. He may be contacted at arindam.sarma@rediffmail.com.
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“An old man’s eagle mind”: A Gerontological Perspective to the Problem of Aging in the select works of W.B. Yeats’s later years
Age, as gerontologists look upon it, is a social
discourse which is constituted by a system of conventions, expectations and constraints
imposed by society on the aged subject and in the case of an aged writer it is
his/her own internalized expectations that matter too. An aged person is
supposed to be passive, miserable, decrepit, introspective and powerless,
seeking the comfort and protection of a domesticated life. This raises a few
questions: what can writers make of old age? How do they regard its
limitations, its representative archetypes, and society’s expectations of them?
How does their attitude change as they grow old?
In the last phase of his career, Yeats’s poetic genius
flourished into an unusual intensity of creative writing, so much so that it
may be considered phenomenal when it comes to the topic of creativity in old
age. Biographical attention has been given to locate its source and
formalist-aesthetic discussions have poured in to analyse the dynamics of
Yeats’s increasingly complex structuring of the experience of old age in his
works over the years of his remarkable artistic development from a fin-de-siѐcle
romantic to a metaphysical-symbolist-realist poet towards the end of his
career. Relatively less attention has been given to exploring the psycho-social
dimension of the late creativity of this gifted intellectual and hence the need
for adding a gerontological perspective to this much-discussed topic so that
old age may be seen as a powerful trope in the dynamics of Yeats’s thoughts on
death and immortality, enabling us to identify the characteristic imaginative
modes of late writing and to ramify the paradigms of gerontological studies as
well.
In this context, the images and metaphors of old age
and their rich ambivalence in Yeats’s later poems are suggestive of a
productive tension between the social conventions and stereotypes of old age
and the poet’s intensely personal experience of it as a time of apocalyptic
self-renewal. Moreover, in his later years, he seems deeply preoccupied with
the dialogue between his private and public self, leading to a self-chosen
distancing from all the external demands of the modern world on the one hand
and inventing new and less flattering ‘masks’ of antithetical selfhood on the
other. Be it the mask of a madman, or aged sexuality, or androgyny, these forms
of aged subjectivity are made to infuse new values in representing the aged and
to undermine social expectations that are too restrictive in measuring the
power and strengths of old age.
Dr. Sudipta Chakraborty is working as an Assistant Professor of English in Sreegopal Banerjee College (Govt. Sponsored and affiliated to the University of Burdwan), Hooghly, West Bengal. Dr Chakraborty has presented scholarly papers in different national and international level seminars and conferences. He has quite a few number of publications to his credit in renowned national and international journals. His doctoral dissertation ─ “Space and Cultural Geography: A Study in V.S. Naipaul’s Representation of India in his Travel Narratives” ─ has been widely acclaimed both in India and abroad. He may be contacted at schakra2006@gmail.com.
Dr. Sudipta Chakraborty is working as an Assistant Professor of English in Sreegopal Banerjee College (Govt. Sponsored and affiliated to the University of Burdwan), Hooghly, West Bengal. Dr Chakraborty has presented scholarly papers in different national and international level seminars and conferences. He has quite a few number of publications to his credit in renowned national and international journals. His doctoral dissertation ─ “Space and Cultural Geography: A Study in V.S. Naipaul’s Representation of India in his Travel Narratives” ─ has been widely acclaimed both in India and abroad. He may be contacted at schakra2006@gmail.com.
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‘Turning from the Mirror to Meditation upon a Mask’: Yeats’s search for his Daimon in “Ego Dominus Tuus”
“Ego Dominus Tuus” is one of W.B. Yeats’s later poems
published in The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919). This paper purports to put forward the idea that like other dialogue
poems of Yeats it is meant to resolve a crisis in the poetic life of Yeats. The
poet wishes to find out, rather travel into the mindset of, a new ideology of
poetic creation – or karyitri pratibha
as it is called in Sanskrit poetics. He held earlier, under the influence of
his father, that a work of art should bring out the artist’s authentic
personality. Now he is trying to believe that the artist in his work tries to
show exactly what he is not but would like to be, his ‘antithetical self’ or ‘Daimon’.
Prof. Amiya Bhushan Sharma is affiliated to the Department of English, Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. He may be contacted at sharma.amiya@gmail.com.
Prof. Amiya Bhushan Sharma is affiliated to the Department of English, Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. He may be contacted at sharma.amiya@gmail.com.
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‘The writer is indebted to the Pioneer and Civil and
Military Gazette’: Kipling, Newspapers, and Poetry
This paper takes its title quotation from the Contents
page of the first edition of Departmental Ditties (1886). It argues that
Kipling's polite notice of acknowledgement of the place of prior publication
for his poems may usefully also be read as an (unintentional) declaration of
literary indebtedness. In doing so, it takes up an invitation offered by Khwaja
Jamiludin in The Tropic Sun (1974).
Jamiludin asks us to imagine the impact on Kipling's literary work of his day
job in Lahore at the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) and, in particular, to
imagine the impact of his reuse of telegraphed news, concerning events all over
the world, to produce copy for the paper.
That impact, and Kipling's indebtedness, has been
examined by Matthew Rubery in terms of Kipling's prose in The Novelty of the News (2009). Rubery describes a Kipling
remarkably attuned and receptive to ways in which the traditions of personal
story-telling reshaped themselves, in the nineteenth century, through and
against an engagement with a “post-telegraphic world of impersonal intelligence
transmitted from an unseen source.” This paper sets out to examine that impact
and indebtedness in terms of Kipling's early poetry, which, though written in
India primarily for what would have then been termed the Anglo-Indian audience,
had also, through the subscription list of the CMG, an audience “up and down
the Empire from Aden to Singapore” (The
Idler, 1892).
Looking at the poems in their original places of
publication, my paper focuses on the importance of the newspaper as a poetic
medium for Kipling. It suggests that Kipling's work ‘repurposing’ telegrams
influenced a poetic style which sought to make itself as ‘newsworthy’ as
possible. On the level of the single poem, this involved the development of a
style suited to the medium, which prioritized the easily detachable, short
phrase whose summary nature, and popular, unlocalized, ‘British’ idioms lent
itself to quotation and re-use. On a more political level, Kipling sought to
exploit the immediate and intimate contact which newsprint offered to both give
a sense of Anglo-Indian society to itself, and to place it within a 'greater
Britain' based upon the imperial news network.
What is suggested, at least in terms of Kipling's
poetry, is that this early work at Lahore offered the first version of a style
that, while often dealing with local matters, aimed at a literary
internationalism – a style which would later become more transatlantically
inflected. Kipling sought, through newsprint, a new kind of global authorship.
Kipling's imperial politics, much studied within approaches influenced by
post-colonial studies, have remained in many ways curiously opaque.
This is certainly a result, in part, of the complexity
of his literary art. Hence, what I hope to show is that Kipling's imperialism
may be best understood not in terms of particular political positions, but more
generally as a product of his understanding of the political importance of
acquiring the widest, and yet most systematically intimate of readerships.
Dr. John Lee, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, has published widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, and more recently has been working on Kipling. Organizer of a multidisciplinary national conference (2010) on Kipling's 'The Absent-minded Beggar', and a related special issue of the Kipling Journal (2011), he is the author of the Kipling entry in Oxford Bibliographies Online (2013), and has published articles on Kipling in the Kipling Journal, Essays in Criticism (2013), and the Journal of Media History (2014). He can be contacted at j.lee@bristol.ac.uk.
Dr. John Lee, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, has published widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, and more recently has been working on Kipling. Organizer of a multidisciplinary national conference (2010) on Kipling's 'The Absent-minded Beggar', and a related special issue of the Kipling Journal (2011), he is the author of the Kipling entry in Oxford Bibliographies Online (2013), and has published articles on Kipling in the Kipling Journal, Essays in Criticism (2013), and the Journal of Media History (2014). He can be contacted at j.lee@bristol.ac.uk.
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“A great Knowability”: Fantasy as Ethnography in Kipling’s Short Fiction
This paper proposes to read the use of fantasy as a
mode of ethnographic knowledge production in Kipling's short fiction. It seeks to
examine a productive conjunction between figurative expression and ethnographic
epistemology, which the poetics of fantasy seems to enable, and which in turn
participates in the construction of a new form of what James Clifford calls
“ethnographic authority” (1983). Documenting a shift in ethnographic paradigms
at the beginning of the twentieth century, Clifford demonstrates how
ethnographic knowledge has been enmeshed in a struggle between the disciplinary
demands of scientific rationality on the one hand, and the contingencies of
subjective experience on the other. Culture as mapped via this conflicted
praxis far from being a stable construct, emerges as doubly mediated by the
phenomenology of embodied, sensory and affective encounters between
participants, as well as the technologies of recording and textualiation
through which cultural knowledge is materialized.
Taking its cue thus from this broad theoretical
paradigm of “writing cultures” (Clifford and Marcus: 1986), this paper seeks to
understand how literature might intervene in this disciplinary apparatus, extending
and questioning its historical nexus with forms of colonial rationality and
power, via a new regime of “knowability” signified by the irrational and the
phantasmatic. Kipling’s stories could be seen as a form of textual mediation that
complicates neat patterns of association between imperial power, cultural
alterity and ethnographic authority.
Kipling does this by drawing upon the primary
operative principle of fantasy – the making strange of the purportedly
familiar, what Rosemary Jackson has described as fantasy’s reduplication of ‘reality’
into primary and secondary worlds – and thus reintroducing the fraught question
of foreignness as a form of Freudian “unheimlich,”
an element of estrangement and radical otherness embedded within the boundaries
of the familiar. Using the resources of fantasy and its related fictional
modes, horror and macabre, Kipling orchestrates multiple ethnographic mise-en-scènes,
in which what is at stake is the transaction, interpretation and translation of
a particular kinds of knowledge based in a new understanding of topography,
cultural relations, natural and psychological phenomena.
Be it the haunted landscape of “The Phantom Carriage”
serving as a gateway to buried histories and attendant psychic retrievals in
the form of nostalgia, guilt or melancholia, or the pariah in “The Strange Ride
of Morrowbie Jukes,” provoking a category crisis between different orders of
distinction, or the appropriation of the discourse of natural history in Just so Stories, fantasy explodes the
semiotic codes of questionnaire, cartography, note-taking and classification
through which a cultural field is opened to knowledge.
Ms. Paromita Patranobish is a doctoral candidate with the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She may be contacted at paromita.patranobish1@gmail.com.
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Kipling, JLK and the visual politics of the beast fable
The conversation between literary and visual text in The Jungle Books and Just-so Stories opens up some of the many contexts within which
Kipling’s fiction operates. Lockwood Kipling (JLK) illustrates the first, and
Rudyard Kipling the second collection of stories, but both redraw lines of
complicity and resistance in relation to the colonial period in ways that are
difficult to predict and impossible to define. In this paper I hope to look at
their re-configurations of imperial rule, their shifting perspectives on
‘letting in the jungle’ and their insistence on re-negotiating the relationship
between fiction and illustration. Who is the reader after whom these two very
different people seek? Does the reader need to look at the visual evidence, or
to look away? What is the relationship between visibility and vulnerability that
develops as the beast fable constructs people, their surroundings, and the
structures of power within which they live out their lives? These are some of
the questions with which I hope to engage.
Prof. Christel R Devadawson is affiliated to the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She is the author of Out of line: Cartoons, caricature and contemporary India (Orient Blackswan 2014). A Cambridge-Nehru scholar for her Ph D, her thesis was published as Reading India, writing England: The fiction of Rudyard Kipling and E M Forster (Macmillan, 2005). She edited a critical anthology on A Passage to India with G. K. Das (Pencraft International, 2005) and Word, image text: Nature and time in literature and the visual arts with Shormishtha Panja and Shirshendu Chakrabarti (Orient Blackswan, 2009). She also edited Jane Eyre (Macmillan, 2000) and A Passage to India (Orient Longman, 2004). She may be contacted at christel.rashmi@gmail.com.
Prof. Christel R Devadawson is affiliated to the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She is the author of Out of line: Cartoons, caricature and contemporary India (Orient Blackswan 2014). A Cambridge-Nehru scholar for her Ph D, her thesis was published as Reading India, writing England: The fiction of Rudyard Kipling and E M Forster (Macmillan, 2005). She edited a critical anthology on A Passage to India with G. K. Das (Pencraft International, 2005) and Word, image text: Nature and time in literature and the visual arts with Shormishtha Panja and Shirshendu Chakrabarti (Orient Blackswan, 2009). She also edited Jane Eyre (Macmillan, 2000) and A Passage to India (Orient Longman, 2004). She may be contacted at christel.rashmi@gmail.com.
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Politics, Drama and Poetry: The Political Vision of W.B. Yeats as Reflected in Select Plays and Poems
Some of Yeats’s plays have dramatized political
issues, especially those embracing Irish nationalism, Politics, Drama and Poetry: The Political Vision of W.B. Yeats as Reflected in Select Plays and PoemsSome of Yeats’s plays have dramatized political issues, especially those embracing Irish nationalism, contemporary political intrigues and the rising tide of the native Catholic middle class protest against the traditional Protestant landed aristocracy. Both his plays and his politics have been subjected to incisive scrutiny, but not the political components in his plays. I will contrast the treatment of political themes in them to that in select ‘political’ poems which articulate similar concerns to highlight what is distinctive as also more shadowy, oblique and peripheral about the depiction of these issues in his drama. The plays to be analyzed are: The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan (written in collaboration with Lady Gregory), On Baile’s Strand, The Dreaming of the Bones and The Player Queen. They will be compared with several poems, including “September 1913,” “To a Shade,” “Easter 1916,” “On a Political Prisoner,” “Mediations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Parnell’s Funeral,” “Come gather round me, Parnellites,” “The Ghost of Roger Casement,” “On a Political Prisoner,” and “Sixteen Dead Men”.
Thanks to John O’Leary and Maud Gonne, Yeats got involved with Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and numerous political controversies, even as temperamentally he continued to abhor political activism. Although later he played an active role in the Irish Senate, he never wholeheartedly admired politicians and their profession. In his mind, there was always a certain ambivalence towards militant nationalism, especially armed rebellion against English colonial rule. Moreover, the desire to escape from the sordid reality into a world of fantasy struggled in his self with his political endeavours. Ironically, this appears to be more evident in his plays than in his “political” poems. It is also fascinating that his own works engage less with contemporary politics than some of the plays by Shaw, Synge and O’Casey mounted at the Abbey Theatre.
In my analysis of Yeats’s political vision, I will ask how his Protestant and somewhat genteel background shaped his “Tory” view of the Irish groups he despised: merchants, clerks, Catholic clergymen, and agitators and rabble rousers, especially the Whigs of all shades. Did the early influences of Nietzsche and secret mystical societies at all contribute to the formation of an elitist contempt for the masses? Further, Yeats’s interest in the occult and the esoteric, pagan and magical spirituality opened him to Indian religious thought, chiefly to its mysticism. Mme. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Mohini Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Purohit Swamy all made Indian philosophy, and to an extent Indian politics, fascinating to him. But in spite of significant parallels between the colonial Indian and Irish political situations, he did not set any play in India. He was not alone in this as none of the major Anglo-Irish playwrights, not even Shaw, chose Indian settings for their plays. Was this a result of the state of the Dublin and London theatres of his time? Perhaps the nature of Yeats’s dramatization of political issues in his plays was rooted in a mode of thinking and feeling based on duality, on counterpointing and balancing of opposites, on “a dialectical process of synthesis.”
Prof. Prashant K. Sinha is retired from the Department of English, University of Pune, India. He may be contacted at prashantsinha_2000@yahoo.com.
Thanks to John O’Leary and Maud Gonne, Yeats got involved with Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and numerous political controversies, even as temperamentally he continued to abhor political activism. Although later he played an active role in the Irish Senate, he never wholeheartedly admired politicians and their profession. In his mind, there was always a certain ambivalence towards militant nationalism, especially armed rebellion against English colonial rule. Moreover, the desire to escape from the sordid reality into a world of fantasy struggled in his self with his political endeavours. Ironically, this appears to be more evident in his plays than in his “political” poems. It is also fascinating that his own works engage less with contemporary politics than some of the plays by Shaw, Synge and O’Casey mounted at the Abbey Theatre.
In my analysis of Yeats’s political vision, I will ask how his Protestant and somewhat genteel background shaped his “Tory” view of the Irish groups he despised: merchants, clerks, Catholic clergymen, and agitators and rabble rousers, especially the Whigs of all shades. Did the early influences of Nietzsche and secret mystical societies at all contribute to the formation of an elitist contempt for the masses? Further, Yeats’s interest in the occult and the esoteric, pagan and magical spirituality opened him to Indian religious thought, chiefly to its mysticism. Mme. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Mohini Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Purohit Swamy all made Indian philosophy, and to an extent Indian politics, fascinating to him. But in spite of significant parallels between the colonial Indian and Irish political situations, he did not set any play in India. He was not alone in this as none of the major Anglo-Irish playwrights, not even Shaw, chose Indian settings for their plays. Was this a result of the state of the Dublin and London theatres of his time? Perhaps the nature of Yeats’s dramatization of political issues in his plays was rooted in a mode of thinking and feeling based on duality, on counterpointing and balancing of opposites, on “a dialectical process of synthesis.”
Prof. Prashant K. Sinha is retired from the Department of English, University of Pune, India. He may be contacted at prashantsinha_2000@yahoo.com.
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Songs of the Wandering Aengus: Echoes of the Political Yeats in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s The Habit of Fear
In discussing “Yeats and Decolonization” in Culture
and Imperialism, Edward Said writes: “His greatest theme, in the poetry
that culminates in The Tower (1928), is how to reconcile the inevitable
violence of the colonial conflict with the everyday politics of ongoing
national struggle” (Said 235). Although
Yeats has been considered, as Said asserts, “the indisputably great national
poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the
experiences, the aspirations and the restorative vision of a people suffering
under the domination of an offshore power” (Said 220), Yeats is seldom
portrayed or referenced in contemporary fiction, let alone detective fiction,
as a major influence on narratives. Despite the publication in 2002 of the
provocatively titled collective work Yeats is Dead (Vintage, 2002) in
which fifteen Irish novelists including Roddy Doyle and Gene Kerrigan each
contributed a chapter to a mystery novel
about a missing Joyce manuscript, it is really with Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s
overlooked novel The Habit of Fear (Scribners, 1987) that Yeats is used most
potently as a political as well as literary figure in keeping with Said’s
notion of him as a writer immersed in Irish “literary nationalism” (Said 236).
Indeed, as Davis’s title suggests, The Habit of
Fear is steeped in direct references to Yeats. The plot centres around the
search, in Ireland, of a New York reporter, Julie Hayes, who had just been
brutally raped by two Irishmen in New York, for her father, a nationalist poet
who abandoned her at birth. Yet, as soon as she is on Irish soil, Hayes becomes
embroiled in the conflicts of a series of ultra nationalist Irish organizations
including the Sin Fein, the “Provos” and the ONI (One Nation Indivisible). As
she tracks down the traces of her father, she discovers that his code name was
Aengus as she reads and quotes from the poem “The Song of the Wandering
Aengus”: “The golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon” (Davis
129). At one point, she visits Yeats’s grave in Sligo and tries to decode his
enigmatic epitaph “Cast a cold eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by” (Davis
182); she listens to a local rock group called the Wolfe Tones in echo of
Yeats’ “Sixteen Dead Men” in which he writes “How could you dream they’d listen
/ That have an ear alone / For those new comrades they have found, / Lord
Edward and Wolfe Tone,” and visits a monument to the fallen of the 1799
insurrection at Wicklow.
This paper will examine the numerous intertexts
between Davis’s The Habit of Fear and Yeats’ more political poems in
order to understand how Davis uses Yeats not only as a figurehead for the
confused nationalist agendas of the political groups she writes about in
Ireland but as the key to her protagonist Julie Haye’s personal quest for her
own sense of identity as well.
Prof. Peter Schulman is affiliated to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Old Dominion University, Virginia, United States of America. He is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern Eccentric (Purdue University Press, 2003) as well as Le dernier livre du siècle (Romillat, 2001) with Mischa Zabotin. He has edited a critical edition of Jules Verne's The Begum’s Millions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and recently translated Jules Verne's last novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (University of Nebraska Press. 2012) as well as Suburban Beauty from poet Jacques Reda (VVV editions, 2009) and Adamah from Céline Zins (Gival Press, 2010). He is currently co-editor in chief of a new journal of eco-criticism, Green Humanities and is at work on a book on French filmmaker Alain Resnais for the University of Mississippi Press. He may be contacted at pschulma@odu.edu.
Prof. Peter Schulman is affiliated to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Old Dominion University, Virginia, United States of America. He is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern Eccentric (Purdue University Press, 2003) as well as Le dernier livre du siècle (Romillat, 2001) with Mischa Zabotin. He has edited a critical edition of Jules Verne's The Begum’s Millions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and recently translated Jules Verne's last novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (University of Nebraska Press. 2012) as well as Suburban Beauty from poet Jacques Reda (VVV editions, 2009) and Adamah from Céline Zins (Gival Press, 2010). He is currently co-editor in chief of a new journal of eco-criticism, Green Humanities and is at work on a book on French filmmaker Alain Resnais for the University of Mississippi Press. He may be contacted at pschulma@odu.edu.
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The Laws of the Jungle and the Ways of Men: Problematics of Identity, Indianness and Imperialism in Mowgli the Frog
Though
there are many young readers who grew up reading Kipling and a few who
turned out to be authorities on Kipling in their adulthood, the writer
has been in general neglected as a children’s writer because of his
reputation as an imperialist and racist. John McClure had argued in 1981
that the Mowgli stories amount to “a fable of imperial education and
rule, with Mowgli behaving towards the beasts as the British do to the
Indians…To be above yet to belong, to be obeyed as a god and loved as a
brother, this is Kipling’s dream for the imperial ruler, a dream that
Mowgli achieves” (Booth 96).
Roger Lancelyn Green, on the other hand, argued that Kipling’s Jungle Books give
access to ‘universal’ resonances to the child reader that lasts a
lifetime. Lancelyn Green assumes that everyone has inhabited a ‘Jungle’
of childhood, at once wild and secure, in which he learns the Law by
which he will live when he leaves it, as he must if he is to become an
adult. Thus, Mowgli’s story can be ‘universal’ in the sense that he
invites identification as the ideal boy everybody would like to be. In
fact, earlier readers of Kipling’s writings saw the Jungle Books more simply, as a charmed world to which politics was irrelevant.
In my paper, I will try to go beyond mere ideological or imperialist readings of The Jungle Books by
using samples from the text that will show that the ‘Jungle laws’
follow no neo-Darwinian law of the survival of the fittest, but an
elaborate civil and criminal code that is dependent on wisdom that comes
from experience and a rich treasure-trove of jungle-lore, and the
transformation of Mowgli from the ‘frog’ to the alpha-male who will rule
both worlds (the animal and the human) because he is an alien to yet a
part of them.
Dr. Naina Dey teaches at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College (University of Calcutta). She writes for newspapers, books and academic journals. Her books include Macbeth: Critical Essays, Edward the Second: Critical Studies, Real and Imagined Women: The Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon, Representations of Women in George Eliot’s Fiction and her own book of poems Snapshots from Space and Other Poems. She has participated in workshops and presented papers in various colleges and universities throughout India. She is also a member of the guest faculty for P.G. course at Bhairab Ganguly College (West Bengal State University) and P.G. Dept. of English, University of Calcutta. She may be contacted at naina.dey@gmail.com.
Dr. Naina Dey teaches at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College (University of Calcutta). She writes for newspapers, books and academic journals. Her books include Macbeth: Critical Essays, Edward the Second: Critical Studies, Real and Imagined Women: The Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon, Representations of Women in George Eliot’s Fiction and her own book of poems Snapshots from Space and Other Poems. She has participated in workshops and presented papers in various colleges and universities throughout India. She is also a member of the guest faculty for P.G. course at Bhairab Ganguly College (West Bengal State University) and P.G. Dept. of English, University of Calcutta. She may be contacted at naina.dey@gmail.com.
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Transcending the Colonial: Around the Great Indian Empire with Kim and the Lama
Even though most Asian and African countries of the
world are politically free today, travel literature, especially when the writer
is a white European/American, continues to have colonial undertones and, in
some cases, overtones. It is a known fact that a traveller sees what he or she
wants to see and in this case the white traveller, man or woman, is looking for
something that will make him or her feel superior and, by contrast, the
indigenous person inferior. The same applies to films based on travel
experience, even ad films and one just has to watch channels like National
Geographical, Discovery and some others to substantiate the point made. The
explorer/traveller is always white and superior, confident, adequately clothed
and knows what to do whereas the local is at best a helper, maybe knowledgeable
to some extent, but never in charge.
Keeping this in mind, this paper proposes to look at
some of Rudyard Kipling’s travel writings along with the journey that Kim,
protagonist of the novel with the same title, undertook with the Lama, from
Lahore to Benaras through the length and breadth of undivided India.
Descriptive as well as exploratory on one level, these writings, penned at the
time when colonialism was at its peak in India and the first attempt by Indians
to free themselves had been ruthlessly quashed in 1857, are essentially
colonial, but somehow transcend the colonial spirit at times. This is possible
because of the fact that Kipling was born in India and spent some of his
happiest days growing up in this country when he was sent off to England to
have a proper English education and grooming, something that made him very
unhappy initially – till, at least, he got used to England. A reading of his
autobiographical writings substantiates this.
The purpose of such an investigation is to gently
refute the fact that the line between the colonial and the postcolonial was of
thinking is not as clearly demarcated and influenced by time as it is generally
assumed by academics. This is especially so in the case of Kipling, who is
taken as a strong believer in colonialism, whose lines “East is east and west
and never the twain shall meet” are held up as the ultimate in the colonial
mindset. This paper attempts to probe beyond this and touch upon what it
considers the transactional aspect of colonialism. This aspect of colonialism
is something that needs to be studied in order to throw new light on the
relation between coloniser and colonised.
Dr. Purabi Panwar is retired from the Department of English, College of Vocational Studies, University of Delhi, India. She may be contacted at panwarp@rediffmail.com.
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Mowgli, the Law of the Jungle and the Panchatantra
The Jungle Books written in the 1890s (Kipling’s American period so to speak) were, perhaps still are together with Kim, the most popular of Kipling’s works, mainly because of Mowgli, the baby abandoned in the jungle by his parents (terrified by the sudden advent of the tiger), reared by Father and Mother Wolf, mentored by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, who grows up to become Master of the Jungle. The Jungle Books are actually a collection of miscellaneous short stories with varied characters and settings but Kipling thought of them as stories about Mowgli who appears in eight of the fifteen stories in the two volumes. In the first volume the first three stories are about Mowgli; in the second volume the first four stories are about Mowgli and it concludes with the last Mowgli story, “The Spring Running,” in which he finally leaves the Jungle and the creatures he knows and loves. This paper argues that the Panchatantra (and the Jataka Tales) perhaps served also as the model for Kipling’s style in The Jungle Books and compares and contrasts The Jungle Book with the Panchtantra.
Prof. Mythili Kaul is retired from the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She may be contacted at mythilikaul@yahoo.co.in.
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Self-Delighting Soul: A Reading of Yeats’s “A Prayer for my Daughter” in the Light of Indian Philosophy
In this paper I contest the dominant feminist reading
of “A Prayer for my Daughter” as conservative and patriarchal. Performing a
close reading of stanzas 6-9, in conjunction with Yeats and Purohit Swami's
translation of the Upanishads, I focus on the tropes of the tree, the bird and
the source of abundance (Kamadhenu/Kalpavriksha/cornucopia), all of which I
trace both in Indian and in Western literature. I suggest that the prayer is as
much for the speaker as for his daughter, and that the gendering and
ungendering of the words "soul" and "self," along with
their conflation, invoke Western and Indian ways of conceiving reality, and work
to build a vision of freedom, autonomy and joy in the relation between the
individual and the universe.
Prof. Ruth Vanita, former Reader in English, University of Delhi, founding co-editor of Manushi from 1978 to 1991, is the author of several books, including Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000, with Kidwai), Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture (2005), and Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780-1870 (2012). She has translated many works of fiction and poetry from Hindi and Urdu to English. Her next book will be on Bombay cinema. She teaches at the University of Montana, Montana, United States of America and divides her time between Gurgaon and Missoula. She can be contacted at Ruth.Vanita@mso.umt.edu.
Prof. Ruth Vanita, former Reader in English, University of Delhi, founding co-editor of Manushi from 1978 to 1991, is the author of several books, including Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000, with Kidwai), Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture (2005), and Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780-1870 (2012). She has translated many works of fiction and poetry from Hindi and Urdu to English. Her next book will be on Bombay cinema. She teaches at the University of Montana, Montana, United States of America and divides her time between Gurgaon and Missoula. She can be contacted at Ruth.Vanita@mso.umt.edu.
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W.B. Yeats and Hinduism: The Universal Philosophy
The universal symbolism of the Vedas has been
convincingly demonstrated by authorities of as different psychological and
cultural orientations as Sri Aurobindo, the philosopher mystic on the one hand,
and Anglo-Indian scholars like Coomarswamy on the other. Unsurprisingly, W.B.
Yeats, like many Western philosophers and poets was not untouched by this
universal philosophy. Yeats, however, was in search of ‘unity of being’ a much
more comprehensive concept. He seems to subordinate everything to the life of
imagination, to an aesthetic and heroic vision of life. His belief in poetry being
a form of knowledge and power takes one to Vedic philosophy, as this conviction
has been axiomatic to Indian culture from the Vedas up to Sir Aurobindo.
‘The religion of the self’, which the Upanishads
propounded and the poet of Gita
lifted to the level of a triumphant exultant song, was, as F.A.C. Wilson has demonstrated,
“Yeats’s own religion, though it had its subsidiary roots in European tradition
itself.” Yeats met India through personalities in three successive waves
marking the early, middle and last phases of his life. It was through Mohini
Chatterjee that Yeats was introduced to the Bhagavad
Gita and also to that Samkaric philosophy. His second encounter was with
Rabindranath Tagore, which fortified him in his resolve to revive the spirit of
Ireland. The third and the most important Indian Influence was that of Purohit Swami,
who not only gave him the much needed support for building up his theories
about the progress of the soul the progress of civilization. Accordingly, this
paper tries to explain Yeats’s theory of the soul and religion of the self in
the light of the poems “Mohini Cahatterjee”, “Vacillation”, “The Indian to his
Love” and “The Indian upon God”.
Ms. Ambri Shukla is a Research Scholar with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. She may be contacted at ambri.s@rediffmail.com.
Dr. Shuchi Srivastava is an Associate Professor with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. She may be contacted at ambri.s@rediffmail.com.
Ms. Ambri Shukla is a Research Scholar with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. She may be contacted at ambri.s@rediffmail.com.
Dr. Shuchi Srivastava is an Associate Professor with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. She may be contacted at ambri.s@rediffmail.com.
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Redefining
the Body of Censorship: Reading Rudyard Kipling’s Indian Short Stories
(1888-1902)
More than any other writer of British India, Rudyard
Kipling epitomises what Trinh-Minh-ha called “both-in-one insider/outsider
tendencies”, the perspective which makes his work straddle between different
and multiple allegiances. Born in Bombay, a white, pro-imperialist yet at the
same time sceptical of imperial designs, Kipling registers ambivalence in his
writings which provides crucial insights on the cross-cultural encounter
between the colonizers and the colonized. This paper investigates the role of
censorship in Kipling’s short stories in epitomising this highly fraught
terrain of colonial encounter. If writing is unspeakably concerned with
portraying truth, his Indian short stories (1880-1902) reveal an ambiguous
space of vitalizing his writing as symbolic of being a hybrid object of
interracial origins. Concerned overtly with power and identity, these stories
encompass an ideologically contested embodiment of an imperial critique.
This paper attempts to examine the relationship
between writing, agency and the body and how language or words define and shape
the world. How words in their remoteness and abstractness connotes the material
world in all its complexity. Moving beyond the inescapable perspective of
Kipling as a children’s writer, his stories signify an agency and political
responsibility through the contours of the body and their conflicting
relationship with censorship, prohibition and retribution. His stories embody a
pluralistic account of the negotiation and transaction that took place on
account of the colonial encounter, one which enables to examine how the
transmutation of language sought to recover a world in all its myriad
complexity. This paper in reading the words on the page argue for a nuanced
account of the relationship between writing, body and political responsibility,
to propose a profoundly complex articulation of a writer’s concern with
language and the networks of power.
Ms. Indrani Das Gupta is a Research Scholar with the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, India. She may be contacted at ranid66@ymail.com.
Ms. Indrani Das Gupta is a Research Scholar with the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, India. She may be contacted at ranid66@ymail.com.
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Of combatants and non-combatants: Rudyard Kipling’s short stories of the First World War
That war is a lamentable ingredient in human experience is an idea which was established in collective consciousness by the poets of the First World War, and subsequently reinforced by Frederick Manning in his extraordinary fictionalized account of his experiences in the trenches in Her Privates We (1930). British historical writing on the subject of war has been strongly influenced by Whig, liberal and pacifistic ideological prejudices against war, guided by assumptions that war interrupts what Lionel Trilling, in Britain and Her Army: A Military, Political and Social Survey (1970), calls “a “natural” condition of peace.”
However, Rudyard Kipling's understanding of war tends to dismiss as despicably illusory the attitudes and responses of liberal-pacifism; his writings on war address the stark realities of power and conflict. Accordingly, this paper looks at some of Kipling's short stories following the Great War, written between 1915 and 1932, from two different, though related perspectives. First, it examines some essential differences in style between these fictional works on one hand, and, on the other, the compilation of record and personal reminiscences that led to the publication of The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923), a ‘history’ of mammoth proportions. This non-fictional work focuses on the tribulations of soldiership and directly addresses the subject of war, but the stories, while retaining war as a theme and a constant point of reference, cast only elliptical glances at actual battle experience. The attention shifts from the soldiers to the non-combatant bereaved, from men in action to people reflecting on that action in tranquillity. Secondly, the paper examines the perspectives of the women in these stories, particularly the ambivalence experienced by women who sent sons, husbands and lover off to war. This was an ambivalence that Kipling understood well since he himself remained on the home front during the war and lost his son, John, to it. The intensely drawn portraits of women in stories such as “Swept and Garnished”, “Mary Postgate”, and “The Gardener” suggest not only the national propaganda that was working against women during the First World War, but also, in more psychological terms, a private warfront-homefront dichotomy within feminine experience in a world torn by war and governed by patriarchal codes.
Dr. Subhajit Sengupta is an Associate Professor with the Department of English and Culture Studies, University of Burdwan, India. He has an abiding interest in the works of Shakespeare and has worked on the Renaissance. He may be contacted at subhajits2000@gmail.com.
Dr. Subhajit Sengupta is an Associate Professor with the Department of English and Culture Studies, University of Burdwan, India. He has an abiding interest in the works of Shakespeare and has worked on the Renaissance. He may be contacted at subhajits2000@gmail.com.
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War and sexuality in Kipling’s The Light That Failed
The paper deals with two critical themes – War and Sexuality – in Kipling’s oblique and minor fiction – The Light That Failed that has failed to create a niche for itself in the literary world. These two themes interest me for not just that they represent the colonial policy of England and cultural codes on which the British Empire grounded but their representation and forces that encourage Kipling to incorporate them. Kipling expresses his faith in a war artist, who enables Englishmen to understand the problems and anxieties of soldiers at the front line, though his earlier and more famous fiction – Plain Tales of the Hill – has a host of diverse characters from all spheres of life and society. The issue of sexuality interests me for the only reason that Kipling has left alone the reader to interpret the relationships between characters. My argument is that Kipling believes in normative gender bonding between men and women though the voices of same gender relationships could be heard of. Through the same gender bonding, he exemplifies that this kind of relationships are against the principles of British Empire and will never be legitimized.
Mr. Chetan is an Assistant Professor with the Department of English, Bharati College, University of Delhi. He may be contacted at chetansain@gmail.com.
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Kipling and Yeats as Contrasting Heirs of Shakespeare
This paper presents and analyses the contrasting modes
of reception of Shakespeare's writing by two of his literary admirers who,
although late Victorian in many ways, did not identify completely with British
values of the time because of their geographical and subtly ideological
distance from London. The Anglo-Irish Yeats absorbed the influence of Shakespeare
into his own creative ‘working house of thought’, transmuting the half echoes
into his characteristic poetic idiom and world view. Professor Rupin Desai has
dealt thoroughly with the way Yeats quotes and uses Shakespeare in his poetry,
in his magisterial study published by Northwestern University Press, and my
task is the more modest one of observing the creative adaptation at close hand
in Yeats's play Purgatory. Meanwhile,
observing from a greater distance but in some ways a more adulatory stance,
Kipling was more interested in biographical speculation about where
Shakespeare's own creativity welled from. We can see the fruits of Kipling's
thoughts on the matter in various works including “Proofs of Holy Writ”, his
accounts of The Tempest, and other
sources. The destination of the paper is an appreciation of the vastly
different and often discrepant ways in which Shakespeare has been appropriated
by later creative writers who achieved eminence in their own rights.
Prof. Robert. S. White is Program Leader of the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Western Australia, Australia. He may be contacted at bob.white@uwa.edu.au.
Prof. Robert. S. White is Program Leader of the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Western Australia, Australia. He may be contacted at bob.white@uwa.edu.au.
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Chaps: Kipling, Yeats, and the empire of men
Chap is a curious word. A dictionary may settle it
down a fissure or a crack in the skin, or as a fellow, a boy, or a man. Those
who have perused with any degree of satisfaction a type of British literature
of the latter decades of the nineteenth century or the first half of the
twentieth, or who have been in a certain type of educational establishments in
the twentieth century, will easily identify the latter as the meaning they
relate to. Nonetheless, the former is insightful: chap may be a fellow, a boy,
or a man, but it may also be a fissure or a crack.
It is in this latter sense, as a fissure or a crack,
that chap becomes useful for the post-colonial scholar. Victoria’s barely
British empire was run, as is well known, by chaps of all kinds, a certain
breed of more or less insular, inward looking, near-schizophrenic men who
lugged through real and imaginary horrors for the betterment of their God and
his favourite country. The fashioning of these cracks, or fissures, is, then, a
significant point of entry for any study into the politics, illusions, and
delusions of the British empire: these chaps were often trained,
institutionally, to be the men that their empire expected them to be, and an
integral part of such grooming was, as is well-known, a host of chap-py
literature.
This paper intends to study just such literature.
While a considerable number of studies on this topic, the construction of
Victorian imperial masculinity that is, have focussed on so-called boys’
literature, this paper intends to extend the framework of chap-py-ness from
beyond the familiar confines of the typical Tom Brown’s typical school to literariness
of a more quotidian, as well as a more esoteric, nature. This is to say that in
keeping with the framework of the proposed conference, it intends to study the
chap-py-ness in the works of both Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats, and
consider how their notions of masculine virility inform their respective
choices of genre and of narrative styles as and when it masculinity and empire figure
predominantly as a theme. Kipling, though supposedly a largely self-appointed
spokesperson of the Raj, was often not schizophrenic enough to not be able to
condone it, and Yeats, one of the kingdom-turned-empire’s less unfortunate
victims, was still, perhaps, imperial in his stylistics, mannerisms, and
ambitions. Hence, the fact that Kipling and Yeats were on different sides of
the British empire’s faultlines will also be taken into consideration by this
paper as it ruminates on the kind of men which Kipling and Yeats addressed
their writing to, and, hence, the kind of interventions which they sought to be
made in the empire by these men. The ability of these writings to provoke by
virtue of their narrativites their respective, not entirely insular,
chap-py-nesses across such disparate genres as, amongst others, children’s
literature, journalism, symbolist poetry, and travel writing will be commented
upon in conclusion by this paper.
Ipshita Nath is a doctoral candidate working on the postcolonial representations of memshabibs under the supervision of Prof. Nishat Zaidi in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Her research interests come under the rubric of Cultural Studies, though she has an abiding fondness for the textual mythologies of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and nineteenth century British and American novelists. She occasionally indulges herself in écriture poesy, enjoys the music of Kumar and Burman, is as fascinated by the persona of Marilyn Monroe as by the works of Botticelli and Michelangelo, has an enduring passion for bi-chromatic American, Bengali and Hindi cinema and would like to get hold of a time-traveller to hop in to the ‘20s and the ‘70s. She may be contacted at ipshita1nath1@gmail.com.
Anubhav Pradhan is a doctoral candidate working on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India under the supervision of Dr. Baran Farooqi in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi; he is also working as an Assistant Professor with the Department of English, Bharati College, University of Delhi. He enjoys walking, reading, writing, armchair debating and has a few other hobbies like gardening, photography, coin collecting and philately in which he indulges occasionally. He is interested in the production, conception and dissemination of cultural artefacts, fashions himself a bourgeois Marxist and a misogynist Feminist, and is a strong votary of sustainable development and the preservation of Delhi’s (in)tangible heritage from ruthless development. He may be contacted at anubhav.pro18@gmail.com.
Ipshita Nath is a doctoral candidate working on the postcolonial representations of memshabibs under the supervision of Prof. Nishat Zaidi in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Her research interests come under the rubric of Cultural Studies, though she has an abiding fondness for the textual mythologies of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and nineteenth century British and American novelists. She occasionally indulges herself in écriture poesy, enjoys the music of Kumar and Burman, is as fascinated by the persona of Marilyn Monroe as by the works of Botticelli and Michelangelo, has an enduring passion for bi-chromatic American, Bengali and Hindi cinema and would like to get hold of a time-traveller to hop in to the ‘20s and the ‘70s. She may be contacted at ipshita1nath1@gmail.com.
Anubhav Pradhan is a doctoral candidate working on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India under the supervision of Dr. Baran Farooqi in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi; he is also working as an Assistant Professor with the Department of English, Bharati College, University of Delhi. He enjoys walking, reading, writing, armchair debating and has a few other hobbies like gardening, photography, coin collecting and philately in which he indulges occasionally. He is interested in the production, conception and dissemination of cultural artefacts, fashions himself a bourgeois Marxist and a misogynist Feminist, and is a strong votary of sustainable development and the preservation of Delhi’s (in)tangible heritage from ruthless development. He may be contacted at anubhav.pro18@gmail.com.
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Yeats and Kipling: Parallels, Divergences, and Convergences
Despite radically divergent political and aesthetic
objectives at the commencement of their careers as writers, later the literary
paths of William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling converged at moments, each
seemingly imbibing from the other valuable pointers that they incorporated in
their work. This paper examines these overlappings and suggests that
alongside obvious differences of concern, there was an undercurrent of sympathy
between them, especially in the assimilation of India in their thought. While
Yeats mentions Kipling several times with varying attitudes, Kipling – as far
as my survey goes – never directly mentions Yeats, though I do suggest that
there is at least one instance of what might seem to be an oblique reference to
the early work of Yeats – slightly ironic and disparaging – around the time
when Kipling visited Canada in 1907. Further, in the last decade of his
life Yeats included two poems of Kipling in his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935, and regretted that he
could not include more on account of the prohibitively expensive copyright
charges then prevalent.
What could have been the reasons for Yeats having
chosen these two poems? Could he have been influenced by Kipling's Lama
in Kim, since Yeats, too, was
involved with Bhagwan Shri Hamsa and his pilgrimage up to Lake
Mansarowar? And, reciprocally, did Kipling imbibe from Yeats the tinge of
mysticism in stories like "They" and "The Gardener" that he
wrote after the deaths of his daughter Josephine in 1899 and his son John in
1915? These are some of the questions my paper addresses.
Prof. Rupin W. Desai is retired from the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. He may be contacted at desairupin@yahoo.in.
Prof. Rupin W. Desai is retired from the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. He may be contacted at desairupin@yahoo.in.
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