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.
The fantastic
as a mode of inquiry thus becomes a locus of privileged access, in which the
fantasist imperial ‘insider’ participates in a critical ethnography facilitated
by a non-official, sympathetic association with the phantasmatic ‘secrets’ of
the land, but one whose tendency towards any kind of imperious closure and
fetishization of its object is also ironically treated, critiqued and prevented
through a series of narrative sleights. The ethnographic reduction is thus
perpetually deferred by the very unstable nature of the phantasmatic conditions
of its production.
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.
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.