Friday, October 9, 2015

Hearing men talk of their own work - even if the men are horses and the work is polo

She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work, and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.  (“William the Conqueror”)

There are not many women in The Day’s Work, but William makes up for a lot.  She is the strongest of strong Female Characters.

Twice she had been nearly drowned while fording a river; once she had been run away with on a camel; had witnessed a midnight attack of thieves on her brother’s camp; had seen justice administered, with long sticks, in the open under trees; could speak Urdu and even rough Punjabi with a fluency that was envied by her seniors; had entirely fallen out of the habit of writing to her aunts in England, or cutting the pages of the English magazines; had been through a very bad cholera year, seeing sights unfit to be told; and had wound up her experiences by six weeks of typhoid fever, during which her head had been shaved and hoped to keep her twenty-third birthday that September.

Despite her masculinity, she is a man-killer, only partly because she is a rarity, a young, single English woman living with an army.  She could “look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes — even after they had proposed to her and been rejected.”

The story is about the man, Scott, who finally conquers her, and vice versa.  He does it by doing his duty under extraordinary circumstances, a South Indian famine (William of course does her duty as well).  In its description of meaningful work, the story is quite similar to “The Devil and the Deep Sea.”  Scott is not trying to straighten a bent rod but keep children alive when he is shipped wheat rather than rice.

What was the use of these strange hard grains that choked their throat?  They would die.

I do not remember reading any such thing, but I assume that there is a contemporary fiction of famine, stories of aid workers delivering powdered milk and Plumpy’Nut.  I doubt there was such a thing before “William the Conqueror.”  Kipling, like his hero and heroine, has to come up with solutions on his own.

Amidst the famine, and despite the characters barely meeting, a love story moves along, its apotheosis the moment that William is given a vision of Scott as a god, a moment that she is only granted because she herself is a goddess.  But this is mythic-Kipling, not Kipling-at-work, which here is “feeding babies and milking goats.”

As odd as it seems, “The Maltese Cat,” a detailed description of a polo match, is also structured much like the rebuilding of the engine or the administration of famine relief.  For the players, it is a series of difficult problems to be solved with great effort and at great risk.  The players in this case are the horses – the story is mostly from the perspective of the title character, the captain of the horses.  For the length of the story, the game is their work.

I am having trouble finding a quotation that does not make the story seem ludicrous.  It’s a polo match; the characters are horses (one name here belongs to a human):

Corks was watching the ball where it lay in the dust close to his near fore with Macnamara’s shortened stick tap-tapping it from time to time.  Kittiwynk was edging her way out of the scrimmage, whisking her stump of a tail with nervous excitement.

As with any story about sports, at least when it is not your sport, and mostly even when it is, the question that is hard to answer is “Who cares?”  I mean, it does not really matter who wins any polo match, much less a fictional one.  But here I found myself chasing the ball around the field, caring mostly about what Kipling was doing with his prose.  “It was as neat an exhibition as fancy figureskating.”

28 comments:

  1. 'the question that is hard to answer is “Who cares?” '

    That's the problem - my problem, anyway - with Kipling: even more than his opinions and attitudes - is there any other great writer so intent on telling us what we should think and how? - there is his delight in his technical virtuosity. It's like a piano composition that consists of nothing but cadenzas.

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  2. It is a serious criticism of Kipling, more clearly foregrounded in this book than in any of his I have read, more even than in its novel-length cousin Captains Courageous.

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  3. Roger, you're in good company:
    BIOY CASARES: "One of the great injustices —and one that's almost inexplicable— of literature is that after reading "The most beautiful history of the world", "The Church that was at Antioch", "Wireless", someone may not find their author prodigious.
    BORGES: "Maybe people guessed that behind these invocations hid some propaganda in favor of Rhodes or something like that, and they refused to allow themselves to be moved by it."
    BORGES: This rejection of Kipling should not be exclusively due to his political views; through his stories the people could perceive an extremely unpleasant man.".
    BIOY: "An extraordinary machine capable of astonishing inventions, of unequalled intelligence and prodigious eloquence...".
    BORGES: "...totally incapable of feelings as simple as compassion and tenderness [...], Kipling was continuously inventing new things. Perhaps Kipling will finally get the recognition he deserves: people today like unpleasant stuff and ugliness; Kipling provides both hand over fist".

    Don't be fooled by those rough comments, though; Borges in private was an extremely exacting critic, for example:
    BORGES: "I find this extremely ironic: while Kipling was writing all those wonderful stories of his later years, no critic even acknowledged them; instead all of them admired the idiotic Dubliners nonsense.

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  4. Joyce thought Kipling was the most naturally talented of his contemporaries.

    It's curious to compare Kipling and Saki: reactionary in attitude, nihilistic in many ways, turning away from humans to things (in Kipling's case) and animals, virtuosos in their stories, inhuman and inhumane much of the time, but sometimes capable of enormous compassion. Both were the products of their horrible - terrifying - childhoods, I'm sure, perhaps even in their talents as well as their attitudes. .

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  5. A big difference:Dubliners turned out to be useful for later writers, to the point that "epiphany" stories became a bit of a plague on the form. Much of Kipling (or Saki) must be harder to absorb or imitate without actually being a writer like Kipling. The Jungle Book and Just-So Stories I take as more evidence of this idea - writers for children did figure out how to use these books.

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    1. AR(T) you're absolutely right. At the summit of his powers, Borges claimed to be writing a short story in the same mold as Kipling's The Wish House, but about Judas and Jesus; seemingly he failed to finish it. 25 years later, an older and wiser Borges wrote: "Late Kipling stories are no less labyrinthine or harrowing than Kafka's or James', and they are certainly superior; but in 1885, at Lahore, Kipling began writing a series of brief tales in a direct style. Not a few of them- "In the House of Suddhoo", "Beyond the Pale", "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" - are laconic masterpieces; I once thought that what has been conceived and executed by a young prodigy can be modestly copied by an old learned hand. The fruit of this reflection is this volume [Dr. Brodie's Report]."

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  6. Dubliners was undoubtedly useful to later writers - though if I encounter another bloody epiphany I will scream - but Ulysses and Finnegans Wake had disastrous effects on later writers.

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    1. That's some claim! What disastrous effects do you mean?

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    2. I was thinking especially of Faulkner and Anthony Burgess. However, I was unfair in that - as Doug Skinner pointed out - people can be influenced by learning what not to do as well as what they try to do.

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    3. I guessed wrong. I thought the answer was going to be "obscurantism." Although we have moved past the bad Joycean period, I think. Today's obscurantism has to be blamed on someone else.

      I should defend Faulkner - there was period where I read almost everything he wrote - but in fact I greatly prefer him when he is at his clearest and sharpest, as in As I Lay Dying. He was always following his muse, I can defend him that way.

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    4. I was also expecting an obscurantism answer. Faulkner and Burgess, though. I'll have to think about that and have another look at Absalom, Absalom. I knew that Burgess was a fan of Finnegans Wake but I guess I haven't read enough of him to see any kind of influence.

      Certainly there are writers working today who are trying to use ideas from Joyce: John Gardner's Grendel starts to mix forms most of the way through, to poor effect. I think that Harding's Tinkers is formally influenced by Ulysses and is not a good novel, though I think that the failures of people attempting to follow Joyce would have been failures anyway, because what's really lacking are ideas about humanity, not ideas about narrative structure. Still, yes, some stinko novels. I don't know what Burgess Roger refers to, though.

      A fine unexpected answer; I'm so glad I asked.

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    5. It's funny that "Ulysses" was originally stigmatized as too wild and obscene, and is now often stigmatized as too intellectual and pretentious. I guess that shows the change in the culture. I don't know of anyone who really took inspiration from "Finnegans Wake," except the minor (and endearing) poet Abraham Lincoln Gillespie. who devoted himself to Joycean puns and neologisms. But perhaps there are hidden influences, just as Joyce used Vico and Lewis Carroll for FW, which would have probably surprised both of them.

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    6. Burgess belongs on the list. A Clockwork Orange is the Wake at a lower reading level.

      Wait, he literally rewrote Finnegans Wake at one point, didn't he? A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1966). So, definitely Burgess.

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    7. Burgess, of course! I know his tabloid FW, but haven't read "A Clockwork Orange" (or seen the movie). I didn't know it was influenced by FW.

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    8. I can see Clockwork Orange as a version of Ulysses, but I don't see Finnegans Wake there.

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    9. Graham Swift's Waterland is a watered-down Wake, though.

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    10. Finnegans Wake with just one additional language and without all of the references to rivers.

      You're not thinking of the story in any way are you? I'm not!

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    11. You ignore Burgess' claim that he invented the language so that his teenage hooligans would sound like hooligans, with their own slang? You think he did it to mildly copy Joyce's methods? Some of the puns in Nadsat remind me of the puns in FW, yeah. The humor there is the same, or pretty similar. You must be something more than this, though, right?

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    12. Something more - not really! Is the argument with the phrase "CO is the Wake at etc."? In that phrase "is" means "employs some of the techniques of," not "equates with" or "is a version of."

      It's the other direction, right? Burgess mildly copied Joyce's methods in order to invent convincing slang.

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    13. Yes, "is" was my ish. I could easily believe that Burgess was inspired by Joyce's use of language to invent Alex's slang, sure. Technical stuff like this is the easiest thing to steal from another writer, especially if your aims are smaller than those of the guy you steal from.

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    14. Ha, I figured it out! A triumph of close reading (of my own writing).

      Wait'll you see what I do to Portrait of a Lady next week. "Technical stuff is the easiest thing to write blog posts about especially if etc."

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    15. Decades ago, after reading that badly aged analysis of Finnegans Wake, The Devil's Language, I began writing a picaresque version of Faust in which Mephistopheles corrupted a series of characters throughout history (William Blake being one of his victims). Mephistopheles spoke in a creole of multiple languages and, being a playful guy, he was continuously uttering bad puns in many languages (e.g., a mono can confuse a sugoi goy with a monosugoi guy, or so i' gois Kong Fu-tzu's old cant).

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    16. Ambitious. I like it. It explains a lot.

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    17. Joyce's Bellsybabble (Beelzebub's babble or the devil's language) has also inspired real writers like Arno Schmidt or Burgess.

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    18. Ah, Arno Schmidt. I have never quite dared him.

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  7. It's a perverse aspect of literary history, that the freaks end up neglected, although with luck occasionally rediscovered.

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  8. Influence doesn't always mean imitation. Both Beckett and Flann O'Brien were strongly influenced by Joyce, which for them meant steering clear of his territory. That's how it works sometimes.

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  9. Right, not just imitation. The more imitative works are the ones that sink away soon enough.

    There is some alchemy of artistic sensibility at work here, some kind of transformation, where in the end Beckett and Borges sound only like themselves, no matter what substances went into the alembic.

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