Read Online The Wish House and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rudyard Kipling
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assessed.) ‘The Killers’ is a classic story in its open-endedness, culminating with Ole Andreson stretched on his bed, resigned to his eventual fate for some undisclosed offence.
Early Kipling is often anecdotal in the Maupassant manner, but whereas Maupassant felt constrained by the form and eventually did his best work in the novels
Bel-Ami
and
Une Vie
, Kipling made a virtue out of the limitation imposed on him by the form. By employing narrators, he was able to squeeze more into the story.
Plain Tales from the Hills
employs a catch-phrase that finally becomes irritating – ‘But that is another story’ – yet it serves as an index of Kipling’s awareness of the constraints of his chosen medium. Late Kipling, however, circumvents the difficulty. M. Voiron, for example, in ‘The Bull that Thought’, narrates a story which takes place over a number of years, but because he is a character he is allowed to edit his material openly: ‘And next year,’ he says, ‘through some chicane which I have not the leisure to unravel…’ An author could not permit himself this transition which amounts to the phrase, ‘to cut a long story short’. Kipling’s narrators allow him, without breach of decorum, to ramble, to re-cap, to circle, to back-track, to anticipate, as real people do, and therefore to deal with long periods of time over a short space. The narrators, too, permit Kipling to avoid explanation, where necessary, because the responsibility for the story appears to rest with them, the author’s role being that of auditor. In this way, Kipling crams into the short story the substance of a full-length novel, while the privilege of occlusion is retained.
‘Mrs Bathurst’ is probably the most notorious example of these techniques at work, though ‘“The Finest Story in the World’” employs them too. The narrative in the latter is, as the Kipling-figure remarks, ‘a maddening jumble’. Charlie Mears can remember not just one previous existence but two, which, in his mind, are inseparable. In fact, as the narrator finally realizes, each tale told separately would be banal: ‘The adventures of a Viking had been written many times before; the history of a Greek galley-slave wasno new thing.’ The details are luminous because they are deprived of a coherent setting and context. They exist in the dark-inexplicable and end-stopped – hence their potency. ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ further illustrates the point: for most of its length, Kipling re-visits the theme of self-haunting. (Despite his often-repeated determination never to repeat himself, he had already touched on this in ‘At the End of the Passage’: ‘the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself.’) After Parrenness has donated his trust in men and women, and his boy’s soul and conscience, to the dream-presence of his older self, he is left with his reward – ‘When the light came I made shift to behold his gift, and saw that it was a little piece of dry bread.’ Perhaps this piece of dry bread alludes to Matthew 4:4 (‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’), thus illustrating the nature of his transaction, the swap of morality for materialism. Perhaps it alludes to ‘the bread of affliction’. Either is possible. Reading the story, however, the image is strangely satisfying in itself. It tells, and tells profoundly, without explaining itself. It is the man, this shrivelled piece of bread, and hardly needs the Bible to underpin it.
At the centre of ‘Mrs Bathurst’ is another famously baffling image, which once read is never forgotten: two tramps, one squatting, one standing, by the dead-end of a railway siding in South Africa.
‘There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see – charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to
Early Kipling is often anecdotal in the Maupassant manner, but whereas Maupassant felt constrained by the form and eventually did his best work in the novels
Bel-Ami
and
Une Vie
, Kipling made a virtue out of the limitation imposed on him by the form. By employing narrators, he was able to squeeze more into the story.
Plain Tales from the Hills
employs a catch-phrase that finally becomes irritating – ‘But that is another story’ – yet it serves as an index of Kipling’s awareness of the constraints of his chosen medium. Late Kipling, however, circumvents the difficulty. M. Voiron, for example, in ‘The Bull that Thought’, narrates a story which takes place over a number of years, but because he is a character he is allowed to edit his material openly: ‘And next year,’ he says, ‘through some chicane which I have not the leisure to unravel…’ An author could not permit himself this transition which amounts to the phrase, ‘to cut a long story short’. Kipling’s narrators allow him, without breach of decorum, to ramble, to re-cap, to circle, to back-track, to anticipate, as real people do, and therefore to deal with long periods of time over a short space. The narrators, too, permit Kipling to avoid explanation, where necessary, because the responsibility for the story appears to rest with them, the author’s role being that of auditor. In this way, Kipling crams into the short story the substance of a full-length novel, while the privilege of occlusion is retained.
‘Mrs Bathurst’ is probably the most notorious example of these techniques at work, though ‘“The Finest Story in the World’” employs them too. The narrative in the latter is, as the Kipling-figure remarks, ‘a maddening jumble’. Charlie Mears can remember not just one previous existence but two, which, in his mind, are inseparable. In fact, as the narrator finally realizes, each tale told separately would be banal: ‘The adventures of a Viking had been written many times before; the history of a Greek galley-slave wasno new thing.’ The details are luminous because they are deprived of a coherent setting and context. They exist in the dark-inexplicable and end-stopped – hence their potency. ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ further illustrates the point: for most of its length, Kipling re-visits the theme of self-haunting. (Despite his often-repeated determination never to repeat himself, he had already touched on this in ‘At the End of the Passage’: ‘the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself.’) After Parrenness has donated his trust in men and women, and his boy’s soul and conscience, to the dream-presence of his older self, he is left with his reward – ‘When the light came I made shift to behold his gift, and saw that it was a little piece of dry bread.’ Perhaps this piece of dry bread alludes to Matthew 4:4 (‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’), thus illustrating the nature of his transaction, the swap of morality for materialism. Perhaps it alludes to ‘the bread of affliction’. Either is possible. Reading the story, however, the image is strangely satisfying in itself. It tells, and tells profoundly, without explaining itself. It is the man, this shrivelled piece of bread, and hardly needs the Bible to underpin it.
At the centre of ‘Mrs Bathurst’ is another famously baffling image, which once read is never forgotten: two tramps, one squatting, one standing, by the dead-end of a railway siding in South Africa.
‘There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see – charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to
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