“The Man Who Would be King” (R. Kipling)

The End of the 19th- Century

The End of the Nineteenth Century

Victorian Age: a mixture of optimism, doubt, and guilt;

“Improved standard of decency and morality; self-satisfaction engendered by the great increase of wealth, the prosperity of the nation as a whole, and the immense industrial and scientific development; conscious rectitude and deficient sense of humour; an unquestioning acceptance of authority and orthodoxy” (Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature).

Literary Movements:

Naturalism: more pseudoscientific in its approach and more concerned with degraded and often sordid levels of human existence than realism;

The French School: Zola (literature as branch of social science; novel to study society as chemist studies components in test-tube) and Taine (race + environment + time);

England: Thomas Hardy (novels marked by deep deterministic pessimism, poetry carries naturalism into modern era).

Symbolism: rejection of bourgeois-capitalistic materialism and the realistic literature growing out of it;

France: Mallarmé and Verlaine; Symbolists’ aims: to extirpate all narrative,

exposition, and didacticism from poetry to form each poem around a single image or sensation, and to utilize the newly-discovered subconscious associations of the human mind to lead the reader along the path from the concrete to the intangible, a conscious cult of beauty for its own sake, and an obsession with sensory or erotic experience.

Other Influences

Charles Darwin: evolution by natural selection→ blow to fundamentalist religion→ growth of realism and naturalism;

Karl Marx: conflict of social classes, intransigence of the bourgeois-capitalist ruling classes.

From 1880 to 1914: disappearance of Victorian age

Characterized by

1. attempt to find substitutes for a religion that seemed dead, or

2. kind of spiritual emptiness — sense of hopelessness of trying to believe in anything.

3. Substitutes for religion: Art: “Art for art’s sake” → Walter Pater: one’s duty is to

cultivate pleasure, to drink deep from the fountains of natural and created beauty→ hedonism as way of life; Wilde: hedonism in essays and in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but here: sense of guilt for asking too much of life;

Imperialism: Kipling → sympathy with the soldiers who fought the frontier wars, kept peace in the Empire, did glorious work for a mere pittance and the reward of civilian contempt; the stress of the white man’s responsibility to his brothers who, despite difference of color and creed, acknowledged the same Queen; the value of an Empire as creator of a new, rich civilization; he sums up for all time a certain phase in English history;

Pessimism: A. E. Housman→ futility of life, certainty of death, certainty of nothing after death; a “stiff upper lip” despite disappointment in love and sense of an untrustworthy world; in the novel: Hardy→ man never seems to be free: the weight of time and place presses heavily on him, and, above everything, there are mysterious forces that control his life; man is a puppet whose strings are worked by fates that are either hostile or indifferent to him (when Tess is hanged, we read: “And so the President of the Immortals had finished his play with Tess”)

Return to optimism: Stevenson → books for children, poetry, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (duality of good and evil); short stories are very good→ becoming accepted form: writers had to learn how to express themselves succinctly, using great compression in plot, characterization, and dialogue — announces approach of an age less leisurely than the Victorian, with no time for three—volume novels, and demanding stories in quick mouthfuls.

Liberalism: belief that man’s future lies on earth not in heavens, and that, with scientific and social progress, an earthly paradise may eventually be built;

H. G. Wells: one of great figures of modern literature→ worlds in which science had achieved its last victories over religion and superstition, in which reason reigned, in which everybody was healthy, clean, happy, and enlightened;

Utopia → like Shaw, destroy all vestiges of past that cluttered the modern world — class-distinction, relics of feudalism, directionless education, unenlightened and self-seeking politicians, economic inequality;

Shaw and Wells wanted a kind of socialism; rejecting doctrine of sin, they believed that man’s mistakes and crimes came from stupidity, or from an unfavorable environment, and they set to work the blueprints of the devices that would put everything right.

“The Man Who Would Be King” (1888)

1. Told by a first person narrator, an unnamed newspaperman. Embedded in his narrative is Peachey Carnehan’s account of what happened to him and his fellow Daniel Dravot during their attempt to become kings of Kafiristan. In his confusing narrative, sometimes Carnehan refers to himself in 3rd person.

2. Setting: 19th- century imperial India3. A parody of a biblical story→ a god who is

sacrificed (crucified), survives and returns

Throughout the story, several biblical allusions emerge: “Go and be fruitful and multiply”, “daughters of man marry Gods or Devils”

4. A parable on British imperialism→ first through fighting and then through Masonic rituals, Carnehan and Dravot convince the local people that they are gods and kings.

Characters

Newspaperman: gets involved in the adventures of Carnehan and Dravot. Provides them the information they need to take control of the Kingdon of Kafiristan. His “realistic” realm (the everyday world of “real kings”) contrasts with the fantastic, make-believe world of Dravot and Peachey, who create their own fantasy and then live in it. He’s attained to facts, not fiction.

Carnehan and Dravot:

Former soldiers of the Queen in imperial India. Freemasons: use the ideals of order, loyalty and

regularity they have adhered to in the fraternity → their contract reflects that.

A pair of loafers/cons who believe that if India were in hands as capable as theirs it would yield ten times the current profit. To prove their thesis, they head off to Kafiristan to make themselves kings and to amass a royal fortune. Village by village, they consolidate a small empire, pacifying a population accustomed to endless war and furnishing instruction in civilized essentials such as farming and bridge-building → Kipling’s “the white man’s burden”: civilizing the savages.

Carnehan x Dravot Disciple Master Down to earth Taste for exaltation Follows the Breaks it

contract Survives long Dies like a monarch,

enough to tell the proud to the end. tale.

Themes

Dual nature of reality→ Real world of facts and the make-believe world of fiction. Dravot and Carnehan are always playing roles (newspaper correspondent, mad priests, real kings), creating stories for themselves within which they then live.

Commentary on British imperialism→ the newspaperman’s comments on how Britain ruled its huge empire: oppression, crime, the Eastern as the Other. In this sense, Dravot’s wish to have a native wife can not hold→ two separate worlds.