Aug 11, 2016 03:21 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...story.html
EXCERPT: [...] Yet when he published this novel, Kipling's reputation was already on the wane. As the two Jungle Books show, their author was a proponent of order and discipline, restraint and duty. He believed in what he notoriously called “the white man’s burden,” the obligation of the superior West to bring civilization to “lesser breeds without the Law.” He defended Britain during the Boer War, became a pal of Cecil Rhodes, and made clear his jingoist reverence for the military virtues. By the time of his death in 1936, Kipling had been out of critical fashion for a quarter-century, even though his later work included magnificent stories that range from the comic “The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat” to the immensely moving “The Gardener” and “Dayspring Mishandled,” a complex study of artistic revenge and marital treachery. Today, more often than not, Kipling’s books serve mainly as quarries in which academics dig out instances of racial insensitivity, colonialist arrogance and anti-feminist caricature.
But should Kipling’s various prejudices, however deplorable, keep us from experiencing the real and lasting pleasure of his best stories? Defending his own admiration for Kipling, Neil Gaiman once said, “It would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place. Kipling was many things that I am not, and I like that in my authors.” To which I would add further that the very point of reading fiction is to see through eyes other than one’s own. In time this leads to an enlargement of perspective and forestalls any rush to simplistic judgments. The sign of an educated person, it’s been said, is the ability to offer assent or dissent in nuanced, graduated terms.
And what of “The Jungle Books”? It was pure pleasure to revisit them. Still, I suspect many people know only [...] through their jejune film representations. A pity. These stories, by turns thrilling, humorous and touching, need to be read: Kipling’s language is rhetorically thick, every sentence charged, yet the action fast-moving. [...] While Kipling will doubtless continue to roil 21st-century readers, to simply dismiss his work with a boo or smirk of cultural superiority reveals little but cultural ignorance....
EXCERPT: [...] Yet when he published this novel, Kipling's reputation was already on the wane. As the two Jungle Books show, their author was a proponent of order and discipline, restraint and duty. He believed in what he notoriously called “the white man’s burden,” the obligation of the superior West to bring civilization to “lesser breeds without the Law.” He defended Britain during the Boer War, became a pal of Cecil Rhodes, and made clear his jingoist reverence for the military virtues. By the time of his death in 1936, Kipling had been out of critical fashion for a quarter-century, even though his later work included magnificent stories that range from the comic “The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat” to the immensely moving “The Gardener” and “Dayspring Mishandled,” a complex study of artistic revenge and marital treachery. Today, more often than not, Kipling’s books serve mainly as quarries in which academics dig out instances of racial insensitivity, colonialist arrogance and anti-feminist caricature.
But should Kipling’s various prejudices, however deplorable, keep us from experiencing the real and lasting pleasure of his best stories? Defending his own admiration for Kipling, Neil Gaiman once said, “It would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place. Kipling was many things that I am not, and I like that in my authors.” To which I would add further that the very point of reading fiction is to see through eyes other than one’s own. In time this leads to an enlargement of perspective and forestalls any rush to simplistic judgments. The sign of an educated person, it’s been said, is the ability to offer assent or dissent in nuanced, graduated terms.
And what of “The Jungle Books”? It was pure pleasure to revisit them. Still, I suspect many people know only [...] through their jejune film representations. A pity. These stories, by turns thrilling, humorous and touching, need to be read: Kipling’s language is rhetorically thick, every sentence charged, yet the action fast-moving. [...] While Kipling will doubtless continue to roil 21st-century readers, to simply dismiss his work with a boo or smirk of cultural superiority reveals little but cultural ignorance....