Читать книгу Just So Stories - Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг - Страница 5

About the Author

Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombai, when it was part of British India during the days of the British Empire. He was born in 1865, the year that Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published, undoubtedly a genre of writing that later influenced his work. At the age of six, Kipling was sent to England to continue his education. He was deeply unhappy during this part of his childhood and it seems that this was when he began inventing companions in the form of anthropomorphic animals.

Having finished his schooling, Kipling returned to British India to become assistant editor of a newspaper in Lahore, which is now in Pakistan. He immediately felt at home and quickly forgot about his time in England. In 1887 Kipling moved from Lahore to Allahabad to work on another newspaper. He had already published a great many short stories by this time and two years later left India on a world tour. This included a trip across the United States and then a voyage by boat to England. Having ensconced himself in London he published his first novel The Light that Failed (1890), but evidently had a crisis of self-confidence and suffered a nervous breakdown. His personal life was set to change in 1892 however, when he married Carrie Balestier, the sister of Wolcot Ballestier, with whom he had collaborated on another book.

Their honeymoon took them to Vermont in the United States, where they decided to settle because Carrie had fallen pregnant. The Kiplings remained in Vermont for four years. During this period Rudyard appeared to be content and wrote his best known work, The Jungle Book. Unfortunately a political crisis between Britain and the United States led to anti-British sentiment and Kipling felt it most from the press. A family feud between the Kiplings and Carrie’s brother proved the final straw and sealed Rudyard’s decision to leave America.

The Kipling family moved to the south coast of Devon, England and then East Sussex from 1902. By now Kipling was a famous man and enjoyed his growing celebrity in the first decade of the 20th century. In 1907 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, such was his fame and reputation worldwide. World War I was, however, to have a tragic outcome for the Kiplings. In 1915 their son John was killed. He had gone to war in the blind spirit of enthusiasm that characterized the age and fallen at the Battle of Loos. Kipling felt eternal guilt at his son’s death because he had used his influence to get John accepted into the army following his initial rejection for having poor eyesight.

Following Kipling’s own death in 1936 his work became rather unfashionable, partly because of changing tastes and partly because the British Empire began to disintegrate following World War II. British India itself gained its independence from colonial rule in 1947 and was partitioned into Pakistan and India. In the latter half of the 20th century Kipling’s work became part of the cannon of English literary history, especially his two Jungle Book collections, and he is now considered one of the all time greats.

In India, his legacy is a matter of contention because his writing is centred on colonial times and many of his characters are intrinsically racist. It isn’t that Kipling himself was prejudiced particularly, but that the culture among the British colonists was superior in its view of the natives. Kipling therefore wrote his characters as he witnessed real people around him. It would be true to say that many Europeans had an elitist attitude to non-Caucasian races at that time, so it would be inappropriate to judge Kipling by modern standards of political correctness.

The Jungle Book

When The Jungle Book is mentioned, most people think of the Disney animated film. This actually has very little to do with the stories of Rudyard Kipling, as Walt Disney only took the basic idea of anthropomorphic jungle animals and transformed them into lovable children’s characters. Kipling’s characters and stories are far darker and fantastical. In fact, Kipling deliberately wrote his stories as fables, to provide moral and ethical guidance to his readers, both young and old. The first collection of stories was published in 1894, quickly followed by a second in 1895, appropriately titled The Second Jungle Book.

Mowgli, the central human character, is a young boy who has been raised by a she wolf. He is thus in the unique position of being able to communicate with the various animals of the jungle. There had been various tales of children having been raised by wild animals and this is where Kipling drew his inspiration from. Some of those tales had an element of truth to them, but the majority were myths. Nevertheless, they made a solid foundation for Kipling’s stories, as Mowgli was the ideal transitional character. In essence he was half human, half animal in his psychology. He also possessed the naivety of a child and was therefore open-minded and fearless.

Mowgli appears in three of the stories in The Jungle Book. There are seven all told, with a song chapter following each one. As well as Mowgli and his animal companions, there are stories about a white seal named Kotick, a mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, another boy named Toomai, and a group of domesticated Indian animals living in an army barracks. Kipling anthropomorphizes throughout The Jungle Book, so that he is able to tell his stories from the animals’ point of view. In doing so, he manages to comment on human behaviour in an objective, as opposed to subjective way. The animals in his books observe society, free from the constraints of culture and etiquette, but they also have their own interests and concerns. In English literature the practice of writing human-like animals was established with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. The earliest use of this device however, dates back to the ancient Greeks, with Aesop’s fables. By using animals to teach people lessons in wisdom it somehow made it more acceptable and easier to digest, especially for younger readers.

In The Second Jungle Book we find Mowgli returned in the first five stories out of a total of eight. The second story, The King’s Ankus, illustrates very well Kipling’s use of Mowgli’s naive outlook on life. In the story Mowgli finds a very valuable, jewel encrusted ankus (an elephant stick), but to him it is just a curious object, which he tosses away unaware that to other humans it is priceless and even worth killing for. Kipling uses this as a metaphor for pointing out the ridiculousness of the want of wealth in society, when all that matters is that we are healthy and happy.

The remaining three stories are about an Indian politician, three scavenging animals having a quarrel and a young Inuit hunter. This final story and the story of the white seal Kotick, in the first book, are anomalies as they are not set in the jungle at all, but in the northern latitudes at or near the Arctic Circle. Although Kipling had spent some years living in India, he actually wrote both books whilst residing in the American state of Vermont, which borders with Canada. This is evidently where he got his inspiration for these two misplaced stories.

It also explains the distanced and romanticized view of India in his books. There is something about his approach to the stories that tells the reader that Kipling is evoking memories or confabulations of an India that perhaps never quite existed. This, however, does nothing to erode the charm of his writing and only serves to condense his images so that the reader is taken in fully by his fictional world.