thread: 2007-01-19 : The Jungle Books
On 2007-01-23, Curly wrote:
The wikipedia entry on Rudyard Kipling is a nice bio.
I like the inconvenient details it offers:
*The mention of Orwell is paradoxical. On one hand, their early lives were so parallel, and Kipling obviously was an influence on works like Shooting An Elephant and Animal Farm.
On the other hand, Orwell abhorred Kipling's colonial cheerleading. Still, they were both anti-Nazi. So it's hard to pair or parse them in convenient ways.
*Consider the anecodote about how Kipling was raised to age 6 by Portuguese and Indian servants to "think and dream" in their tongue, and was then sent to England (to prevent kids like him from 'going native'). But in England he was abused by his guardians. Then he turns-around and champions England's superiority. Freudian. ...and then the Boy Scouts decide that this is a good guy to base their child-grooming program on?!
*Kipling travelled the US, met Mark Twain, and settled in Vermont.. where he wrote the Jungle Books! (Whoa. They're American Literature?)
*Kipling left the US after a US/UK dispute over whose hegemony would prevail in Venezuela; and the anti-British sentiment resulting from the incident.
*"His books are conspicuously absent from the English Literature curricula of schools and universities in India" Isn't it odd that his place in English Lit isn't secure? I can understand his Political writing being out of fashion. And yet -those- works ARE read in India.
*The section on Kipling's influence on Heinlein is right on the money. Their strengths and flaws are so matched. And there's the same difficulty in -only- condemning or -only- endorsing either of them. Lastly, they're each iconoclastic enough; that they can't quite be dismissed as 'just another' dead white male pig.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling
