Rudyard KIPLING (1865-1963)

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Categoria:	Inglese
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Data:	16.06.2005
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Rudyard KIPLING (1865-1963)
Life & main works:
• Born in Bombay, India. >>BRITISH COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Sent to England to attend school
>> DIVIDED LOVE FOR INDIA AND ENGLAND
• Journalist
• Poems short stories and novels about Indian life:
o Plain Tales from the Hills (1890) [short stories]>>
THE STORY OF MUHAMMAD DIN (1886);
LISPETH
BEYOND THE PALE (1887)
o KIM (1901) [novel] >
• 1907 > first Englishman to receive the Nobel prize for literature
• during the First World War he worked as a correspondent >> POEMS ABOUT FIRST WORLD WAR
• He was one of the most important British colonial writers.
• THEMES:
HE EXALTED IMPERIAL POWER AND BELIEVED IN THE “BURDEN” OF THE BRITISH, WHO, AS THE ELECTED RACE, HAD TO CARRY CIVILIZATION ALL OVER THE WORLD AND ESTABLISH THEIR GOVERNMENT BASED ON HONOUR AND DIGNITY (he had always been proud to be English).
BUT HE ALSO HAD ALWAYS SYMPATHY FOR INDIAN PEOPLE.
PESSIMISTIC VISUAL: incompatibility of the two world (British and Indian)
KIM (1901)
KIM AT AN INDIAN RAILWAY STATION
• SETTING: India, a railway station. It’s a sign of English civilization. Night (3.25 a.m.) (line 16).
• PLOT: Kim helps the lama to take to write train to Benares. He has the control of the situation, instead the Lama doesn’t know what to do.
• LANGUAGE: use of Indian words and expressions.
• NARRATOR/ POINT OF VIEW: third person narrator, UNOBTRUSIVE. Point of view: an English man (see lines 29-30, 35-36), but he tries to make the reader see through the characters’ point of view.
• CHARACTERS:
o Kim: the protagonist.
(He lived in workhouses, he didn’t have a family, was adopted by a benefactor who was also his uncle).
He’s brighter than the people around him; he’s protective and generous, he’s helping the lama out. He has BRITISH ABILITIES and KNOWLEDGE OF INDIAN TRADITIONS
o The Lama: a Buddhist monk of Tibet or Mongolia. He’ uncivilized, defenceless in this foreign world, innocent, naïve, with no money. (lines 4, 16, 22, 33, 37-38).
o The clerk: He sells the tickets at the station. He doesn’t care about Kim and the Lama, he simply does a mechanical work. He’s cold, detached. He doesn’t work well (he gives them the wrong ticket).
>> SYMBOL OF CORRUPTION
SHORT STORIES:
• Narrative form popular
• Against the omniscient narrator >> more ambivalent vision of the world; NARRATOR=a fictional character in different situations
• STYLE: Kipling has a particular ability to use the words to convey feelings and emotions and portrait BOTH EXPONENTS OF THE BRITISH RULING CLASS AND THE NATIVES.
THE STORY OF MUHAMMAD DIN (1886)
• SETTING: India, a English master’s house.
• NARRATOR: internal first person (the English master). He’s amused for the energy of the son (lines 22-29)
• LANGUAGE: use of Indian words.
• NARRATIVE TECNIQUE: at the beginning there are two lines of a quotation that summarizes the theme of the story.
• CHARACTERS: The protagonist (Mohammad Din) isn’t British and he’s a servant’s child > important;
The master
The Doctor is the symbol of English people who considered Indians only as an inferior people. Negative character, the master and Kipling do not agree.
• THEMES:
o People needs relationships;
o Children are able to surpass any social barrier;
o An Englishman can surpass the social barrier only if he’s ENLIGHTED (open-minded), and any Englishman is so for Kipling (indeed the master have a friendship with the little child of his servant, he was really affectionate to him).
LISPETH
• TITLE: very important because the name is pronounced in the Indian ay, not in the English one. It’s the name of the British (and Indian) queen.
• SETTING: north-west of India
• NARRATOR: first person; not internal, obtrusive; someone who is acquainted and experienced to India. He reports the common thoughts of British people (line 86, 120, 129, 138) and is very cruel with the Englishman who doesn’t behave in a good way with natives (irony + lines 98-100, 141-144).
• LANGUAGE: use of Indian words and pronunciations.
• NARRATIVE TECNIQUES:
o at the beginning there is a brief poem that summarises the theme of the story;
o irony based on what it is said and what it is implied (lines 61-62, 89)
• CHARACTERS/PLOT:
o Lispeth: she was an orphan native. She becomes a servant and a sort of daughter of a Christian Chaplain. She becomes Christian and very beautiful.
But she isn’t completely understood neither by British people (because she cannot loose her Indian mentality and traditions) nor by Indian people, who think that she will despise (=disprezzare) them as the British do.
She’s betrayed by the Chaplain’s wife and by the British man she loved. She finally decides to abandon Christianity and British people and to return to her savage people.
She was still like a white woman but she decided to reject all about British.
o Chaplain’s wife: she’s an idiot because she thinks stupid things about natives (see the narrator’s criticizing).
• THEMES:
o Teaching Christianity is a practice to save the poor ignorant people;
o Race problem (line 120)
o Ignorance of British who think Indians are only stupid and inferior people, with no possibility to improve themselves.
BEYOND THE PALE (1887)
• TITLE: “beyond the pale”=out of the limits of something; not correct, indecent.
• SETTING: India.
• NARRATOR: third person; omniscient but he adopts the protagonist’s point of view (see for example line 177) and doesn’t inform us. > reticent > he wants to show how an English man lives this tragedy; we cannot understand the story because we have a different culture. He doesn’t judge the Indian traditions and Bisesa’s uncle.
• LANGUAGE:
o semantic field of love: the two lovers (the British man and the Indian girl) speak the same language, the language of love. >> LOVE CAN SURPASS CULTURAL DISTINCTIONS.
o Use of Indian words and pronunciations.
o Insert of a poem (an Indian one).
• CHARACTERS/PLOT:
o Trejago: The protagonist. He’s the British man who falls in love with Bisesa.
o Bisesa: the Indian woman who falls in love with the British man. She’s very young and she’s a widow. She’s very courageous, but at the end she cannot do anything to remain with Trejago.
o Her uncle: he prohibits their love. He cut Bisesa’s hands and hurt Trejago for punishing them and for stop their relationship.
• NARRATIVE TECNIQUES: The first part (first and second paragraph) are a sort of anticipation and comment to the story.
• THEMES:
o LOVE: it’s the same in every corner of the world and has a unique language, But it’s not easy and sometimes it’s impossible with two people of different cultures.
o CULTURAL and MENTAL DIFFERENCE.
POEMS ABOUT WAR.
For these poems, Kipling can be included in the category of “war poets”, even if he didn’t fought the war.
He had a child who died fighting in the First World War.
His most important poems are:
* The Beginner
* An only son
* A son
* If
* The Bridegroom
* The White Man’s Burden.
THEMES:
• Criticizing: The soldiers were often too young to understand what was going on. They fought as if it was a game. They are innocents.
• The necessity of fighting
• Patriotism
• Exaltation of the qualities of a British soldier
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