‘The Cause of Humanity’ and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Abstract

 Reviews tends to occlude what is most surprising in Stanley’s formulation of ‘structured spontaneity’ (p. ). Where one would expect such a phrase to imply the giving of form and unity to disparately encountered elements, Stanley instead suggests that disparateness and change emerge from practice, discipline, and order. In other words, spontaneity is not first and the structuring of it second, but rather the other way round. Rather than pursuing this distinction, the book’s frequent conflation of two differing models can sometimes overshadow the power of its theoretical implications. e book’s most interesting moments occur when Emerson’s practices of surprise are not simply replicated in his modernist inheritors, but are developed or tested against certain limits. A strong example of the first occurs when surprise emerges as the dividing line between Baudelaire’s artist (someone who embraces the permeability of being surprised) and Baudelaire’s dandy (someone who is stoic but embraces surprising others). In the book’s third chapter, Stanley persuasively tests Emersonian philosophy against the deterministic forces of race and gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. In the reading offered, Quicksand’s stock ending is startling to readers precisely because the book ‘has reconditioned its readers to expect a resilient open-endedness that typical novelistic closure betrays’ (p. ). When Helga’s impressionability and receptiveness to flux falter in Larsen’s rapid- fire ending, the reader is also unable to negotiate the sudden constraints of the novel’s form with a practice of more general openness. If Practices of Surprise reminds us of literature’s power to renew our view of the world via surprise, to transform the mundane into the profound and the ordinary into the extraordinary, it also does the more ambitious work of attempting to read modernism pragmatically by way of Emerson’s proto-modernism. Behind individual practices of surprise is a tale about the tradition of creative reading and the significance of pedagogy in American and transatlantic letters. P U J S ‘e Cause of Humanity’ and Other Stories. By R K. Ed. by T P. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . xxi+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is collection of discarded or suppressed writings by Kipling further extends the editorial work of omas Pinney, editor of Kipling’s Letters, in six volumes (London : Macmillan, –), and of Kipling’s Poems, in three volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; reviewed in MLR,  (), –). Among the new items in this book is an effective piece called ‘De Profundis (A Study in a Sick Room)’. e narrator has pulled out of social engagements with a ‘Mrs Lollipop’ and with ‘the Colonel’s wife’ because he has a fever. His ‘Bearer’ (personal servant) takes advantage of his young master’s illness to take the evening off. ‘ere will be an evening party in the servants’ quarters tonight’ while the ‘Sahib’ is trapped and helpless: ‘the fever has you bound hand and foot for the night; and your voice, even at its most powerful pitch, will be far too weak an hour hence to MLR, .,   disturb the revellers in the serai’ (p. ). Feverish insomnia leads to hallucinations. A train crosses a blazing hot landscape directly towards the stricken man, and from it leaps ‘a royal Bengal tiger with yellow eye balls and opened jaws’ (p. ). e hallucinations are a product of the quinine that he has taken, but they are experienced as a ‘very real Hell’ (p. ). e sleeplessness is relentless, and the second phase of the hallucinations is a nightmare about professional disgrace: ‘You have embezzled money, taken bribes, sold appointments, betrayed your friend, and the judgement for these acts is even now at hand’ (p. ). e helplessness of the insomniac appears in a second, equally strong narrative about insomnia called ‘Till the Day Break’, where the cruel elusiveness of sleep is tested by trying to empty the mind or to count sheep while tormented by the fear of being bitten by a snake. In such a case, ‘[i]t would be amusing for the punkah-coolie to hear a Sahib bellowing and to know that the Sahib could do nothing, and so to fan that Sahib from this world to the next’ (p. ). In their evocations of...