Alexander Bubb (Faculty of English, University of Oxford)
"Upon my breast a myriad heads have lain": Kipling, Yeats and the Imaginative Possibilities of India
I propose to present a comparative overview of the manners in which two literary imaginations approached the complex web of discourses, stereotypes and romances which comprised India in the metropolitan mindset. W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling were political enemies, metropolitan migrants, Modernist romancers of the East, and almost exact contemporaries (their lives coincide closely with the date parameters of this workshop). They also proved, strange bedfellows, echoing each other’s rhetorical technique or sharing aesthetic anxieties, even in the public act of mutual condemnation. My DPhil research concerns the striking crossovers in their outlook and literary style, and my intention is that a thorough comparison will help to re-establish critically-neglected literary exchanges and comparative links, and to stitch together a divided canon into a more coherent historical whole.
Their usefulness as guides to this period stem from their nature as what Victor Turner would call ‘liminal’ or ‘threshold’ figures. I suggest locating the two men together as late Romantic writers who aspire to a public, ‘legislative’ role in that tradition, but who are disoriented by the century in which they attained that authority. They are discomfited by modernity and seek alternative paths, displaying what Chaudhuri calls Modernism’s ‘self-divided’ mindset. On their simultaneous journey from the 19th century to the 20th, from the colonial margins (Bombay and Dublin) to the metropole (London), they remain Janus-faced, bearing with them imaginative raw materials to the literary forge while gazing backward upon that part of their self which has been left behind. As colonial threshold figures, they are peculiarly poised to fill the liminal, hybrid role required by this period of its artists: they are estranged familiars, and retrospective prophets.
Their problematic invocation of Romanticism or ‘romance’ (for example, “we were the last romantics” or Kipling’s poem ‘To the true Romance’), often accompanies a mutual attraction to innocence, childhood and the irrational or spiritual. These facets meet in a shared interest in India, the country of Kipling’s childhood which Yeats, though he never visited, felt he could understand spiritually. Kipling’s harvesting of Indian mythology informs his effort to compile a national folklore. Yeats behaves similarly in Connaught, but also combs Indian mysticism for a philosophical system. Indian religion represents for both a turning away from Christianity, and an aspiration towards an alternative model of unity. But while Yeats adopts a highly eclectic ‘Hindu’ view of Eastern philosophy Kipling worships an aesthetic of spiritual purity, whether Buddhist or Islamic, unsullied by syncretism.
Both played a significant role in forming public ideas of India: Kipling as the populist great communicator of Empire, and Yeats - through his patronage of Tagore and the Theosophists - promoting an image of India which consciously excludes British rule. It is ironic that the apparently omniscient Kipling identifies the limits of colonial knowledge - the wall of radical difference – while Yeats, the anti-imperialist, is arguably the more Orientalist in tone. The importance of Asia for Modernism is now known. An examination of these two poets should shed light on its unthought-of complexities.
