‘Mrs Bathurst’: Indeterminacy in Modern Narrative

Abstract

If Rudyard Kipling is not usually thought of as a modern writer in the sense of modernist, it is because his work seems, superficially, to belong to a familiar and traditional kind of story-telling discourse, in which a lucid, literary, and reassuringly ‘normal’ authorial narration frames and judges the colourful speech of characters who belong to distinct and recognisable social and ethnic types. This impression is, however, misleading. It is true that Kipling does not indulge in the kind of stylistic experiment by means of which writers like Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence attempted to render the workings of subjective consciousness and the unconscious. But the relationship between the story and the telling of it in Kipling’s work is often highly unorthodox, making it as teasingly ambiguous, as difficult and ‘polysemous’ as that of the acknowledged modern masters.