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.
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Notes
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY, 1978) pp. 147–51.
W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky, 1954) pp. 3–18.
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London, 1978).
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans Richard Miller (London, 1975).
Elliott L. Gilbert, The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story (Manchester, 1972) pp. 110–11n.
Gilbert is indebted to J. M. S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1959) p. 145, for the suggestion that Vickery stood up to attract the lightning, though Tompkins unwarrantably assumes that the second figure is female.
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© 1989 Phillip Mallett
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Lodge, D. (1989). ‘Mrs Bathurst’: Indeterminacy in Modern Narrative. In: Mallett, P. (eds) Kipling Considered. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20062-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20062-7_5
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