The Adolescent Strain

Abstract

Describing the sources of creative subject-matter, William Faulkner remarked: “It’s difficult to say just what part of any story comes specifically from imagination, what part from experience, what part from observation. It’s like having … three tanks with a collector valve. And you don’t know just how much comes from which tank.”¹ The same three tanks fed Kipling’s genius, with the same enigmatic relationship between empirically derived information, the data of internal life, and the coinages of imagination. The simplest, most conventional of the traits Kipling assigns to adolescence can be divided into three categories: the simultaneous rebellion and submission with which adolescents respond to adult authority; their fervent devotion to cliques, to peer group values, and to linguistic privacy of their own argot; their capacity for fantasizing about heroic adventures and seeking out scaled-down versions of these fantasies — juvenile excitement — in their own lives. Here the model that Kipling creates is a traditional one and, as such, easily grasped. Any student of literature has observed it before in other works by other authors. Still, Kipling’s renderings of these traits bear his own unique stamp, the imprint of a highly idiosyncratic life.