Kipling and Singularity

Well, I haven't had the time or inclination to write for a few days. I had hoped to write something Tuesday night after the first meeting of my eighteenth-century novel class, but it happened to be the night of the State of the Union Address, which I had to watch attentively since I required my students to watch it. So I suppose I should do a brief recap of what passed in my Tuesday seminars.

In postcolonial lit, Dr. Raval spoke more or less extemporaneously on Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and the genesis of postcolonial discourse for the entire two and a half hours. What he had to say was interesting and informative, but I found the experience strangely exhausting. I haven't had a class where the professor just lectured for an entire period since I took a Shakespeare seminar from Dr. Loren Reser about eight years ago. But that was in an auditorium-style classroom with upholstered folding seats with armrests and dim, soothing lighting. Once I figured out Dr. Reser was just going to talk the whole time, I started bringing knitting along to class with me. But in a cramped, chilly classroom with glaring fluorescent lights, listening to a professor with a sometimes indecipherable Indian accent talk non-stop for two and a half hours is a more mentally and psychologically challenging task. Especially when you know you're going to have to go straight from that class to another two and a half hour long seminar--not even time for a smoke break in between!

Black Skin, White Masks, incidentally, is a very compelling book, for the writing style as much as for Fanon's insights into the psychology of the black man in the sphere of French colonialism. The heavy reliance on Freudian/Lacanian psychology causes the book to feel dated at times, and some of the psychoanalytic arguments seem forced. But the overarching assessment of the black man's internalized loathing and feelings of alienation from the self and others in a colonial context is sound. I'll try to get to it in more detail in another post this weekend.

In other news, Dr. Robinson's class was the complete opposite of Raval's. Robinson is intensely energetic, and encourages a discussion-driven class. As I noted in a previous post, the topic of discussion was: what makes or does not make Robinson Crusoe a novel? Going about answering this question (no answer was ever reached, by the way, and I don't think we were intended to produce and answer) required first describing what the book has got going on. The dominant idea that emerged from this line of discussion was that Crusoe is rife with Christian (especially Puritan) allegory, and that the first person narration is somehow significant. My argument for what makes Crusoe like a novel rather than just an extended allegory was that because a first person narrator is always somewhat unreliable, there exists more room for different interpretations of the series of "providential" events that befall Crusoe to emerge. The reader understands that Crusoe has had a religious conversion and chooses to paint his recollection of his time on the island in a religious light. But because the reader is not required to accept Crusoe's interpretation of events in order to have access to the plot of the story, one can read the book without acknowledging the religious tone and still arrive at the same basic understanding of the Crusoe's history.

I stand by that; I think it's as good an argument as any.

And to wrap up, I submitted my abstract for U of A's New Directions Conference today. I've been kicking around this idea about Kiplingand singularity that first occurred to me while reading James (Jan) Morris's Pax Brittanica, in which there is a reference to Kipling's poem, "The Deep-Sea Cables":

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar --
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world -- here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat --
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth --
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

This poem is in praise of the network of under-sea telegraph cables--but couldn't it almost be about the internet? I'm fascinated by the idea of Kipling as a modern man, in awe of technology. This is not the light in which we are usually inclined to see him. Well, more on that later, though. I think it's about time for me to sign off and get to reading before I get to bed.

Apparently there's an article entitled "Kipling and Technology" that appeared in KJ (I'm assuming that's shorthand for Kipling Journal) 241 from 1987. I shall have to look that up.