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Aesthetically Effective, Imperialist Retrograde Peter Havholm. Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling's Fiction. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. xi + 187 pp. $99.95
THE BASIC QUESTION Peter Havholm sets out to answer is why much of Kipling's fiction is aesthetically effective when his imperialist and racist opinions were so retrograde. This puzzle has always been central to Kipling criticism. At the outset, Havholm cites a number of critics for whom, as Daniel Karlin puts it, "What is powerful and convincing in Kipling's art is so mixed with what is repellent and sometimes mad in his outlook . . . that it is hard to make the case for him as an artist without engaging in a defense of his politics." The question regarding Havholm's study is whether he adds anything new to the conversation. Part of his solution to the puzzle concerns "awe," as his title suggests. "Awe" or "wonder" seems to be a close relative of exoticism:
. . . Kipling's stories please his readers by evoking wonder at human actions whose political, cultural, and biological economies are presented as separate from those in the world in which readers actually live, in two senses. Kipling's stories almost invariably distance readers from actions and passions represented as wondrous: one is invited always to be awed rather than to become involved.... Secondly, many of Kipling's characters and actions are set in dream worlds so that his ideas can work perfectly.
By implication, at least, India as viewed through the rosy-tinted lenses of Anglo-Indian ideology was itself a "dream world."
Havholm provides close, insightful readings of many of Kipling's stories. He usefully contextualizes these readings in terms of Anglo-Indian ideology-"the voice of the Sovereign," as he calls it. He thoroughly illustrates the attitudes and beliefs of the British administrators, businessmen, and soldiers in India,...