Kipling the Trickster: Knowingness, Practical Jokes and the Use of Superior Knowledge in Kipling’s Short Stories by John Coates (review)

Reviewed by: Kipling the Trickster: Knowingness, Practical Jokes and the Use of Superior Knowledge in Kipling's Short Stories by John Coates John Lee Kipling the Trickster: Knowingness, Practical Jokes and the Use of Superior Knowledge in Kipling's Short Stories. By John Coates. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2021. ix+ 281 pp. £44.50. ISBN 978–1–80079–341–5. Kipling the Trickster is less a monograph and more a collection of exceptionally fine readings of some fourteen short stories, from throughout Kipling's career. John Coates is the reader of Kipling that Noel Annan would have wanted. In 'Kipling's Place in the History of Ideas', Victorian Studies, 3.4 (1960), 324–48, Annan argued that Kipling was a kind of pioneering sociologist, the English equivalent of continental figures such as Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto; like them, Kipling was fascinated by the ways in which individuals were, in large part, products of the various social groups to which they belonged. Coates offers us detailed examples for that argument; he shows how, even in a largely comic tale such as 'My Sunday at Home', the sight of an American doctor struggling with an English workman on a sunlit railway platform may also be seen as a puppet show, in which the figures dance a polka-mazurka to rhythms set by their cultures. Underpinning such explications is a detailed knowledge of Kipling's writings, and of their political context. 'The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat' is introduced via Lloyd George's Land Campaign, Belloc and Chesterton's The Party End Page 409 System, the Marconi scandal, the Radical Plutocrats Enquiry, and Kipling's friendship with Max Aitken. The story's concerns, Coates shows, extend far beyond a comic revenge: the impact of the new technologies and their media on 'moral attitudes' to communication, entertainment, politics, and the law is traced; and a growing interrelationship between those areas is drawn to the reader's attention as something particularly worrisome for the future (p. 246). Coates's Kipling, while no intellectual, is decidedly clever. Coates is also sensitive to details of style. He explores how Kipling uses epigraphs, quotations, and allusions to complicate the reader's faith in the narrator's assumption of superior knowledge, often by setting up troubling double perspectives on a story's actions. Coates demonstrates the weight an individual word can be made to carry by its placement and repetition in a story. Later stories conjure up such a weight of meaning by opposite means; the cryptic detail becomes telling only when fleshed out from the readers' 'own emotional resources and range of experience' (p. 255). While Kipling's interest in humour is a constant from his earliest Indian stories, his later style teases out the varying nature of the connections between knowledge, knowingness, jokes, and the jest as revenge. Coates's book offers itself as a response to a tradition of criticism that has found fault with Kipling's humour. Edmund Wilson's 'The Kipling that Nobody Read', Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1941), 201–14, is a key point of reference; in it, Kipling's humour is seen as compulsive, born of a traumatic childhood, and resulting in a largely humourless score-settling. Coates persuasively shows that Kipling's humour is far more various, far more humane, and far more complex than such a tradition allows. In the tour de force of his final chapter on 'Dayspring Mishandled' Kipling emerges as a writer of considerable moral sensitivity. Yet, as the struggles of the book's first two chapters suggest, there is no systematic argument to be made from this demonstration of the variety and capaciousness of Kipling's humour. Perhaps this is a part of the point: Kipling as trickster cannot be pinned down in one guise. Or perhaps there may have been such an argument to be made—Kipling the Trick-ster was published posthumously, after Coates's sudden death. Whichever is true, readers of Kipling are indebted to those who brought the typescript to publication. Coates is one of the finest readers of Kipling's short stories since J. M. S. Tompkins. John Lee University of Bristol Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association...