The method is unsound: the aesthetic dissonance of colonial justification in Kipling, Conrad, and Greene - authors Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene

Style, Fall, 1996 by James Scannell

In three sips the Arian frustrate, While he drains his at one gulp -'

and many other things which are now hidden from your eyes. However, Mrs. Mcintosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the fashion of the people of the country - of whom, by the way, you know nothing." (331)

This passage includes references both to the Hellenism of McIntosh's book learning and to the Hebraism, the "energy driving at practice," about which the narrator knows nothing. We later learn that Strickland, whom we've been brought by the narrator to respect for his awe-inspiring knowledge of the natives he rules, is for Mcintosh an "ignorant man" (332). Unlike Strickland, Mcintosh does not merely know how the natives will act, but he also understands why they act. McIntosh's understanding of the significance of the cleaning of the samovar and the sipping in Browning's poem represents a marriage of the most esoteric knowledge with the most mundane of daily actions; the rhythmic cleaning is as informed by a theology or cosmology as is the three sips of the Spanish Monk. Mcintosh alone sees to the heart of matters, an ability that, far from precluding an attention to ordinary practice, in fact entails a knowledge of the ideal in and through "practice."

Kipling makes much of this ability in the Plain Tales collection. Figures who embody one or the other side of the dyad are undercut, just as Strickland in all his practical glory is undercut by Mcintosh. Mrs. Hauksbee, the clever-est woman in India, who helps several people stick to the straight and narrow, is herself bested at the beginning of the short story sequence in "Three and - an Extra," when she acts without the backing of an approved ideal. Trejago in "Beyond the Pale" brings doom upon himself and his lover: the practicality that makes his intrigue possible prevents him from fully acknowledging the cultural laws he has transgressed. On the other hand, those who err on the side of Helenism, who attach too much meaning to everyday events, are equally suspect: the "Boy" of "Thrown Away" who commits suicide over a "cruel little sentence, rapped out before thinking" (19), or Aurelian McCoggin, whose love of "isms" is cured by an attack of aphasia. Only a handful of figures manage to inform their practical doings with the knowledge of a higher sphere. In "His Wedded Wife," the Worm, who joins a "high-caste regiment" in which "you must be able to do things well . . . to get on with them," does nothing well except read, keep to himself, and write home. The members of the regiment refuse to accept him until he inadvertently advertises his acting talents, by dressing as a neglected wife and coming upon the regiment as a fury "rushing out of the dark, unannounced, into our dull lives" (160). The revenge is successful because his play-acting speaks to the regiment's deep feelings of complicity, haunting even those in no way concerned in this particular matter. Janoo in "In the House of Suddhoo" respects the spiritual hold the seal-cutter has on Suddhoo, though she understands it is all a sham, and that respect assures her revenge as well: "Unless something happens to prevent her, I am afraid that the seal-cutter will die of cholera - the white arsenic kind - about the middle of May" (154). Finally, Moriarty in "In Error" is saved by his illusion that Mrs. Reiver is a saint whose respect he must earn: the "error" has no foundation in reality, but his belief in that self-constructed ideal has the amazing practical result of curing his alcoholism.