"The Mark of the Beast": Rudyard Kipling's apocalyptic vision of empire

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by Paul Battles

Just as Fleete attempts to justify his desecration of Hanuman by invoking the Bible, the narrator uses a biblical allusion to describe the Silver Man: "he was what the Bible calls `a leper white as snow'" (214). This allusion is mark of distinction, e.g., Exodus 4: 6, in which God marks Moses with leprosy as a gesture of divine power: "his hand was leprous, as white as snow." Moses' leprosy figures forth his holiness-does the Silver Man's likewise? Though the narrator suggests that the Silver Man is "unclean," Leviticus 13: 12-13 states that a person entirely covered by leprosy (as the Silver Man is) is "clean." Yet the narrator's obsession with the Silver Man's leprosy can be understood by his desire for pure categories: as Mary Douglas has noted, uncleanness results from confounding the "general scheme of the world" by which things are classified according to their nature (55)--as the Silver Man indeed confounds the scheme of colonial discourse.

Fleete's reasoning in defiling Hanuman's statue is twofold: since Hanuman is a beast, marking his statue is justifiable; and, since the Indians are powerless to resist, he can do so with impunity. The narrator bears the same attitude toward the leper. When the narrator and Strickland confront the Silver Man outside Strickland's house, the narrator's description makes clear that he considers him less than human:

thinking of poor Fleete, brought to such degradation by such a foul

creature, I put away all my doubts and resolved to help Strickland from

the heated gun-barrels to the loop of twine--from the loins to the head

and back again--with all the tortures that might be needful. (229)

Just as Hanuman seems a mere beast to Fleete, the narrator describes the Silver Man as a "foul creature"; elsewhere, he discusses him primarily in terms of animal characteristics--he mews like an otter or howls like a wolf. It is the Silver Man's less-than-human status that allows the narrator to justify the tortures that follow. The torture scene itself parallels Fleete's desecration of Hanuman's statue. Strickland and the narrator quite literally mark the leper using a heated gun barrel, whereas Fleete uses the tip of his cigar; both involve branding, as one might brand an animal to designate ownership. Fleete marks Hanuman because he perceives him to be in need of definition through discourse, blank, unwritten. Precisely the same rationale operates in the narrator's decision to torture the Silver Man:

though the Silver Man had no face, you could see horrible feelings

passing through the slab that took its place, exactly as waves of heat

play across red-hot iron--gun barrels, for instance. (230)

The leper has no face, no identity, but rather assumes the identity and meaning projected upon him by the narrator and Strickland; he is a blank, and his face (which is not) only mirrors the gun barrels, the instruments by which he will be defined, written.

The torture scene makes particularly clear the connection between knowledge and power, Foucault's pouvoir/savoir, which Said has shown to be central to colonial discourse. There is a direct relation between the process of narrating and the process of marking the Silver Man: both are concerned with unraveling the textual enigma that Hanuman's leprous priest embodies, that is, with gaining knowledge; moreover, both are strategies of disseminating knowledge, or rather a particular way of knowing. In narrating the events concerned with Fleete's transformation, the narrator asserts his perspective, his knowledge; but, at the same time, his narrative is driven by the absence of knowledge--by the need to determine "what really happened"--and the tale's conclusion is quite explicit about this: