The Native Body and Exchange Culture: Race, Narrative and Geopolitics in Rudyard Kipling's Kim

Robbie B. H. Goh

《小說與戲劇》 18卷1期 (2007/12) Pp. 29-49

並列摘要

This paper examines Rudyard Kipling's Kim in the context of geopolitical fiction and its ideological project to re-figure colonial rule and authority. Much of this project concerns the displacement of that rule and authority from its overt (prescriptive, power-centred) arena, onto the covert arena of spatial representation and movement. Here, the confluent ideological flows of capitalism and spiritualism (as abstraction, and thus permitting an air of pluralistic acceptance) work together with this geopolitics in order to write a discourse of activity, inclusivity and fulfillment.
Clearly it is race and the racially-marked body-upon which the overt disparities of geopolitical power rests-which pose the central problem for such a project. Clearly, too, Kim-with its culturally-hybrid protagonist, and its central relationship between a native Lama and his essentially white cha or disciple-is a crucial text for the development of Kipling's narrative project. Along with his more blatant racialisms-including racial and cultural stereotyping and the alignment of the narrative with a smugly superior white perspective, which together with related features have long been noted in the critical scholarship-Kipling also presents a model of cultural rapprochement in the figure of the hybrid Kim, and also in the relationship between Kim and the Lama. At another level, the inadequacies of the depiction of Kim and the Lama-the infamously abrupt ending of the novel, the Lama's abnegation of his spiritual quest for Kim's sake. Kim's uncertain future as an adult attempting to reconcile the roles of spy and chela-are diverted onto a narrative jouis-sance centering around the rapid movement of native bodies as they are put into employment by the white colonial system, and as they become abstracted within the novel's vision of spiritual pluralism. Kipling's novel gives pleasure not because it escapes the ideological circuit of colonialism, but because of the inventive pleasure it provides in spite its ideological involvement.

並列關鍵字

Rudyard Kipling ； Geopolitics ； Kim ； Native Bodies ； Exchange

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