Chapter 21 The Thief Who Liked To Quote Kipling - About Kipling

Many people like Sean Connery. As long as it is the movie played by the most handsome man in the world in the last century, no matter how bad the movie is said to be, they must watch it. However, not many people may have seen him and Michael Key. Eun co-starred in The Man Who Would Be King, and Taiwan translated the title of the film as "War with Baxuka". The story of the movie is very interesting. It is said that two swindlers in the Indian colony suddenly had a whimsical idea. They remembered that they had served in all kinds of noble and lowly professions in their lives because of the necessity of deceiving professions. After some searching, they found a valley above 7,000 meters above sea level in the Hindu Kush Mountains, along which lived seven tribes who were always at odds with the water (“They always urinate upstream while we drink water”). Pee").In history, these tribes were only briefly conquered by external forces once thousands of years ago, when Alexander the Great fought all the way to the Indus River and sighed. It is said that Alexander had promised these tribes that he would come back, so thousands of years, The seven small tribes have been passed down from generation to generation, waiting for their king and their god to come back...

Sean Connery and Michael Caine bought enough British rifles, hired Sherpas to lead the way, sang their Lancer military songs, and marched proudly towards the snow-capped mountains and their strange dreams. The man who told this amusing story was Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, the Kipling whose lines were quoted by Roden Barr, Our Thief of New York, in 1888, Kipling At the age of twenty-three. If I remember correctly, Kipling should be the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.From the perspective of the mainstream of novel development, Kipling is actually quite a strange character—this old empire, which is the starting point of modern novels, has always had quite a few good novelists, but it seems that the British are going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature It has to be someone with a strange shape. For example, Churchill, a World War II hero who is more suitable to win the Nobel War Prize (unfortunately, it seems that there is no such award), actually won the Literature Prize. On the contrary, it is Graham Greene who writes so well. Being nominated more than 20 times and still not getting it, the suspicious taste and political acumen of the group of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences can be seen from this.

But having said that, their taste is still better than the judges of the French Prize Goncourt, much better. Why is Kipling strange from the perspective of the mainstream of the development of the novel?Because he is a bit like a writer who has lost time and space, and he is also like a writer who doesn't know the Han Dynasty, let alone the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and who bumps into it and has no idea what the civilized world is today. Kipling was born in Bombay, a big city in India, in 1865. He started writing very early. He wrote poems and novels in his teens, but it was not early at all in terms of writing novels in Western Europe. Kipling’s writing time fell Around the period from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, we know that the great river of Western European novels had flowed through the most mature peak period at that time, and the writing of the great authors and themes that looked at the sky and the world had already been exhausted, or Said that no one believed in the possibility of its existence at all.

According to Lukacs’ accusation, roughly, the original powerful narrative tradition in Europe has shrunk into the detailed and cumbersome description of naturalism. Thinkers, historical narrators, practitioners of revolution in the real world, and standard-bearer poets have been replaced by "professional novelists" under the capitalist professional division of labor; At the beginning of Quixote, he said, "The earliest novelists in Europe traveled in a world that seemed infinite to people." The sad knights of La Mancha rode their horses towards the magnificent adventure of the vast and unknown, free and easy. No one can stop it; then when it came to Balzac, buildings began to rise up to block people's sight and way, "The buildings are social institutions: including the police, courts, finance and the world of crime. The era of Balzac is no longer There is the blissful idleness of Cervantes or Diderot"; when we go down to Flaubert and Zola, "the field of vision shrinks to a place within a wall", that only man, without borders Continental Europe is constantly divided and isolated, the infinity of the external world has been lost, and people can only look down at the infinity of the soul to replace; After death, European novels can still be like the dream of the infinite human soul in full bloom, and since then it has lost its magic power, and even Madame Bovary's dream of freedom trapped in a small room cannot be preserved, and people can only think of her. His own trial, and his job as a land surveyor, this is Kafka's and the K who doesn't even have a name.

Kipling's novels were written in this era when the division of labor had been completed, and the city was so crowded that everyone felt like an island, but his novels, and even his writing identity and method were completely different from mainstream novels. According to the chronology, it is easy to mistake him for a writer in the era of Defoe and Fielding. He is like Mr. Don Quixote in the past who has been out on adventures for too long. From the Indian peninsula, which is several centuries behind the "social development time", he suddenly rushed back to the congested Europe. Or, therefore, out of place, reckless, doing something ridiculous (or as a Swedish journalist wrote when he received the Nobel Prize, "Ah, wish he had a snake in his hand!"), but manly , vividly, and more or less brought back the "happy idleness" that Indians still retain.

In this book, Bullock chooses Kipling. I personally don't know if there is a deeper or intuitively associated meaning of comparison, including the free and adventurous taste in Kipling's works, including Kipling's lingering The adult fairy tale characteristics of the past, or even Kipling's complete disregard for the bureaucratic construction of modern society, etc., are these the same as Rodden Barr, who is located in the most "progressive" and tallest building in the world. Trying to keep adventures, fairy tales for adults, a second-hand bookstore where time stops, and even the happiness and freedom of penetrating thousands of households with the skills of an old thief-at least, we see his response to Kipling's anti-Semitic poem The irony of Saving Castle Barkero, and other related acts, is largely correct, and Kipling has always had a ridiculous habit of acting and writing ridiculous things.

Kipling was never a "professional" novelist, as Lukacs said, he also wrote poetry, and kept writing poetry, even almost being awarded the title of Poet Laureate in England (almost because of his own Rejected), not like Faulkner and the like, who just wrote at the "age of poetry" when they were 17 or 18 years old and lamented life.Among them, the most famous but also the most ridiculous is the poem "The White Man's Burden" (The White Man's Burden) written in 1898 when he was already thirty-two years old. Celebrating the greatness and justification of imperial power as the "Mandate of Heaven" of the white man:

Take up the white man&s burden—— Send forth the best ye breed—— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives & need To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild—— Your new caught, sullen peoples Half devil and half child ... Please forgive us for not having the patience to finish quoting or to help you translate it. For those who are really interested in imperialism, it is not difficult to find the full text on foreign websites using the author's name Rudyard Kipling - Kipling also sent this poem to The old President Roosevelt of the United States won the praise of the old Roosevelt that "from the point of view of expansionism, it is very reasonable".

Even in the field of novel writing, Kipling has been hovering between "orthodox" novels and early adventure legends. His most famous and widely circulated novel is Jungle Books, which is translated as "Jungle Prince" in Taiwan. Write about a child Mowgli who was raised by wild beasts in the forest, as well as the fierce and warm black panther Bagheera, the powerful, clever and cunning big snake Ka, the big bear Barlow, the white cobra Nagg, and the group of squeaky Cha-cha-cha-cha, a badass monkey.Perhaps when Kipling wrote, he was thinking of some kind of cruel law of the jungle, thinking that this is the truth of life, and it is the truth of the confrontation between races and nations, but the success of Jungle Books is obviously not in these outdated prejudices, but in His wonderful storytelling and character creation abilities.So many years later, Jungle Books is almost completely regarded as just an interesting forest fairy tale, and even the cruel elements that can be seen everywhere in the book are completely removed, and become the typical Disney cartoons of bravery, strength, and the unity of man and animals. Silly stories of cartoon films for children all over the world.

Well, so much Kipling's right and wrong has been said in one breath, it is necessary to say some good things about Kipling-please note that this is by no means a hypocritical so-called "balanced report", but the truth. Kipling is really a storyteller, whimsical, full of climaxes and full of vitality. As a reader who temporarily forgets that he has read and agrees with Said's "Orientalism", it is actually extremely comfortable to read; As a reader who has to suffer intellectually from boring contemporary European and American novels, I feel relieved and alive. Here I am very happy to recommend another masterpiece of Kipling's "Kim". It just so happens that there is a translation in Taiwan, which is extremely convenient for purchasing or reading.

Kim was the name of a child, a white British child like Kipling himself, who was born and raised in India.His father, the standard-bearer of the Mavericks of Ireland, was exiled in the Eastern Colonies and died smoking opium when Kim was three, leaving the child to a poor Eurasian woman, but his down-and-out father believed that one day everything would be alright. It will get better, one day there will be a colonel riding a horse and leading the world's most elite troops to welcome Kim, and there will be nine hundred athletes who worship the green field and red bull as gods and blow their horns to welcome Kim. This prophecy is sealed in the base like a spell. In the amulet hanging around Mu's neck.Inside the amulet were actually three documents, one was his father's discharge certificate, the other was Kim's birth certificate, and the other was just his father's signature. Young Kim grew up in a poor street, and he was proficient in survival skills. He was called "Friend of the World" by everyone in the neighborhood. One day, he accidentally met an old Tibetan lama from the snow-capped mountains in the north, and somehow became the lama's apprentice. .The lofty abbot of the Suren Temple, Lama Dexiu, has a sad wish. He plans to travel all over India to find a legendary river, a river that can cleanse the sins of the world. According to legend, Sakyamuni also When I was a prince, I shot the river that emerged from an arrow. From here, the strange old and young, one white and one yellow, went together to find their calling in the vast and boundless India—— A blissfully idle adventure in an infinite world. It will also be a blissful and idle adventure for readers from New York to India, from the West to the East, from the contemporary splendor at the end of the 20th century to the mystery and mystery of colonial India-if you read Rodden Barr Open the book "Kim" after solving the case.