Rudyard Kipling's first, heavily-autobiographical novel, The Light that Failed, does not stint on literary quotations. Throughout the text, there are allusions to or snatches of poetry lifted from Emerson, Andrew Marvell, the King James Bible, and the works of the 19th century Scottish poet James Thomson—among others.
But the young Kipling—despite his evident urge to quote—somehow avoids making any allusion to the one piece of English poetry that one would most expect to find its way into a book on this subject: namely, John Milton's sonnet on his blindness ("When I consider how my light is spent").
Kipling's novel—after all—tells the tale of a young artist cursed with the sudden and irreversible loss of his eyesight—preventing him from doing any further work.
One would think that Milton's case history, then—his own fear of declining powers due to loss of vision—would be an obvious source of inspiration for the novel. Kipling's protagonist Dick Heldar—like Milton—faces the prospect of losing forever that "one Talent which is dead to hide"; he dreads finding his artistic powers, like Milton's, "Lodged with me useless," etc.
But no—Kipling leaves this one fund of literary quotation on the table—in contrast to his practice elsewhere in the novel. Why?
Perhaps because the "eyes" in Kipling's novel were not really eyes—whereas they were in Milton's case.
Milton—who had made his life as a scholar and poet—had to actually face the prospect of losing the ability to read and write that had given his daily routine joy and meaning.
Whereas in The Light that Failed, the eyes may only be a metaphor.
Freud, in his essay on "The Uncanny," asserts at one point (with his usual bald confidence when it comes to matters of symbolism) that "the fear of going blind, is quite often a substitute for the fear of castration." (McLintock trans.)
And indeed—one can read the whole of The Light that Failed through this lens—Kipling's fear of the emancipated woman, the "New Woman," the "Woman Artist," etc.—his unfortunate mutterings in one scene about so-called "hermaphroditic futilities" (a line that even Dick Heldar felt he could say only to the dog)—manifests as an unconscious fear of losing male potency. ("I'm down and done for," etc.)
On this reading, Maisie's long endurance against Dick's importunings can be seen as a drawn-out castration. Indeed, it appears to have become something of a critical commonplace (judging from the book's Penguin Classics introduction) to interpret Dick's "blindness" in this Freudian sense.
But—I say—sometimes the eyes are actually eyes. The fear of literal blindness played a role in Kipling's own story of childhood trauma (his farming out to a dreadful foster family)—which he told about so powerfully in "Baa Baa, Black Sheep"—and which he revisits in the first chapter of this novel.
And Dick's descent into blindness is told with conviction in the novel. It is not just the loss of potency, but the fear of the more literal immurement in the eternal walls of a black prison—that Kipling manages to convey with real terror.
So, if the blindness in The Light that Failed is—in part at least—actual blindness—then why couldn't it be Milton's blindness?
Perhaps because Kipling could not bring himself to accept Milton's pious conclusions in the poem—his humble submission to fate. Kipling could not convincingly embrace the conclusion that "they also serve who only stand and wait."
Among the many things Kipling's novel is, after all (it's certainly also a reflection of the misogyny and colonialism of its era, e.g.)—The Light that Failed is also a product of late Victorian theological pessimism. Matthew Arnold's "Sea of Faith" has indeed retreated pretty far, in the fin-de-siècle world portrayed in its pages. The young bohemians at the center of the book can only bring themselves to gesture toward religion through half-facetious references to "Allah" and his will.
The same mental atmosphere that would produce A Shropshire Lad a few years later, and that had already produced Edward FitzGerald's classic translation of Omar Khayyam—both set in a despairing, godless universe, where humankind is fundamentally alone, yet subject to the forces of an inexorable cosmic fate—plainly played its part in producing The Light that Failed.
Perhaps the biggest (almost unconscious) giveaway that this is an unbeliever's book is that a central plot element revolves around James Thomson's extraordinary poem, The City of Dreadful Night—a poem about the spiritual emptiness and vanity at the heart of all things.
(The passage from Thomson's poem that appears to have most affected Kipling was also the one that most moved me, when I first read the poem some years ago—the description of Dürer's "Melancholia," which makes the angel (Thomson describes her as a woman; though some art historians insist it is a comely man) into a sort of guardian spirit and protector of all who suffer from clinical depression—the perpetual ruminator who redeems our despair through sublimating it into work.)
And yet—the book is somewhat ambivalent about its godlessness—as it is about many things. Indeed, ambivalence may be the key to Kipling's whole character.
It has been obvious to every critic who has dealt with him at length—from Edmund Wilson on—that Kipling's traumatic childhood was central to his life as an author. One cannot understand the work without investigating his biography—therefore—as repellant as such a notion would be to a later generation of New Critics.
And the chief effect of this trauma seems to have been to implant in Kipling a profound ambivalence toward authority. He seems to have two oscillating poles of his character: there is Kipling the rebel, who feels the need to thumb his nose at any figure of authority—particularly feminine authority; and then there is Kipling the jingoist, the imperialist—the one who wrote some of the ripest and most servile verses ever penned, in shameless flattery of the self-conception of the British Empire.
In this constant dialectical tension between a desire both to sneer at authority, when it seems potentially weak, and cravenly submit to it when it seems in the ascendant—we find the basic personality structure of the political right. Indeed, psychoanalysts like Adorno and Erich Fromm would have no trouble diagnosing Kipling as a classic case of the "authoritarian personality."
As Fromm once described the prototypical case of the phenomenon—Martin Luther: "his personality was torn by a constant ambivalence toward authority; he hated it and rebelled against it, while at the same time he admired it and tended to submit to it." (See Escape from Freedom.)
Kipling could be described in the same way. Indeed, Kipling wears all this on his sleeve—particularly in The Light that Failed. He explains overtly the primary lesson he learned from his traumatic childhood as follows: "he had seen the strong hand prevail too often in other places to be squeamish over the moral aspects of right and wrong."
It makes sense, after such a training, that he would be torn inwardly by a hatred and resentment of the "strong hand"—a fear of it and a desire never to find himself under its force—and a simultaneous worship of it and desire to possess it for himself. He is the prototypical bullied child who grows up to be a bully of others in turn.
This insight into the "authoritarian personality" also helps explain an aspect of his character that struck Edmund Wilson as something of a paradox: why was Kipling able only once—in "Baa Baa, Black Sheep"—to take the part of the underdog; why did everything else he ever wrote glorify and lionize the overdog? In Fromm's thesis, we have our answer.
Of course, Kipling seems consciously aware of these tendencies in his protagonist (and thus, in himself) and tries to distance himself from them critically. Dick Heldar, in the course of the novel, is obviously supposed to have his pride and cruelty and selfishness humbled. But at the same time—Kipling can't quite bring himself to do it (as the book's introduction also points out). He likes the cruelty of Dick's macho environment too much to actually reject it by the book's end.
The same can be said of Kipling's theology. It never actually resolves itself into a coherent worldview—because Kipling could never escape his own fundamental ambivalence.
Of the two poles of Kipling's character, it is certainly Kipling "the rebel" who is more prominently on display in The Light that Failed. This is a young rebel's book that wishes to court impiety and blasphemy and thumb its nose at Jove (or, perhaps, Juno most especially).
Yet, at the same time—the book counsels submission to cosmic authority—the stern hand of fate; albeit, again, without much conviction. The God of The Light that Failed is a cruel and arbitrary one, whose only mercy to Dick at last is to let him die in the Sudan with a bullet through his brain.
Kipling thus cannot bring himself to adopt the unambiguous stance of the Promethean artist—the revolutionist against God and fate—the "metaphysical rebel," as Camus called this archetype—in part because he also worships strength. The projection of male authority into heaven is one that he ultimately must bow before; even as he rejects and storms against the female manifestations of authority on Earth (as a traumatized child—in one of the novel's more powerful and self-revealing admissions—Kipling writes, "Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he loathed Mrs. Jennett" (his awful foster mother)).
There is much in this novel, of course, that reads today as proto-incel or proto-MAGA. And indeed, in all of Trump's political movement, we find—not only the same misogyny and anti-feminism—but also the same uneasy ambivalence about authority figures—the desire on the one hand to sneer at "experts" and the "establishment," coupled with the most abject boot-licking servility before the myth of the "strong man" (viz. Tucker Carlson's vivid fantasy of Trump taking America across his knee and "spanking" us all like a "disobedient daughter").
And perhaps in this dual-naturedness; in this inability to come off the fence and opt at last for the role of either metaphysical rebel or eulogist of power and authority—we find the psychological block that prevented Kipling from drawing upon Milton to write his great novel on blindness. Kipling, at last, perhaps found that he could not love Milton's God—much as he felt that he was supposed to (after all, Kipling-the-anti-rebel felt the need to append, to Kipling-the-rebel's observation quoted above, about Dick "hating his God"—that "this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the young").
But then again—it's not clear Milton could bring himself to love his God either. Much the same ambivalence we have been discussing here has been detected in his work. Was it not of him, after all, that Blake famously wrote that he was "of the Devil's party and did not know it"?
May we not say the same of Kipling? And is that not the only thing that still redeems his work? As much as the mature Kipling tried not to rebel—after all—to project himself into the role of the "strong hand" that held the whip; to become an apologist and a eulogist for the absurd sophistries of white supremacy, colonialism, and male chauvinism—was there not also a part of him that identified, in spite of himself, with the underdog? It is due to the flashes we get of that aspect of his character that he is still readable today.
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