The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 27: Your God and My Gods

I realized something surprising last night, which is that outside of a handful of his "Just So Stories" and a barely remembered reading of Captains Courageous many, many years ago, I mainly know Rudyard Kipling for his poetry. This is surprising because I don't really know anybody primarily for their poetry, and this includes people who write poetry and nothing else. It's simply not a literary form I've given much time to. But for whatever reason, Kipling's poetry, at least at one point in my life, drew me to him more than his prose did. I couldn't tell you why this was; all I can say is that when I was a teenager I read "Boots" over and over again.

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So when the ubiquitous Stephen Jones compiled Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror & Fantasy in 2008 (with a very nice introduction by the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman), I figured this would be a plenty nice way to ease my way into Kipling's prose. I was also a little surprised, because while I knew Kipling had written one horror story -- "The Mark of the Beast", about which more later -- I had no idea he'd written enough to fill up a nearly 800-page book. He did, though, and it's a beauty.

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You can probably piece together the rest, so let's jump right in. I only read two, which is, yes, my standard number, but I'd hoped to squeeze in at least one more. I chose "The Mark of the Beast" for obvious reasons, as well as "The Phantom Rickshaw" because it was a bit longer than the other story, and because I understood it to also be a reasonably famous story, but in his introduction Neil Gaiman raves about a story called "The Gardener", and says of yet another:

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...[A]t least one of the stories in this volume revolts me on a hundred levels, and has given me nightmares, and I would not have missed reading it for worlds.

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Well, thanks for keeping that title close to your chest there, Neil. For all I know, he's talking about "The Mark of the Beast" or "The Phantom Rickshaw", though I sort of doubt it.

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Anyway. A very illuminating bit of reading this was. Apart from the fact that I very much enjoyed both stories, and found Kipling's prose immediately appealing, it made me wish that the origins of certain story formulas were easier to trace, because both of these employ classic horror story structures, especially "The Mark of the Beast", and of course that story was written in 1890, and "The Phantom Rickshaw" in 1885. Were these plots original to Kipling? If so, his influence in the horror field is actually monumental, just based on "The Mark of the Beast". Of course, the late 19th century would have been well along in the history of horror literature; then again, the horror fiction written then could count as the foundation for modern horror, and "The Mark of the Beast" is, in fact, quite specific to certain changes in the world at that time, and forever after.

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Now, "The Mark of the Beast" is very basic. A group of Westerners are carousing in an Eastern land -- India, in this case. They get terribly drunk, and two of them, our narrator and a "member of the Police" named Strickland, are left to help a third man, an Englishman (as they all are) named Fleete who owns property in India, get home. In doing so, they find themselves passing by a temple:

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Our. road lay through the bazaar, close to a little temple of Hanuman, the Monkey-god, who is a leading divinity worthy of respect. All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people -- the great grey apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.

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Well, all three of the men are absolutely blasted, however, and Fleete breaks away from his keepers and desecrates the temple by putting out his cigar on a statue of Hanuman. After doing this, from the temple a man devastated by leprosy, dubbed a "Silver Man" because of the state and color of his skin, assaults Fleete. Fleete is rescued by his companions, though in the days to come he will develop some sort of rash on his chest, where the leper "nuzzled" him, and will acquire a rabid taste for nearly-raw porkchops. And he will begin howling.

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As you can see, this story, as a piece of plotting, has influenced about every third horror novel or film since it first appeared, whether that was with Kipling or before. Any time a tourist thoughtlessly, foolishly, or callously trods over sacred ground, only to face dire consequences later, well...perhaps with "The Mark of the Beast" we have our source. Even if we don't, there's something interesting to Kipling's approach to the material. Frequently dismissed as a Right-wing Imperialist, Kipling shows an odd sort of respect to the cultures and beliefs of the "Subcontinent". The manner in which Strickland and the narrator ultimately deal with this situation could perhaps raise some eyebrows, at least as it relates to this argument, but the title of this post comes from a native proverb that Kipling uses to open the story:
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Your Gods and my Gods -- do you or I know which are the stronger?

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Their Gods, or so this story would seem to indicate. And anyway, if Fleete had been something more than a drunken, blundering pale face, none of this would have ever happened.

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"The Phantom Rickshaw" doesn't touch on these issues quite so directly: it's the story of Jack Pansay, an Englishman in India who is the kind of fellow that used to be called a "bounder" and his brief love affair with Agnes Keith-Wessington, his cruel dissolving of same, her succumbing to illness, and her subsequent post-mortem harassment of Pansay as he attempts to carry on a relationship with his new love. Not exactly the funny story that glib summation would imply, "The Phantom Rickshaw" is actually kind of funny, as well as eerie, and even a little angry. The anger is directed at men like Pansay, because though the story is told in his voice, Kipling allows him some blatantly phony moments of remorse over the manner in which he broke things off with Agnes, nor does he spare Pansay the opinions of others. After the haunting of Pansay by the title contraption begins, Pansay comes under the medical supervision of the wise, curious, and kindly Dr. Heatherlegh, who rarely fails to remind his patient that he's only bothering to treat him of his physical and psychological trauma (no one but Pansay can see the Rickshaw, or hear Agnes's voice coming from within, begging Pansay to forgive her -- for what??) because he's professionally interested. At one point, Pansay has become such a ghastly and down-trodden figure, that publicly he's come to be pitied:

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"And that's rather more than you deserve," [Heatherlegh] concluded pleasantly, "though the Lord knows you've been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind; we'll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon."

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The last pages of "The Phantom Rickshaw" are quite something, as Pansay's relationship with Agnes's ghost, and with the rickshaw, change, and his terror mingles with acceptance and even a muddled sort of affection. All this, even though Pansay's quite certain that his fate is rapidly approaching, and will not be pleasant. Finally, in the last lines, Pansay is absolved of nothing, either by Kipling or by himself, and as he meets his end no one can doubt that it was his own brutal self interest that was the sole cause.

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Meanwhile, this horrid little man is given, by Kipling, certain opinions that flesh out his place in India, and even Kipling's as well, though it may go against certain popular perceptions of the man. Early in his haunting, Pansay tries to logically explain away the sudden appearance of a woman who looks exactly like his deceased ex-lover, riding in a rickshaw that is a duplicate of hers, and manned by coolies wearing the same uniforms as those men who served Agnes:

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[M]y first hope that some woman marvellously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies with their old livery was lost. Again and again I went round this tread-mill of thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition. I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty [his new girlfriend]; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the rickshaw. "After all," I argued, "the presence of the rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd. Fancy the ghost of a hill-man!"

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Because, of course, non-Westerners can't have souls. Except Kipling shows that they do -- those are the ghosts of "coolies", after all. Take the spirits of others lightly at your own peril, Kipling is saying. And don't be glib about it, either. Curiously, in both stories someone half-quotes the line from Hamlet:

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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Both times, the speaker only makes it to "There are more things..." before being cut off. In "The Mark of the Beast", it plays out like this:

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I said, "'There are more things...'"

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But Strickland hates that quotation. He says that I have worn it threadbare.