The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire
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The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire
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Overview
Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others—and deft use of psychoanalytic theory—The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 723 KB |
About the Author
Christopher Lane is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Read an Excerpt
The Ruling Passion
British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire
By Christopher Lane
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1995 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7939-3
CHAPTER 1
The Incursions of Purity: Kipling's Legislators and the Anxiety of Psychic Demand
Impurity and Expropriation: The Colonial Impulse to Power
Now, this is the road that the White Men tread
When they go to clean a land ...
Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread
Their highway side by side!
— Rudyard Kipling
A stone's throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread
And all the world is wild and strange.
— Kipling
It's curious the fascination that white men feel drilling queer material into shape.
— Kipling
In their speeches and writings, many British Victorian colonials raise concerns about the successful implementation of law and authority. Their anxiety resonates beyond imperial governments and legislative structures; it also questions the internal coherence of colonial rule. In interpreting this anxiety, I suggest that a conflict between desire and mastery prevailed on what I shall term Britain's "colonial impulse to power."
This oscillation between desire and mastery clarifies an uncertainty that surfaced in many colonial texts about how to inhabit and symbolize colonialism's political and psychic registers; it also foregrounds the drives and fantasies that propelled Britain's ongoing bid for global sovereignty. Kipling often referred to the "breaking strain" that stymied his protagonists, for instance, when their national loyalty created intolerable fatigue and confusion over the precise meaning of the labor. Although this "breaking strain" implies that acts of personal sacrifice glorified Britain's empire, many historians tell us that Britain's drive to secure political and economic sovereignty also intensified and sexualized relations between men, projecting antagonism and hostility onto those outside its franchise. Since Britain's colonial mastery generated profound ambivalence toward its subjects, British women may have represented supports and vanishing mediators whose partial absence allowed forms of colonial mastery to prevail.
This account, however, is only one side of an uncertain and contested story. If Britain's colonial power was as absolute and secure as its politicians maintained, how should we explain so many colonials' suspicions that Britain's power not only was vulnerable but also, on another level, already lost? This anxiety between colonizer and colonized, and between men and women, at the turn of the last century differed greatly from the full weight of Britain's administrative power. It produced a paradox over the way that prominent colonials understood political instability at the level of ontological, group, and national fantasy, and the reason Britain's authority turned on a nebulous and quite precarious hinge between external security and internal control.
Before we consider Kipling's engagement with these psychic and rhetorical dilemmas, let us first turn to several prominent exemplars of colonial doubt: in his military speeches, for instance, Lord Horatio Kitchener — friend to Kipling, administrator in South Africa, political rival to the viceroy of India, and discreet homosexual — considered this psychic rigidity a precondition for military success: "No soldier who is unable to exercise due restraint in these matters can expect to be entrusted with command over his comrades.... Every man can, by self-control, restrain the indulgence of these imprudent and reckless impulses that so often lead men astray." Kitchener urged the soldier to examine and manage his "reckless impulses" to prevent him from being "led astray." When this policy failed, as it often did, Kitchener proposed genocide and brutal subjugation as a corrective for a paucity of domestic and internal control. Calls for askesis and sexual chastity influenced not only this ferocious and unappeasable command, but also the premise that the native would not submit to outside rule without evidence of the colonial's self-restraint. Adopting this paradox of controlled violence, Kitchener considered the vigilant internal discipline of passions as a valuable quality for export.
Recent critics have documented the colonial perception of indigenous peoples as lawless, seditious, and sexually promiscuous; this work provides an impetus for my study. However, critics have paid less attention to the dynamic that was integral to Britain's "Empire of the Selfsame," and have often framed this dynamic by appealing to historical events. Contrary to this single emphasis on historical materialism, I suggest that an unremitting dread of external defiance and internal unmaking propelled Britain's drive for global mastery; that the unappeasable quality of this drive created a fervent ambition that many colonialists tried to temper and vindicate by ethical appeals. Let us consider more examples: Robert Needham Cust, a civilian who served in the Punjab in the 1850s and 1860s, acknowledged that "the first sweet taste of unbounded power for good over others, the joy of working out one's own design, the contagious pleasure of influencing hundreds, the new dignity of independence, the novelty of Rule and swift obedience, this and the worship of nature in the solemnity of its grandeur and the simplicity of its children, were the fascinations which had enchanted me." Henry Lawrence, who directed many of Britain's contemporaneous policies in the Punjab, elaborated on this point without appearing to jeopardize his command's authority: "It is all nonsense, sticking to rules and formalities, and reporting on foolscap paper, when you ought to be on the heels of a body of marauders, far within their own fastness, or riding into the villages and glens consoling, coaxing, or bullying as it may be, the wild inhabitants." Finally, let us cite James Fitzjames Stephen, an influential imperialist of the time, because his sentiment influenced Kipling's later demands for colonial appropriation: "The sum and substance of what we have to teach them [amount to] the gospel of the English.... It is a compulsory gospel which admits of no dissent and no disobedience.... If it should lose its essential unity of purpose, and fall into hands either weak or unfaithful, chaos would come again like a flood." Despite the confidence of these statements, each appears haunted by anxiety that a counterforce can unmake and usurp their authority from within. We could describe this force as colonial jouissance since it underpins each declaration and dissipates labor and power. In considering the full influence of this counterforce, we also might argue that it obliged the colonial to compete with a corresponding impulse to self-dispossession whenever he bid for a country's possession. Thus the anxiety fueling the colonial's ambition to possess a country may have precipitated a significant number of internal crises for the colonial and his administration.
Since masculine rigor seemed amenable to channeling discipline into an incitement to power, many colonialists deemed it a suitable force to check these destructive impulses. For instance, Fitzjames Stephen gendered force as the expression of resolute masculinity: "Strength in all its forms is life and manhood. To be less strong is to be less of a man, whatever else you may be." However, Stephen never clarified the referents to this "whatever else"; they conflict with central axioms of colonial masculinity.
These examples demonstrate that by the time Kipling came to theorize imperialism, inexorable laws of progress, hierarchy, and evolution appeared to determine the foundational logic of Britain's empire, presenting "mankind" as the governor of Nature's ordinance: "Nothing is gained by coddling weak and primitive men. The law of survival applies to races as well as to the species of animals. It is pure sentimental bosh to say that Africa belongs to a lot of naked blacks. It belongs to the race that can make the best use of it. I am for the white man and the English race." This appeal to natural law generated a frame of categories and roles able to proscribe acceptable behavior by condemning their infraction. The law seemingly resolved the problem of antagonistic and self-destructive drives by fostering an ideal by which to measure the subject's deficient relation to each political mandate. Kipling's imperial law established a "transcendental signifier" against which to defend the empire from the manifest dissent and chaos of its unruly impulses.
Kipling often connected this anxiety with the process of writing and the general production and dissemination of colonial meaning; his fiction relies on an analogous injunction to expel all of its detrimental elements. Kipling termed this radical excision "Higher Editing"; he sought to leave only a text's essential elements: "A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked." However, his attempt to reduce the proliferation of meaning in his narratives inadvertently produced an elliptical and "modernist" style that stressed allusion, inference, and interpretation as a means to withstand "the pressure of the absent." Additionally, the excised is never absent in Kipling's writing; the pressure of a "burden incommunicable" amplifies the precise limits of his narrative control. In the opening sentence of a description of his "Working-Tools," for instance, Kipling argues that "Every man must be his own law in his own work." The narrator of "False Dawn" later demonstrates the practical impossibility of this ideal: "No man will ever know the exact truth of this story ... so the tale must be told from the outside — in the dark — all wrong" (67).
With its appeal to law over desire's vicissitudes, Kipling's writing mirrors a defensive structure that tries to expel sexual intimacy and miscegenation from the text; this attempt repeatedly surfaces and fails in the readings that follow. Benita Parry foregrounds Kipling's reliance on parataxis, for instance, arguing that the trope "organizes incommensurable discourses in ways that obscure and conceal the antagonism of their ideas." The brevity of Kipling's fictional endings indicates the urgency with which he tried to disband the shattering chaos of desire; this brevity also foregrounds anxious moments of colonial authority by displaying his tenuous control over the text's periphery. Kipling's "nostalgia for a center" often manifests as an extensive fraternal diaspora, for instance, that relieves the uncertainty of "race" by promising a reprieve from horrific formlessness: solidarity among white men provides at least imaginary defense against "impure" elements of racial difference and sexual desire. Yet Kipling's fiction is never stable in this regard because the displacement of "impurities" compels them to haunt their original structure. Let us therefore examine this difficulty of desire, and its uncertain resolution, in one of Kipling's most interesting narrative failures.
The Aim of Desire and the Passion That Fails
He must be a man of decent height,
He must be a man of weight,
He must come home on a Saturday night
In a thoroughly sober state;
He must know how to love me,
And he must know how to kiss;
And if he's enough to keep us both
I can't refuse him bliss
— Rudyard Kipling
He was beginning to learn, not for the first time in his experience, that kissing is a cumulative poison. The more you get of it, the more you want. — Kipling (182)
There are many lies in the world, and not a few liars, but there are no liars like our bodies, except it be the sensations of our bodies. — Kipling
Critics generally condemn Kipling's first novel, The Light That Failed (1891), as a lamentable failure. While enigma and thematic irresolution riddle the work, the narrative splits between two remarkable and dissimilar endings. In the first, the protagonist Dick Heldar dies in the arms of his closest male friend, Torpenhow; in the second, amended version, Heldar forms a precipitous marriage to Maisie, a woman who has from the novel's outset expressed almost unmitigated hostility toward him. The narrator must emphasize her uninterest in Heldar because their artistic rivalry disrupts the romantic attachment, creating an agony of unrequited love. Although neither version is successful in realist terms, Kipling preferred the first but proffered the second as a hasty revision to renew the interest of his disaffected readers.
This revision is incongruous because Maisie's abrupt change of heart and spontaneous repentance contradicts the narrator's emphasis on her and Heldar's incommensurate demands. On the one hand, the narrator censures Maisie's preoccupation with painting as a selfish disregard for her "suitor's" plight. On the other, her resistance is central to the narrative because it upholds the novel's basic concerns: the relentless unpleasure of Heldar's creativity, the extent to which he succeeds in convincing himself (if not the reader) of his passion for an "unworthy" woman, and the self-destructive impulses that represent all heterosexual interest in the novel. Maisie illustrates all of these themes because the novel projects her as the reprehensible cause of Heldar's misery.
In this respect, the novel's split between two endings is not an exception to, but rather an emblem of, a wider narrative difficulty; the split documents the novel's resistance to sexual desire. The Light That Failed represents a crisis of object choice for which the classic scenario of the unavailable woman — and her conventional indictment — seems inadequate to explain its failure. Maisie and other women in the text are recipients of an embittered misogyny, but the antagonism of desire that beleaguers Heldar not only precedes his involvement with Maisie, but also transforms her lack of interest into a conflict to which she has no obvious connection.
Thus, the text follows a split in Heldar between his desire's aim and the object that receives it — the object which he considers its cause — although his desire's character falls elsewhere, within the purview of masculine relations, and particularly the arms of one man whose attraction prevails throughout. We can attribute many critics' complaints about this text's flaccidity to a conflict between aim, desire, and object because the text exists irrespective of Kipling's metaphysical explanation for Heldar's despondency and the author's misogynist rejection of women as the principal cause of Heldar's misery. The phrase "spoilt my aim" recurs in this text (10, 11–12, 14, 206), for instance, an example and symptom of Heldar's psychic impotence and as a precursor to his eventual blindness — an illness that stages his need for Torpenhow's specular assistance, allowing him to focus on what otherwise he cannot see about his desire.
We can further illustrate Heldar's dilemma by the significance he attaches to kissing. His obsession for Maisie begins — like Philip Carey's similarly hopeless "demand" for Mildred in W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1915) — from an apparent lack of intimacy (see chapter 5 for discussion of Maugham). Their first kiss occurs after his gun has misfired, its aim spoilt: "Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but ... it was the first" (13). By granting Heldar only one kiss, Maisie makes each request exorbitant, leaving Heldar furious and later incapacitated by its "cumulative poison" (182); the demand always exceeds her response — and, one might suggest, his need. While Maisie constrains oral gratification in The Light That Failed, several bizarre and equivalent incidents represent this pleasure between men and between women. For instance, Heldar and Torpenhow hear the refrain from the musical — cited as an epigraph to this section — during their reuniting walk. Although the narrative curiously disembodies this stanza, it is not, as Kipling claims, a "music-hall refrain" (141), but rather an example of his own verse whose inclusion gives this scene particular significance: it encourages Heldar to sign up for military service, though the narrator never explains why a regiment of men would sing their desire for a man who "must know how to love me, / And he must know how to kiss; / And if he's enough to keep us both / I can't refuse him bliss" (141). Later, Heldar receives an unsolicited kiss from a female acquaintance and comments, as if to reiterate this refrain: "'The amount of kissing lately has been simply scandalous. I shall expect Torp to kiss me next'" (196). In fact, this homosexual possibility recurs throughout Kipling's work as the most feasible limit — or point ad absurdum — to same-gender contact. To put this issue another way, we could say that it recurs as the jocular expression of a wish that expands one man's affectionate interest for another, from the specific concerns of object choice to the generic field of homophilia. Thus Mulvaney, in "With the Main Guard," reports a soldier's comment to his officer as follows: "The Staff Orf'cer wint blue, an' Toomey makes him pink by changing to the voice ov a minowderin' woman an' sayin': 'Come an' kiss me, Major dear, for me husband's at the wars an' I'm all alone at the Depot.'" Similar and unaccountable homoerotic rejoinders punctuate Kipling's short story "Love-o'-Women": "He might as well have said that he was dancing naked," comments Mulvaney to Ortheris incongruously to explain his sergeant's behavior; Mackenzie later declares of another soldier: "I knew there was no callin' a man to account for his tempers. He might as well ha' kissed me" (184).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ruling Passion by Christopher Lane. Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Introduction: Theorizing "The Empire of the Selfsame",
1: The Incursions of Purity: Kipling's Legislators and the Anxiety of Psychic Demand,
2: The Fate of the Pioneer: Mason, Haggard, and the Colonial Frame of Homophilia,
3: Framing Fears, Reading Designs: The Homosexual Art of Painting in James, Wilde, and Beerbohm,
4: Fostering Subjection: Masculine Identification and Homosexual Allegory in Conrad's Victory,
5: Maugham's Of Human Bondage and the Anatomy of Desire,
6: Managing "The White Man's Burden": The Racial Imaginary of Forster's Colonial Narratives,
7: Re/Orientations: Firbank's "Anglophobia" and the Sexual Nomad,
8: In Defense of the Realm: Sassoon's Memoirs and "Other Opaque Arenas of War",
9: Saki/Munro: "Savage Propensities"; or, The "Jungle-boy in the Drawing-room",
Epilogue: Britain's Disavowal and the Mourning of Empire,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,