ABSTRACT
In the decade preceding the publication of Kim (1901), widely regarded as Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece, the bard of empire wrote two other novels: The Light that Failed (1891) and Captains Courageous (1896). Kipling’s first attempts at novel writing, unlike the short stories and poems which he had already published to critical acclaim, have widely been regarded by literary critics as failures, and their publication and sales history also suggests that these novels were not well received. This chapter will argue that Kipling, at a historical moment in which communication and transport infrastructure was drastically expanding across the face of the globe, struggled to write a novel that represented these global networks in the worldly reach they were beginning to attain. In so doing, he was trying to write a new kind of networked literature, one both formally and geographically expansive in scope. However, by counter-intuitively looking at the moments when his novels fail in this project, this chapter argues that Kipling’s novels reveal the instability of imperial identity, global consciousness, and the rise of the networked world-system that still shapes the world today.
Nevertheless, Kipling’s early novels are attempting to construct narratives that can imagine space on a global scale, thereby contributing to the imperial project, as they address and control colonial space through a series of ‘geometrical’ lines and assimilate three-dimensional land and seascapes into the linear grooves of realist narrative. However, in their failure to fully control these spaces, they also create cracks, or crevices, in imperial ideology, revealing its limitations and allowing us to trace, retrospectively, the later failure of the imperial project as it is already engrained implicitly into these novels. The chapter concludes by arguing that Kipling’s early novels were in fact attempting to envision a planetary order centred not in a specific imperial country (Britain) but rather on a globally interconnected network of physical infrastructures, demonstrating the extent to which Kipling’s writing looks forward to a worlded literature, or ‘world literature’, as it has come to be known.
