BtZ42 p. 14 "to stumble into an orgy...."

[ish mailian]

Nice list!
Orwell credits Kipling with documenting a history that might have been lost.

from Orwell's Essays

RUDYARD KIPLING (1942)


How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the
long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must
say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century
Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary
picture we have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that
one could otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from
unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his picture of army life
seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any middle-class
English person is likely to know enough to fill up the gaps. At any
rate, reading the essay on Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just
published or is just about to publish [Note, below], I was struck by
the number of things that are boringly familiar to us and seem to be
barely intelligible to an American. But from the body of Kipling's
early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously
misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army–the sweltering
barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts
and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings
and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horsepiss,
the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody
skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the
cholera-stricken camps, the 'native' concubines, the ultimate death in
the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic
music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola's gorier
passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some
idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On about the same
level they will be able to learn something of British India in the
days when motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error
to imagine that we might have had better books on these subjects if,
for example, George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had
Kipling's opportunities. That is the kind of accident that cannot
happen. It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should
produce a book like WAR AND PEACE, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of
army life, such as Sebastopol or THE COSSACKS, not because the talent
was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient
sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate
contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed
natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the
army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a
degree which continental observers find almost incredible. Civilized
men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in
most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial
literature. It took a very improbable combination of circumstances to
produce Kipling's gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs.
Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of
temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself
was only half civilized.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part17


On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 6:29 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> "held by a Messiah no one has quite recognized yet"
>
> a nod to Norman O. Brown and the "orgy" of polymorphous perversity? (pure
> crazy spec and
> I do not think so really. This is just H(alf) A. Loaf's fantasy because he
> only ever gets half a loaf and this is a full loaf fantasy.)
>
> why is it part of an Oriental episode?---P and his mysterious East passim...
> in a Forbidden Quarter? Besides the below, very interesting, 'Forbidden
> quarter'
> in Google brings up Empty Quarter in an Arabian desert,
>
> The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, ...
>
> https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1136804021
> Rashmi Varma - 2011 - ‎Preview - ‎More editions
> As discussed above, Fanon visualizes this through the spatial metaphor of
> the colonizer's city as “the forbidden quarter”: The violence which has
> ruled over the ordering of the colonial world ... that same violence will be
> claimed and taken over
>
> Fanon For Beginners - Page 119 - Google Books Result
>
> https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1934389870
> Wyrick PhD, Deborah - 2014 - ‎Philosophy
> By referring to dreams and sexual urges, Fanon reminds us of the ... When
> natives surge into “ THE FORBIDDEN QUARTERS,” Fanon explains, their object
> is ......
>
> Relevant Fanon texts in English when TRP writing GR.
>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l