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

[ish mailian]

Rushdie wrote a very interesting analysis of Kipling's "On the City Wall."

Then I went to bed and dreamed that Wali Dad had sacked the City and I
was made Vizier, with Lalun's silver huqa for mark of office.

....

But I was thinking how I had become Lalun's Vizier after all.

On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 8:10 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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