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The Adventure of Technology: Kipling, the Motorcar, and National Regeneration

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.2021.0076

1080-6601

Eva Chen,

American Literature and Culture

The Adventure of Technology:Kipling, the Motorcar, and National Regeneration Eva Chen (bio) Rudyard Kipling became a car enthusiast and a member of those "early, intrepid—some called them mad—automobilists" in the last years of the 1890s when motoring was still in its infancy.1 The motorcar, a term coined by Frederick Simms after he bought the British rights to the Daimler patents in 1893, was prohibitively expensive and notoriously unreliable (Richardson, British Motor Industry, 14).2 Its open top, hand operated cranks, explosive vibrations, constant breakdowns, and unprotected exposure to wind, dust, and rough roads made for a challenging driving experience. But the car also offered unprecedented mobility, fast speed, and individual control. Its roaring energy and "poetry o' Motion" promised to transcend spatial and temporal limits like "the Angel's Dream," fueling fantasies of exhilarating emancipation from human limitations.3 Kipling was enthralled with this new technology of personal transport, describing the car as "swifter than aught 'neath the sun," and outrun by only two things, "Death and a Woman who loved him."4 The thrill of driving this "thund'ring toy" is akin to sexual excitement, both involving a "blind," "fierce, uncontrouled descent" on "Love's fiery chariot."5 Kipling's interest in the car first started in 1897, the same year the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in London with 236 members.6 But it was a twenty-minute ride in October 1899 in the £800 Panhard-Levassor driven by Alfred Harmsworth of the Daily Mail that sealed his fate—"we returned white with dust and dizzy with noise," "but the poison worked from that hour."7 From then on he bought and experimented [End Page 169] with a variety of models, and made constant motor tours all over Sussex and as far away as Scotland.8 From 1911 to 1935, less than a year before his death, Kipling and his family made as many as thirteen motor tours to France, "when motorists were as much pioneers of travel as are now airmen."9 The motorcar figures importantly in his work, particularly in the stories, poems, letters, and diaries of the fin de siècle years. It features in ten of his stories and is the subject of witty celebration in The Muse Among the Motors, his 1904 motoring column for Harmsworth's Daily Mail, where he parodies the best of the classic English poets to salute the fast speed of the car, the freedom of automobility, as well as the hardships and travails of early motoring. As a "rhapsodist of motor-cars" and Britain's "poet motorate," Kipling is one of the earliest voices to champion the motoring movement.10 To Kipling, motoring is nothing less than what Gijs Mom calls an adventure of technology.11 Driving the heavy, clumsy early car is a physical adventure involving hardships and a degree of danger that helps to breed courage, fortitude, and resilience. As a technology of speed, the car inculcates a no-nonsense efficiency, and "Law, Orrder, Duty an' Restraint, Obedience, Discipline" that Kipling has always celebrated in his machines.12 But early motoring's tinkering culture, whereby the unreliable, eccentric engine and a scarcity of mechanics forced motorists to get down and dirty for constant repairs, turns motoring into an embodied struggle with technical dangers conducive to the cultivation of improvisation, resourcefulness, and specialist knowledge. The early motorcar thus connects to late Victorian discourses on mobility, technology, and degeneration, and particularly to Kipling's long-standing concerns for national regeneration. Kipling's imaginative relationship with the motorcar is thus importantly linked to his call for the cultivation of a toughened, resilient, and resourceful masculinity.13 He had long railed against the perceived national degeneration plaguing the imperial core, first in his 1880s encounters in London with the "effeminate," "long-haired" "Young Man of the Present day," and most bitterly in his disappointment with Britain's inept performance in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), a war which should have been "simple and pastoral" but ended up "having us on toast" and teaching Britain "no end of a lesson" (Letters, 3:9).14 He had always looked to the colonial fringes...