Features of R. Kipling’s Work in the Naturalist Prose of F. Norris

Gadylshin Timur Rifovich ORCID: 0000-0001-7293-9277 PhD student, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119991, Russia, Moscow, Leninskie Gory str., 1 tgadylshin@inbox.ru

Frank Norris (Norris, Frank, 1870-1902) was an American writer, one of the founders of naturalism in US literature. During his short but eventful career, Norris managed to create seven novels and publish many short stories and literary-critical articles. The writer's worldview incorporates a number of artistic traditions and philosophical ideas with which he began his professional career. One of those who significantly influenced the creative development of Norris was the English writer Rudyard Kipling (Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936), author of the novels "The Light Went Out" (The Light That Failed, 1891), "Kim" (Kim, 1901) and a number of short stories. From Kipling with his neo-romantic landmarks, Norris inherits an interest in the themes of colonization and immigration. The writer demonstrates how diverse cultures and ethnic superstitions combine in the American "melting pot". In this hostile and prejudiced environment, disagreements inevitably arise, often leading to violence. Norris, as a naturalist writer, considered it his duty to thoroughly investigate the causes of conflicts and talk about criminal incidents with all frankness, despite social taboos: "Terrible things must happen to the heroes of a naturalistic story. They must be torn out of the quiet, uneventful circle of everyday life and thrown into the torments of a boundless, terrible drama consisting of escaped passions, blood and sudden death" ^{[1, p. 1107]}.

However, Norris does not immediately grope for the characteristic naturalistic style that he will adhere to, being already a mature author. At the beginning of his writing career, he discovers a completely different style of writing. The upbringing of the future writer was mainly handled by his mother, Gertrude Norris (Norris, Gertrude, 1844-1919). It is from her, a talented artistic nature, brought up on Victorian ideals, that little Frank inherits a love of literature, theater and music. For her children, Gertrude regularly arranged "home readings – novels, novellas, poems and fragments from dramas" ^{[2, p. 50]}. Norris' passion for ballads and poems about the Middle Ages is strengthened after a trip to Paris, where the young man enters the Julian Academy of Fine Arts in July 1887. In the French capital, he is particularly admired by the Gothic cathedrals, as well as the Artillery Museum in the Invalides House, where a young man meticulously studies medieval weapons. The apogee of this youthful passion is Norris's knightly poem "Yvernelle: A Legend of Feudal France" (Yvernelle: A Legend of Feudal France), completed by November 1890 and published a year later, in 1891. The work, which tells about the love of a girl named Ivernell for a knight, Sir Coverley, is a long poem written by an octosyllabic, and in its content resembles the ballads of W. Scott and A. Tennyson. The poem became an occasion for ridicule of classmates at the University of Berkeley and caused a contemptuous assessment of the writer's father, Benjamin Norris (Norris, Benjamin Franklin, 1836-1901). Young Norris is going through a creative crisis: he realizes the imperfection of what he has created and eventually begins to perceive his poetic creation as an annoying misunderstanding. Frank tries to find and burn as many as possible "volumes in an elegant binding made of morocco cloth, with gold embossing" ^{[2, p. 137]}. Norris painfully assesses "Ivernell" as a mistake of youth and in the future will not mention the book in conversations with interviewers and colleagues.

Norris's acquaintance with Kipling's prose and the first attempts at stylization

After completing work on "Ivernell" in November-December 1890, Norris began experimenting in "a more democratic and modern method of narration, claiming a mass audience" ^{[2, p. 137]}. The new style is associated with the name of Rudyard Kipling, one of the most successful English–language authors in the period 1880-1890, who became extremely popular among American readers. Kipling's prose certainly had nothing to do with the vector set by Norris in his sentimental poem. In his youth, Norris discovers a kind of obsession with the books of the British writer: he is extremely captured by the complete brutality depicting violence, tinged with the oriental flavor of Kipling's stories, "frankly, even aggressively masculine" ^{[2, p. 138]}. For the first time he departs from the style of the "elegant rhymer" and in the Occident newspaper publishes the stories "Coverfield Sweepstakes" (The Coverfield Sweepstakes, December 1890) and "The Verdict of Lieutenant Outhwaite" (The Finding of Lieutenant Outhwaite, March 1891). In them, the young author enthusiastically imitates the style of Kipling, saturating the characters' speech with characteristic jargon. Describing the manner of the English writer, A. A. Dolinin notes: "His narrator-reporter, as it were, transcribes reality, and does not translate it into another, more familiar language — incomprehensible, "abstruse" Indian words, professional terms, local geographical names, argotisms are introduced into the text, which creates the illusion of complete authenticity, "life", and not art" ^{[3, p. 11]}. Norris also achieves a similar goal: in his first stories, he creates an artificial dialect – a mixture of the American equivalent of Cockney and an Irish accent, which is also spoken by the characters in Kipling's collection of short stories "Three Soldiers" (Soldiers Three, 1888). The narrative method is also copied: in early experimental prose, Norris often passes the thread of the narrative into the hands of an unreliable narrator. As noted by J. Crisler and J. Mcelroth, an American writer, adapts "Kipling's seasoned narrative, where the responsibility for an extraordinary story is not borne by the skeptic narrator, but by the person from whom he first heard it" ^{[2, p. 140]}. Norris actively uses a similar form of presentation in early short stories, it is also saturated with the novel "Octopus" (The Octopus, 1901), whose Spanish-language legends and legends of the San Joaquin Valley will become an artistic decoration of the novel.

In "The Verdict of Lieutenant Outwaite", a hero named Vandover personifies the type of "a voluble spinner who unravels the thread of his story in detail" ^{[2, p. 139]}, characteristic of Kipling's manner. Answering the interlocutor's question "Who is that fat woman sitting on the red sofa?", Vandover tells the long story of Lieutenant Outwaite. This character was supposed to marry a girl named Denise Annemond, but at the age of sixteen he goes to serve in Algeria and forgets about the bride he has never seen. Vandover's retelling is characterized by redundant details describing Outwaite's long stay abroad. Returning to his homeland ten years later, the lieutenant accidentally meets Denise. Young people instantly fall in love with each other, unaware of the past that binds them. Thus, instead of saying a brief "This is Mr. Outwaite's wife" in response to the question "Who is this woman?", Vandover significantly stretches the story. Undoubtedly, Norris does not so much flatter the English writer as ironically reproduces the peculiarities of his writing.

In June 1891, The Argonaut published Norris's short story "The Son of the Sheikh" (The Son of the Sheik). The hero of the work is Bab Azzun, a native of Algeria, a representative of the Kabyle tribe, a Berber people living in the north of the country. The father and grandfather of the character were among the best generals of the tribe who defended the land from outsiders. At the age of ten, Bab Azzun moves to Paris and successfully assimilates into a new environment. He becomes a successful politician and diplomat, publishes scientific books. The character's career is in jeopardy after losing a large sum of money at a horse race. To make up for the lost, Bab Azzun, as part of a French military unit, goes home to Algeria. In a violent attempt to conquer the Arab tribes, the French are likened to the Kipling Englishmen who "humble the intractable Indian population in the name of progress" ^{[2, p. 139]} or suppress the Mahdist uprising in Sudan, described in the novel "The Light has gone Out". Describing the Kabyle people, Norris saturates the text with vocabulary unfamiliar to the reader. Replacing the word "kabyles", Norris uses numerous synonyms – "bournous", "haiks", "douars" and "yataghans". Such definitions, with which the author fills the narrative, do not lend themselves to literal translation. This feature of Kipling's style will become the hallmark of Norris in his literary homages.

The French soldiers depicted in the "Son of the Sheikh" are carriers of the imperial spirit: they look down on the Algerians and humiliate their dignity in every possible way. Hearing how his people are insulted, Bab Azzun talks about patriotism in a somewhat strange way: "Arabs are not taught enough to be true patriots" ^{[4, p. 6]}. The refined hero, fed up with life in Paris, notes W. Dillingham, "is bored by such mundane concepts as "patriotism"" ^{[5, p. 52]}. The French camp is unexpectedly attacked by a Kabyle detachment. In this episode, Norris emphasizes the elements of atavism, which for the first time become obvious to the hero: a previously dormant animal instinct awakens in him. In the menacing cries of the warriors, Bab Azzun hears, to put it in the language of J. London, "the call of the ancestors": "He was no longer a Parisian, a "product of civilization." In an instant, all the long years of education and culture were erased" ^{[4, p. 6]}. Thus, "The Son of the Sheikh" becomes one of the first stories where the background for the development of the plot is an exotic reality in the spirit of Kipling.

In the future, Norris's interest in Kipling does not weaken, as demonstrated by the book "Perverted Tales" (Perverted Tales, 1897), where the author ironically imitates the styles of colleagues in the writing workshop. The story called "Accidentally found rickshaw" (The 'Ricksha That Happened, the caption "By R-D K-G" was added to the title) can be considered a kind of pinnacle of the American writer in the art of stylization. As in the early homages dedicated to Kipling, in the introduction to the story, the hero of Norris warns about the possible unreliability of the narrative and passes the thread of the latter to his comrade named Mulligatoni, who tells the story of the rickshaw murder. Norris does not delve into the details of the incident and confines himself to describing the lifestyle of the suspect in the crime, whose name is Stepterfetchet. The work is undoubtedly a kind of mockery of the reader, since the plot component does not play a significant role. The text of the story is saturated with Kipling's characteristic vocabulary and is subordinated to only one purpose: it is designed to emphasize the skill of Norris the stylist. Numerous argotisms and professional terms borrowed by the author from Indian languages (Bengali and Hindi), such as doggo (ready), ekka (lonely), shikary(hunter), etc., do not bring the reader any closer to solving the mystery of the rickshaw murder, and any attempt to penetrate the creator's plan of the work is doomed to failure. Thus, Norris manages to achieve the intended effect: shifting the emphasis from the content to the form, he thus demonstrates the ability to "dissect" the features of the letter of an author familiar to him.

Exotic and masculinity. Kipling's ideas on American soil

Kipling became one of the first writers who really introduced the European reader to the outlandish Indian culture, its customs and customs. In his youth, he worked as a reporter in the city of Lahore, where he discovered important qualities for a writer – "insatiable thirst for new things, excessive curiosity, sincere, genuine sympathy for people" ^{[6, p. 13]}. The young journalist got acquainted with representatives of various professions and social classes in India and wrote on all kinds of topics – about poverty and wealth, wars and riots, cholera epidemics and criminal incidents. Kipling gradually gained fame as a close researcher of the life of the lower classes: "I wandered until dawn through all sorts of random establishments: liquor dens, gambling dens and opium dens, which are not at all mysterious and mysterious; I watched street dances and puppet shows" ^{[7, p. 61]}. He wrote bluntly about everyday violence on the streets of Indian cities and settlements. Norris greatly appreciated Kipling's talent as an observer and his ability to work with primary sources. He loved to read the idol's stories together with his wife Jeanette, even reflected this in the novel "Blix", where the characters, Condy and Travis, make reading Kipling almost ritualistic. Among the couple's favorite works, Norris mentions "The Extraordinary Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" (The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, 1885) and "The Return of Imray" (The Return of Imray, 1891). At the end of the Victorian era, these stories struck the reader with their uncompromising rigidity, depicting the barbaric mores of the inhabitants of the Eastern world. In Morrowby Jukes, fever patients are sent to die in a crater in the middle of quicksand, from which it is impossible to get out. The camp of the "living dead", the personification of the plague barracks, is carefully guarded by the military, who shoot anyone who tries to escape from here. To get food, the infected kill crows and form a "republic of wild animals doomed to eat, fight and sleep at the foot of the pit" ^{[8, p. 165]}. Such a space is deadly for a sahib, a "representative of the dominant nation" ^{[8, p. 159]}, who, once there, becomes completely dependent on the natives. Morrowby Jukes miraculously manages to break free, and his predecessor is treacherously shot by the former brahmin Ganga Das.

The story "The Return of Imrei" begins with the words: "Imrei committed an offense beyond comprehension. Quite young, who had started his career so successfully, he inexplicably disappeared from this world without informing anyone of his intentions – to be precise, from a small Indian town where his garrison was located" ^{[9, p. 365]}. The hero-narrator and the Englishman Strickland, settle in Imray's house and four months later discover his corpse in an attic infested with snakes. The murderer turns out to be a superstitious servant named Bahadur, who blames Imrei for the death of his son: "He said, "What a good boy," and patted him on the head; after that, my son died" ^{[9, p. 375]}. The unfortunate man's fault turns out to be only that he "did not understand the psychology of an Oriental person and did not correlate behavior with outbreaks of autumn and spring fevers" ^{[9, p. 377]}.

To investigate the behavior and prejudices of an Oriental person is one of the main tasks of Kipling the writer. While in India, he studies the local way of life and Hindu rituals for a long time and carefully. As N. Y. Dyakonova and A. A. Dolinin note, Kipling's stories "widely pushed the boundaries of canonical literature, and an unusual world opened up to the stunned reader in them, where exoticism and heroics emerged through the dense, rigidly written "grassroots" life" ^{[10, p. 9]}. Not only Hindus fall into the orbit of the writer's attention, but also numerous peoples living in the country – Bengalis, Marathis, Sikhs, etc. The apotheosis of Kipling's ethnographic research is the novel "Kim" (Kim, 1901), in which the scene and surroundings of the hero change rapidly, as if in a kaleidoscope. Step by step, the reader follows the rake Kim and travels with him all over India. In this extremely treacherous and dangerous space, where the "Big Game" is unfolding, the most important are the ability to distinguish "one's own" from an outsider. After learning the truth about the Irish father who died in the war, the hero begins to doubt his cultural identity.  Throughout the novel, Kim strives to establish her identity and tries on many masks: a street beggar, a lama student, a pupil of a Catholic school and, in the final, a British intelligence officer. The "friend-foe" dichotomy and the problem of dividing people by attributes (ethnic, cultural, social) are of great importance in Kipling's universe and will gain paramount importance in the work of his student, Norris.

In the eastern world, rife with violence and cruelty, there is no place for a woman. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the story "The White Seal" (The White Seal, 1893), part of the cycle "The Jungle Book", Kipling likens society to fauna, where men, like navy seals, have to fight for a place in the sun: "Oh, you men, men," said the Uterus. – Why can't you be reasonable and calmly take places on the rookery?" ^{[11, p. 444]}.

Kipling's woman is aloof from male strife, and her active intervention makes a man weak and vulnerable to enemies. In the writer's works, a British man and an Oriental woman are usually involved in a love conflict, and their relationship is a priori doomed to failure. The novella "Beyond The Fence" (Beyond The Pale, 1888) opens with a characteristic phrase: "No matter what happens, a person must stick to his caste, race, his circle. The way of whites – to whites, blacks – to blacks" ^{[12, p. 173]}. Kipling's characters with enviable constancy confirm the reasonableness of the above thesis. Lispet, the heroine of the story of the same name, is a representative of the mountain people of the Pahari, living in the family of a Christian pastor. When she turned seventeen, Lispeth falls in love with a British soldier and builds dreams of an early wedding. The man is not serious and, under the influence of his adoptive father, Lispet promises to marry – so that the girl will not be upset when he leaves her. An Englishman makes a prudent decision that probably saves his life: he goes to England, where his bride is waiting for him. Lispet leaves her foster parents because of their deception and returns to her people, "as if wanting to more than compensate for all those years that she was alienated from him" ^{[13, p. 48]}.

Naivety and blind faith in the word of a man are inherent in Kipling's female characters. The above-mentioned story "Behind the Fence" depicts the fanaticism that the inhabitants of the province are capable of submitting to prejudices. Between the Englishman Trijego and the Indian Bishesha, who became a widow at the age of sixteen, a secret affair is started. The hero, covered with a blanket, regularly comes to the girl for dates under the cover of night. Soon the community becomes aware of their connection, and the heroes become victims of local barbaric mores: Bisheshe's hands are cut off, and Trijego becomes lame after being beaten. In Kipling's universe, female charms are disastrous for a male character: becoming a slave to love passion, he condemns himself to a speedy punishment.

This kind of codependency becomes the subject of interest and Norris. In the novella "After Strange Gods" (After Strange Gods, 1894), the narrator tells a story heard from a familiar barber, a Chinese named Kew Wen Lung: "The price of shaving includes cleaning the area around the eyelids with a chip of turtle shell, which Kew Wen tenaciously holds with his fingertips" ^{[14, p. 375]}. In such an exposition, the author's desire to shock the audience is undoubtedly manifested: the prospect of losing an eye depicted in the work simultaneously attracts and disgusts the inexperienced viewer. The prologue precedes the tragic love story of a French man and a Chinese girl. The heroine is infected with smallpox. Fearing that the disease will disfigure her face and after that the young man will leave her, the girl makes an impulsive decision to blind him. The goal has been achieved: the pathological passion of a Chinese woman leaves a lover who has lost his sight next to her. The novella ends with the phrase: "This story was told by my friend, Kyu Wen Lung, the gong-toi. Personally, I don't really believe in her, but you can if you consider her worthy of it" ^{[14, p. 375]}.

Noteworthy is the story "Bandy Gallaghan's Girl" (Bandy Gallaghan's Girl, 1896), which also shocked the reader with naturalistic details. In the Chinatown area (San Francisco) a hero named Bundy Gallaghan is robbed of five dollars, and he chases a Chinese man with traces of leprosy on his face. During the chase, Bundy finds himself in a strange place: "Everything is covered with acrid smoke. Three Chinese were sleeping on the bunks, the fourth was curled up on a mattress – he was lazily smoking and was in a semi-fainting state. In the midst of the events, Bundy found himself in an opium den" ^{[16, p. 19]}.

From here, the hero manages to rescue a besotted girl of Spanish origin from captivity. He hopes to help her get rid of the vice and soon falls in love with her. However, a love story with such an optimistic plot ends darkly: the heroine, who became a prostitute in a brothel, is unable to overcome opium addiction and soon commits suicide. Norris emphasizes the painful effect that the death of a loved one has on Bundy: "I've been thinking a lot about this girl. I think I made a terrible fool of myself because of her. When she died, it was very painful. I believed that I would never be able to overcome this" ^{[16, p. 32]}.

The theme of male weakness gets sophisticated development in the stories "Toppan" (Toppan, 1893, also known as "Unequal Yoke" – Unequally Yoked) and "A Caged Lion" (A Caged Lion, 1894). They show how a world–famous polar explorer named Toppan stops studying science - this is the price for the right to be near the woman he loves: "A man, a majestic lion, turns into the heroine's lapdog" ^{[2, p. 141]}. In these two stories, one can see the prototype of Norris's future novel, A Man's Woman (1899), where Ward Bennett, who is leading an expedition to the North Pole, is also to a certain extent "enslaved" by the woman he loves.

In the previously mentioned story by Norris "Accidentally found rickshaw", the narrator reports that a man who arrived in India has three possible life scenarios: "Either he dies quickly, which is bad, or he lives quickly, which is worse, or he gets married, which is the worst option" ^{[16, p. 1120]}. The author undoubtedly borrows this statement about marriage from Kipling, and it once again emphasizes the desire of both writers to explain love as a kind of pathology, a kind of disease that needs clinical research. In his works, Norris invariably focuses on the actions of a man, on the code of his behavior, the hero of his works is an extreme individualist who values freedom, the embodiment of masculinity and aggression. By getting close to a woman, he risks jeopardizing his existence, as the author often demonstrates in his short prose. The man at Norris embodies the animal nature, and his ambition helps him to dynamically change, transform the world. In his understanding of masculinity, the American writer certainly repeats Kipling, who offered the audience "a direct program of behavior, an ideal model to be guided by in everyday activities" ^{[10, p. 8]}.

The aesthetic views of Kipling and Norris

What is the program of behavior formulated in Kipling's works? As V. M. Tolmachev notes, the meaning of the concept of "neo-Romanticism" indicates "its polemic with various versions of Romanticism of the XIX century" ^{[17, p. 433]}. Writers of the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. they realize the need to get rid of the poetic verbosity inherent in romantics and struggle for "concentration, conciseness of language" ^{[17, p. 433]}, and in this they are helped by "values associated with the image of order, ritual, exemplary" ^{[17, p. 433]}. In Kipling's case, this is the image of imperial statehood. The British Empire, the writer is convinced, carries genuine values to the weaker and backward states of Asia and Africa: "In Kipling's formulation, the "burden of the whites" is the subjugation of the lower races for their own good, not robbery and violence, but creative work and purity of thoughts, not arrogant complacency, but humility and patience" ^{[3, p. 15]}. Accordingly, in his prose, Kipling, as the "bard of imperialism," glorifies the heroes of the nation who shed blood for her in the expanses of foreign territories, and all those who are called upon to promote the assimilation of local residents: colonial officials, builders, doctors, officers. It is interesting that the views of Kipling, who supported the aggressive wars of the British Empire in the Sudan (1881-1899) and South Africa (1899-1902), in some way echo the position of Norris on the interethnic issue. The American writer, born into a respectable family, was a proponent of the theory of racial superiority. Norris stigmatizes outsiders and at the same time is proud of his Anglo-Saxon origin. In journalism, the writer praises the achievements of the American military: in particular, he admires the battleship "Oregon" (Oregon) and the whaling ship "City of Everett" (City of Everett). Norris did not hesitate to go to Johannesburg in 1895 to support the British in their fight against the Boers. Thus, not only artistic ideals, but also political and philosophical beliefs bring Norris closer to Kipling.

It can be noticed that the mentor and the student are getting closer in, perhaps, a more important aspect – in their attitude to art and artistic truth. The hero of Kipling's novel "The Light Went Out" (The Light That Failed, 1891), Dick Heldar, utters a phrase that can determine the creative credo of both the author and Norris: "We only have to think about success, about the impression that our work can make on the public, allow even the slightest thought of cheap popularity – and immediately we lose our creative power, freshness of manner and everything else" ^{[18, p. 104]}. Using the example of Dick, an artist and a war correspondent who traded his talent for public recognition, the English writer demonstrates what the pursuit of profit can lead to. The sudden blindness of the character can be considered one of the central metaphors of Kipling's work, who is familiar with the physical side of this kind of illness firsthand: as a child, little Redyard temporarily lost his sight after a severe nervous breakdown. The writer finds a worthy outcome for his character: Dick Kheldar returns to the source of his inspiration, to the East, where he immediately goes into battle to die and "prove to himself the right of a strong personality to dictate his own rules to fate not only in love, but also in military affairs" ^{[17, p. 437]}. The fear of losing talent is also present in the creative consciousness of Norris, who graduated from the Julian Academy and knew perfectly well the value of true artistic talent. A sense of anxiety for his literary future permeates all of the writer's work, especially the novels "Octopus" (The Octopus, 1901) and "Vandover and the Beast" (Vandover and The Brute, 1914). These works present variations of the tragedy of a modern artist: if a student of painting Vandover, instead of developing his talent, wastes himself on parties with an abundance of alcohol and women, then the reason for the poet Presley's failures lies in his creative and mental infertility. The hero of "Octopus" does not really try to help the farmers of the San Joaquin Valley, to whom he dedicated his poem "The Toilers", which brought him popularity. Using the examples of their heroes, Kipling and Norris prove their commitment to art, whose main value can be indicated as follows: "An artist has no right to flatter, embellish, ingratiate; he is indebted not to a crowd hostile to genius, but to his talent sent down to him from above" ^{[10, p. 14]}.

Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to assume that R. Kipling outlined the vector of F.'s creative development for many years to come. Norris. He became one of those who involuntarily forced the young writer to reject sentimental poetry stylizing the Middle Ages, and drew his attention to the neo-romantic novel and reflected in it "the emptiness of the world and the "horror of abandonment" of a person in it" ^{[17, p. 437]}. In an era when the Victorian consciousness gradually began to crack, Kipling, as N. Y. Dyakonova and A. A. Dolinin note, managed to "discern a vast lacuna, to unravel the need for a modern romantic hero, a new moral code, a new myth that would be in tune with Darwin's theory of evolution: "The strongest survives"" ^{[10, p. 7]}. Norris, one of the first in American literature to focus on the concepts of natural selection and atavism, undoubtedly managed to become a worthy successor to this tradition.