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Article Dans Une Revue Kipling Journal Année : 2022

'Tell It As a Lie': The Ambiguous Blend of Fiction and Journalism in Kipling's Many Inventions

Résumé

In Many Inventions (1893) Kipling deals with the difficulty to tell the truth in a journalistic manner. “A Matter of Fact” presents three journalists who have witnessed an extraordinary apparition and agree to “tell it as a lie”, rather than to report is as news. This metanarrative story prompts the reader to question the status of the other stories in the collection: should they be treated as disguised news? While “A Matter of Fact” is more easily accepted as a fictitious anecdote, other stories in the collection are based upon authentic and contemporary testimonies on the colonial experience in Anglo-India and Kipling, as an unofficial mouthpiece for Anglo-India, was expected to tell his metropolitan readers about the truth. This paper focuses on the limitations of the ploy of fictional truth applied to the imperial situation. What is at stake is the representation of the British Empire and of the colonial experience itself which seems to be understood as too extraordinary to be perceived as true. In the terms defined by Mario Vargas Llosa in “The Truth of Lies” (1990), many of Kipling’s fictions however say a literary truth about Anglo-India even when they lack historical truth, in so far as they present Anglo-Indian desires and fears. The status of these fictional texts is ambiguous, due to the documentary value of many of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian short stories perceived by the metropolitan audience.
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hal-03979149 , version 1 (08-02-2023)

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Elodie Raimbault. 'Tell It As a Lie': The Ambiguous Blend of Fiction and Journalism in Kipling's Many Inventions. Kipling Journal, 2022, 96 (390), pp.45-53. ⟨hal-03979149⟩

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