Pearl Buck and Rudyard Kipling

Fascination with the East: A Realistic Look Introduction Both Rudyard Kipling and Pearl Buck provided their readers with a realistic view of life in the East. Kipling’s Kim was a detailed account of the variety of life in India at the end of the 19th century. Buck’s The Good Earth, chronicled the lives of a peasant family in China as it dealt with the challenges and obstacles of famine, poverty, and oppression.

Both authors were very successful in conveying the problems of everyday life in the East to Western readers: each work was hugely popular and captured the imagination of the West by supplying vivid details and characterization through a realistic lens—a lens that only could have been supplied by an author who had personally been there and seen first-hand how life was led in China and India.

For that reason, Kim and Buck were able to convey a real sense of the East to people in the West who had never experienced it for themselves but who could, in a world on the brink of globalization, finally experience it through the artistic novel form and obtain a better sense of what the world was like on the other side of the Earth.

Buck’s Success The extent of Buck’s success in conveying the problems of everyday life for an ordinary peasant family in 19th-20th century China can be measured in the stunning descriptions and realism found on every page of The Good Earth. Buck’s style of writing is simple and direct and not encumbered by abstract or metaphorical prose that obliterates the narrative structure of some works.

Buck’s method of telling the story is straight-forward and the introduction to the saga of Wang Lung and his family is given with precision and simplicity: “It was Wang Lung’s marriage day” (Buck 1) is how the novel spanning decades during which the ups and downs of tremendous dramatic swings are experienced begins.

This easy introduction into the world of the Chinese is inviting for the Western reader, as it does not forbid entrance with any circumspect or indecisive approach in which the author questions her own ability to tell the story. She simply begins to tell and she tells it without pomposity, condescension or irony.

The words are free of any malicious intent: there is, instead, a great spirit of sympathy that is intertwined with Buck’s descriptions of Wang Lung and the other characters, such as O-Lan and “Poor Fool,” the wealthy landowners who gradually lose their wealth as a result of over-spending and opium usage, and many others who populate the novel. Buck’s sympathetic portrayal of these people helped Western audiences to understand them more deeply and on a personal level.

The story of Wang Lung, who at times acts nobly and at other times acts reprehensibly (for instance, when he betrays O-Lan and gives her jewels to his concubine) reveal the true extremes to which a man can go—extremes that Western readers would appreciate as they themselves in their own histories involving wars and revolutions experienced.

At the same time, Buck does not twist or manipulate her characters into the kind of larger than life heroes and legends that are found in the Old World myths or in Romantic novels. Buck’s characters are common, down-to-earth: they do not express profound sentiments that would seem alien to a peasant’s way of thinking; their concerns are primarily in the here and now. Wang Lung wants to own land. He wants to work hard and obtain savings for his family. His children face sickness.

His wife sacrifices the life of her child that the others in the family might live. When they are in the city, they are swept along with the common mob that enters into the home of the wealthy man: they are not apart or separate from these incidents but are rather right there involved in them, caught up in the tides of events as they are happening at the moment.

Wang Lung seeks to hide from the Chinese army when in the city because he does not want to be conscripted. A Western reader could surely appreciate this fear, even if it does not seem particularly honorable. However, Wang’s honor is depicted in other ways—such as when his son brings home a slab of meat that he has stolen.

Wang Lung throws it on the ground and refuses to eat stolen meat because he wants to teach his children not to steal: “Beggars we may be but thieves we are not” (Buck 111). This sentiment could be appreciated and respected by any Western reader—but so too could O-Lan’s when she picks up the meat and cooks it to feed her family in spite of what Wang Lung says. Buck depicts this action without commentary, neither praising nor condemning her actions.

The author simply tells what happens and lets the reader process it. The Western reader is almost sure to sympathize with O-Lan: She knows what is in the child’s heart, that he only stole in order to feed the family and that Wang Lung’s pride is more the motivation for his expressing himself in this manner.

There is nothing in these characters that rings out as particularly unique: they are, instead, manifestations or representations of people in China found in everyday life, everywhere one looks—a people suffering from disadvantage, dealing with hunger, trying to keep a family together while attempting to hold on to their own sense of dignity and pride. The story is also not without its own enchantment, however.

Just as every Westerner is familiar with the concept of the American Dream, Buck puts this kind of dream within the heats of her characters and allows it to come true, if only by way of happenstance. Wang Lung and O-Lan just so happen to be swept up by the mob as it enters into the wealthy man’s home, and he just so happens to pay Wang Lung in order to be spared, and O-Lan just so happens to find jewels in the house which she takes.

Again, Buck does not condemn her characters but rather depicts them with empathy, showing that though they did not set out to rob or extort, when given the option of taking from the wealthy to benefit themselves, they do not let the opportunity pass. They see it is an instance in which they can finally obtain the dream they desire for themselves. In short, Buck is able to appeal to the Western sentiment by showing ordinary lives of an ordinary Chinese family.

She does not sentimentalize their struggles or romanticize them. She presents them simply and without affectation, judgment or commentary.

She also gives them the opportunity to pursue what every Westerner also seeks to pursue—that is, the dream of prosperity and wealth; the Chinese spin, of course, is that no matter how hard an individual works, the environment and the plight of the lower class is much more difficult to overcome in the East—and that is why the dream only comes true for Wang Lung and family by way of serendipity.

Kipling’s Success The extent to which Kipling is successful in exploring the problem of everday life in India through Kim is evident in the way he interweaves the two grand themes of the spiritual life (represented by the Tibetan Lama seeking Enlightenment) and the pride and honor of serving the political life of the Great Game (represented by the intelligence and counter-intelligence operations of the British and the Russians in India).

Whereas Buck gives an up close and personal, realistic and non-romantic look at the lives of an ordinary Chinese peasant family that, in the end, because extraordinarily wealthy, Kipling depicts the everyday struggles of the Indians through the lens of romantic adventures, using realistic descriptions and realistic characters to keep the story grounded in reality so that it is wholly believable and wholly enchanting for Western readers.

The everyday problems that are explored by Kipling in Kim are different than they are in The Good Earth—namely, because the hero of the novel is not an ethnic Indian, though he is a native of the land: he is the son of Irish immigrants, but raised like an Indian in the country occupied by the British in the 19th century.

As such, he learns all the Indian customs and ways, and is really only identifiable as a British subject by the identification papers left by his father and by the Masonic certificate that he wears around his neck. Being seen as an asset of good use for British intelligence officers (since he is so easily believed as an Indian), Kim is pulled toward service of the Crown, is educated, trained, and put into action.

At the same time, he is pulled toward service of the spiritual life by the Lama who wants to take care to find the River of Arrows that he might escape the Wheel of Things—a metaphor for the trappings of political pursuits which are taking place forever and anon in India.

Kipling thus reveals that the main two struggles of everyday life in India are to balance these two opposing forces—the force, on the one hand, to serve the mighty political figures who rule the realm and to be accepted by them as one of their team; and the force, on the other hand, to tend to one’s spiritual life and do what is important to transcend the pettiness of vain pursuits and escape, like the Lama, the ever turning Wheel of Things.

Kim, ultimately, balances both forces and shows that one can serve each: as Kim states, “I am not a Sahib. I am thy chela” (Kiplin 207).

By showing Kim as a child being cared for by a kindly Indian woman, by using a great deal of dialogue to convey all kinds of manners of characters, and by integrating real-world espionage into the novel’s story, Kipling invites the Western reader to invest in the story, in much the same way Buck does: both, in other words, appeal to an aspect of Western sensibility.

Buck appeals to the Western love of a success story (with a hint of sentimentality and heart given at the end when Wang Lung weeps for O-Lan after he realizes the depth of his betrayal), and Kipling appeals to the Western love of espionage: in a sense, it is one of the original Western spy thrillers. It depicts the manner in which the British Crown uses its subjects to obtain the upper hand in the Great Game—the political chess match between Russian intelligence and British intelligence.

Kipling places the everyday struggles of Indians within this context and thus elevates to a level that will be of interest to the Western reader. Had Kipling simply depicted everyday characters of India without this context, the story would have lacked the compelling and dramatic appeal for the Westerner that it otherwise has. By casting events against a backdrop of political intrigue, Kipling is able to show how an ordinary life in India is always even at its most basic still extraordinary in so many ways.

The range of characters that Kim gets to meet helps to reinforce the exotic nature of the Indian world, and Kim’s ability to go in between the Western and the Indian world helps to make him appealing to the Western reader as well. In Kim, a sense of the everyday problems of the Indian life is less pronounced than it is The Good Earth—mainly because the everyday problems are not the main focus of Kipling. Instead, Kipling’s focus is on the.