Kipling, Rudyard

writer

[Archive rare] (ENG) Rudyard Kipling lit un extrait de "A matter of fact" à la Sorbonne

Artesquieu · Jun 9, 2022 · partial coverage

• Rudyard Kipling
• A Matter of Fact
• short story
• sea monster
• reading
• Sorbonne
• English literature
• rare archive
• fantastic fiction
• spoken word

Coverage note: partial (a very short reading of about seven lines, with an extensively garbled auto-generated transcript: only the broad scene is recoverable, and uncertain words are left out)

Core ideas

The recording is a reading, not an interview: Kipling reads a passage from "A Matter of Fact", a story about men aboard a small steamer who witness a sea monster. In the excerpt, a fog is blown into shreds and the narrator and his companions see a sea that is rolling on every side and "empty of all life". In one spot the water bubbles and something enormous breaks the surface: the creature's great side is gashed and the blood is spurting out, while the "grey wolves of the under-sea" (as the captions render it) pour away in the sluices of the wound and a pair of quivering shoulders, hung with weed and rusted shells, rises clear of the waves. A second creature, a female, approaches the first, which is dying, circles round him and lays her neck across his great back; he disappears under the water for an instant and comes up again "grunting in agony" while the blood flows. His neck shoots clear of the water and stiffens. One of the narrator's companions, named Keller, comments on the scene in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, as though he were watching an ordinary accident, while their little steamer rolls again. The excerpt thus shows Kipling's method in this story: a fantastic and violent event rendered in precise physical detail and set against the understatement of the onlookers.

Excerpts