got his Throat"
by Lisa Lewis
| notes on
Some stories are meant to be read quietly and some stories are meant to be told aloud. Some stories are only proper for rainy mornings, and some for long hot afternoons when one is lying in the open, and some stories are bedtime stories.All that survives of the Blue Skalallatoot stories is a map and a letter (see Kipling Journal March 1968, pp. 6-8); the Orwin Sylvester Woodsey stories seem to have vanished forever. The other two tales that appeared in the following numbers of St Nicholas were “How the Camel got his Hump” and “How the Rhinoceros got his Skin.”
All the Blue Skalallatoot stories are morning tales (I do not know why, but that is what Effie says). All the stories about Orvin Sylvester Woodsey, the left-over New England fairy who did not think it well-seen to fly, and who used patent labour-saving devices instead of charms, are afternoon stories because they were generally told in the shade of the woods.
You could alter and change these tales as much as you pleased; but in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them, - the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale. Of course little people are not alike, but I think if you catch some Effie rather tired and rather sleepy at the end of the day, and if you begin in a low voice and tell the tales precisely as I have written them down, you will find that Effie will presently curl up and go to sleep.
Now, this is the first tale, and it tells how the whale got his tiny throat...
This, a most difficult composition, appears to have presented no obstacles. As an imaginative piece of work it is above criticism.[“Kipling’s other Art,” Kipling Journal 39, September 1936, p. 98]. Of “the Whale looking for the little ’Stute Fish,” Whitehouse said:
Everything flows into the rapacious throat: the water, raft, Mariner and jack-knife – not forgetting the suspenders, so delicately traced. The technique is not a whit less excellent: the portrayal of perspective and form by means of shading.
[it] is, of course – and, of course, intentionally so – screamingly funny. The attitude of the little ’Stute Fish, and the half-fearful, half-cunning expression in his eye, is exactly what we should expect from a little ’Stute Fish hiding from a Whale. [Ibid., p. 99.]J.M.S. Tompkins wrote:
The jocular manner and the refrains (‘You must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved’) amused me, though a young cousin complained: ‘You needn’t say that again’ [p. 55].Rosalind Meyer commented:
It is, then, essential to the design of the stories that the animals should talk. The denouement of many of the stories turns on this power to communicate, as may be seen in the brief and only exchange between the Whale and Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens, A.B.: [quoted, p. 9, lines 20-8]. Each is providing information useful to the other, and, as a consequence, the story proceeds to its happy ending.
In folk-tale, creatures may talk: but as a rule their discussion is superfluous to the plot. The Wolf, for instance, could easily discover Little Red Riding Hood’s destination in some way other than by questioning her. The Whale may not. [“But is it Art?” Kipling Journal, 231, December 1984, p. 14].