Chapter 1

The Foundational Narrative: Kipling, Buck, Steinbeck

Part of The Etymological Archive | Chapter thread: how to look — and what looking does to the person being looked at

Four words. Three of them are instruments: you need them to say what these stories do. One of them is a word with a history: you already own it, and you have never looked at it.

Each entry moves the same way. Encounter — the place in the text where you need the word before you have it. Instrument — the word, and the difference it lets you make. Use — one thing you cannot do as well without it.

The Words

RESPECT
- Encounter: Kipling, Close Reading C4. Then Mrs. Pan at her window, who looks out of it "really for the first time" (Buck §114). Then Elisa in the car: "She did not look back" (Steinbeck §113).
- Instrument: Latin respicere — re- (back, again) + specere (to look). The same root as inspect, spectator, perspective. Respect is not a feeling you have about someone. It is something you do with your eyes: you look a second time. The first look takes what it expects. The second look sees what is there.
- Not: politeness, admiring. You can be polite to someone you have never once looked at.
- Use: Choose one moment in this chapter where someone looks at another person — the family at Rikki (Kipling §37), Mrs. Pan at Lili (Buck §71), the man at the fence at Elisa's flowers (Steinbeck §51). Is it respect, or only looking? Defend your answer with one quotation.

DETACHED
- Encounter: The first three paragraphs of "The Chrysanthemums". Fog, plows, willows, wind — and only two words that name a feeling.
- Instrument: French détacher, to unfasten — the opposite of attach. The detached observer has let go of the outcome. Not of the people.
- Not: cold, indifferent. Cold does not care. Indifferent does not look. Detached looks hard and keeps its hands off. Steinbeck's air is "cold and tender" — and the narrator who wrote that sentence is neither cold nor tender. He is detached.
- Use: Is the narrator of "The Chrysanthemums" detached, cold or indifferent? Use one quotation from §1–3 to defend the distinction. Then ask the same question of Buck, who names Mrs. Pan's feelings only twice (§4, §15).

PERIPHERAL
- Encounter: Kipling, Close Reading C2 — the sweeper, who carries Nag's body to the rubbish-heap (§64, §68) and gets no name, no line, and no place in the song. Then The Big Question.
- Instrument: Greek periphereia — peri- (around) + pherein (to carry): the line carried around the edge of a circle. To be peripheral is not to be absent. It is to be in the picture, at the edge, where the eye does not go.
- Not: unimportant, minor. Peripheral is not a quality a person has. It is a place someone else has put them.
- Use: Name one peripheral person in each of the three stories. Choose one, and write three sentences that move that person to the centre — only what they look like, what they do, what they use.
- Comes back: later in the course, when the question is no longer who stands at the edge, but who put them there.

VERANDA — a word with a history
- Encounter: Rikki-tikki eats his first breakfast on the veranda (§17). The last fight happens on it (§86–100): Nagaina comes out of the garden and onto the veranda, and that is where the house is nearly lost.
- Instrument: You know this word. Swedish has it. That is the reason to look at it again. English picked it up in India in the 1700s, from Hindi varanda — and Hindi had very probably taken it from Portuguese, the first European empire on that coast. Swedish borrowed it later. A veranda is the part of the house that belongs to the garden: roofed, open, neither inside nor out. The word for that in-between space came into English the way the English came into India.
- Use: Who sits on the veranda in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and who never does? What does a veranda let you do with a garden — live in it, or look at it?