Technology and the Cinematographic Writing of Trauma in Kipling’s Motoring Short Stories

In many short stories, Rudyard Kipling celebrates technology by foregrounding the excitement generated by its peculiar romance, but his specific tribute to motoring goes beyond his fascination for the technical. He manages to exploit the narrative potential of the motorcar as a driving force in the story, setting the plot in motion in a realistic setting but opening it up to adventure and the fantastic. These stories depict characters marked by physical and psychological traumas and present an ambiguous vision of this new means of transport. The most interesting stories rework the Edwardian motorcar stereotypes—the futurist car, the deadly car crash, the industrial intrusion in a pastoral environment—and offer a metanarrative analysis of the structure of the text as a mechanism. Thematically, stylistically and structurally, the association of motoring and the cinematograph led Kipling to combine two technologies that offer a fascinating mobile spectacle. Through this association, he delineates a new sort of spatiality.