Bring us deliverance, spy! (interpretations of The Spies’ March by Kipling in time of the Media War and Pandemic)

Abstract

The essay is concerned with decoding the subject (cognitive) content of R. Kipling's The Spies' March, notable mainly for its proud name. The problem is that the text is created using the double coding technique; it is fundamentally ambiguous and can be read in two ways, allowing in both cases various cognitive and semantic interpretations in the modern historical and cultural context. The spy attribution of the March is a clever deception, created first by the author in the hope that the readership will be able to uncover his language game following the old adage “a good [poetic] witch covers her tracks, but a better [semiotic] one can uncover them”. That’s what they call now research, investigation or enquiry, depending on purpose and circumstances. He refers to “spies” as epidemiologists who fought the outbreak of plague in Manchuria in 1911. For Kipling, it was a language game, the poetic purpose of which was to describe in purely military terms and partly in Bible language of the Apocalypse the fight against the epidemic, which, in its intrinsic “quest” for globalization, threatened to outgrow into a pandemic. Unfortunately, the readers proved to be too gullible, neglecting to analyze biblical references of The March and its dramatized composition in which two choruses are opposed to each other and which is preceded by a distant Voice; they often trusted the title’s literal meaning, and preferred to read The March as glorification of spies. To do this, it is just enough to “turn” the Yellow Flag of the original (a symbol of a pandemic disaster) into a proud one, a flag of dignity and fame. In Russia, translators have also joined this process. Details of such a false-negative decryption are presented in the section entitled “Lexical, symbolic and discursive keys for decoding The March”. The technique of creating and decoding an ambivalent text is, of course, the main object of theoretical analysis. Nevertheless, in terms of application, the potential use of the key ideological “messages” of The March in the global information and political environment, giving now a lot of place to politainment as well as infotainment, is even more important to explore. We consider two major “messages”: «There are not leaders to lead us to honour» и «Bring us deliverance, spy!». The tasks of such a politainment entreprise might be to form a causal relationship between these two Kipling’s brainchilds, namely, to personalize the "spy" in the international media discourse and entrust him with the implementation of Kipling's order regarding deliverance from current “calamities”. The mainstream media trend shows that the greatest chances to become such a “spy” has VP, which recently also received from Roland Lombardi, by analogy with the devout Lawrence of Arabia, the informal title of Arabian (Poutine d’Arabie). To do it, it’s enough for western media to add inverted commas when mentioning his nickname.

Keywords: Kipling, Spies' March, double coding, semantic ambiguity, politainment, infotainment, language games, political discourse, translation.