INSULATED AGAINST NONSENSE:

Just so (David Warren, 1/17/10, Sunday Spectator)

The "just-so" story was defined by Rudyard Kipling, in his magisterial and exemplary work, Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902. I remember it well as a formative masterpiece of my own early childhood -- after the Pookie books, and before the all-but-scriptural Kim. It is the work in which Kipling explains e.g. How the Whale got his Throat, How the Camel got his Hump, How the Leopard got his Spots, How the First Letter was Written -- the sort of basic briefing any child needs, to confront a world that might otherwise appear senseless.

The account of the Beginning of the Armadilloes, in the High and Far-Off Times -- and on the banks of the turbid Amazon -- is especially instructive. It supplies a theory of the convergent evolution of the clever armadillo, from the Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and/or his friend the Slow-Solid Tortoise, under the ministrations of the Painted Jaguar.

Consulting it today, I realize that my skepticism toward the dogmas of neo-Darwinism might well originate from that story. It is not that I prefer Kipling's account of the origin of species, which was a quite intentional (and very amusing) farce. Rather, that it spared me from developing a taste for quite unintentional farces. [...]

Kipling -- perhaps our greatest 20th-century prose author in English -- was a satirist of the deepest kind. I say "deepest" because on the surface he is hardly a satirist at all, except in some rather overtly political verses; and even those are subtly loaded with paradox, under the surface. In the Just So Stories he was not merely trying to enchant young children, as adults think he was doing. He had a mind too knowing for that kind of play. He was instead arming his young readers to defend themselves against the faithless simplicities of their adult keepers.

No modern writer is quite so subversive as Kipling. And at the heart of him you find, in Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, and everywhere, this shining truth: that faith, good faith, good loyal faith, transcends all "explanations" of the unexplainable.