Читать книгу Kidnapped - Роберт Льюис Стивенсон - Страница 7

Stevenson has always been noted for his descriptive power. It cannot be repeated too often that he was a major force in the reconstitution of travel writing, and that description was one of the elements that gave his writing such appeal. Edinburgh on foot, Belgium balanced in a canoe, the Cévennes on a donkey’s back—all these places were captured by someone with a painter’s eye and a poet’s pen. That this talent—Stevenson would have insisted it was a skill he taught himself, although it can be seen in his earliest correspondence—would be transferred from his letters to his travels to his fiction is hardly surprising. “The Pavilion on the Links,” with its empty spaces and shifting sands, and The Merry Men, whose powerful riptides constitute a sonata to the sea, are two of his earliest and most brilliant ventures in the field of Scottish descriptive writing. In time, Stevenson became a model for all the manuals on writing fiction, and if the formal analysis of place or setting had not disappeared, or gone into desuetude, we might still see examples from his work. But who today wants to read long passages of description? Indeed, one of the nineteenth-century novel’s most cherished techniques is not just dated, a bit antique, but completely irrelevant: what does one need with prose description when we have photography and cinema? In effect, the writers who held the highest position in Victorian fiction were among those whose fall has been the hardest. Scott and Dickens and Eliot were too long by far, and it was the descriptive passages that were the easiest to get rid of because they were the most incidental to the narrative.

What made Stevenson such an exception to this process? If indeed he was the model for the how-to books, why did his descriptive prose survive the excision of the readers? Put another way, why was he quoted so regularly in the early twentieth century for a technique that was already being viewed as something of a relic? For one thing, Stevenson himself saw description as an anomaly in late-nineteenth-century fiction. He knew that the pen could not compete with the eye. He had no intentions of making his prose serve the purpose of a camera, a device he was much taken with and used extensively to record his private life. Instead, description was made to serve atmosphere and emotion beyond all else; it was never designed to pictorially reproduce a natural scene. In a long note inscribed on the flyleaf of his autographed copy of Kidnapped, Will Low recalled telling Stevenson (when the novelist visited him in Paris shortly after the book’s publication) how vivid a “picture” had been formed in his mind of Alan and David’s flight through the heather. Stevenson then challenged his friend:

“Well,” he exclaimed “now turn to the book and tell me if you can find a half page of description.” This we did together and I found that a word here and there, and the sen sations felt by the pursued, were all that had given me this strong sense of the character of the country. R.L.S. was much pleased for at the time his motto was “Death to the optic nerve”; and he had cunningly replaced any form of definite description of the scenes in which his characters moved, by the portrayal of their emotions roused by these external conditions.7

Since David Balfour covers a broad swath of Scotland on foot, it is inevitable that the landscape figures centrally in both his eyes and his thoughts. He is repeatedly struck by the desolation of the territory, first when he is cast ashore on Earraid (“I thought in my heart I had never seen a place so desert and desolate” (p. 115) and later as he flees with Alan “over the most dismal deserts in Scotland” (p. 212). Not only is the country “broken” and “uneven” but it is dominated by “wild rivers” and “eerie mountains” that are even more forbidding. David’s perception of this land “as waste as the sea” (p. 193) is remarkably consistent throughout the narrative.

It was near noon before we set out: a dark day, with clouds and the sun shining upon little patches. The sea was here very deep and still, and had scarce a wave upon it; so that I must put the water to my lips, before I could believe it to be truly salt. The mountains on either side were high, rough and barren, very black and gloomy in the shadow of the clouds, but all silver-laced with little water-courses where the sun shone upon them. It seemed a hard country, this of Appin, for people to care as much about as Alan did. (p. 145)

Each of the first three sentences of this brief paragraph begins with an unremarkable observation (“It was near noon,” “The sea was … deep and still,” “The mountains … were high”), while the fourth and final sentence offers a summary judgment on all that went before. David has just entered the country of Appin, where the murder of Colin Campbell is about to occur. The time, so carefully indicated, is a detail that Stevenson drops into nearly every chapter, a means of enforcing the psychological realism and maintaining a tight rein on the structure. And the images, while foreshadowing the “death of the Red Fox,” are equally representative of the natural elements that recur throughout the text. The bright sun shining, the sea so still that it might pass for fresh water, the black mountains—the scene is more suggestive than descriptive; it is not a picture that Steven-son captures but a mood, and it is characteristic that both the attractive and the ominous elements coexist, or are conjoined in the scene itself. So the dark mountains are laced with rivulets that, under the reflection of the sun, are silver to the eye, thus encasing in prose Stevenson’s deep conviction that in nature, as in human experience, duality is all. But no scene, however suggestive-descriptive, is complete without commentary or interpretation: “It seemed a hard country, this of Appin, for people to care as much about as Alan did.” For David, a young man desperately in search of his origins, and almost preter- naturally sensitive to scenes of intimacy (“a scroll of smoke … meant a fire, and warmth, and cookery, and some living inhabitant that must have lit it; and this comforted my heart wonderfully” [p. 21]), the vastness and emptiness of the spaces only heightened his feelings of coldness and loneliness. What he does not yet understand, as Stevenson does, is that people’s attachment to their country often has little to do with the ease of the land: that place may have a more profound meaning for their lives than can be found in any calculus, and that despite the charms (and protection) of the country across the water, as Alan grudgingly admits, Scotland has a deeper hold on one’s affections: “‘France is a braw place, nae doubt; but I weary for the heather and the deer’” (p. 102).

Stevenson’s gift for evocation, achieved by the combination of prose rhythm and poetic image, is so subtle and compelling that a reader might easily overlook its role in developing and furthering the narrative. Nothing in a Stevenson text is merely technical, nothing is without meaning, and that is especially the case in a novel as densely compacted of ideas as Kidnapped, one that joins historical incident with psychological truth. The novel is based upon a famous political trial in Inveraray in 1752,8 and focuses on the period immediately following the defeat of the Jacobites in 1746 after their final failed effort to retrieve the crown of England for the house of Stewart. It would be fruitful to examine the narrative in this context. In our own time we have forgotten how deeply historical Stevenson was, how familiar he was with all aspects of Scottish life and culture, and how determined he was to represent it in his fiction. Indeed, the choice of subject of Kidnapped is nothing less than a testament to his own country’s history, ensuring that its transmission be shaped by a Scottish as opposed to an English reading. Stevenson provides that reading, and for all those devoted to the eighteenth century, and the unending studies of the last Jacobite rebellion, and the clan system, and the divergences between the Highlands and the Lowlands, and the clash between two cultures, and between three countries, Kidnapped is a model text.

Yet it is also a text that lives outside its own history, and independently of our knowledge of the real Colin Campbell’s murder, or Robin Oig’s hanging, or Alan Breck’s exile, even though those hard facts are not just integral but essential to the narrative. The novel has clearly flourished in an array of national cultures where the barest outlines of the historical events are Greek to the audience. Even North American readers can hardly be expected to know the incidents that the story purports to narrate. What, then, enables it to move readers in spite of (or apart from) its historical vestments? Perhaps it is the unobtrusive way in which fundamental realities about the conditions of the world are introduced into the narrative. For issues that Stevenson uncovers under the guise of adventure, indeed in the form of adventure, such as innocence terrorized, or cruel and capricious violence, to name just one constellation, are profoundly affecting as experiences and timeless when considered as philosophical reflections. This is a story that begins with the offstage presence of death and the palpable feeling of abandonment: David Balfour has just become an orphan. The question of how he will manage makes for interest, as Henry James might say, but in the world according to Stevenson, nothing comes without pain and certainly not without grief. For the conditions of life are hard—Stevenson called it a “battlefield” in The Suicide Club—and victory, which at best is nothing more than survival, is not for the faint of heart.

One of the most striking characteristics of Kidnapped is the starkness of its realism, a feature recognized immediately upon its publication: “Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid Mr. Stevenson is to say that he has the true Defoe manner, for there are all those little side issues, trifles, as it were, which he often introduces, which makes the whole thing, though you know it to be fiction, to read as if it were fact.”9 Although the realism touches all aspects of the narrative, from historical events to portraiture,10 it can be seen in some of the smallest details as well. There is Cluny Macpherson, rebel, imprisoned in his own “Cage,” half noble, half pathetic, offering David a meal of col- lops with a squeeze of lemon juice (“cookery was one of his chief fancies” [p. 204]), a small luxury he could not afford a few years earlier when Prince Charles visited him on the run from the English (“‘for at that time we were glad to get the meat and never fashed for kitchen’” [p. 205]). Or David alone on the isle Earraid, cold, weary, and wet, who “knew indeed that shellfish were counted good to eat” (Stevenson had read that in Edmund Burt)11 and who then winds up nearly “retching” to death. So much for the truth of books. Unlike in fanciful fiction, David never knows what to expect from his diet of raw fish; “sometimes all was well and sometimes I was thrown into a miserable sickness; nor could I ever distinguish what particular fish it was that hurt me” (p. 119). This might be read as emblematic of one of the book’s central principles: David Balfour lives with the same kind of uncertainty as do people in life. Stevenson places us in David’s position so that we are roughly in the same state of confusion and ignorance as he is when confronted by his uncle, or Captain Hoseason, on Earraid or in the Highlands. The purpose of the narrative is to make us first experience the action, then only gradually come to understand its meaning, so that the lesson of life is that we engage first, and only later do we understand. In effect, Stevenson illustrates a general principle of life, that our knowledge cannot come before our experience; or put another way, existence precedes understanding.

We must be careful how far we take this argument, or at least not rigidify it. For Stevenson was a deep believer in the embodiment of intelligence in books. We cannot say that he argues for experience at the expense of knowledge. When David finally gets off Earraid, he says that had he been sea bred he would not have spent a day on the isle, but if he had only “sat down to think” he “must have soon guessed the secret and got free” (p. 125). For boys of the sea it is a matter of knowledge that comes by way of experience; for David, lacking the experience, it is a problem to be deduced through the use of intelligence, a process that is about the best one can hope for in an imperfect world, or in a world where the experiences of life come quicker than the occasions for reflection. If anything is true about Kidnapped, it is that the narrative and dramatic movements are virtually in tandem, and continue almost nonstop until the final three chapters. One of the reasons the novel has been so long-lived is precisely because of this movement, because the action appears continuous from the time David sets off on his journey until the moment he crosses the Forth. Within the chapters are any number of incidents that are each one a micronarrative within the larger story. And the effect of all these microstories that crowd and populate the text? Are they just ploys to keep the reader turning the page? To some degree that is true. But it is only a half-truth. For Stevenson never uses a detail for its own sake. Virtually every incident in Kidnapped is designed to either reveal personality or express an idea or illustrate a point about history, literature, law, manners, religion, or folklore. Like Henry James, Stevenson was committed in his fiction to the aesthetic principle of formal congruence.

One of the most striking illustrations of Stevenson’s realism is the portrait of the Covenant’s cabin boy. David meets him first when he brings a message to Shaws and then talks with him on the road to Queensferry.

He said his name was Ransome, and that he had followed the sea since he was nine, but could not say how old he was, as he had lost his reckoning. He showed me tattoo marks, baring his breast in the teeth of the wind and in spite of my remonstrances, for I thought it was enough to kill him; he swore horribly whenever he remembered, but more like a silly schoolboy than a man; and boasted of many wild and bad things that he had done, stealthy thefts, false accusations, ay, and even murder; but all with such a dearth of likelihood in the details, and such a weak and crazy swagger in the delivery, as disposed me rather to pity than to believe him. (p. 46)

The picture of this boy is not only graphic but heartbreaking. Yet even here the role he enacts is a function of Stevenson’s larger design, to expose the tyrannical authority of the ship’s officers and their complete abandonment of any responsibility for their actions. Kidnapped treats of law and lawlessness. The Covenant, by trading in human cargo, is operating way beyond the bounds of the law. By lighting on the cabin boy Stevenson sears into David’s mind (“the poor child still comes about me in my dreams” [p. 64]) the cruelty and terror visited upon the weak and helpless by those in power and control. Ransome’s experience can be read plausibly as emblematic of the terror exhibited by James Stewart and his wife, the terror of the Highlanders defeated and disarmed before the English mace and crown, a government prepared to dispatch them arbitrarily to trial, and, if need be, to the gallows.

David’s initial encounter with Ransome does not give him any clear idea as to why he seems unlike any boy he has ever met. The style and manner of speech, the physical characteristics and behavior, even the nature of the conversation all strike a plain-speaking and clear-thinking lad like David as utterly bizarre. Ransome’s reason has been short-circuited, his mind unbalanced; David refers to his “crazy” walk, his “crackbrain humour.” Ransome’s condition, as David and we discover, was the result of such relentless physical abuse that the loss of reason was the only way he stayed alive: by forgetting or disre- membering the beatings given him by Shuan he was able to continue doing his job, which was essentially that of a galley slave. David would on occasion insist on making Ransome recognize what was happening, and then the boy would cry out in rage, and rush to do something—what could he do, really?— but immediately he would forget again, and revert to a kind of helpless passivity. One of Stevenson’s deftest touches is the capture of Ransome’s disordered mind—the jumble of vague memories of home (his father a clockmaker, a starling whistling an old ballad) joined to the lowest, most brutal fragments of sailors’ talk, so exaggerated as to sound absurd, yet all with more than we would wish of truth.

Title page from the edition published by James Henderson solely for the purpose of copyright. The text included the first ten chapters of the novel.