Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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at the Cornhill, “but as it is all in Scotch he cannot take it, I know. It was so good, I could not help sending it.”22 Of course the story was accepted, but Stevenson’s remark reflects his awareness of the difficulty the language presented to a foreign (i.e., English) reader, and so he would occasionally insert a definition within the sentence: “I found a den, or small hollow, where there was a spring of pure water” (“Pavilion”; italics added). Or from Kidnapped: “we spent a great part of our days at the waterside, stripped to the waist and groping or (as they say) guddling for these fish” (p. 183; italics added). But this kind of internal glossing, while artistic at best, was simply unworkable when the vocabulary and idiom and syntax were predominantly Scots. As proud as Stevenson was of working in his native tongue— “‘Tod Lapraik’ is a piece of living Scots; if I had never writ anything but that and ‘Thrawn Janet’, still I’d have been a writer”23—it was plain that it could not be read, let alone understood, without a Scots dictionary, or at least a glossary. Stevenson was conscious of this, as he was of the grumbling on the part of English readers about a language they had little knowledge of and less interest in. When Marcel Schwob wrote to him asking if he could translate any of his books, Stevenson suggested Kidnapped or The Master of Ballantrae, but then warned him: “In both these works you should be prepared for Scotticisms used deliberately.”24
But the matter of language goes beyond mere usage, beyond the fact that Scots pyat is used in place of magpie (p. 147) or that clachan substitutes for “what is called a hamlet in the English” (p. 184). For Stevenson language is the texture and structure of thought, and the words we use and the way we use them, their rhythm and inflection, are as important as what they mean. They tell us who we are. In an inspired touch Stevenson shows us what we lose when our voice is stilled. He places David Balfour in the same position to the exotic Highlanders as the English reader is to the text. David is helpless before all these people whose Gaelic “might have been Greek and Hebrew for me” (p. 124), just as the reader is baffled by a plethora of alien words. A telling example is the scene where the fishermen are laughing at David, who is panic-stricken on the islet. The Scot feels their behavior as deliberate cruelty; the Gaels think the lad with the waving arms a figure of great fun. Neither comprehends the other, and a simple experience is thus apprehended in diametrical terms. For without a common tongue we are all living in a Tower of Babel, confused by others and caught in the web of our own words. David’s frustration, and his sense of isolation, is heightened as he travels through an uncharted territory where everyone speaks a “strange” language and where his own speech is equally “strange” to everyone else. He has a brief respite from these feelings when he meets Mr. Hender- land, only because the Lowland minister “spoke with the broad south-country tongue, which I was beginning to weary for the sound of” (p. 140).
It was while hiding on a naked rock in the heat of the day, when the redcoats were jabbing their bayonets in the surrounding heather, that David faced another linguistic experience.
It was in this way that I first heard the right English speech. …
‘I tell you, it’s ’ot!’… and I was amazed at the clipping tones and the odd sing-song in which he spoke, and no less at that strange trick of dropping out the letter h. To be sure, I had heard Ransome, but he had taken his ways from all sorts of people, and spoke so imperfectly at the best, that I set down the most of it to childishness. My surprise was all the greater to hear that manner of speaking in the mouth of a grown man; and indeed I have never grown used with it; nor yet altogether with the English grammar, as perhaps a very critical eye might here and there spy out even in these memoirs. (pp. 177–78)
This passage appears two-thirds of the way into the narrative, and is the first time that “English” is formally cited as a language. In other words, for the first two-thirds of the novel David Balfour, along with everyone else, is implicated in the two languages of his own country, Scotland, and only now, when he is nearly cheek by jowl with a live English soldier, does he realize that the language of that country, of the supporters of King George, of whom he counts himself an adherent, is quite simply different from his own. It comes as a genuine shock to him. And his assumption that it is the “right English speech” only further confounds him; for if the English spoken by the soldier is proper English, why then does it sound so “odd” both in its inflection as well as in its pronunciation? (David, of course, was not equipped to identify the class of the speaker, but Stevenson cleverly maintains his character’s integrity while offering the reader an early Shavian observation.)
Stevenson has suddenly brought the two cultures of Scotland, of the Highlands and the Lowlands, into contact with the third culture of England, thus bringing into the foreground the reality of not two countries but three. Of course David and Alan, along with everybody else through the first nineteen chapters, are speaking English, but it is from David’s point of view an improper or imperfect sort of English, as David periodically translates for his reader the occasional Scots word, just as Stevenson provides the occasional gloss. In reality this passage makes explicit issues about language that are played out in the novel, not the least of which is the sense of inferiority that the narrator has with respect to his command of English, an inferiority he attributes to his weakness in grammar but which in reality Stevenson subverts for the reader. When David says he has never grown “used with it” in reference to the inflection and pronunciation of the soldier, the reader might pause and think, “used to it,” but the phrase is actually good Scots, meaning “to make familiar with, to accustom to,” and is cited in the SND and EDD as dialectal, with Stevenson quoted from Underwoods in the SND. What the author is doing is clear and opaque at the same time: he is asserting the legitimacy of his own language, its forms and expressions, its rhythms and inflections, while giving apparent credence to an unsuspecting reader that David does not have a solid command of English grammar. It is a tactic that only the most deliberate and self-reflexive of writers would undertake, and few could manage as artfully. It is a small irony that a number of Stevenson’s forms of speech that may be considered Scots or idiosyncratic or both were altered by editors and compositors in the setting of the novel, since it hardly needs saying that it was an English publishing apparatus that put the book in print. But through it all there is more than mere gamesmanship on the writer’s part, for Stevenson addresses the central questions of how we use our language and what it means to us. David was quick enough to guess that Ransome’s speech was a bastardization that derived from a variety of social experiences, and he was not prepared to accept it as definitive. If this passage means anything, it is a sly shedding of the sense of inferiority that the Scots speaker has to the English.
Kidnapped is a text constitutive of and informed by three major languages—Scots, English, and Gaelic—with a fourth, Latin, thrown in for good measure. Obviously not all are given equal status; Stevenson was unfamiliar with Gaelic, and the proverbial Latin phrases were designed more for gentle satire than to make a case for another language’s place in the province of the book. Yet even here Stevenson was insinuating an important point: for as he said repeatedly, we are but the ruins of an ancient culture, and those familiar tags from Virgil and Horace and Martial, tossed off so casually by Rankeillor, remind us of who we are and where we come from. They remind us, too, of an older book and another wandering, timeless hero: David’s odyssey, after all, has a long and glorious history behind it.
Autograph title page.
1. New York Daily Tribune, 10 December 1894, p. 16.
2. “Mr. R. L. Stevenson on the Cultivation of Style”, Publishers’ Circular, 17 June 1893, p. 668.
3.