Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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hovered over many of his early stories.
But the method in Kidnapped was different. Without question Stevenson was determined to create a realistic experience of fear and terror—not sensational, not melodramatic, but a meticulous melding of the exact detail with a measured tone in order to effect the proper sensation: the bolt of lightning that saves David from a near-fatal fall at the top of the stairs in the House of Shaws; the rats “scurrying” over his face after he is shanghaied and thrown in the putrid bowels of the ship; the “raw, red wound” on Ransome’s leg, the stigma of Shuan’s physical abuse but a badge of courage for the orphan whose mind was more profoundly damaged; or the “rope’s end” that Ransome himself carried to “wollop” the boys even smaller than him, thus repeating an unending cycle of abuse. The seamless integration of these details within the narrative constitutes a pattern of Stevenson’s style, a lean and poetic realism that is both plain and movingly affective at the same time, a style that despite the time of the story (1751) and the moment of composition (1886) most closely resembles the modernist experimental fiction of Ernest Hemingway.
When David comes to his lawyer at the end of his adventure, he is questioned sharply about his experience: “‘You say you were shipwrecked,’ said Rankeillor: ‘where was that?’ ‘Off the south end of the isle of Mull,’ said I. ‘The name of the isle on which I was cast up is the Island Earraid.’ ‘Ah!’ says he smiling, ‘you are deeper than me in the geography’” (p. 250). David’s answer was clearly more than Rankeillor bargained for. In a way, the lawyer offers a grudging if oblique compliment to his young client, telling him in effect that the details of these small and obscure western islands are of no importance to the main issue under contention: who is this person in his office, and is he the rightful heir to the estate of Shaws? But that was Stevenson’s characteristically oblique way of noting one of the major motifs of his text—not only a book whose characters traverse a broad swath of Scottish land but one where the place-names of everything from a clachan to a town, from a loch to an isle, from a battlefield to a gallows site are identified with a fidelity to their location and their history that can be appreciated only by reference to a historical gazetteer.
David Daiches was succinct when he called Kidnapped “a topographical novel about Scotland in 1751.”6 Stevenson was insistent that his book be accompanied by a map, and publication was held up until a map could be produced that would effectively trace David Balfour’s “wanderings,” much like the wanderings of epic heroes in the past. Any number of radio broadcasts of the adventures of David Balfour have followed his route through the western isles and across the Highlands, a route that has also become a tourist attraction. Not only have writers followed in the footsteps of Stevenson but people have signed up to follow in the footsteps of his pen-and-ink creations. On a banal level this is a testament to how well travel agents have been able to commodify a novel into a viable marketing tool. But on a more profound level it reflects how deeply Stevenson embedded his country’s physical history—for topography to him was history—into the consciousness of his people. Mull and Morven, Earraid, Queensferry Balquhidder—these all exist in the national cultural life of Scotland, separate from their real life, by dint of their imaginative reconstruction in a fictional text.
II
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