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The Four Boundary-Crossings of R. L. Stevenson, Novelist and Anthropologist                 Recent research on the affinities between certain passages in Robert Louis Stevenson’s writings and specific anthropological theories of his time has revealed to what extent his South Seas and Scottish works are to be located within the history of Victorian anthropology. Particularly significant, in this sense, are the studies that have assessed the writer’s indebtedness to Edward Tylor’s theories on primitive culture as well as his position within the “Scottish tradition of anthropological assemblage” linking Walter Scott and James Frazer (Crawford : ).1 Indeed, there are striking signs of a continuity between Stevenson’s ethnographic imagination and the scienti fic or pseudoscientific hypotheses underlying a discipline such as anthropology , devoted to the study of that other, which the Victorians firmly associated with the “primitive.” Just as significant, however, are the discontinuities . It is no coincidence if, once confronted in the South Seas with what appeared to him as a clash between “barbarism” and “civilization ,” the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde did not side with the latter. (In a letter to Sidney Colvin from Samoa, Stevenson wrote that we all are a product of “two civilizations—or, if you like, of one civilization and one barbarism. And as usual the barbarism is the more engaging,” Ltrs : .) And this is why, when in the Marquesas Islands he first witnessed the effect of European colonization on Polynesian culture, he felt he could establish a comparative link between the Scottish Highlands in the eighteenth century and the Pacific Islands, thus ethnologizing his country’s past while historicizing the colonial present. In moving beyond the physical and mental  boundaries of late-nineteenth-century bourgeois British culture, Stevenson, unlike his contemporary anthropologists, did not focus his gaze on a series of juxtapositions; his search, rather, was aimed at uncovering analogies, based on his repeated refutation of conventional oppositions between the primitive and the civilized, children’s and adults’ reading practices, high and low literature. His intellectual engagement with ideas and theories shaping the anthropological discourse of his times acquires its full significance , therefore, only once set in the context of his writerly interests—made apparent, especially, by his recurrent use of the term “epic” to describe those qualities, in certain narrative forms, which could appeal to readers of every class, age, education, and race. In his search for a common root underlying not only cultures distant in time and space but also social classes and human psyches, he repeatedly crossed the boundaries between anthropology and fiction writing while experimenting with the narrative forms available in the editorial market. The universal effectiveness he was seeking was based on his personal experience of the pleasure of reading, which he viewed as the primitive core of all responses to narratives. A pleasure, this, which he initially associated with his own earliest responses in his childhood to imaginative stories and to the written word.2 The link with these ontogenetically primitive reading experiences remained throughout his life the basis of his overall approach to fiction, which he gradually evolved by combining the point of view of a professional author and of a cultural anthropologist. As a contribution toward a reassessment of how Stevenson’s anthropological approach to fiction shaped his novel-writing, the present essay will map out the four main thresholds he crossed in his writing career. Each one of these occurred in conjunction with a physical journey—his first stay in France, his two trips to the United States, and his cruise of the Pacific—but most importantly, they marked as many redirections in the ongoing experimentation with literary forms and genres out of which his extraordinarily polygraphic output took shape. By putting into sequence these four crossings, the essays and travel accounts he wrote at the time all appear to share a common feature, in that Stevenson recurrently presents himself in them as an ethnographer, describing or interviewing various kinds of others, always with an eye on the lessons he can derive from them for his aesthetic or narratological theories. Upon turning to the fiction written after these crossings, one finds how he applied these lessons by constructing a number of different reading-models based on, first, children , then “uneducated readers” (Stevenson : ), and finally South Seas Islanders—thus testing what can be defined as an anthropologically  Pleasures of Reading, Writing, Popular Culture [18.117.165.66] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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