Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Voices of the Scottish Empire

 Voices of the Scottish Empire               Among the diverse representations of imperialism in late nineteenthcentury literature, one image in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Isle of Voices” is surely a contender for maximum symbolic suggestiveness. The short story describes a beach infested with a cacophony of speech, produced by a sorcerers’ league of nations whose members remain entirely invisible and largely incomprehensible to the native inhabitants of an island where foreign wizards turn leaves into dollars. In spite of the tale’s fantastic nature, its gist is hardly at odds with Stevenson’s nonfictional accounts of the South Seas. As other writers likewise recognized, the essentially surreal nature of imperial enterprise and its results called for means of artistic expression that went beyond the bounds of Victorian realism. Scottishness could be of distinct advantage in this respect, for the blending of the bland with the quaint, the mundane with the fantastic, and the commonplace with the grotesque had a long standing in the Scottish literary tradition. Moreover, a Scottish author’s look at Empire was likely to combine an inside with an outside perspective: a duality rooted in the more than proportional participation of Scots in British imperial ventures on the one hand, and the abortiveness of previous Scottish attempts at colonization on the other. If there was in any sense a Scottish Empire, as the title of a recent book by Michael Fry suggests, it had no visible bodily contours on a map where Scotland itself bore the same color as England . If a politically disembodied Scotland remained distinct from and distinguishable to the rest of the world, its chief mode of existence was that of a collective voice, given public utterance by individuals such as Burns, Scott, or indeed Stevenson. It is perhaps notable, then, that readers will find Scottish sounds conspicuously unspecified in the above-mentioned colonial mélange of “all tongues of the earth” (Stevenson : ) on the Isle of Voices, whereas French, Dutch, Russian, Tamil, and Chinese are singled out by name. It is even more noteworthy, though, that readers of Stevenson’s South Sea fiction in general will look in vain for Scots among its major characters. When Scottish voices are heard, they tend to appear as marginal or accidental . A prime example is a letter from Clydeside whose homey and “quite conventional” (Stevenson c: ) tones ring out from a dead man’s chest on the half-submerged brig Flying Scud in The Wrecker. An anonymous “Glasgow voice” features in the frame narration of this novel (, ), while Edinburgh provides an episodic touch of local color to the main narrative, whose American-born protagonist is glad to escape from the “somewhat dreary house” () of his Edinburgh relations. All told, Stevenson’s fictional South Seas may well strike us as a virtually Scot-free setting. This discrepancy between Imperial reality and its literary reflection is perhaps best explained in such psychological terms as repression or displacement , and I would suggest that reference be made not only to individual but also to Scottish national psychology. Scottish involvement in colonial rule clashed with a Scottish complex in which, by Stevenson’s lifetime, Burns’s fiery rants about equality and brotherhood of men had become just as essential constituents as the popular egalitarian saw, “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns,” loosely translatable as “We are all children of Father Phallus.” However, the “politically aloof” stance of leading eighteenthcentury thinkers (Calder : ) had paved the way for a neutralization of the Scottish Enlightenment’s radical intellect, by means of a bigamous marriage of convenience to sentimentalism and commercialism. Scottish thought, feeling, and behavior could thus at the same time cohabit and betray each other quite merrily. The nineteenth-century Scottish psychogram, which I have thus begun to sketch, would not be complete without a representation of that special alliance between Tory sentiment and unorthodox ideas that could generate rebelliousness in conservative quarters. If Stevenson’s liberal reputation coexisted peacefully with his essential identity as a Tory who was “much more logically conservative than we generally credit him with being” (Harvie : ), then we can see in him the contradictory but logical product of a culture in whose artistic imagination or popular mythology the figures Malzahn: Voices of the Scottish Empire  of Bonnie Prince Charlie, John Knox, Lenin, and Christ may appear aligned with each other, to stand united against all kinds of Philistines and Pharisees. To Stevenson, the...