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 Violence in the South Seas Stevenson, the Eye, and Desire             The subject of this paper, that of the eye as a focus of violence in Stevenson ’s South Seas writing, was first suggested by a remark of the French philosopher Georges Bataille (–). In an early essay simply titled “Oeil” () Bataille alludes briefly to Stevenson’s travel book In the South Seas (). Bataille’s theme is the uncanny power of the eye to disturb our thought. As a contemporary of Dalí and Buñuel in the surrealist movement in Paris, he not unsurprisingly begins by discussing the unforgettable image from their film Un chien andalou of the same year () of an eye being sliced open with a razor blade. What is less expected is that he links this image to Stevenson: “That a razor would cut open the dazzling eye of a young and charming woman—this is precisely what a young man would have admired to the point of madness, a young man watched by a small cat, a young man who by chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon, suddenly wanted to take an eye in that spoon. Obviously a singular desire on the part of a white, from whom the eyes of the cows, sheep and pigs that he eats have always been hidden. For the eye—as Stevenson exquisitely puts it, a cannibal delicacy—is, on our part, the object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it. The eye is even ranked high in horror, since it is, among other things, the eye of conscience” (Bataille : ).1 Bataille’s reference is almost certainly to that part of In the South Seas where Stevenson writes the following of lapsed cultural practices among Polynesians: “the eyes of the victim were formally offered to the chief: a delicacy to the leading guest” (Stevenson : ). As is characteristic of Bataille’s often richly suggestive writing, his juxtaposition of Stevenson and Un chien andalou calls other passages to mind, including other instances in Stevenson’s work where the human eye becomes linked with violence. The young man taken with the sudden desire to take an eye in his spoon, to claim power over the eye, has affinities with two of Stevenson’s characters who in different ways also attack the eye. First, from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there is Dr. Jekyll, whose alter ego Mr. Hyde is described at one point as “closer than an eye” (Stevenson : ). This figure of speech brings home not only Hyde’s unbearable proximity to Jekyll but also his control of Jekyll’s very perception and understanding. Jekyll’s solution is the desperate one of suicide; only via his own death can the alien eye be put out and Hyde’s power resisted . Second, there is Huish in The Ebb-Tide, who plots literally to throw vitriol into the eyes of the tyrannical Attwater. Attwater himself, who subdues this revolt using his own deadly violence, may recall for us Bataille’s phrase, “the eye of conscience”; his role in the story is that of the stern, self-appointed, conscientious white man in the colonies. What could be more fitting than that Huish should try to blind him? To explore further such links between the eye and violence in Stevenson ’s work, I shall look at three works where the connection is particularly prominent. All belong to Stevenson’s South Seas writing: The Ebb-Tide () and “The Beach of Falesá” (), and finally In the South Seas (). In examining the latter in particular, I shall also draw attention to the prominence of a third theme in which Stevenson and Bataille shared an interest, namely desire. As we shall see, both violence and the eye are to a certain extent the instruments of desire in Stevenson’s work as in Bataille’s. The Ebb-Tide is a story greatly preoccupied with the power of the look, the violence of the gaze. As its motley trio of adventurers, Davis, Herrick, and Huish, sail closer to Attwater’s settlement, looking acquires a murderous intensity, and the violence of their lustful gaze seems to be reflected back at them: “[I]f intensity of looking might have prevailed, they would have pierced the walls of houses; and there came to them, in these pregnant seconds, a sense of being watched and played with, and of a blow impending, that was hardly bearable” (Stevenson : ). Looking is associated here, as in Freud’s...

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