Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Introduction

Many were the geographical and social boundaries that Robert Louis Stevenson crossed in person. And many more as a writer: mixing genres, combining elements of high literature and popular narratives, introducing the personal and subjective into the “scientific” genres of biography and anthropology, repeatedly returning to situations and characters of ambiguous categorization, passing from one kind of writing to another in a continuous process of innovation. Indeed, it seems that he crossed too many artistic boundaries, and early twentieth-century literary taxonomists punished him for his repeated trespassing by relegating him to a lowly and marginal position in the academic canon—way down, on the boundary between serious literature and boys’ stories and other products of popular culture. Stevenson continues to remain out of bounds even for those who claim to be engaged in revising and opening up the canon—like the compilers of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, who still in the seventh edition cannot find a place for him in their selection.The fact is, a writer whose first essays were written in the style of William Hazlitt, and last published novel was the first colonial fiction in the language, simply cannot be forced into the ready-made categories of old canons or new fashions. And yet, precisely the ex-centric nature of Stevenson’s diversified and provocative opus, with its conscious intertwining of the “popular” and the “artistic,” can turn into an asset. Even though, along with Walter Pater, he was the supreme prose stylist of his age and could have continued in a                                           xiii belle-lettrist ivory tower, Stevenson reacted to the new mass-consumption market not by rejecting it but by repeatedly and self-consciously exploring the world of penny literature; and he did so because he saw in the popular subgenres a modern version of atavistic narrative forms. This aspect of his work was repeatedly explored at the Gargnano conference, and his creative engagement with popular literature set in contexts that have made possible fascinating crossovers between literary and cultural studies. As a result, Stevenson, the marginal novelist, gradually emerged, rather, as a liminal writer, a cultural actor who in opening door after door located himself on a number of thresholds connecting—and dividing—the realm of literature with the world of experience, politics, and history. The vistas that open up once we view Stevenson as a “writer of boundaries ” make past calls for a “revaluation” appear somewhat anachronistic, since they assumed a continuing validity for hierarchies set up by the literary system founded on modernism. This does not mean, however, that the issue of a revaluation—which, incidentally, is never mentioned once in the essays collected in this book—is no longer relevant; if only because the reasons behind his exclusion from the Anglo-American twentiethcentury academic canon have become today as many motivations for rereading his texts today, and thus discovering their particular significance for all students and scholars of age-of-transition British literature and culture. An ideal frame for moving from “re-valuation” to “re-reading” can be found in the controversy about Stevenson, which Gerard Manley Hopkins engaged in with Robert Bridges a few months after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde and Kidnapped. Bridges, who wasted his technical skill in trying to recreate the syllabic meter of Greek and Latin, was concerned that his friend was spending his time reading modern fiction instead of studying Dante and the classics. Hopkins replied that Stevenson, alone among his contemporaries, wrote “continuously well,” and was such “a master of a consummate style” that each of his phrases was as “finished as in poetry.” When Bridges became too pressing with his remonstrance, Hopkins lost his patience: “Your sour severity blinds you to his great genius,” and put an end to the polemical exchange with a good piece of advice: “You need not in writing join issue about Stevenson any more: instead of that you can read a book or two more of his and ripen a while” (Abbott : –, ). The origin of the “sour severity,” which resulted in his critical exclusion, is to be found in the cultural context that led to the “Fall of Stevenson,” xiv Introduction registered with satisfaction and complacency by Leonard Woolf in a  essay where he described how the style of the writer who had been “just the man to captivate the taste of the romantic ‘nineties,” sounded by then “drearily thin...