Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

The Greenhouse vs. the Glasshouse: Stevenson's Stories as Textual Matrices

The Greenhouse vs. the Glasshouse Stevenson’s Stories as Textual Matrices              Jekyll’s groundbreaking masterstroke of metamorphosis can be read as an intratextual metaphorical clue: indeed, his fascination with bodily proliferation , and his transgression of the taboo of individual integrity mirror Stevenson’s own fascination with textual proliferation and his transgression of the contemporary naturalist taboo of textual integrity. Transposing Jekyll’s most famous statement thus comes very close to defining Stevenson ’s literary manifesto: “Text is not truly one but two. . . . Others will follow , others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that text will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (Stevenson : ).1 Concentrating on The Master of Ballantrae, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Treasure Island, Stevenson nurses a constant literary obsession: just as Jekyll wants to launch an assault on the “fortress of identity” (Stevenson : ), Stevenson seems to be eager to dismember, to scatter the text. Stigmatizing as an illusion the naturalist effort to barricade the text, to turn it into an authoritative and indisputable stronghold, Stevenson becomes a literary outlaw and opens a new, modern, literary way. In his stories the text is dislocated, it is made to proliferate; to escape narrative control, it becomes heterogeneous, opaque, essentially unstable. Stevenson’s novels invalidate and outmode Zola’s contemporary ideal of the text as a transparent and transitive “glasshouse”: “Je voulais . . . une composition simple , une langue nette, quelque chose comme une maison de verre laissant voir les idées à l’intérieur . . . , les documents humains donnés dans leur  nudité sévère” [I wanted . . . a simple composition, a clear language, something like a house of glass that allow you to see the ideas inside . . . , human documents presented directly and unadorned] (Zola , vol. : ). Instead , he invents a text that is more like a self-contained greenhouse, its own reflexive and dynamic literary fertilizer that experiments with random developments, with textual heterogenesis. Stevenson playfully insists on the same routine in his narratives: he ironically stages, story after story, the desperate and pathetic fortification of the text, a fortification that he entrusts to dutiful servants of the Realist system, those interchangeable lawyers and mere copyists for whom the text is an authoritative way to testify reality. But the text soon becomes a demolition site, it escapes the lawyers’ control and assaults the stronghold from the inside; it starts proliferating, and dissolves narrative integrity as well as textual linearity. Morbid “testification,” defeated and proved a delusive fake, thus gives way to dynamic “textification”: reality disappears behind its several versions, it becomes mere compost to the text. In Stevenson ’s transgressive greenhouse, the text thus prophetically bears all the characteristics of the modern Deleuzian ideal of the rhizome; and in the same way as Jekyll transposes Stevenson’s method, “the Captain” comes up with an ideal text-to-be: his logbook and his map, folded together in the chest, constitute a treasured literary model, the never-ending, heterogeneous, discontinuous, nonreferential surface that Stevenson wants to write. The Text as a Demolition Site The same pre-text postpones the beginning of the story in Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Master of Ballantrae, to the point that it becomes a sort of metatextual ritual, a text-lock that triggers the entry into fiction: in all three stories, Stevenson stages the same procedure of textual fortification, the same barricading of the text. In Treasure Island, the Captain’s papers consist in a resisting “bundle tied up in oilcloth” (Stevenson : ), “sewn together” (), and Doctor Livesey adds a personal level of protection: “The doctor looked it all over, as if his fingers were itching to open it; but instead of doing that, he put it quietly in the pocket of his coat” (). The same ceremonial opens Strange Case: Utterson radically locks up a text from Jekyll in “the most private part” of his safe (), and takes another, already “sealed in several places” and strives even to suppress knowledge of its existence: “The lawyer put it in his pocket. ‘I would say nothing of this paper’” (, ). But Peter M’Brair, in Jaëck: The Greenhouse vs. the Glasshouse  the preface to The Master of Ballantrae, is clearly the most efficient in this series of censoring lawyers and textual undertakers. Here, the text is padlocked...