Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Stevenson and the Property of Language: Narrative, Value, Modernity

 Stevenson and the Property of Language Narrative, Value, Modernity        .  .    “If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money,” Stevenson declares (b: ). He is possibly exaggerating for dramatic or rhetorical purposes: he seems to violate his own totalizing injunction on numerous occasions, judging by his frequent mentions of the pecuniary pressures and considerations surrounding his own writing. More than this, many of his works foreground or begin with various kinds of financial transactions—inheritance and its thwarted or deferred fulfillment, economic competition, penury as a threat to art and to one’s moral character, and other such scenarios—that become crucial to the furthering of the plot. Stevenson’s own career and life seem to exhibit a dualistic attitude to money. Menikoff (a: ) observes that “as mercenary as [Stevenson] appears in his correspondence with McClure, Scribner’s, and Cassell, he nonetheless retained an integrity, almost an innocence, about the process of artistic creation.” This artistic “innocence” often manifests itself as a sense of the special moral and social duty of the writer, one that somehow had to transcend the baseness of everyday life: The writer should “tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of the present, to move us with instances ; he should tell of wise and good people in the past, to excite us by example; and of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought and kindness, and supports them . . . on the way to what is true and right” (Stevenson : ). In all this, the writer is somehow to steer clear of the motivation of “profit,” which only leads to “a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty literature” (). Yet in Stevenson’s quasi-autobiographical account of the writing process , “A Chapter on Dreams,” he acknowledges that the process of writing is very much a “business,” in which the writer’s “financial worries” and his “eye to the bank-book” are in large part responsible for transforming his private dream-content into the polished and consumable product of “a considerate story” (Stevenson a: , ). Stevenson’s narratives are the site in which he plays out the dualities of both a financial and literary nature, working out ambivalent feelings toward the necessity of money (and of earning it through popular modes of writing) on the one hand, and a repugnance of money and its corrupting influences (contrasting with a moral ideal of literature) on the other. Many of Stevenson’s narratives reflect these concerns, and among these “The Bottle Imp,” Treasure Island, and Kidnapped have recently attracted scholarly analysis of the interpenetrations of textuality, ethics, and finances (McLaughlin ; Wood ; Sorensen ). These studies have emphasized the ways in which Stevenson’s “ambiguous aesthetic” works toward “actively deconstructing binaries” of aristocratic morality vs. “nongentlemanly ” expedience, valuable “gold” standards vs. corrupt “silver” ones, precommercial sign systems vs. commercialized “textualization[s] of value” (Wood : –; Sorensen : ). In such narratives, Stevenson is seen as negotiating between opposing literary and financial value systems, such that “domestic romance . . . becomes inseparable” from “consequences” and “profit and loss”; and the criteria for evaluating “serious” literature also accommodate the need for writing to “furnish a living wage” (McLaughlin : ; Wood : ). There is clearly a close relationship between language and money, two of the principle media of modern society—although not the relationship of a simple homology. Sorensen (: ) emphasizes the historical and contextual particularities of both linguistic and monetary systems; language is not only functionally different from money in that it is capable of “generating money,” but it is also true that “different languages have different values” in the unequal polities and economies of different regions. Thus problematized, the relationship between language and money cannot merely be that of analogous equivalence; and accordingly, Stevenson’s  Scotland and the South Seas literary project cannot rest on the acknowledgment and demonstration of “the overwhelming reality of the market” (Wood : ). Stevenson’s acute awareness of the material conditions governing linguistic and financial exchange was very much rooted in the politics of place, in the unequal cultural transactions between fringe and dominant positions (the Highlands , the Pacific islands...