Narrating Scotland: The Imagination Of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Barry Menikoff

Beloved for generations as one of Robert Louis Stevenson's most thrilling adventure novels, Kidnapped tells the story of David Balfour, a shrewd and orphaned Lowlander, and Alan Breck Stewart, the brave and flamboyant Jacobite rebel. Together with its less familiar sequel, Catriona, both novels constitute what many scholars consider to be Stevenson's greatest achievement in fiction. In this reinterpretation, Barry Menikoff questions the traditional understanding of these twin novels as mere adventure stories. He suggests instead that Stevenson wrote the volumes with a broader and more searching purpose in mind. Although Stevenson chose to cloak himself in the guise of an entertainer with no aim beyond relating amusing and romantic tales from the past, Menikoff reveals that the writer was a serious student of Scottish history and culture. His true project was nothing less than the reconstitution of his country's history in the period just after the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion.

Menikoff contends that in Kidnapped and Catriona Stevenson imaginatively reconstructed that culture, in part for the sake of his nation, and for its posterity. Narrating Scotland traces the Scottish writer's weaving together of source material from memoirs, letters, histories, and records of trials. Menikoff uncovers the documentary basis for reading Kidnapped and Catriona as political allegories and reveals the skill with which Stevenson offered a narrative that British colonizers could enjoy without being offended by its underlying condemnation. Menikoff shows that Stevenson's experiments in fiction, which would anticipate such works as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, successfully inscribed his country's loss of indigenous culture upon an epic narrative that for more than a century has masqueraded as a common adventure story.

233 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2005

Reviews

[Richard Dury · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book. To start with the physical aspects: nowadays it's a pleasure to handle such a sturdy, well-stitched volume produced by an anonymous but brilliant book-designer for the University of South Carolina Press in elegant type on slightly creamy paper. This is a care taken by the author too in every aspect of the book from painstaking research (lightly worn) to dashing style and even to the choice of dust-jacket illustration. The book opens with a chapter on Stevenson as historian working on an history of the transformation of the Highlands, followed by eight chapters on how he used the documentary sources familiar from that abandoned project for details and narratives in _Kidnapped_ and _David Balfour_. These chapters are like a wonderfully expanded series of explanatory notes, fascinating in themselves, while at the same time building up a thesis on the unique way Stevenson used and transformed historical documents in the creation of fiction. But the texture of the text is not of one note after another, as Menikoff is passionately and intellectually involved in explaining and evoking explanatory links. Just one example: the use in _Kidnapped_ of names and allusions that the reader is unlikely to know is a cue for an essayistic exploration of this phenomenon (pp. 59-60). Another example: the Epilogue gives us a useful overview of how Stevenson's work was characterized and valued in a wide range of 1894 obituaries. In the Epilogue the two novels are summed up as a new creation 'the realistic historical novel' and 'a social and political chronicle' that 'paved the way for Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and W. G. Sebald' (p. 206). Finally, Menikoff writes in a vigorous style that simplifies and is suggestive—just to give an idea: like Picasso making a drawing in considered and decisive gestures—like in fact Stevenson himself. Though I don't agree with every one of the analyses, I enjoyed reading all of them—Menikoff knows how to construct a sentence—and they made me think. It is a style both vigorous and elegant, like the last sentences of the Epilogue. A style that 'works' ideas like a potter working clay, as in the following appraisal: 'Stevenson's style could plausibly be seen as the counterpart of Eastern calligraphy, whose perfection was the sole aim of the culture's most revered figure, the scholar-artist' (p. 205). An excellent book, an enjoyable reading experience.