Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson by Barry Menikoff

Abstract

MLR, 103. I, 2oo8 205 interpret 'the city as neighbourhood' in Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, expounding a localism which he sees as displacing a centre-periphery dynamic. Marx's approach illustrates thedebt of thenew modernist studies toNew Histori cism. Among the textshe discusses are a speech by John Maynard Keynes, Conrad's letters,Sir Hugh Clifford's books onMalaya, Malinowski's anthropology, Amelia Ed wards's travelwriting, and a I930 report by theCouncil forthePreservation ofRural England and theDesign and Industries Association. All of these are treated alongside literary texts as commensurate formsof discourse indicative of social, economic, and ideological change. Given Marx's focus on 'the kinship between modernist fiction and anthropology' (p. 17i) and his interest in a return of the local, it is perhaps surprising that he does not refer more to JedEsty's A Shrinking Island (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), which deals with precisely these issues; Esty's book ismentioned only briefly,presumably because itcame out too late for Marx to engage further with it. Marx's approach generates what one might characterize as a pervasive cynicism in relation to authors' motives and values: Conrad's complaints about illness while writing are interpreted as essentially amarketing tactic; Forster's 'only connect' as a version of 'Rule Britannia!' (p. I2I). One of the strengths of his book as an origi nal contribution tomodernist studies is that, as well as engaging with familiar topoi such as Empire and primitivism, itdeploys concepts such as the sentimental and the picturesque, familiar in other fields of literarycriticism but not normally central to discussions ofmodernism. Perhaps the two conceptions ofmodernism with which I began should be seen as two poles of a necessary dialectic driving forward thenew modernist studies: at one we explore itsmaximum extent and diverse connections; at theother we specify and delimitmodernism, conceptualizing itas a sharply defined phenomenon. UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE ANDREW MICHAEL ROBERTS NarratingScotland: The Imagination ofRobert Louis Stevenson. By BARRY MENIKOFF. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2005. xii+233 pp. ?C29.50. ISBN 978-1-57003-568-5. Narrating Scotland is a tour de force of first-ratescholarship, closely focused on the two novels thatmake one extended narrative,Kidnapped and Catriona (the latteren titledDavid Balfour in theUSA), yet bringing in a dazzlingly wide range of relatively obscure historical texts and sources with which Stevenson was familiar and ofwhich hemade unique, coded, intricateuse in thecomposition of these books. The result isa reading of Stevenson which shows him foreshadowing Truman Capote inhis braiding of factand fictionbut which reveals him operating on a larger scale, historically and nationally, revealing a vision of Scotland as comprehensive and challenging as thatof the one predecessor about whom he was clearlymost self-conscious: Walter Scott. Stevenson, Menikoff writes, 'offereda narrative thatappeared to reinforce the con ventional English wisdom that thedefeat of theHighland clans prepared theway for the development ofmodern Scotland. This was a view propounded byWalter Scott in the Waverley novels. But Stevenson, admiring as he was of Scott, never subscribed tohis countryman's roseate progressivism' (p. 3). Menikoff takes serious account ofStevenson as historian of Scotland, showing with precise and copious examples how he adapted fromhistorical and documentary ac counts details, characters, and storieswhich are woven inextricably into the fabric of his fiction.The weight and steely network of theworlds of law and political author ity, Menikoff argues, are things Stevenson takes into full account. By showing how 2o6 Reviews Stevenson fictionalized history into a talewhich continues to haunt the imagination even now,Menikoff affirmsthe lastingvalue of art and literature itssingular capacity to reveal truths that lie beyond the confinements of particular moments and people or evidence that remains no more than documentary. Perhaps a danger ofMenikoff's reading is tomake Stevenson's writing sometimes appear more pondered than it is. Itwould be unfair to remove Stevenson altogether from the realm of adventure stories forboys. Part of the excitement of that genre is also inStevenson's achievement. For Stevenson, theHighlands of Scotland was a location where both poverty and courage might be experienced, not primarily as fictionbut in the context of an im plied social critique of British imperial authority. He explored the historical world inhabited by theClan Gregor and the legal context...