I had just come to the end of reading two rather long and complex books simultaneously. One was Melville’s The Confidence Man, with its shape-shifting hero and its dense and ceaseless verbal play. I had H. Bruce Franklin’s Library of Literature (Bobbs-Merrill) paperback edition which goes far to explicate the book’s allusions, particularly to current events and popular culture. Melville is a lover pf polysemy and his ironies are multi-layered and glorious, but this reader, at least, sometimes felt fatigued in following his labyrinthine moves. At the same time I was reading Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed in Constance Garnett’s old Modern Library translation (called in other English versions The Devils or Demons), that immense satire on provincial benightedness. With this worthy volume, too, I felt on occasion saturated with the author’s lugubrious philosophy, his weakness for a mystified Russian history and religion (as charged today as ever), and his merciless compounding of detail.
I sought then a
lighter, more refreshing, breezy narrative, something to clear the mental
palate, the sort of relief dependably available in Sir Walter Scott, Trollope, or
Chester Himes, and I picked up my 1902 A. L. Burt edition of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae [1]. I was not disappointed. Stevenson, who had a considerable name in his
own day, has come to be considered a writer for children, what with Kidnapped,
and Treasure Island, and Dr. Jekyll, not to mention the really charming Child’s
Garden of Verses; his appeal to an adult literary audience might seem to
some less than obvious.
In fact, though,
the question of taste might well be reversed.
The most appreciated works have never had much in common with novels
celebrated by the literati such as Joyce’s Ulysses. Folk stories and songs, bestsellers, and art
for the masses such as television shows have always maintained different
standards from those of courtly or academic poetry and, in modern times, “high art” in
general. Though many such works are not
tended and transmitted as a cultural patrimony and most may be soon
forgotten, popular art may be every bit as beautiful and moving as the “high
art” most often praised by elites. [2]
All art is
dialectical: in varying degrees, every work will confirm some of the consumer’s
preconceptions. (Were this not so, the
work would be incomprehensible.) Yet,
just as everyone’s physical vision is largely shared, but never identical, so
each view of the world must differ. Art
serves the double-edged purpose of, on the one hand, preserving and
transmitting ideology through generations and, on the other, opening new
possibilities for a critical view of one’s own ideas. While oral and popular stories tend to
systematically inculcate the values of the group, elite art is more likely to point
toward contradictions, problems, complexities, and alternatives. This is true to some extent of work created
in a courtly setting, but much more characteristic of more recent consciously
“high art,” which may even spurn a mass audience. Popular art in general satisfies
expectations; elite art twists, or surprises, or plays with them.
No work can be
wholly on one side of the spectrum.
Indeed, it is only in their tension that meaning arises. One is the more reassured of a comforting
truth if one is aware that deniers exist.
And the most strident experimentalist must depend on conventions or no
one would know they are being violated.
To determine where a given work of fiction falls between these extremes
is not only sociologically useful in explaining the writer’s audience, but also
intellectually significant for understanding thematic concerns, and
aesthetically central for determining the structural patterns experienced as
beauty.
The same tension is enacted in every aspect of a novel. A plot may be highly conventional with a hero of unalloyed heroism and a leading lady who is always charming. It may follow a design of retributive justice so the reader may conclude the book with the reassurance that all is right with the world, that everything gets sorted out in the end. Individual lines and incidents may become so hackneyed as to attract both criticism from those who wish for something new and appreciation from those comforted by the familiar.
Narratives may
also convey meaning through twisting expectation. The recurrences in myth and folktales are so
regular that they have been systematized by scholars like Stith Thompson, Vladimir Propp, and
Joseph Campbell, but reliance on convention of all sorts is a matter of
degree. The white hat/ black hat cowboy
movies of early days did not vanish, but they were joined in the 1950s by more
ambiguous “psychological” Westerns and
then by outlaw protagonists. In Don
Quixote and, centuries later in Madame Bovary Romanticism is
ironized.
In The Master
of Ballantrae Stevenson's adherence to the conventions of popular literature is
less rigid than in Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, or Kidnapped. While the two brothers are clearly
established as a reliably moral wronged hero and an immoral scoundrel, their
roles are not entirely stable. Toward
the end of the novel, for instance, while traveling with Mr. Mackellar, James
betrays some pleasanter behavior, while Henry, in the latter episodes, is
clearly gripped by obsession and arrogance, necessitating his death not long
after his brother’s. He has indeed been
driven to this state of mind, but he is thoughtless and self-absorbed.
Some have found
the book’s use of supposed documents to be in a way “post-modern” and
“de-centering.” [3] The reader is in
fact separated from the events by their retelling by the old retainer and further
uncertainty arises since some stretches are told by the presumably less honest Chevalier
de Burke or by the Master himself or by Mackellar’s darker counterpart Secundra
Dass. The fact is, of course, that early
novels regularly relied on putatively documentary evidence to create the
illusion of their “truth;” indeed, before the nineteenth century a great many
works of fiction strive to appear to be records of lived experience. Examples include the common omission of dates
and personal names as though to protect living reputations, Robinson Crusoe’s
journal, and the consistent stream of epistolary works of fiction beginning with
Diego de San Pedro’s Carvel de Amor and continuing to Samuel
Richardson’s popular and influential stories of hard-pressed maidens.
Stevenson’s
language is slightly elevated, but not distantly above the speech of educated,
enough to convey gravitas and authority, but never reaching into the
realm of extravagant rhetorical display.
the degree if his flourishes is evident in Mr. Mackellar’s description of his trek
through the wild American forest with the Master.
The labors of Hercules, so finely
described by Homer were a trifle to what we now underwent. Sime parts of the forest were perfectly
dense down to the ground, so that we must cut our way like mites in a cheese.
The thematics
provide yet another example of largely conventional patterns. The story is normative in spite of Stevenson’s
own transgressive bohemianism and rejection of Christianity. The faithful servant Mackellar, who might
seem just a bit of a prig, is the index to morality within the narrative, while
James is quite monstrously evil and Henry is, for a long time, better than most
of us. Honor and gentlemanliness, the
most commonplace of Victorian idées reçues, govern the reader’s view of
both brothers. In a popular work the
author’s assumptions typically vary little from the reader’s. Henry’s descent into neurosis is presented as
the result of intolerable pressure from his brother. Since the primary focus is the drama (or
melodrama), enacted against a background of common opinion. Stevenson’s acceptance of social norms in
this fiction is the more significant, since he was in fact irreligious, signing
a letter to his friend Charles Baxter “Ever your affectionate and horrible
Atheist, R. L. Stevenson, C. I. [Careless Infidel], H. A. [Horrible Atheist],
S. B. [Son of Belial], etc.” [5] He wore
velveteen jackets like Oscar Wilde, grew his hair, and frequented low dives,
but his fiction betrayed little of his deviations from accepted bourgeois
taste.
Stevenson’s plot
is, for the most part, plausible, though it is tinged with the fabulous and the
contrived. For him “lively literature”
is not born of the accumulation of realistic detail alone, but requires
artifice as well. “All representative art,” he says, “is both realistic and
ideal.” [6] The proportions are
carefully managed in Ballantrae.
Henry, for instance, is at first an utterly innocent victim, a wronged
hero whose virtue seems extraordinary, but he becomes something rather less as
his arrogance increases with his accession to money and title and the growth of
his obsession about his brother. For his
part, the scoundrel James, whose wickedness had seemed almost unlimited, is
humanized as he travels with Mackellar.
The very
conventional conflicts around inheritance and sibling rivalry are not only
heightened to an extreme; they are also colored with the supernatural, as James
seems to reappear almost like a spirit, most dramatically in his apparent
reanimation in the novel’s climax.
To Stevenson the
turns of a well-constructed plot provide the principal pleasure of
fiction. Describing how an experience of
reading might be “absorbing and voluptuous,” he says that style, psychology,
and theme are all subordinate to the reader’s digging “for a certain sort of
incident, like a pig for truffles.” To
him “drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.” He criticizes social or thematic
preoccupations, what he calls “the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate.” His model is Sir Walter Scott, “king of the
romantics,” though he recognizes Scott’s unevenness, attributing it to the fact
that “as his books are play to the reader, so were they play to him.” Of course, incident is the chief element in
myth and in folk stories, as it is in such popular novelists as Scott, and the
incidents are never merely “realistic.”
According to Stevenson, when a story “pleases [the reader] with every
turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire
delight, fiction is called romance.” [7]
He describes the
advent of realism as “the great change of the past century.” To him Zola with his “extreme of detail,”
builds only feux-de-joie of literary tricking.” He realizes, furthermore, that verisimilitude
is a literary rhetorical effect just as fancy is, and that “realism” has not to
do with “fundamental truth” but is itself “a technical method.” He insists in the end that the reader should
“begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily
mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design.” This catalogue of qualities seems carelessly
tossed together, really suggesting little more than a good story, a page-turner
with the qualities that have always characterized popular fiction. [8]
Stevenson’s taste is clear, though many readers may dissent, preferring novels in which style or realistic detail or theme are foregrounded. Yet his standards are those that have underlay the most popular of works from oral fireside folktales to today’s bestsellers. Stevenson need not be relegated to the juvenile shelves of the library. Literature equally confirms readers’ expectations and questions them. Neither is the more beautiful or true; they are complementary. Yet it is always true that the radical, the innovative, the work that challenges, will require more work to consume and is unlikely to find as large an audience as fiction that, for the most part, observes convention, using variations as a seasoning rather than a program. Many readers are likely to share my own inclination for a varied textual diet, mixing the popular now and then with the elite “high art” that prejudice would assign a more prestigious place in literature. In fact both the high and the low have their excellences, their masterpieces, and their failures. Each may have as well a place in the individual’s appreciation, just as most people would not wish to be confined to only sweets or only savory foods, or to vacation only in sites of natural beauty or only in densely occupied cities. Ovid was quite right to note "there is no single sort of [hair]style alone;" one chooses what one wishes and that choice may vary from day to day. [9] Absolute value judgements are as elusive in fiction as in clothing or coiffure.
1. The book appeared
in 2002 on a shelf at the Salvation Army.
The A. L. Burt company began reprinting reference works, moving then to
popular literature such as Zane Gray and Horatio Alger. They came to specialize in juvenile series
such as the twenty-four volumes in The Boy Allies adventures during
WWI. They did publish some classics as
well, including the Burt’s Home Library,” which touted itself as “popular
literature for the masses . . . the treasures of the world’s knowledge.”
2. This has altered
in recent years due to the salutary appreciation of the beauty of many forms of
popular and mass culture as well as the less wholesome but newly fashionable
attitude that artistic value judgements are meaningless, that study of any
committee-written situation comedy is precisely as rewarding as devotion to
Dante.
3. Two critics taking
this approach, one more popular and one more scholarly will serve as
examples. In his article “Meet the
Master of Ballantrae” in the August 10, 2009 issue of The Guardian,
calls The Master of Ballantrae, “a postmodernist pastiche of his
[Stevenson’s earlier] novels and notes in
prase that “in its discontinuous structure it looks forward to the
contemporary novel.“ Nels C. Pearson, in
“The Moment of Modernism: Schopenhauer’s ‘Unstable Phantom’ in Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness and Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (in Studies
in Scottish Literature, vol. 31, no. 1 [1999]) waxes more florid, claiming
that the novel “demonstrates the deconstructive relationship between an
arbitrary essence and a narrative that desperately tries to unveil it.”
4. Several early
epics on Herakles by Creophylus, Peisander and Panyassis of Halicarnassus are
known, though only by reputation or a few fragments. The Argonautica contains some brief
references to the labors, and a listing occurs in Euripedes’ The Madness of
Heracles, but a full account is set down only by Diodorus Siculus and later
by the Pseudo-Apollodorus.
5. Letter of February
2, 1873.
6. The line occurs in
his essay “A Note on Realism.”
7. The quotations in
this paragraph are from Stevenson’s essay “A Gossip on Romance.”
8. The quotations in
this paragraph are from Stevenson’s essay “A Note on Realism.”
9. “Nec genus ornatus
unun est,” Art of Love III, 135.
No comments:
Post a Comment