Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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Название: Kidnapped
Автор: Robert Louis Stevenson
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Контркультура
Серия: Canons
isbn: 9781847674432
isbn:
One of the most striking illustrations of Stevenson’s realism is the portrait of the Covenant’s cabin boy. David meets him first when he brings a message to Shaws and then talks with him on the road to Queensferry.
He said his name was Ransome, and that he had followed the sea since he was nine, but could not say how old he was, as he had lost his reckoning. He showed me tattoo marks, baring his breast in the teeth of the wind and in spite of my remonstrances, for I thought it was enough to kill him; he swore horribly whenever he remembered, but more like a silly schoolboy than a man; and boasted of many wild and bad things that he had done, stealthy thefts, false accusations, ay, and even murder; but all with such a dearth of likelihood in the details, and such a weak and crazy swagger in the delivery, as disposed me rather to pity than to believe him. (p. 46)
The picture of this boy is not only graphic but heartbreaking. Yet even here the role he enacts is a function of Stevenson’s larger design, to expose the tyrannical authority of the ship’s officers and their complete abandonment of any responsibility for their actions. Kidnapped treats of law and lawlessness. The Covenant, by trading in human cargo, is operating way beyond the bounds of the law. By lighting on the cabin boy Stevenson sears into David’s mind (“the poor child still comes about me in my dreams” [p. 64]) the cruelty and terror visited upon the weak and helpless by those in power and control. Ransome’s experience can be read plausibly as emblematic of the terror exhibited by James Stewart and his wife, the terror of the Highlanders defeated and disarmed before the English mace and crown, a government prepared to dispatch them arbitrarily to trial, and, if need be, to the gallows.
David’s initial encounter with Ransome does not give him any clear idea as to why he seems unlike any boy he has ever met. The style and manner of speech, the physical characteristics and behavior, even the nature of the conversation all strike a plain-speaking and clear-thinking lad like David as utterly bizarre. Ransome’s reason has been short-circuited, his mind unbalanced; David refers to his “crazy” walk, his “crackbrain humour.” Ransome’s condition, as David and we discover, was the result of such relentless physical abuse that the loss of reason was the only way he stayed alive: by forgetting or disre- membering the beatings given him by Shuan he was able to continue doing his job, which was essentially that of a galley slave. David would on occasion insist on making Ransome recognize what was happening, and then the boy would cry out in rage, and rush to do something—what could he do, really?— but immediately he would forget again, and revert to a kind of helpless passivity. One of Stevenson’s deftest touches is the capture of Ransome’s disordered mind—the jumble of vague memories of home (his father a clockmaker, a starling whistling an old ballad) joined to the lowest, most brutal fragments of sailors’ talk, so exaggerated as to sound absurd, yet all with more than we would wish of truth.
Title page from the edition published by James Henderson solely for the purpose of copyright. The text included the first ten chapters of the novel.
III
Since Kidnapped is marked with incidents of violence as well as danger, it is no surprise that fear and courage are among the most powerful recurrent emotions. Although the successive dangers contribute to the perception that the story is directed to boys, in reality those selfsame incidents highlight the central issue of manhood, which is what David must achieve. Early on he is exposed to his uncle Ebenezer, who responds viscerally to the bolt of lightning that saves David’s life: “Now whether my uncle thought the crash to be the sound of my fall, or whether he heard in it God’s voice denouncing murder … he was seized on by a kind of panic fear, and … ran into the house and left the door open behind him” (p. 39). As soon as he discovers that David is still alive, “there came into his eyes a terror that was not of this world” (p. 40). Although Ebenezer Balfour is often dismissed as an overdone villain, the staple of popular fiction, Stevenson etches him with an exactitude that belies that casual view. His miserliness is detailed with an engraver’s accuracy— measuring out the beer, husbanding the candles—while his negativity is enforced by his insistent repetition of no: “Na, na; na, na” (p. 32). What is more extraordinary is how the man has changed over his life, for the idea that he was once young, and in love with David’s mother, and courted her only to lose out to his brother and get Shaws instead, is a lesson that David has to absorb by the end of the novel, when he learns the full story of his family history from Rankeillor. But in the meantime, or in the novel’s real time, which is that of the sequence of actions as they were experienced, albeit narrated retrospectively, David is watching a man in the grip of an emotion that was well described by Seneca in Epistle XIII: “No fear is so ruinous and so uncontrollable as panic fear. For other fears are groundless, but this fear is witless.”12 The door left open behind him, the look in his eyes that was not of this world—these reveal a man incapable of confronting any kind of opposition without resort to “panic fear.” Ebenezer’s way of dealing with the world is with slyness and deceit, a type of negative behavior that conforms to the portrait Stevenson sketches of his house in near ruins, and is confirmed by his betrayal of David to Captain Hoseason. Although Stevenson never uses the word coward to describe Ebenezer, the idea is implicit in the action.
David is beached on Earraid just past midnight. “To walk by the sea at that hour of the morning, and in a place so desert-like and lonesome, struck me with a kind of fear.” The dread of the night and the solitariness fill him with emotion: “I was afraid to think what had befallen my shipmates, and afraid to look longer at so empty a scene” (pp. 116–17). The desolation of the place, joined to the terror of the unknown, possibly more frightening than any real danger, forces David to think about what he should do to hold himself together. He instinctively realizes that the best thing he can do is avoid thinking about the things he fears: the death of his shipmates and the unforeseen dangers of the island. Why he should be afraid to think of the crew’s death might seem strange, since they had “stolen” him from his country, were complicit in the murder of Ransome, and twice attempted to kill him and Alan in the roundhouse. Yet David had learned while on the Covenant that “rough” though they were, sailors were not all that different from other men (“No class of man is altogether bad”) and had their own small virtues, “kind when it occurred to them, simple … [with] some glimmerings of honesty” (p. 62). Thus he feels bonded with them in shipwreck—he still thinks of them as shipmates— despite their battles in the roundhouse. David does not want to think of their fate because then he would have to reflect on his own. The fear of death is profound, and Stevenson presents it with a quiet yet emphatic simplicity: “‘He was a fine man too … but he’s dead’” (p. 47); “He gave the captain a glance that meant the boy was dead, as plain as speaking” (p. 68). Death is a leveler, and no man, however bad, deserves anything but pity at the final accounting. We know this to be one of Stevenson’s most profound convictions, one that runs through his fiction from “The Pavilion on the Links” (1878) to “The Beach of Falesá” (1892).
For David to become a man he must first recognize fear, which could be СКАЧАТЬ