Política de competitividad

The parallels between the lives of humans and animals, which Bums highlights with his own form of imaginative sympathy, appeals to Muir, just as Burns's democratic sensibility appealed to Whitman, who remarked that Burns's 'concrete, human points of view' made him 'very close to the earth', producing poetry remarkable for its 'boldness' and 'rawness'.®^ Seeking to dismantle the hierarchical mode of thinking tliat places 'Lord Man' at the top of die tree, apart from and superior to the natural world, Muir instead posits a network of interdependence in which humans appear as a part of the whole, no less necessary or unnecessary than a bacterium.

Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.®^

This is closer to the inclusiveness celebrated by Whitman, who highlights the intercoimection of all things, and hints at the properties of 'lower' life- forms which humans share through their* evolutionary heritage:

Walt Whitman. 'Robert Burns as Poet and Person'. Prose Works 1892: Collect and Other

Prose, Vol. II. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vois. New York: New York University Press, 1964. pp.558-568.

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I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg

of the wren...

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots.

And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons. But call any thing back again when I desire it.®®

Whitman's aesthetic is most assuredly not one of Cartesian dualism, and indeed his efforts on behalf of a democratic art seeks to dismantle such hierarchies, and as such is more in keeping with an ecological vision of the world than is perhaps M uif s own.

Mastery and possession: these are tlie master words launched by Descartes at the dawn of the scientific and technological age, when our Western reason went off to conquer the universe. We dominate and appropriate it such is the shared philosophy underlying industrial enterprise as well as so-called disinterested science, which are indistinguishable in this respect. Cartesian mastery brings science's objective violence into line, making it a well-controlled strategy. Our fundamental relationship with objects comes down to war and property.®^

The human interest of adventure writing tends to foreground the human figure and diminish the importance of nature - a humanist hierarchy which has prevailed in Western thought since the Renaissance at the very least. Much ecocritical theory values the experience of 'dwelling' in the natural world, in opposition to the tactics modern humans tend to

Walt Whitman. 'Song of Myself'. 11. 663-673. Leaves of Grass, p.59

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employ in their relationship witli nature - those of exploitation and hierarchy; in otiier words, the tactics of Cartesian imperialism. The replacement of the values of the hierarchy witli those of tire ecosystem are of particular interest to contemporaiy analyses of nature writing, and have been adopted and transformed by proponents of ecocritical theory in a number of ways, however, it is by no means clear whether Stevenson's works of fiction, absorbed as they often are in the world of romance and adventure, merely reiterate the conventional dualities of man and natuie in their representations of environment, or whether it is possible to detect a renegotiation of landscape, not just as background scenery, but as an interesting and equivocal participant in the world of die novel itself.

Perhaps Stevenson's most profound treatment of this theme is to be found m die novel whose very title speaks of mastery and locality: The

Master of Ballanti'ae. Inspked during Stevenson's stay in the Adirondack

mountains, and his experiences at sea, it is a strange tale, and one which 'extends over many years and travels into many countries'.®® The reader thus approaches it with a ready-made sense of alienation, twice-exiled already from the world of the novel, both spatially and temporally

Robert Louis Stevenson. The Master ofBallantrae. Ed. Roderick Watson. Edinburgh;

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dislocated, as the exile of botli author and editor provides a narrative framework for what is to come. The supposed 'editor' of MacKellar's century-old revelations introduces himself as 'an old, consistent exile' whose time spent revisiting his native city, finds it to be 'strange' and 'painful':

Outside, in foreign spots, he comes by surprise and awakens more attention than he had expected; in his own city, the relation is reversed, and he stands amazed to be so little recollected. Elsewhere he is refreshed to see attractive faces, to remark possible friends; there he scouts the long streets, with a pang at his heart, for the faces and friends that are no more. Elsewhere he is delighted witli the presence of what is new, tiiere tormented by the absence of what is old. Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is smitten with an equal regret for what he once was and for what he hoped to be.®®

Uie editor had heard something of the history of the Durrisdeers through the whisperings of local knowledge and tradition, and indeed MacKellar's narrative begins with a glance at the countryside reputation of the family - a similar device to that employed in James Hogg's The

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and Lewis Grassic

Gibbon's opening passages in A Scots Quair. Indeed, local knowledge shows itself to be central to tiie novel's twisting plot; the guides and trackers who know 'the secret paths of the wilderness' and Secundra Dass, whose method of saving the Master fails because his tropical

Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 148

knowledge does not apply to the frozen wastes of the winter Adirondacks.

Places and people, in The Master ofBallantrae, are riddled with a profound duality, as tlie experience of tlie American wilderness seems as aHen to the bewildered Chevalier and Master as the night-time city appeared to Stevenson and Thomson in their wanderings. The essential ambiguity of reality is suggested by the Irish Chevalier's account of tlieir first struggles in the wilderness:

Some parts of the forest were perfectly dense down to the ground...In some the bottom was full of deep swamp, and the whole wood entirely rotten. I have leaped on a great fallen log and sunk to tlie knees in touchwood; I have sought to stay myself, in falling, against what looked to be a solid trunk, and the whole thing has whiffed at my touch like a sheet of paper.®^

This doubleness is later echoed in MacKellar's description of his feelings towards The Master once he has resolved to follow the family across the ocean to America:

Tlie outer sensibility and inner tougliness set me against him; it seemed of a piece witli that impudent grossness wliich I knew to underlie the veneer of his fine manners; and sometimes my gorge rose against him as though he were deformed - and sometimes I would draw away as though from sometliing partly spectial. I had moments when I thought of him as of a man of pasteboard - as

Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 149

tliough, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity witliin.®®

A clever and at times disturbing analysis of psychological motives. The

Master of Ballantrae is, above aU, an extended study of the duality of

dwelling and adventure; of who goes off to seek his fortune and who stays behind at home. It might well be expected tliat adventure, witli all its associations with fortune-seeking, exploration and exploitation, is defined by Cartesian mastery and possession, and that the Master, as his title suggests, engages unashamedly with this self-centred way of life. Indeed, that is the way tlie character is presented for the first half of tlie novel; a rapacious, ruthless man who sets his own independence and life above everything else. By this analysis, the brother that stays at home is the less guilty of the two; long-suffering, taking care of his lands and family. But it is difficult to see how the house of Durrisdeer is a dwelling, its bulk and grandeur failing to reflect Hie schismed family living under its roof. Indeed, the house itself is an 'abstraction', a symbol of unity which masks division and deceit:

I saw that he had fallen, like the rest of us, to think mainly of the house. Now that aU the living members of the family were plunged in irremediable sorrow, it was strange how we turned to that conjoint abstraction of the family itself...®^

88 Ibid. p.l54

Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 150

The family's emigration to North America is the final judgement on dwelling at Durrisdeer:

And then they were gone indeed, having looked tiieir last on the kind roof of Durrisdeer, their faces towards a barbarous country. I never knew before the greatness of tiiat vault of the night in which we two poor serving-men....stood for the first time deserted; I had never felt before my own dependency upon the countenance of otiiers. Tlie sense of isolation burned in my bowels like a fire. It seemed that we who remained at home were tine true exiles, and that Durrisdeer and Solwayside, and all tliat made my country native, its air good to me, and its language welcome, had gone forth and was far over the sea with my old masters.^®

The locality and its associations are disrupted for MacKellar, the unseen existences of the house only provoking melancholia and alienation, the familiar memories stimulating the opposite of tlie flâneu/s cheerful pleasure in tlie unfamiliar resonances of place. The dwelling, deserted by its inhabitants, is a ghostly, equivocal place, appealing to a certain melancholic romance and nothing more.

We took our leave in silence: the house of Durrisdeer standing with drooping gutters and windows closed, like a place dedicate to melancholy. I observed the Master kept his head out, looking back on these splashed walls and glimmering roofs, till they were suddenly swallowed in the mist; and I must suppose some natural sadness fell on the m an..

The ultimate destination or 'home', in The Master of Ballantrae, is the wilderness and tlie only act of 'dwelling' possible in that environment is

90 ZW. p.l44 91Ibid.p.151

Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 151

to die there; all paths lead to the metaphorical fall of the house, and brotherly unity is only possible in the grave. Neither dwelling nor travelling can offer any solace in this novel; human community is again and again denied, and any sense of connection with the natural world is rooted in the past of childhood, not in the tragic business of adult hfe. The obsession with control, with 'mastery', leads to tragic ends. Henry Durie's plot to kill his brother leads his imagination to wander after him through the Adirondack forests, as MacKellar remarks that his mind:

dwelled almost wholly in the Wilderness, following that party with whose deeds he had so much concern. He continually conjured up their camps and progresses, the fashion of the country... And it is the less wonder if the scene of his meditations began to draw liim bodily

But this is not to say that emotions of love, admiration and allegiance are impossible. However, these too are interrogated and shown to be of an ambiguous nature. Despite MacKellar's protests, he admires and even respects the wicked Master, and the reader is drawn into this mixture of fascination and revulsion:

'Life is a singular* tiring,' said he, 'and mankind a very singular people. You suppose yourself to love my brother. I assure you, it is merely custom. ...Had you instead fallen in with me, you would to-day be as strong upon my side.'^®

«ZW. p.l91 9HW. p.l64

Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 152

Equivocal allegiances, it might be suggested, are at the core of the exile's experience; allegiances to the place of one's birth and one's adopted home:

Of all the mysteries of tire human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountahrs; its unsightly places black with coal; its treeless, sour, uirfriendly- looking corn-lands; its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, 'Oh, why left I my hame?' and it seems at once as if no beauty under tire high heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods.^^

Where one will be buried seems to be an important theme; it draws Stevenson to write his famous 'Requiem':

This be the verse you grave for me

Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea And the hunter home from the hill.^^

But which 'home', which 'here' did he have iir mind? The poem was written while he was ill hr North America, but it was eventually to be carved on his memorial hr Samoa. Of course, part of the poem's meaning follows from the metaphor of life as a journey, and 'home' is deatir (this

94 Robert Louis Stevenson. 'The Silverado Squatters', pp.194-5.

98 Robert Louis Stevenson. 'XXI Requiem'. Collected Poems. Collected Poems. London:

Chapter 2: Rural Flâneurs 153

was oddly inverted in 'WiU o' the Mill', where death itself is the only journey the hero takes). James Thomson seems to be an unlikely kindred spirit in this wistful wondering, writing his own requiem:

Where shall once tlie wanderer weary Meet his resting-place and shrine? Under palm-trees by the Ganges? Under lindens of the Rhine? Ever onward! God's wide heaven Must surround me there as here;

And like death-lamps o'er me swinging Night by night the stars burn clear.^®

Destinations are a hazy mirage to the flaneur, whose existence is defined by movement. Is the flâneur, then, really tlie ecological figure which has been stalking the margins of Stevenson's writings? The answer, perhaps, lies in tlie relationship between 'place' and memory, which began tliis discussion. Stevenson's memory flashed upon him with sensations of his homeland, as he records in a letter to Sidney Colvin:

I am exulting to do nothing. It pours with rain from the westward, very unusual kind of weather; I was standing out on the little verandah in front of my room this morning, and tliere went through me or over me a heave of extraordinary and apparently baseless emotion. I literally staggered. And then the explanation came, and I knew I had found a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland, and particularly to the neighbourhood of Callander. Very odd these identities of sensation, and the world of comiotations implied; Highland huts, and peat smoke, and the brown swirling rivers, and wet clotlies, and whisky, and the

98 Cit. James Thomson. Tom Leonard. Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James

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romance of the past, and that indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man's h e a r t . . .

The romance of memory is a savage sort of tiling, not sentiment only, but physical sensation. Stevenson had been reading stories by Barbey d'Aurevilly, the Parisian dandy and journalist, and found in tiiem the 'reek of the soÜ and the past', 'an identity of sensation; one of those conjunctions in life that had filled ...[him] to the brim, and permanently bent his memory'. Elsewhere he remarks tiiat 'the strangest thing in all man's travelling, [is] that he should carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth'. John Muir, too, had this experience during liis wanderings:

...while I was yet many miles back in tlie palmy woods, I caught the scent of the salt sea breeze which, although I had so many years lived far from sea breezes, suddenly conjured up Dunbar, its rocky coast, winds and waves; and my whole childhood, tiiat seemed to have utterly vanished in the New World, was now restored amid the Florida woods by that one breath from the sea. Forgotten were tiie palms and magnolias and the thousand flowers that enclosed me. I could see only dulse and tangle, long-winged gulls, the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, and the old castle, schools, churches, and long country rambles in search of birds' nests.^9

97 Robert Louis Stevenson. 'Letter 2577 To Sidney Colvin'. The Letters of Robert Louis

Stevenson. Ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew. 8 vols. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995 p,91

98 Robert Louis Stevenson. 'The Silverado Squatters'. pp.216-217 99 John Muir. 'A Thousand MUe Walk to the Gulf'. p.l56

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The startlmg incongruity of these visions, seen as they are in unlikely foreign places, makes tliem all the more vivid to the beholder. The sensation of the old land is not, perhaps, a measure of the incongruity of