“A grand memory for forgetting”

This chapter discusses "a grand memory for forgetting". Memory is one of Robert Louis Stevenson's great subjects. It is dispersed across the body of his writings, in essays and letters as much as in the novels and tales and poetry. Stevenson's interest in this vast subject coincides with an important moment in history, the twenty-five years or so between 1870 and his death in 1894, a moment when modern ideas about memory take a shape still recognize. Stevenson goes on here to play with figures of partial survival and loss: the fragment of memory that survives is like "a bad daguerreotype". Stevenson likes writing-and-travelling step by step, but he also loves to stop abruptly short, and to leap. This is where his style of writing dances together with his subject matter, for the ruptures and leaps at the heart of his writing are as mutually related as memory and forgetting. Memory must leap across the rifts of oblivion.