FEAR AND THE MAP
Psychologically, focus aims to overcome fear. In “A Humble Remonstrance,” a review indirectly addressed to Henry James, Stevenson wrote about the genre of Treasure Island, which he considered an elementary novel of adventure: “Danger is the matter to which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realize the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear.” To the extent that Stevenson ministers to this interest, as Henry James saw, he might be writing far more serious fiction than at first appears. Fear, even treated idly, is as mysterious as it is powerful, and when it has deep early-childhood origins, it is likely to generate anxiety, “fear without an object.” A threatening glance animates many religions, chief among them those in the fundamentalist modes, which sow the seeds of a generalized climate of fear that, because societies are only human, needs to be strenuously denied or displaced onto “acceptable” expressions. Christianity has a long history of self-induced hostility to other religions, which it has periodically manifested by so-called crusades, military ventures underwritten by religious propaganda. Missionary zeal, leading to persecution, has an equally long history of being as violent and terrifying as it has been benevolent in occasionally bringing peace and equity to its converts.
For the literary historian, however, the relation of fear to literature is not well understood, though observations about this date back to Aristotle’s Poetics, about 330 B.C. We know that Stevenson lived from childhood onward in the constant presence of the threat of death, which finally overtook him in the midst of paradise. Before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, he could look back over a very short life, in a material sense, but an immensely long life in battle against death. Occasionally he mentions the battle—one thinks of the brutal train journey he jovially recounts in his ultra-realistic book The Amateur Emigrant (1895). He seems to have accepted fear, treating it almost as a form of pleasure. Fear and pity then become pleasurable to a reader of his books, because as Northrop Frye remarks in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), with quest romances like Treasure Island the story generally “turns fear at a distance, or terror, into the adventurous; fear at contact, or horror, into the marvelous, and fear without an object, or dread (Angst), into a pensive melancholy.” Stevenson weaves effects of weird or ghostly terror into a texture of narrative charm, thus diffusing our negative emotions. Adventurous action and total acceptance of a surplus of expectation produce the artist’s antidote to fear.
If, for literature, adventure stories are a deliberate counterattack against fear, they need a talisman for their magic, their charm. But these stories also stimulate excitement, the drive to get the reward, a holy grail, or a chest of gold coins. We know that the novelist, his father, and his stepson drew up an imaginary map of an island, from which the yarn was spun, and this map had all the magic character of a secret message, an encrypted design, full of hidden clues to unknown treasure. For Stevenson first came the map, then the story. The story caught fire from a magical moment, and since the novelist recalls precisely this illumination in one of his last essays, we can imagine Treasure Island as the story of a chart, as sailors would have called it. An alchemical equation is drawn between the island and its plan, not least because the plan includes everything except the story that goes with it.
As a magic design every map suggests the occult outline of human desire, the desire to possess some seemingly infinite delight, to find a treasure. As a magical fragment of writing, a tracery of space, the map seduces the reader into an expectant state of unfulfilled desire: The reader has to know what will happen to those who possess the map, the place where “X marks the spot”; hence the map is almost more important than the treasure itself. Similarly, the pirates signal a death threat by a kind of reverse map, and Treasure Island begins precisely that way, with the chapter on “The Black Spot.” Possession of the map brings danger to the possessor, yet it also creates a mystery about the island, so that throughout his novel Stevenson is able to lean on an abiding sense of ominous foreboding, until a final resolution occurs. One wants to say that in its magically seductive power the map is the most dangerous symbol in the world.
There is nothing new or odd about the significance of the map as the source of a plot in an adventure story. The brilliant and subtle Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was a lifelong admirer of Stevenson, claiming for him that he had the power to order his stories according to strict narrative outlines, as if following a controlling map. On a more ordinary level the adventure novels of Arthur Ransome (Swallows and Amazons, for example) or the single most important precursors of Treasure Island, namely Robinson Crusoe and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, tell stories of shipwrecked adventurers who must discover the shape and conformation of the islands where they find themselves alone. The explorer actually “maps” his discovery, if not on paper, then in his head. Indeed every map presupposes a traveler who is to discover the correct cartography or at least the most significant features of the terrain about to be “discovered.” Conversely, many of the great explorers have made it a central aim to sketch the map of terrain traversed, a purpose critical to all imperialist expansions, suggesting that maps play a far more important role, psychologically, for such enterprises than their plainly functional use by explorers and settlers. They create a discoverer’s mind-set, the premonition of a world to be explored. One famous case would be that of Joseph Conrad, who thus described the strange origin of his most celebrated story, Heart of Darkness. As a boy he had been fascinated by a large white empty area in the center of his map of Africa; and he vowed he would someday visit this uncharted place, to discover what was there. In Moby Dick (1851), Melville wrote chapters on “The Whiteness of the Whale” and “The Chart.”
Conrad was writing a novel on the whiteness of the map. In realistic terms, while the inscribed outline of a mysterious place has its own mysterious fascination, as it had for Conrad, and while charts are essential to all travels into unknown parts, the travel itself still needs to be undertaken—otherwise the map will be an idle fantasy. What is critical for literature is that as imaginative symbols maps negotiate between fact and fiction, a trick of verisimilitude that, for example, appears in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, an important influence on Stevenson. The imaginary place and its map are subject only to the author’s mind, but as a pictorial figure of thought, they transport the reader from this real place to that imagined place. They initiate mental travel in the story. For literature, meanwhile, the mapped adventure must still be made real and plausible through the action of exploring. The mysterious well of meaning implicit in any map implies, as for Conrad, that one must go on a journey to realize the lines of the map. Making the map real in turn means creating scenes, dialogue, evocations of atmosphere, and detailed descriptions of the physical actions occurring in these scenes. When Treasure Island recounts a fight between Jim (armed with an unprimed pistol) and the mutinous Israel Hands (armed with a dagger), we see every single fine-grained moment of the encounter, through each reversal of fortune, until the sudden conclusion to the desperate fight. Contemporary readers of Stevenson often commented on his ability to render the visual aspect of things, his gift for combining visual and tactile sense impressions, as when he tells us that the villainous Black Dog’s pale face was colored like tallow, dirty yellowish-white candle wax seeming to melt into a disturbing absence of color itself. Later in his career the author said he was getting used to the “feel” and the “sounds” of scenes, more than anything visual. His imagination was turning inward.
With all this sensory precision, events in the story give the reader hints and clues that are never developed as explicitly named “deeper meanings.” If the aim is to transform the map into a narrative on more than one level, the method must be distinguished from that of other novels designed to show their characters expressing important ideological concepts, stories therefore belonging among novels of ideas. By contrast, with the adven
ture story there is one overwhelmingly important aspect to the animation of the magic map, and that is the hero’s adventuring forth on a quest of some intensely important kind, a quest defining the hero’s character almost as a thing in itself, separate from interests in the big world with all its complex social interests.
Sometimes, of course, the hero’s quest and that of society coincide, but here, in Stevenson, the coincidence is made to hit an absolute bottom line—the search for a charted treasure. This hunt is an almost involuntary action, as if everyone shares in it, one way or another. Curiously, the treasure in this novel is shown finally to have only the most limited inherent value. By the end of the story Jim Hawkins seems not to care about its variety, its amount, its price. His final estimate is almost excessively grown-up: “All of us had an ample share of the treasure and used it wisely or foolishly, according to our natures.” We see, then, the treasure is important only as it reveals “our natures.”
Perhaps, however, for Stevenson there is yet another definition of treasure, namely the imaginative dream of action that Jim’s story represents. For the author treasure signifies only if it implies the hunting and the experience the map has magically framed for him. In literary history, this was the period of the most famous anthology of poetry in English, Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), and also our most brilliant treasure chest of multiple meanings, Peter Roget’s original Thesaurus (1852). The issue is one of imaginative life. In parallel, the critic can point to literature as a partner in a spiritual enterprise. Written and spoken stories that require to be read, that require an adventure of literacy, by nature criticize the instant gratification of simplifying fundamentalist effects, largely because those forms of entertainment and all their noisy collaterals prefabricate the human response, whereas anything seen, felt, envisaged, described, narrated, or dramatized in imaginative language is bound to stimulate the mind. Such language refuses the seduction of the stock response. The most important form of novelty is what we have to imagine, because there is no phony simulacrum arranging for it to sell.
Finally, the ideal story for Stevenson is one that catches the atmosphere of the action and builds expectation upon that combination. His narrative skill is always mobilized to defeat the literalism of any unthinking, prosaic spectator whose torpid mind only a redeemed language could hope to revive.
The excitement of the lively reader reading is the true definition of treasure. A character in Shakespeare asks the question: “What’s aught, but as ’tis valued?” ( Troilus and Cressida, Act 2, scene 2). As for treasure in the literal sense of gold and silver, the ending of the novel provides an ironic moral to the tale. Jim is reminiscing at the very end, sadder and wiser. He takes a long look back at his adventure, his venture, his life as a privateer, and he gives the last word on the whole affair to a raucous Caribbean bird, Long John Silver’s parrot, Captain Flint. This long-lived creature is the last remaining link to the mysterious Flint. It is almost as if the parrot buried the loot himself, waiting to observe the mayhem its gold and silver would generate among the next batch of predators, gentlemen adventurers unrestrained by all their civilized habits and pretensions. Clearly there is no inherent conflict between adventure stories and deeper meanings, but the trick of conveying this requires considerable poetic skill, shown in a strangely melancholy ending of the tale that befits its secret interest in the growth of young Jim Hawkins’s character. In his final words the dream and the myth return, casting a long shadow over the adventure.
The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”
Angus Fletcher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Recipient of a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the author of books on allegory, prophecy, court masque, and the philosophy of literature, specializing in the theory of literature and in the symbolic connections between literature and the other arts. His interdisciplinary concerns are reflected in A New Theory for American Poetry: Environment, Democracy and the Future of the Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2004) and in his forthcoming Harvard University Press book Time, Space and Literature in the English Renaissance. In 1995 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support research into ecology and the literary imagination, particularly as these relate to the English poet John Clare. In 1992 he received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (Harvard University Press, 1991). He has lectured widely on many questions of literary history and theory. In 1982 he presented the Christian Gauss Lectures at Princeton University on the topic “Mazes and Thresholds: The Theory of Liminal Poetics.” In 1981 he was North American Delegate to the Milan Conference on “The Labyrinth.” In the mid-1970s he served on the Supervising Committee of the English Institute, for whom he edited The Literature of Fact (1976). In 1979 he held a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which led primarily to the publication of Colors of the Mind. Mr. Fletcher did his graduate work at Yale and Harvard, and has taught at Cornell University, Columbia University, University of California at Los Angeles, State University of New York-Buffalo, California Institute of Technology, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of California at Berkeley, and the City University of New York. Currently he lives with his wife Michelle in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
To
S. L. O.,1
AN AMERICAN GENTLEMAN
IN ACCORDANCE WITH WHOSE CLASSIC TASTE
THE FOLLOWING NARRATIVE HAS BEEN DESIGNED,
IT IS NOW, IN RETURN FOR NUMEROUS DELIGHTFUL HOURS,
BAND WITH THE KINDEST WISHES,
DEDICATED
BY HIS AFFECTIONATE FRIEND, THE AUTHOR.
TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER2
If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons,
And buccaneers, and buried gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:
—So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:a
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!
PART I
The Old Buccaneer
I
The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow
SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, DR. LIVESEY, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often a
fterwards: in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
“This is a handy cove,” says he at length; “and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?”
My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.
“Well, then,” said he, “this is the berth for me. Here you, matey,” he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; “bring up alongside and help up my chest. I’ll stay here a bit,” he continued. “I’m a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you’re at—there”; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. “You can tell me when I’ve worked through that,” says he, looking as fierce as a commander.
And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.
Treasure Island (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 4