Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age

Chapter 2. Off the Map: Stevenson’s Polynesian Fiction

Pirate Fiction The map in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881) draws on the distracting analogy to paper money in Poe’s “The Gold Bug” (Figure 5).1 Like the “foolscap,” the map points to buried treasure, and indeed the treasure resembles the hoard of Poe’s tale: it is, we are told, made up of a great “diversity of coinage . . . nearly every money in the world” (TI 186). Based on the monetary analogy we might be led to conclude that the aim in Treasure Island would be to convert the paper of the map into the gold of the treasure. Yet this is the distracting illusion that Stevenson takes from Poe. Treasure Island is, in this sense, the story of a map and its distractions—the narrative of what happens to Jim Hawkins while he is absorbed in the illusions of the treasure map. This is also the story of the composition of Treasure Island that Stevenson tells in the essay written at the end of his life entitled “My First Book” (1894). The depiction of the novel’s origins dramatizes as well the absorbing effects of a map—the original map sketched out by Stevenson that was the source of the novel: “I have said it was the most of the plot,” he insists, “I might almost say that it was the whole” (MFB 197). Called upon by his “paymaster, the great public,” to speak of his treasured work, the famous author—that “familiar and indelible character”—might be expected to indulge in cherished memories of how he turned paper into gold, the “map of an island” into Treasure Island. But the tale Stevenson has to tell offers a different account. It all began, he reports, with some doodling: a map was made and “with the unconsciousness of the predestined” it was “ticketed” “Treasure Island” (MFB 193). Then, as I pored upon my map of “Treasure Island,” the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imagined woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, Wghting, and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a Xat projection. (MFB 193) Chapter 2 Off the Map: Stevenson’s Polynesian Fiction Figure 5. Robert Louis Stevenson’s map of Treasure Island. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. What Stevenson did not know is that, while gazing Wxedly at his wonderful map, he was himself being drawn into the story that he had already started putting on paper. For, as he goes on to explain, the Wctional treasure map would have the real effect of turning him into a pirate.2 The map in this scene was supporting an act of unconscious plunder—the misappropriation of literary material that would become his “Wrst book.” Awareness of this effect of the map would come only later when, for example, he “chanced to pick up [Washington Irving’s] ‘Tales of a Traveller ’ . . . and the book Xew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my Wrst chapters—all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the Wreside” (MFB 194). “Plagiarism,” Stevenson confesses, “was rarely carried farther” (MFB 194). Other unconscious pilfering came to light later as well: having given the islet next to Treasure Island on the map the name of “Skeleton Island”— again “not knowing what [he] meant”—the author found himself obliged “to justify the name” and “broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer” (MFB 197). Like a good pirate story, then, the tale of the composition of Treasure Island itself begins with the discovery of a treasure map. In this case, the novelist, peering into the map, becomes an unconscious pirate as he receives the foreign materials that will become his own Wrst book. Then again, it might be more accurate to say that the novel emerges with the disappearance of the treasure map. For, like the sheet of paper in Freud’s “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad,” the map withdraws in Stevenson’s account of Treasure Island’s origins. If, beyond the limited graphic receptivity of paper Freud believes he discovers in the mystic writing pad a reXection of his image of the human...