Of all things, right?
Our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business: it drops so much out of a man.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Much of my childhood did consist of playing video games for longer-than-recommended hours, as this blog will prove, but I also turned into an avid reader. Player’s Guides got me into the whole business during kindergarten (and perhaps earlier, if you can believe the loving hyperbole of your parents – who knows, really), but I remember vividly reading hardcover abridged versions of literary classics.
Whatever the brand, our local supermarket contained dozens of these little tomes, introducing a brand new generation of children to the best written works Western civilization had to offer -with illustrations, of course! Who could resist reading Treasure Island at so young an age?
What makes pirates and seafaring voyages attractive to a young kid? Beats me; I honestly can’t understand why we like these sorts of swashbuckling adventures. Maybe the dreams of a young boy lust for adventure precisely because it exists in an extraordinary situation. Maybe it merely excites the imagination, allowing us to see new horizons from the comfort of our own homes. And maybe, just maybe, children see things for what they are, rather than the artifice that the adult world often places upon a young man’s shoulders far too early.
So it is that I find myself reading, with great joy, the original version of Treasure Island without cuts or revision. Simply put, I am enjoying every last morsel of wordplay Stevenson can churn out of his adventurous mind. Considering my only familiarity with the source material comes from, of all things, Muppet Treasure Island, this strikes a rather different contrast. There’s real danger, and real suspense, without the easy exit of musical numbers, humor, or controlled puppetry. The first person perspective, told through the eyes of Jim Hawkins, places many a reader directly into the action in a way few novels can.
And the way Stevenson writes astounds me in so many way. He can describe, surely, as any good novelist produces on nearly any inspired day, but he knows exactly what to describe. The reader fills in the blanks with the utmost vigor, for he/she employs the common stereotype of the pirate, in all its stupid glory. If anything, the author in question created our modern conception of pirates as both jolly and dreadful, terrible and fun-loving. We see heroism mixed with darkness, the damned with the saved. The sweetest tongue glistens and convinces all of his worth, yet turns traitor at the first sign of personal gain while still feigning friendship and ignorance.
Anyone who remembers the barest hint of the storyline recalls what I go on about, but Stevenson’s peculiar characters always tread the line between good and evil. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (yet another novel by the same author), he sees from his Calvinist leanings that you cannot take the God out of man, no matter how hard you try. The contrast between good and evil always seems so straight in his works, and I wouldn’t strive too far to say that the contradictions in mankind delighted him. Yet, he always errs to the side of good, that man overcomes his impulses to avoid the moral if at all possible. And, I suppose, that makes Jim Hawkins a cipher for the reader, a most delightful one.
Honestly, I will take my time through Treasure Island. Sure, I could plow through its relatively short length if I dedicated an hour or two to the task, but I would rather enjoy a bite at a time than become a voracious literature glutton. Apparently, I am a boy at heart, as is Chesterton, who wrote an entire book about him! Like Charles Dickens, Chesterton revived literary criticism about Stevenson as well, focusing a laser-sharp eye on his wit and the truths that Stevenson’s books contain.
In a phrase; Stevenson exists as a reaction to modernity, a world of clear right and wrong, of adventures and the bright wonder of creation. He writes about happiness, in the truest way possible, a remedy to the prevailing pessimism of his own age and our modern one. Perhaps we need more writers and artists who show us the jovial and not just the painful. Why must meaning always come in hurt and never in jubilation, triumph, and exaltation? It’s the same thing Chesterton wondered again and again:
But whatever be the case with most boys, there was certainly one boy who enjoyed Treasure Island; and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson. He really had very much of the feeling of one who had got away to great waters and outlandish lands; perhaps even more vividly than he had it later, when he made that voyage not metaphorically but materially, and found his own Treasure Island in the South Seas. But just as in the second case he was fleeing to clear skies from unhealthy climates, so he was in reviving the adventure story escaping from an exceedingly unhealthy climate. The microbe of morbidity maybe have been within him, as well as the germ of phthisis; but in the cities he had left behind pessimism was raging like a pestilence…he alone escaped, as from a city of the dead; he cut the painter as Jim Hawkins stole the boat, and went on his own voyage, following the sun. Drink and the devil have done for the rest, especially the devil; but then they were drinking absinthe and not with a “Yo ho ho”; consuming it without the most feeble attempt at any “Yo ho ho”– a defect which was, of course the most serious and important part of the affair. For “Yo ho ho” was precisely what Stevenson, with his exact choice of words, particularly desired to say just then. It was for the present his most articulate message to mankind.
So maybe you should read something like this every once and a while…
