Bliss and War on the Island: Undoing Myth and Negotiating History in Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and Garland's The Beach (1996)
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This paper discusses the islands in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Alex Garland's The Beach as contradictory spaces both expressing and disrupting three related Utopian visions: fantasies of spatial autonomy, timelessness, and ideological homogeneity. It takes as a starting point Fredric Jameson's claim that an "opposition between temporalities [...] seems to characterize Utopias [...]: Utopos' inaugural gesture as opposed to that daily Utopian life beyond the end of history" (2005: 212). The analysis will discuss how both islands function as uncanny spaces in the Freudian sense, as both texts revolve around a traumatic origin which is repressed but returns in the terrifying forms of violence, death, and war.
In this context, both islands will be read as tropes for a mythical cultural space. In Treasure Island, the island is a displaced version of Great Britain, first constructing and then dismantling the myth of a glorious, timeless and unified Empire. The repressed kernel of violence that emerges in The Beach is the Vietnam War. The island will be read as a trope for the illusory ideological assumptions accompanying the war, a lethal trap luring their protagonists into perdition because of the latter's stubborn holding on to a Utopian vision.
Finally, both islands are also tropes for the texts in which they figure: both narratives negotiate a traumatic, violent history that precedes the lives of the protagonists, so they depend on renditions of cultural memory like maps, films, and video games for their knowledge. Like their islands, the texts emerge as spaces of cultural memory, haunted by history and their predecessors.