ABSTRACT
Compared with ‘pieces of eight’ or ‘sixteen men on a dead man’s chest’, ‘Dooty is dooty’ may not be the first phrase that comes to mind when thinking of Treasure Island. Yet Long John Silver’s tautologous watchword is repeated four times in Stevenson’s most famous pirate tale, and the whole narrative is saturated with the discussion of duty. This phrase provides the key to three interlocking problems. It directs us to the book’s break with what Stefan Collini has called the ‘unreflective Kantianism of Victorian moral commonplaces’ (63). The depiction of the pirates in Treasure Island holds up a mirror to a society characterized, as Collini puts it, by ‘a tendency to extend the category of duty as widely as possible’ (98) and in which, as Stevenson sketches out in the posthumously published fragment ‘Lay Morals’, the idea of duty has become both constrictive and debilitating. This underscores the fact that not only Jim’s profit on the adventure, but also his very survival, depend on his capacity for action, understood to be exactly that which cannot be accounted for within a model of duty based on obligation and calculation. Finally, Stevenson’s development of a literary form that models precisely this relationship highlights what Jacques Derrida describes as the ‘fabular’ mode of existence of the law and provides a basis for rethinking the cultural and political fantasy of the pirate. Introducing ‘Lay Morals’, Stevenson describes communication as a hermeneutic process: ‘the speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again’ (5). In the case of Treasure Island, the phrase ‘dooty is dooty’ supplies the crucial missing co-ordinates without which the book remains incomplete, like the duplicate map drawn up by the officers to keep the site of the treasure hidden from their mutinous crew.
