Living and Literature

  After teaching the class today in Treasure Island, I started to reflect on what the connection is between 'lived experience' and literature, and how far away I feel from this way of looking at it. I have been so used to looking at my own experiences in a deconstructionist way that it is difficult for me to ask the simple and direct question: what does this mean for me and my own life? From a deconstructionist point of view, 'my own life' refers to a set of behaviors and languages that has been acquired, particularly through repeated narratives and 're-tellings'. And while I tend to agree with this perspective, I wonder if it sometimes closes of the possibilities of connecting with literature in ways that feel most authentic to me. And, to be honest, I even cringe at this last sentence, knowing that even the term 'authentic' is based on a very constructed narrative of what it means to be 'really me'. When I start to peel away the layers, the onion doesn't appear so solid anymore.
   Literature like Treasure Island can take people very deeply (and quickly) into issues of class and imperialism, especially how they are tactfully handled through the sinister image of the treasure-hunting pirate. On a crude level, the pirate represents the acquisitiveness of a society that focuses on wealth as a marker of status and power, while concealing that representation by showing the pirate as a 'hated other'. In other words, the pirate becomes the shadow of what the others are afraid to admit of themselves, such as an insatiable desire for conquest or to be 'the very first' to achieve something. But on a more empathetic level, pirates also represent disowned and under-served voices; people who haven't attained the privilege that certain kinds of education, language and epistemology have granted to certain people, like the doctor and squire in the book. When 'respectability' of a favored class is denied someone, they are wont to try to achieve that respectability in whatever means they can, including the drive toward adventure, battle and a certain kind of disciplined life within a marginalized community. I think this latter comes close to how I feel about the 'symbolism' of the pirate, as I keep reading and re-reading the text. A pirate is only a pirate because the society exposes and then labels her or him as such. Their ways of gaining wealth, power and fame may not be too remove from the ways people in the mainstream often do so, by whatever means they can.
     To go back to my original question, does this have anything to do with life? I think that it has to do with the whole social life, but I am still struggling to know whether we can capture that entire "life of a society" by relating it only to one's personal experiences (my first trip, my 'preferred treasure', etc.). I suspect that relating Treasure Island to my own life will require several re-readings, and it's the sheer effort to connect to the text that will provide natural inroads to one's personal life, often without one's even knowing it.