Reading. The Swiss Family Robinson as Virtual Reality

Abstract

When I was a child, I did not want to know that The Swiss Family Robinson had an author who had made it all up. I thought the words on the page were a true report of events at a place that actually existed somewhere— somewhere else. Those words gave me magical access to this independently existing reality. I was offended and deeply troubled when my mother pointed out the name of the author on the title page and told me the work was a fiction. It was the beginning of the disillusionment that has, I suppose, along with the remnants of mystified enchantment, made me a literary critic. I hasten to add that I make no claims for the accuracy of this memory. How would one verify or disprove that what I remember is what really happened? My mother is long dead, and no other verifying witness can be called. Whatever there is of the autobiographical in this essay is as much a construction after the fact as any other autobiography.² I only claim that this is what I remember now. After all, you have only my word even for my testimony of the present effect on me of re-reading The Swiss Family Robinson.

This essay is drawn, in somewhat revised and augmented form, from pp. 126–31; 139–55 of: J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). © 2002 J. Hillis Miller. I am grateful for permission to reuse this material.