Denizens of the Deep

I've just finished "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson- why I couldn't have slept through two more hours and started reading again at 7 I'll never know.

That's just an expression, I know it's because my sleep schedule is all out of whack.

Though I've certainly got a thing or two to report on the book, it seems much of it was covered in the afterword by one Dan Chaon. He even references Pinky and the Brain. Clearly there isn't much left for me to add.
I came to this book already knowing it, the principal characters, setting, the uncanny transformation from a straight laced member of society to the, well, guy that does whatever he wants. I would have said"evil" or the like, but that attributes too much to Mr. Hyde; a selfish little animal who can only control his own appetites to the degree necessary to avoid being hung for his crimes until such a point as he no longer succeeds in that and must "Hyde" (Oh, I just got it! I'm kidding.) in the form of Dr. Jekyll.

That Chaon really took the wind out of my sails, he already commented on how, though we all know the story, we actually know very little of the details themselves. I was surprised to find that Jekyll was a full bodied individual, getting on in years, and that, when transformed into Hyde, was a smaller figure, actually shorter, not just hunched over, and that he was actually younger. The process involved wasn't merely the dissolution of the conscience, but the displacement by the inner entity, the different being, that was Hyde.

A quick word on "dissolution"- as I read the book and the process was described, Jekyll talks of it instead as a 'solution' instead of dissolution. His meaning is clear, but it's interesting that they probably didn't have the word dissolution back then (the book was released in 1886). Dissolution suddenly strikes me the same as saying 'irregardless' instead of 'regardless' a habit I fell out of quite happily several years ago at my friends insistence.

There was a reason I wanted to read this book, beyond it being a well known classic and that I had still to read anything by the author (I also haven't read Stevenson's 'Treasure Island')- preying on my mind during the holidays was the idea of that multifarious nature of myself and man in general. Hardly a new thought, but one that had been bugging me all the same.

My specific concern was the idea that when I engage in idle chatter with strangers (with varying degrees of strange) I'd naturally engage in a flippancy that, while a crowd pleaser, wasn't a fair representation of myself, and that I was doing a disservice to myself for not being more genuine, as well as to others for not giving them a chance to get past that wall.
"That isn't me," I'd think after the fact, " some smug guy that thinks he knows everything and has the clever riposte to your last comment. I don't like that guy, and it's really weird to me that other people do."

While I was complaining about this to a friend a couple of weeks ago he essentially said that whether I liked it or not, that is a part of who I am. When he said that I was struck by the idea that I could just have another part of me. Oh, yeah, just, you know, a whole other me. And though I didn't always like him, I can appreciate that he possesses a useful skill set, and it is mine. Isn't it amazing that we all have that? I'm amazed.

I've also been playing this video game, Persona 4, which deals with this- in fact every boss battle thus far is with the inner side of one of the main characters, a side that, once disavowed, turns into a giant monster to fight until it's accepted as a part of the character in question. Sure wish they'd get accepted BEFORE I wasted all my items.

Suddenly it seems quite natural that I'd want to pick up and finally read "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", right?

As for the text itself, it is written in a very prim Victorian style, which I generally am a fan of, though I admit it can still lull you into a doze if you haven't the energy for it at the moment. As Chaon points out, the descriptions aren't very specific- except for a case of child brutality and the murder, we are left to our own devices to imagine the kind of skullduggery Hyde gets into. And our own devices are enough! It's a very simple impressionistic style, but effective. A little over half of the book is the account from the perspective of the lawyer Utterson, and so the story is a mystery. Personally, I like mysteries, but they're pretty boring when you have been told the ending over and over again for the past century.

The latter half is the written account of Dr. Jekyll explaining his deeds and sensations, and that is the part I tore through at 5 this morning when I should have been sleeping. I was especially drawn in by certain passages that surprised me with how relevant they were to the kind of discourse I was looking for:
"I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering."

"I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth (...) that man is not truly one, but truly two (...) I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens."

"I saw that (...) even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both."

I'd ramble on for a bit more, but these quotations are really cool sounding, so I should stop one sentence ago.

Word I learned: Lacunar, from lacuna, an empty space or a missing part; a gap

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My next book is a collection of short stories by this famous Voltaire guy. He may by famous, but I have no clue what I'm in for.