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I don’t know, Jess & Lady.
One of the delights of reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for me, was coming to the book with a head full of psychological treatments of what the story was about (split personalities, id versus superego, etc.), and finding instead a straight-up supernatural horror story.
I shouldn’t use the word “instead”, of course – the supernatural text doesn’t preclude a psychological subtext; and, in any case, if you insist that Henry Jekyll’s own account of his work, in his final(?) confession, was erroneous or even deliberately deceptive, then you can eliminate the supernatural element entirely. Let me re-emphasise that I’m not accusing Moore of “cheating” or “taking liberties” with Stevenson’s story; and I really don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade with some kind of petty attempt to circumscribe the permissible interpretations of the narrative.
Nevertheless…it may be just that my taste is particularly superficial…but I got a real kick out of the “mad science” account of Jekyll’s experiments that he himself leaves behind in the short story. I shouldn’t really have described its metaphysics as Cartesian in my last post; as far as I remember, Jekyll discovered that the body is “plastic” – a manifestation, or function, of the spirit – and when the spirit is altered, a new body appears. The dualism of Descartes seems to be present, but the relationship between the spirit and the body is different.
I remember when I first read Descartes, feeling giddy at the realisation that the philosophy that had made modern science possible was so bloody mad! I don’t mean “patently mistaken” mad, I mean bizarre, freaky, “Bride of Frankenstein” mad! “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” gave me the same kind of kick. Like the religious neuroscience of Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” or the delirious, hellish biochemistry of his “Novel of The White Powder,” where, as in Stevenson’s tale, we’re told of science effecting the physical manifestation of the evil component of the spirit – except here in a separate body – and as a preliminary to sexual intercourse with that component! (At least that’s what I think Machen is getting at – my Latin isn’t up to much.)
Psychological readings of these stories are often fascinating; but I retain an affection and a taste for face-value craziness at the narrative level. We live in an age where many Roman Catholics will boggle when you explain to them what’s supposed to be literally happening in their Mass – where "magicians" will talk about their ritual operations in terms of psychotherapy – where the gods and goddesses have become mere “archetypes” or “symbols”…not really real.
So, to come back to Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde and the nature of his/ their condition – I relish some ambiguity about the matter; but explicit, Freudian-style deconstruction of Hyde’s evil just saps some of the fun out of it for me.
*Whew*
Now, as far as Captain Nemo is concerned…
The Nemo I have in my head from Verne’s writings is somewhat choleric, and possibly mad, but all the same a rather sympathetic – perhaps even heroic – figure. He embodied Verne’s sensibility and political views, to a degree (at least that’s the impression I get, particularly from “Mysterious Island”, but I don’t know anything about Jules Verne’s biography, to be honest).
In LOEG, on the other hand, a great deal of the humour is at the Captain’s expense – he gets humiliated in various ways, has to play the native man-servant in Volume 1, does the whole “Odd Couple” routine with Hyde in Volume 2, and he splutters and complains and bugs his eyes out all the time, so that you’re expecting him to any moment exclaim “Ten billion blue blistering barnacles!” or call someone a “bashi-bazouk!” and then slip on a banana-skin and fall on his behind. I’m exaggerating, I know; but when I think of Nemo in the LOEG world I see him sitting on the bed that’s too small for him in the boarding school of Vol. 1, his arms folded in a huff! Without denying Nemo’s genius and ability, Moore deconstructs his “madness” – portrays it as mere madness, as a rather mundane mental dysfunction.
I imagine that Moore’s socialist beliefs prevent him from embracing Nemo whole-heartedly, and that’s fine. The LOEG version of Nemo is often genuinely funny (especially if you play the “Odd Couple” theme tune in your head whenever he’s hanging with Hyde). It’s just that my dumb, fan-boy heart would cackle with glee to see the old, romantic version of Nemo fighting in the League. |
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