Post #108: Messrs. Jekyll and Hyde

4 April 2024

“An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear, I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who’s that grunting? You wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no—I didn’t. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged!”

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

     We tend to think of the Victorians as blinkered Puritanical goodie-goodies with major ethical blind spots, but theirs was an age with a deep appreciation for the wild things that lurk behind the respectable facades we present to the world. Before the great Viennese pioneers of modern soulcraft began their systematic exploration of our inner worlds and their complicated boundary lines, the theme was already well-established in literature. Robert Louis Stevenson’s treatment is so familiar as to verge on cliché, and Joseph Conrad gave it unforgettable shape not only in his unrivaled Heart of Darkness (which gets read and dismissed for all the wrong reasons these days and was given a far more fitting tribute in Apocalypse Now than it is likely to get in any contemporary classroom) but also in his Secret Sharer and wherever else one looks closely enough in his oeuvre.

     There should be no need, here, to enter upon the intricate details of the Freudian architecture, or to delineate its finer points against what Jung describes as our Shadow. What is common to the Victorians and the pioneers of psychology is an unflinching recognition that we are in some profound sense divided against ourselves, and that our mental balance requires terms on which the two sides can cohabit even if they are not properly reconcilable. The fashion for striking all manner of transgressive public postures that has been convulsing the West for much longer than the current posers probably realize, has not altered the challenge in any fundamental way, nor given an answer to the difficulty that would improve significantly on what the pioneers bequeathed to us a century ago.

     In rough outline, there is a civilized side to us, a sunny and presentable side, the nice-guy dimension, as it were, that belies a darker side, a shadow dimension that we normally keep hidden from the world—the domain of bad boys and wild men, and their female counterparts. Eros serves as a bridge of sorts between these two irreconcilable sides of our human nature, but negotiations are difficult because the dividing line runs through the erotic itself: safely on the one side, the element of loving connection that has nothing disreputable about it; in the middle, a neutral zone of playfulness that is only partly at home in the adult mind; and on the far side, the forbidden territory, the no man’s land of the psyche where all manner of aggressive and violent specters hold sway, dark powers whose names we dare not pronounce, but whose deep roots are nonetheless connected to the ground waters of our vitality. Whatever we may think of them, these menacing shades, not much concerned with loving pretenses, are somehow also part of our human condition and cannot just be wished away. Not only pleasure itself but creativity, too, often thrives on forbidden thrills, and there is wisdom in Stevenson’s recognition that Jekyll must die when Hyde does.

     The inherently fraught relations between the two sides are so interesting, and so troubling, because they have no obvious solution. There is the default position of acknowledging the dark side in a general way only, that is, without admitting any personal stake or acknowledging that it has any place at all inside oneself—amounting to little more than an evasion of the issue. Such feeble efforts at limiting the difficulty to others may be engaged in naïvely, in an innocent minority of cases, but it is usually done more disingenuously, at least in adults, and plainly deluded unless perhaps it is completely hypocritical and designed only to fool others, not oneself. When, by contrast, the existence of darker currents running within oneself too is admitted, as proper self-knowledge requires, the question becomes what to do with them—their dangerous and sometimes damnable aspect being bound up, inextricably, with what is exciting and invigorating about them. It all begins with acknowledging that “there is an appeal to me too in this fiendish row,” as Conrad put it. But as for what to do next, whether to join the “howl and dance,” or instead to fight it with every fiber of one’s better self, there we stand all of us quite alone—alone, because the appeal is such a private one, heard by no one else, while also impossible to silence except by pretense or willful ignorance.

     Before we rush from this disturbing diagnosis a little too readily into tropes about ignorance being bliss—imagining that the best path to goodness is to pretend that we are never pulled seriously the other way—we might remind ourselves why our wild side, problematic as it is, cannot be dismissed or excised as a mere evil and no more. It was shaped by aeons of bitter struggles for survival and procreation, and it is no extraneous element, no illegitimate intruder upon civilization, but rather the ground on which our human nature, and with it our moral intuitions, acquired the shape we now take so much for granted (if we have not caught the postmodern bug badly enough that we believe all nature, and perhaps all morality, to be more or less dispensable). There was a time, long before our human ideas of right and wrong were shaped, when vitality still governed the life of our species uncontested, as it does that of our animal cousins. Our submerged primeval instincts harken back to that time, and connect us to it in ways that we can neither evade nor return to for longer than a few dangerous moments at a time.

     The echoes of the wild world that we once inhabited more comfortably than we do our modern dispensation, at least at the instinctual level, reach us from a great distance, and yet it would be lying to ourselves to pretend that they do not remain intimately familiar, if only we will listen honestly to the appeal they make. That, more than anything else, is what Marlow learned on his journey into the heart of darkness. These dread echoes, half-menacing and half-enticing, cannot be assimilated to civilized society because they form its older antithesis, the life we left behind, and for good reason; but neither can they be banished from a deep memory that is inscribed upon our very cells and that probably continues to underlie, in some intangible way, every aspect of our collective life as well.

     In the first chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud illustrated this dynamic by analogy with Rome, the Eternal City: what we take to be a modern metropolis is not only a complex tapestry of elements from very different periods, but all manner of earlier structures are buried underneath or built into what is visible. Moreover, the human mind preserves its antiquities not only in its submerged foundations, but in different dimensions, so to speak, where they persist such that even the most primordial scenes might rise before the mind’s eye again if the observer ever changed the direction of his glance, or his position, sufficiently to call them up from the remote past. If that be found too abstruse (and Freud himself cautioned that it was not to be taken too literally, since the mind’s parameters cannot be properly represented in pictorial terms), perhaps a simpler and more practical illustration will suffice. Could anyone even moderately versed and seasoned in the ways of the world, and of women more specifically, pretend to a young man asking for his advice that he would be sufficiently prepared, when it comes to the bedroom especially, by heeding his Sunday school lessons, and nothing more? What a great existential interest women too have in men who know what they are doing when the lights go out, and not just the daylight story, need not, I hope, be spelled out here.

     It is not, I must emphasize, that the fundamental truths about goodness and decency that I summarize as “Sunday school lessons” should ever be dismissed as marginal or even irrelevant (or that they could not be taught just as effectively by secular parents and societies)—only that they do not, by themselves, prepare us for the more unexpected twists and turns, or the kinks, of adult life. I am not slighting the dove, only pointing out, with Biblical warrant even, that the serpent has its share in wisdom—and that snakes have been around for a hundred million years to our hundred thousand or so. I do not mean to be taken too literally, but as a rough guide to the respective ages of our moral and our primeval side, it would not be altogether fanciful to think of the latter as easily a thousand times older, like the snake beside modern homo sapiens sapiens, to say nothing about the much more recent beginnings still of human civilization.

     Even raising our sights as high as they will go, to the saintliest of human beings, it is notorious that they, as a class, can by no means be said to show a particular immunity to temptation or moral tribulation, but that, to the contrary, they have often struggled most fiercely with their demons and their dark nights of the soul. The Buddha’s own path may look relatively pacific, but only if one excepts the final months of his push for enlightenment, when the ascetic violence he unleashed upon himself was such that the very gods are said to have taken fright and looked on thinking that he was surely going to destroy himself. What is more, the Buddhist catalogue assigns a particularly prominent place to a bandit and serial killer, Angulimala, who was so lost to the ways of wickedness that he wore the fingers of his victims on a string around his neck—or rather, countless such strings, because he killed so many before he was stopped in his tracks during a confrontation with the Awakened One himself.

     Such wild stories, usually less sanguinary but often no less dramatic, are told about too many saints in other traditions as well to be dismisses as errant details. That these extreme struggles are resolved, in the end, on the side of the ever-shining light, not that of Conrad’s conquering darkness, is as it should be. But to believe in the ultimate triumph of one side is not to deny the reality and validity of the other—without therefore favoring it. Not the least thing that true heroes require is worthy enemies and profound struggles that bring out the best in them. Whether we are heroes or not, the inner jungles with their impenetrable darknesses are something we all have to face sooner or later, even if we think we have moved far beyond Joseph Conrad and Sigmund Freud. We have not.