Softened with Time
A (Proto)Bergsonian Metaphysics in Robert Louis Stevenson's _Jekyll and Hyde_
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is, among other things, a novel on the subject of duality as represented by the separated personalities of Jekyll and Hyde. Generically speaking, philosophies on the subject of dualism have resulted in competing emphases on either the Aristotelian union of soul and body or a Cartesian separation of body and spirit. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, however, resists classification amongst these philosophical positions, for the boundaries between Jekyll and Hyde are, by novel’s end, blurred and complicated by the enduring memory shared between the two entities. Kantian parallelisms between spirit and matter do not work here, for the memory, as an ephemeral non-material aspect of the physical human person, is precisely that which binds Jekyll to Hyde and Hyde to Jekyll however much the two may hope for total and irrevocable separation. As the novel’s opening inscription portends: “It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind” (4). Jekyll and Hyde do not lead separate, parallel lives, but rather they are intricately bound even in those moments when Hyde has consumed the identity of Jekyll; the remaining memory haunts the bifurcated character even unto his suicidal conclusion.
In Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case, he writes, “Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them” (55). Stevenson’s novel fictively emphasizes the interstitial relationship between spirit and matter located in the memory. Memory fills the liminality between the body and the mind: it is neither an idealized representation nor a realist thing but rather an intermediary aspect between the two. Within the novel, memory is not merely an epiphenomenon that absorbs physical realities but does not causally impact matter; rather, memory induces visceral responses that connect mind and matter through the conceptual fibers of remembrance not only for Jekyll/Hyde but also for the other characters that populate the text. For example, Gabriel John Utterson, Jekyll’s fellow physician and confidante, endures physical nausea caused by the memory of Hyde’s countenance: “the face of Hyde sat heavy on [Utterson’s] memory; he felt (what was rare with him) a nausea and distaste of life” (18). In an impossible physiognomic arrangement, the narrator makes Hyde’s outward physical aspect—his face—sit upon Utterson’s interior aspect—his memory. Memory here assumes a quasi-physical dimension when it can be sat upon, and the face takes on a quasi-ephemeral quality disembodied as it is from the corporal reality of Hyde’s body. Memory operates as a softened threshold between the material and the spiritual, but more importantly, it is a site of energy capable of resonating outward with visceral implications. It is the memory of Hyde’s face that causes Utterson to feel nauseatingly ill and to experience a sensory revulsion of “distaste.” Hastie Lanyon’s memory of Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde induces his body into a startled shiver: “I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror” (47). Jekyll’s memory takes on a corporeal quality when it suffocates him with aural and visual reminders of Hyde’s crimes: “I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed against me” (57). And later, the memory again evokes visceral effects of sickness and starts: “the animal within me licking the chops of memory... And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuttering” (58). Here, Stevenson likens memory to a material thing that can be tasted or touched (i.e., “licking the chops of memory”); and the memory causes “a qualm,” “a horrid nausea,” and “the most deadly shuttering.” Repeatedly, the competing claims between mind and matter result in a frisson of energy centered in and branching out from the memory so that the memory shares attributes of spirit and body as Stevenson’s fictive language portrays.
Jekyll and Hyde explores this energetic relationship between mind and matter. They are not separate, static spheres of parallel congruence, but rather, they interact and transfer energy in a dynamic exchange of influence and impact. The twentieth-century French philosopher, Henri Bergson, iterates a metaphysics that helps to describe Stevenson’s emphasis on memory in Jekyll and Hyde. In Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson writes, “The recent discovery of centrifugal fibers of perception inclines us to think that this is the usual course of things and that, beside the afferent process which carries the impression to the centre, there is another process, of contrary direction, which brings back the image to the periphery.... Thus we are constantly creating or reconstructing” (125–26). Further, the active (rather than merely passive) role of the memory on matter and mind is a primary thesis in Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). Stevenson’s fictional exploration of the energetic memory adumbrates Bergson’s similar conclusion when Bergson proposes the following: “Let us note that the most radical of mechanical theories is that which makes consciousness an epiphenomenonwhich, in given circumstances, may supervene on certain molecular movements. But, if molecular movement can create sensation out of a zero of consciousness, why should not consciousness in its turn create movement either out of a zero of kinetic and potential energy, or by making use of this energy in its own way?” (152). Memory is not simply a passive entity that sits at the threshold between spirit and body, but rather, memory is an active force capable not only of archiving past experience but also of kinetically influencing future events.
This essay explores the ways in which Stevenson adumbrates a Bergsonian metaphysics in three distinct areas. First, Stevenson’s literary treatment of memory (as iterated above) illustrates remarkable parallels to Bergson’s similar philosophy of memory as a vital intermediary between mind and matter. Second, Stevenson’s temporal considerations foreshadow Bergson’s philosophy of duration or duréeinsofar as both authors hesitate over the notion of standardized time, linked as it is to spatial metaphors and numerical quantification. Third, both Stevenson and Bergson destabilize themes of ontological, philosophical, and scientific determinism and offer, instead, an outlook of endless and unforeseeable possibility—a “creative evolution” of “pure heterogeneity” according to a Bergsonian philosophy. Thus, this essay argues that Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hydeiterates a proto-Bergsonian metaphysics in its treatment of memory, temporality, and philosophical indeterminism.
The intro to my essay published in the Victorians Institute Journal 45 (2017): 7-30. I do not include the article in its entirety for copyright purposes. I am grateful to the editors for "illustrating" my article on the front cover.