Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

Jesus, how we laughed. How silly I was at seven. Didn’t know a bit of good hokum when I saw it …

All the characters in Stevenson’s story are isolated males: Mr Utterson, the lawyer; his friend and distant relation, Mr Enfield; Poole, the servant; and, of course, Dr Jekyll himself. They live separately in a city, the loneliest place. Jekyll himself foresees this isolation increasing in the future, when men become scarcely human, but rather ‘incongruous and independent denizens’. In the story, London masquerades as Stevenson’s native Edinburgh. All told, it’s a good setting for horror.

The horror is of a markedly cerebral kind. There are no monstrous creatures going about the world, as in Frankenstein or Dracula. Of course there is Hyde. But Hyde is a projection of Jekyll. This is why the story still interests us: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a pre-Jungian fable, a vivid illustration of the Shadow side of a decent man, that aspect—vigorously suppressed by the religious and ‘unco’ guid’ of Victorian Calvinist Scotland—of our natures whose presence we all have to acknowledge. The aspect which, as Jekyll says of his drug, shakes ‘the very fortress of identity’.

The fable concerns the shattering of this fortress. This is the point. The drug Jekyll takes is not the instrument of Hyde’s coming into being. The drug is merely a neutral means of transmission. In Jekyll’s words, ‘The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; but it shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition’.

With these powerful words, Jekyll admits that had he undertaken his experiment in a nobler spirit, he might have released from within himself ‘an angel instead of a fiend’. How remarkably this reflection of the 1880s recalls comments on LSD experiments of the 1950s!

The best part of the novella—it’s scarcely a novel—resides in the final section, in Jekyll’s statement. It’s wonderful, a tour de force, although at the same time rather bloodless. Hyde’s sins are no more than alluded to. This is more a sermon than a horror tale. Here again, the future is prefigured. The drug cannot be correctly administered, or its effects controlled; we are reminded of L-dopa in Oliver Sachs’s remarkable story Awakenings, where any dose proved too little or too much.

Here is Stevenson’s moral imagination speaking, fleshing out what started as a dream (as did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). ‘It fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.’ This is the Calvinist speaking, trying to hold to a rigid morality which the world was to cast aside in another generation or so, letting loose the Hyde of the First World War, 1914–1918.

Like the other two nineteenth-century novels of terror already referred to, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has frequently been filmed. To my mind, all film versions of Frankenstein and Dracula are crude and almost parodic versions of the novels themselves.

Such is not the case with film versions of Dr Jekyll. The horror, as I’ve said, is too cerebral, too bloodless, for the movies. Injustice must be seen to be done. We have to be shown Fredric March or Spencer Tracy, or whoever it is, consorting with prostitutes, wielding the stick, being cruel. We have to see the beaker foam, with its deadly but seductive brew, to watch the terrible transformation, whiskers and all, take place … To witness what is at first willed become involuntary.

I believe Stevenson, the old Teller of Tales, would be pleased that Hollywood reached towards something darker and more disturbing than Treasure Island.

I have come to few conclusions regarding national differences in British and American fantasy. The longer you look at the two animals the vaguer seem the distinctions. If you observe the dromedary or Arabian camel and the Bactrian camel—the only two sorts of camel on the planet—you immediately see the distinction we all know from childhood: the former has one hump, the latter two. But if you look at all other animals in the zoo, you don’t find anything else resembling a camel. Not even their relations, the llamas. The similarities are overwhelmingly greater than the differences.

Here we have these two camels, the US and the UK variety of fantasy. Here you have this panel reduced to counting humps.

Perhaps because of my early reading—my very early reading, when books still contained pictures—I regard fantasy, as distinct from SF, as having a spiritual, or perhaps I mean a religious, or perhaps I mean a metaphysical side. This regard comes from the area whence all memories spring, the personal deeps, compounded of old forgotten stories told and read, alchemic woodcuts, and perhaps a surly reproduction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s doppelganger drawing, How They Met Themselves, with lovers deep in the forest, transfixed. Perhaps too the interchange of light and shade above one’s cot—who knows?

If forced to it for the purposes of this forum, I’d say that this spiritual aspect is largely absent in American fantasy and at least flickeringly present in the English stuff. Why should this be? Possibly for a simple reason: the English stuff is so much older, has a much more ancient lineage (though I don’t forget that lineage also became, because of our shared language, a shared American lineage two centuries ago; were it otherwise—were you all Greek speakers, say—I’d not be here arguing the toss). Did the 1980s yield in the US anything so powerful—so full of ancient power—as Robert Holdstock’s wonderful Mythago Wood ? The past activates fantasy, as the future SF.

I’ve never seen a reference, even in Trillion Year Spree, to the fourteenth-century poem, written in Middle English, entitled ‘St Erkenwald’. The poem is probably by the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the seventh century, the saint Erkenwald, as the poem tells, rebuilt St Paul’s cathedral in London on what had been a pagan site. Digging in the foundations, the workers come across an impressive sarcophagus on which are carved arcane sentences.