JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 66 из 359and it is the body of Hyde which they find. The worst horror of all has occurred; the man has died thinking like Jekyll and looking like Hyde, the secret sin (or the Mark of the Beast, if you prefer) which he hoped to conceal (or to Hyde, if you prefer) stamped indelibly on his face. He concludes his confession with the words, "Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Dr. Jekyll to an end.” It's easy-too easy-to get caught up in the story of Jekyll and his ferocious alter ego as a religious parable told in penny-dreadful terms. It's a moral tale, sure, but it seems to me that it's also a close study of hypocrisy-its causes, its dangers, its damages to the spirit.
Jekyll is the hypocrite who falls into the pit of secret sin; Utterson, the book's real hero, is Jekyll's exact opposite. Because this seems important, not only to Stevenson's book but to the whole idea of the Werewolf, let me take a minute of your time to quote from the book again.
Here's how he introduces Utterson to us on page one of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty, and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.* . . . He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.
*I must admit that, after reading Stevenson's description of Utterson, I found myself curious as to just how he was lovable!
About the Ramones, an amusing punk-rock band that surfaced some four years ago, Linda Ronstadt is on record as saying, "That music's so tight it's hemorrhoidal." You could say the same thing for Utterson, who fulfills the function of court stenographer in the book and still manages to come off as the story's most engaging character. He's a Victorian prig of the first water, of course, and one would fear for a son or daughter brought up by the old man, but Stevenson's point is that there is as little of the hypocrite in him as there is in any man living.
("We may sin in thought, word, or deed," the old Methodist credo goes, and I suppose that by thinking of fine vintages while he knocks off his gin-and-water, we could say that Utterson is a hypocrite in thought . . . but here we're entering a fuzzy gray area where the concept of free will seems harder to grasp; "The mind is a monkey," Robert Stone's protagonist muses in Dog Soldiers, and he is so right.
Jekyll is the hypocrite who falls into the pit of secret sin; Utterson, the book's real hero, is Jekyll's exact opposite. Because this seems important, not only to Stevenson's book but to the whole idea of the Werewolf, let me take a minute of your time to quote from the book again.
Here's how he introduces Utterson to us on page one of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty, and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.* . . . He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.
*I must admit that, after reading Stevenson's description of Utterson, I found myself curious as to just how he was lovable!
About the Ramones, an amusing punk-rock band that surfaced some four years ago, Linda Ronstadt is on record as saying, "That music's so tight it's hemorrhoidal." You could say the same thing for Utterson, who fulfills the function of court stenographer in the book and still manages to come off as the story's most engaging character. He's a Victorian prig of the first water, of course, and one would fear for a son or daughter brought up by the old man, but Stevenson's point is that there is as little of the hypocrite in him as there is in any man living.
("We may sin in thought, word, or deed," the old Methodist credo goes, and I suppose that by thinking of fine vintages while he knocks off his gin-and-water, we could say that Utterson is a hypocrite in thought . . . but here we're entering a fuzzy gray area where the concept of free will seems harder to grasp; "The mind is a monkey," Robert Stone's protagonist muses in Dog Soldiers, and he is so right.