Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

curious invention of Stevenson’s, the shop is filled with mirrors and watches. And these watches seem to be running some kind of race; they become a symbol of time passing. Markheim takes the pawnbroker’s keys. He knows the safe is on an upper floor, but he must hurry because the servant will come. At the same time, he sees his own image multiplied and moving in the mirrors. And that image he sees becomes an image of the entire city. Because from the moment he has killed the pawnbroker, he assumes the whole city is pursuing him or will pursue him.
    He climbs up to the back room, pursued by the ticking of the clocks and the changing images in the mirrors. He hears steps. He thinks those steps could be those of the housekeeper coming back after seeing her dead master, and that she will turn him in. But the person climbing the stairs is not a woman, and Markheim has the impression he knows the person. He does know him, because it is he himself; hence we are faced with the ancient theme of the double. In Scottish superstition, the double is called “fetch,” which means to look for. So when somebody sees his double it is because he is seeing himself.
    This character enters and starts up a conversation with Markheim; he sits down and tells him that he will not denounce him, that a year ago he would have thought it a lie to be called a thief, and that now, he is not only a thief but a murderer. This would have seemed unbelievable just a few months before. But now that he has killed a person, why would he have a problem killing another? “The housekeeper is going to come,” he tells him, “the housekeeper is a weak woman. Another stab and you can leave, because I’m not going to turn you in.” That “other I” is supernatural, and signifies the evil side of Markheim. Markheim argues with him. He tells him, “It is true I am a thief, it is true I am a murderer, those are my acts, but is a man his acts? Might there not be something in me that does not fit the rigid and senseless definitions of ‘thief’ and ‘murderer’? Can I not repent? Am I not already repentant about what I have done?” The other tells him that “these philosophical considerations are all fine and good, but consider that the housekeeper is about to come, that if she finds you here she will turn you in. Your duty right now is to save yourself.”
    The dialogue is long and deals with ethical problems. Markheim tells him that he has killed, but that does not mean that he is a murderer. And then the character who has, until that moment, been a dark figure, turns into a radiant character. He is no longer an evil angel but a good one. Then the double disappears, and the housekeeper approaches. Markheim is there with the knife in his hand, and he tells her to go get the police because he has just killed her master. And this is how Markheim saves himself. This story makes a deep impression when you read it because it is written with a deliberate slow pace and deliberate delicacy. The protagonist, as you can see, is in an extreme situation: they are coming, they will discover him, they will arrest him, they will possibly hang him. But the discussion he has with that other, who is he himself, is one of delicate, honest casuistry.
    The story was praised, but Stevenson thought he still had not finished with the subject of schizophrenia. Stevenson, many years later, was sleeping beside his wife and started shouting. She woke him up, and he was feverish—he had coughed up blood that day. He told her, “What a pity you woke me up because I was dreaming a beautiful nightmare!” What he was dreaming—here we can think about Caedmon and the angel, about Coleridge—what he had dreamed was that scene in which Dr. Jekyll drinks the potion and turns into Hyde, who represents evil. The scene of the doctor drinking something he has concocted and then turning into the opposite is what Stevenson’s dream gave him, and then he had to invent all the rest.
    Today,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
has a disadvantage, and that is that the story is so well known that almost all of us know it before we read it. On the other hand, when Stevenson published
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, in the year 1880—that is, long before
The Portrait ofDorian Gray
, which was inspired by Stevenson’s novel—when Stevenson published his book, he published it as if it were a detective novel: only at the end do we learn that these two people are two facets of the same