Who Cares about a Punch & Judy Pathos?

[Terrance]

In The Carrick" and in "The Metamorphosis" there is a central figure
endowed with a certain amount of human pathos among grotesque, heartless
characters, figures of fun or figures of horror, asses parading as
zebras, or hybrids between rabbits and rats.  In "The Carrick" the human
quality of the central figure is of a different type from Gregor in
Kafka's story, but this human pathetic quality is present in both.  In
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" there is no such human pathos, no throb in the
throat
of the story, none of that intonation of "'I cannot get out, I cannot
get out,' said the starling" (so heartrending in Sterne's fantasy A
Sentimental Journey).  True, Stevenson devotes many pages to the horror
of Jekyll's plight, but the thing, after all, is only a superb
Punch-and-Judy show.  The beauty of Kafka's and Gogol's private
nightmares is that their central human characters belong to the same
private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around them, but the
central one tries to get out of
that world, to cast off the mask, to transcend the cloak or the
carapace.  But in Stevenson's story there is none of that unity and none
of that contrast.  The Uttersons, and Pooles, and Enfields are meant to
be commonplace, everyday characters; actually they are characters
derived from Dickens, and thus they constitute phantasms that do not
quite belong to Stevenson's own artistic reality, just as Stevenson's
fog comes from a Dickensian studio to envelop a conventional London.  I
suggest, in
fact, that Jekyll's magic drug is more real than Utterson's life.  The
fantastic Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, on the other hand, is supposed to be in
contrast to this conventional London, but it is really the difference
between a Gothic medieval theme and a Dickensian one.  It is not the
same kind of difference as that between an absurd world and pathetically
absurd Bashmachkin, or between an absurd world and tragically absurd
Gregor. 

 The Jekyll-and-Hyde theme does not quite form a unity with its setting
because its fantasy is of a different type from the fantasy of the
setting.  There is really nothing especially pathetic or tragic about
Jekyll.  We enjoy every detail of the marvelous juggling, of the
beautiful trick, but there is no artistic emotional throb involved, and
whether it is Jekyll or Hyde who gets the upper hand remains of supreme
indifference to the good reader.  I am speaking of rather nice
distinctions, and it is difficult to
put them in simple form.  When a certain clear-thinking but somewhat
superficial French philosopher asked the profound but obscure German
philosopher Hegel to state his views in a concise form, Hegel answered
him harshly, "These things can be discussed neither concisely nor in
French."  We shall ignore the question whether Hegel was right or not,
and still try to put into a nutshell the difference between the
Gogol-Kafka kind of story and Stevenson's kind. 

In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd
world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle
out of it into the world of humans—and dies in despair.  In Stevenson
the unreal central character belongs to a brand of unreality different
from that of the world around him.  He is a Gothic character in a
Dickensian setting, and when he struggles and then dies, his fate
possesses only conventional pathos.  I do not at all mean that
Stevenson's story is a
failure.  No, it is a minor masterpiece in its own conventional terms,
but it has only two dimensions, whereas the Gogol-Kafka stories have
five or six. 

http://www.monica.com.br/mauricio/cronicas/cron141.htm