Weekend by William McIlvanney Page B

reconversion to being fully human, instead of a sexual urge with identikit man attached.
    He had spent the time since he came here doubling back in his mind. Willowvale had become where Mary Sue was, inside his head whether he wanted it or not.
    He had been trying, he suspected, to rediscover in himself enough stature to accommodate the feeling he had for Mary Sue. He had been trying to make himself worthy of her. It wasembarrassing but it was true. Shades of courtly love. Perhaps that also explained the torture he had put himself through to try to make good his bad treatment of Mickey Deans.
    He swung his feet on to the floor and sat up. He looked at the man in the wardrobe mirror and thought it was time to try to get to know him better. How could Jacqui Forsyth have imagined he was open to her proposition? He had never considered being with a student in his life. Maybe he had become so estranged from himself that people thought he was someone else.
    He was ready to make acquaintance with himself again. He thought affectionately of Mary Sue turning at the bottom of the stairs to give him the letters. He decided it was time to read the letter from the publisher.
     
     
     
     
    The layers of implication in the name Hyde contain inherent natural contradictions. The first meaning, with its undertones of hypocrisy and presenting a sham image of who you are, carries pejorative weight. Read from this viewpoint, the text can be taken as a critique of individual social duplicity. But the second meaning, punning with the name of a park, compromises the first one. For the second meaning acknowledges by implication the acceptance of the natural, the comparatively wild, as an inevitable part of the socially constructed, the man-made. In a somewhat domesticated form, it is true. But it does to some extent normalise both Mr Hyde and Dr Jekyll. The first meaning would have distanced us from them, as criticism of another tends to do. The second meaning puts a bridge between them and us. Hydebecomes not merely a part of Dr Jekyll but a part of ourselves. Read from this viewpoint, the text becomes a less comfortable examination of our own inner lives set against our attempts to conform to the supposed norms of social behaviour – the instinctive self that is housed in the social person, the park within the city. The third meaning casts us further adrift from any fixed or predetermined point of view and challenges further the initial implication of one-sided criticism. The hide of an animal is its most blatant characteristic, the means by which it shows itself most fully. So Hyde is paradoxically not hiding. Dr Jekyll is. The text can be seen as being not merely a condemnation of the evil of Mr Hyde but of the evil of the society that would deny the truth of him utterly while exploiting it, exemplified by Dr Jekyll.
     
     
     
     
    The need to use the toilet woke him, as it always did these nights. Two trips a night as a zombie was his average. Noticing his travelling alarm glowing beside him to his left in the dark, he found that he was lying on the wrong side of the bed. He wondered vaguely how that had happened. Then he remembered why he was on this side of the bed.
    As he groped his way upright, trying not to disturb her, he was glad he had insisted on an en-suite room for all lecturers. Female students would have one, too. Only male students would have to go on safari to the nearest toilet on their floor if they felt the need during the night. It was a way to keep the cost of the trips within budget. No one had ever complained about gender discrimination – no doubt, he suspected,because they would simply use the wash-basin that was in every room which wasn’t en-suite.
    When he switched on the bathroom light, he was startled to see that he was naked. He slept in pyjamas. It was like being embarrassed by what he didn’t want to see. The grey and heavy looseness of his body confronted him with a familiar dismay.
    He held his penis