Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 36

The Obscure
In 1756, Edmund Burke posed the notion of the obscure, which argues that:
“to make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the
full extent of any danger, when we accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension
vanishes” (Burke 1757, 3-4).
This notion explains the terror in the unknown. The human mind will find fear in something it cannot
rationalise or explain. Burke’s line of thinking here correlates to the later Kantian logic of gaining
knowledge. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant writes: “thoughts without content are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the sense can think nothing.
Only through their unison can knowledge arise” (Kant, 2007, A51). For Kant, if empiricism becomes
obscure, knowledge cannot be acquired. This idea alone provides a literary space for a detective to provide
an explanation for either the ‘intuitions’ or the ‘sense’ for the reader.
Stevenson, however, purposefully creates a setting which we can consider to be an example of
the obscure. To begin with, Utterson is presented as a character who does not correlate to our notion of
upstanding citizen; something seems off about him. The novel begins: “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 loveable” (Stevenson, 2015, 33). The
language used here does not suggest someone ‘loveable’: ‘never lighted by a smile’, for example is not
the quality of someone considered to be ‘loveable’. Furthermore, ‘rugged’, ‘cold’, and ‘scanty’ all suggest
an unlikeable, perhaps villainous, contemptible or 'underdog' figure. We later learn that “it was frequently
his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going
men” (Stevenson, 2015, 33).
We can suggest, then, that despite something seeming untoward about Utterson, he is still
regarded as a ‘good influence’, a good member of middle-class society who can help those members of
society who find themselves on a downward trajectory. This portrays their fictional society as a place in
which the moral expectation of goodness is different to our own because Utterson does not correlate to
our version of a moral higher-class citizen but seems to be classed as one within his own society.
Therefore, despite the fact that Stevenson describes this London to us, we do not have a rational
understanding of it or why it differs from the London that we are familiar with. This does not allow us to
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