Antibody of Orthodoxy: Subversive/Conservative Holmes
It is a curious fact--but fact nonetheless--that elements in the story of the creation and reception of Sherlock Holmes approximately parallel elements of the plot and reception of Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein creates his monster by exhuming and appropriating body parts. Similarly, Holmes is also assembled from an assortment of parts: he is, as various critics have remarked, part Poe's Dupin, part Collins' Inspector Cuff, part Doyle's old professor Joe Bell, part Doyle himself. Frankenstein's monster is more passionately "human" in the book than the cold, emotionally repressed Victor and is eventually victorious in his struggle against his creator; in latter-day popular lore and usage, the monster's victory has been compounded by the fact that he has usurped his creator's name. Holmes has also effaced his creator. Everybody seems to know the story: the Irish eye-doctor's unexpected success with a character in a little-explored genre, the decision to kill Holmes in the Reichenbach Falls, the outbursts of public grief (young men wearing mourning bands in the streets, letters to Doyle beginning with "You brute!"), the harried author's reluctant decision to bring the detective back to life. And at least since the publication of Dorothy Sayers' essay "Dr. Watson's Christian Name" in 1946, it has been a staple of "Sherlockian" mock-criticism to treat Holmes and Watson as historical figures and to deny that Doyle actually wrote the stories.
Although this parallel is of course slightly fanciful, it serves to illustrate a point that I think is central to the Holmes canon. Much of Doyle criticism focuses on the ways in which Holmes embodies and defends Victorian order through his use of 'scientific method.' My goal in this essay is to raise questions about these claims. For the Holmes stories, like Mary Shelley's novel before them, are intensely concerned with the tense, anxiety-ridden relationship between science and ethics; between the epistemological framework of nineteenth century "natural philosophy" and its application in the arenas of political ideology and moral thought. Their effect is rather to complicate and question Victorian orthodoxy (especially where imperialism is concerned) than to reinforce it.
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So what does one make of Sherlock Holmes? The stories and novels, of course, seem to tell a clear enough tale. Holmes is repeatedly represented (and represents himself) as a model of objective rationality. From the very first description we get of him in A Study in Scarlet, the Great Detective
[...] is a little too scientific [...] it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine him giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge. (Doyle, 1.7)
Later stories continue in this vein. For instance, in "A Scandal in Bohemia," Watson opens by saying that Holmes was "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen [...] he never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer" (Doyle, 3.1). In "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter," Watson tells us that "sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was preeminent in intelligence" (Doyle, 4.184). The physical descriptions given by Watson are also calculated to reinforce this impression of ascetic, excessive, cerebrality; Holmes is "excessively lean" with "sharp and piercing" eyes in A Study in Scarlet (Doyle, 1.13); "lean" and "gaunt" in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (Doyle, 3.77); "thin and sinewy," "tall," and "spare" in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (367-8).
Naturally enough, most readers of Doyle take him (or Holmes/Watson, as the case may be) at his word. Stephen Knight writes in an influential essay, for example, that "he [Holmes] stands for science, that exciting new nineteenth century force in the public mind" (Knight, 55). Van Dover remarks, somewhat more specifically, that "The detective offered himself as a special model of the new scientific thinker; his distinction lay in his decision to apply the new method to concrete human problems rather than abstract mechanical problems" (Van Dover, 1). And it is undeniably true that Holmes often seems to voice much of the brash confidence of the science of the era. "From a drop of water," he writes in the article that is to propel him into partnership with Watson in A Study in Scarlet, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other [...] all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it" (Doyle, 1.18). Later he elaborates his views in the case of "The Five Orange Pip
s":
"the ideal reasoner," he remarked, "would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reasoner alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilize all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do" (Doyle, 3.118-9).
Holmes's emphasis, and Doyle's, would seem to be on the organic, interconnected nature of the world, in which everything is arranged in a causal (and ultimately teleological) order--a claim that was codified quite early in the nineteenth century by Laplace, who claimed, in his "Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilitiés" (1814), that "the present state of the physical universe is the effect of its past state and the cause of the one to follow, so that an intelligence in possession of all the data and great enough to analyze it would both know past and future with perfect certainty" (Chapple, 48). Supporting Laplace's claim was, first, the newly discovered science of thermodynamics, the first law of which posits that "energy is neither gained nor lost in operation, only transformed into some equivalent form. The energy of the whole system remains constant" (Chapple, 45)--that is to say, that the universe is a vast, but ultimately closed, and therefore quantifiable and predictable system. And the yet more recently formulated theory of evolution by natural selection could also be marshalled to the defense of Laplace, since the entire history of life, although of "infinite complexity" in the "relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence" (Darwin, 127) was shown to be driven by a Malthusian law of scarcity of resources and survival of the fittest: "all past and present organic beings constitute one grand natural system [...] intelligible on the theory of natural selection with its contingencies of extinction and divergence of character" (Darwin, 386). As Gillian Beer writes: 'it is its [Darwin"s theory"s] ability to propose a total system for understanding the organization of the natural world which has been its most powerful influence' (Beer, 16). It is what enables Matthew Arnold to write that, although science has been "a divider and a separatist [...] dissipating dreams of a premature and impossible unity, [...] true science [...] recognizes in the bottom of her soul a law of ultimate fusion, of conciliation" (Arnold, in Chapple, 129).
These overarching narratives of determinism and organic unity--what Deleuze and Guattari call "arborial logic" (Darwin's favorite metaphor for the history of evolution is the tree)--are mirrored in Holmes's own work of detection, in which he gathers clues (seemingly isolated events), reads them as signs, and organizes them into coherent narratives--"a chain of logical sequences without a break or flaw" (Doyle, 1.142). Doyle's detective fictions, in this view at least, are thus best read as narratives of scientific optimism (appropriately enough, Doyle was born in the same year that The Origin of Species was published), in which the hero is able to apply the methods and narratives of science to the realm of human interaction; the realm of society and morals. As Van Dover writes: "the detective is the timely figure who makes the argument in popular literature [...] that scientific method can serve a moral function and that the common man can comprehend the method of scientific thinking" (Van Dover, 9). Holmes's "deduction," then, is a science, but also an ideology.
It is a kind of panopticism. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the formation of a body of scientific knowledge goes hand in hand with the development of "disciplinary power" that is "exercised through its invisibility; [while] at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility [... which] assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them" (Foucault, 187). Seemingly omniscient in his omni-scientific competence, Holmes can thus be read as the personification of the surveillance mechanism necessary for the continuing existence of the state. Gillis writes that
the rise of the detective narrative in the nineteenth century must be viewed in relation to the conjunction of the particular discourses of justice, the body and capital that emerged at the point [...] 'The growth of penology, criminology, urban sanitation and social medicine is a response to crowding on the part of the urban middle class, which sought a greater social control and surveillance over the body'
(Gillis, 3)
The detective is a kind of technician of the judicial code. He is representative of the invisible disciplinary power that replaces the traditional form of power that was (again, according to Foucault), prior to the seventeenth century, always visibly manifested, most notably through the spectacle of the criminal body directly tortured by the executioner.
The reading of Holmes as the personification of omniscient/omnipotent disciplinary power is, in many ways, undeniably justified by many passages in the canon of the Holmes stories. One need only remember, for example, how often Holmes is able to solve his cases by becoming effectively invisible, while his enemies remain exposed. In "The Case of the Dying Detective," for example, he is able to entrap his foe by pretending to be dying. In "The Final Problem," he and Watson disappear off of a moving train, and watch gleefully as Moriarty passes them by, in hot pursuit of the empty vehicle. In "The Empty House," and "The Mazarin Stone," Holmes fools his enemies by substituting a life-like wax bust for himself, while he remains lurking in the shadows, or behind a curtain (not to mention the two year hiatus in which he pretends to be dead in order to throw his enemies off the track!). In |
