Notes for Lee Horsley, English 303 Modernism lecture on Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes ~

Modernist thought, modernist cities & the solving intellect

In this lecture we're looking at the Sherlock Holmes stories & considering the links between this kind of popular fiction - the classic detective story - and the wider phenomenon of literary modernism. As you move on to modernism, you'll be talking about modernist elitism, about the determination to 'make it new', and about the sheer technical difficulty that distanced high modernism from a popular audience. But it would obviously be misleading to think of modernism as a completely separate phenomenon - & one thing we gain from thinking about possible comparisons with early 20thC popular literature is a sense of common ground - whatever the differences, there are some shared preoccupations. There are 2 main points of contact here that I want to focus on: first, on characteristic patterns of thought - on what we might call 'ways of knowing'; and 2ndly, on imaginative geography - specifically, on the representation of the city. In both cases, I think what we see is overlap but also difference - and both the connexions and the contrasts are helpful in defining the nature of modernism.

(1) Modernism and the Epistemological Dominant

So - let's look first at modes of thought - at one of the central concerns that binds together the literary modernist and the writer of crime stories. The detective story has been called 'the epistemological genre par excellence' - and it in fact is for this reason sometimes called the 'sister genre' of modernist literature. 'Epistemology' seems to me one of the more useful 'ologies', with reference both to detective and modernist fiction. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction, writes that the 'dominant' of modernist fiction is, like that of the detective story, epistemological. That is, he says,

'modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground such questions as'How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?' Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of the knowable? And so on.'

McHale's list gives us, I think, a fair idea of the sort of questions we might take to be associated with an 'epistemological' genre - epistemology simply being the study of the nature of human knowledge - of 'how we know what we know'. The detective story is epistemological in that it obviously focuses on such questions as the interpretation of evidence, the methods of finding things out, and so on. The struggle to interpret the world is also a central theme of many modernist texts. As I say, though, there are also telling contrasts. The other thing that characterises the detective story is, of course, the rational confidence of the answers it provides. If any of you have seen a recent film parody of the Holmes stories called Zero Effect, you'll have come across what Daryl Zero (the Holmes figure) calls 'the 2 obs' - observation and objectivity. Traditional detection has complete faith in the 2 obs. - (& this 'rationalist faith', as we'll see, is one of the elements in classic detection that ultimately separates it from the modernist sensibility).

This focus on what we know and how we know goes - in traditional detective fiction - with a structure that foregrounds the interpretation or investigation of a crime. It's a commonplace of analyses of detective fiction that what we have are two stories - the 'first story' being that of an actual event investigated (the crime itself), the 'second story' that of the investigation - an investigation that meticulously reconstructs the 'missing' forst part of the narrative - the sequence of events leading up to the moment of the crime. When the 'right solution' is reached, then 'everything falls into place', and for us, as readers, to see it 'in place' means that the 'unknown' has been made known. Umberto Eco says that readers of the detective novel can indulge in the 'metaphysical shudder' of discovering what is hidden and secret. But (& here again we're moving towards a contrast with modernism) in the game-like structure of the traditional detective narrative, this is always a well-defined and knowable secret: the mystery isn't something that lies beyond the reach of our consciousness, but is a 'secret' which can be revealed in full during the course of the '2^nd story'. It's only that a veil has been drawn over it for the duration of the novel, to keep us all in suspense. One concise summing-up of this given by Grossvogel, in Mystery and its Fictions:

'As a genre, the detective story is optimistic and self-destructing. Its coy mystery, served by its mechanistic detective and antiseptic corpse, is free of the odour of death.The duration of the story (its reading) is the time we must wait for the pieces to fall into place; the intensity of the 'mystery' is voided by our awareness of the mystery's transitoriness.'

This, then, is another of the elements of traditional detection that most obviously separates it from modernist tendencies: so Conrad's fiction, for example, often draws on the conventions of the popular crime story; a novel like The Secret Agent, for example, has a '2 story' structure that invites comparison with classic detection; in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim the narrator, Marlowe, is struggling (as a detective struggles) to understand events, motives and mysteries. But in Conrad's work, this sort of structure is fragmented and displaced, with partial knowledge only coming accidentally and haphazardly, and the 'unknown' mostly resisting all efforts to grasp it or explain it - the unknown remaining ultimately perplexing and mysterious. What you'll see, then, as you move on to modernist texts is that they are preoccupied with epistemological questions, but that what characterises them (in contrast to the detective story) is epistemological doubt - uncertainty about how we know, and what we can know. Instead of being capable of the solving powers of the detective, those who try to penetrate what's hidden and secret are all the time being hampered by the incomplete, irrational, subjective nature of their understanding.

For this lecture, though, staying with the Sherlock Holmes stories, let's think about some of the ways in which these stories embody - define - the characteristics of what's called 'the classic detective story'.

(2) Understanding clues

As I said at the outset, the '2 obs' - observation and objectivity - are defining elements in classic detective fiction. Sherlock Holmes above all presents himself as the practitioner of a theory of detection - a theory we would generally label 'scientific rationalism': it's methods are very similar to those of diagnostic medicine, and in fact, as you may of course know, Conan Doyle was greatly influenced in this conception by his time as a medical student at Edinburgh University, where he'd been specially impressed by Dr Joseph Bell, who is usually taken to be a kind of rough model for the character of Sherlock Holmes. For Holmes, this approach means that virtually anything he sees - inspects - is a repository of evidence. Anything and everything - mud on a sleeve, soiled knees, whiskers inadequately shaved, a dog that fails to bark - all of these can be used to support far-reaching conclusions. Science was an exciting new force in the late-19^th century public mind - and Doyle was very explicit about drawing on the techniques of science in his stories - most importantly, the careful of data and the careful, logical analysis of all available information - interpreting 'material evidence' & forensic facts, & employing what Doyle calls 'the science of deduction'.

Let's take as our example of Holmsian methods the famous hat that's inspected in 'The Blue Carbuncle':

'[Holmes] picked it up, and gazed at it in the peculiar introspective fashion which was characteristic of him. 'It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have been,' he remarked, 'and yet there are a few inferences which are very distinct, and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him. He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect. He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-cream. Thhese are the more patent facts which are to be deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on his house.'

Watson (of course) is astounded, but Holmes, as usual, explains every deduction. By focusing acutely on every detail he turns the hat from something commonplace and anonymous into something singular and significant. It's used to show how the discerning eye can inspect what seems to be just an arbitrarily detached fragment of an ordinary man's life - and see in it the whole unique life history of its owner. Part of Holmes reasoning depends on details akin to forensic evidence - his 'lens' discloses clean cut hair ends; the dust on the hat isn't gritty, grey street dust but the 'fluffy brown dust' found in houses; ink has been used to cover stains. This last deduction, of course, also depends on the introduction of social and moral assumptions - Holmes is equating stains with 'going down in the world'; he's taking ink to signify a remnant of self-respect, in spite of the dilapidated state of the hat. As a recent critic has pointed out, the most striking example of a deduction that's based on a quite a large-scale assumption about social rules is Holmes's interpretation of the unbrushed state of the hat - which proves, he says, that the owner's wife has ceased to love him. Hat-brushing is taken to equal marital affection: if you see Holmes's deductions working by syllogistic logic, what you have is a 'middle term' in the syllogism that's based on an underlying assumption of rather a high degree of social conformity: The unbrushed hat has not been brushed by the owner's wife; [middle term:] all loving wives brush their husbands hats; therefore, this wife is not loving.

Holmes isn't just a scientific rationalist. He's also in important respects a strange and eccentric individual - given to atonal violin playing, taking cocaine, aloof, bohemian and eccentric, capable of becoming so absorbed in the hunt for clues that he strikes Watson as a man transformed 'from the thinker and logician of Baker Street' into someone seized with 'animal lust for the chase' - his face darkening, his brows drawn into two 'hard, black lines', his eyes shining with a 'steely glitter'. What all of these things suggest, of course, is a man marked out from the common run of mankind - whether by mental powers or by sheer individuality and purposeful energy. The bourgeois world that Holmes is contemplating (via the hat) is something he's completely apart from - superior in his powers, detached by his eccentric habits and his compulsion to discover the truth. Holmes talks about the importance of considering the point of view of the person who is interpreting circumstantial evidence - but this is a long way from his saying that all interpretation is simply subjective. What he's actually saying is that circumstantial evidence that reveals one thing (the wrong thing) to an ordinary, unenlightened pair of eyes will reveal something quite different (the true thing) to the exceptional eyes of Sherlock Holmes.

This Holmsian self-conception obviously has important implications - both in terms of the other characterisation in the Holmes stories and in terms of the kind of plot resolutions that we can more or less take for granted in most of the stories in the series.

(3) The clear triangle of characters

Unlike many classic detective stories, the Holmes stories don’t necessarily have a murderer – and in fact may not even turn out to involve an actual crime (just the appearance or threat of a crime). But like most stories that are part of the genre, they have a clear and ultimately unambiguous triangle of characters – the investigator, the victim (or potential victim) and the transgressor. Holmes, as we’ve seen, I think, belongs to the category of ‘Supermen’ investigators whose solving powers are never really in any doubt. In classic detective fiction, investigators of this kind (and even more ordinarily mortal detective figures) are always the protagonist, always at the centre of the ‘2nd story’ – the story of the solution of the crime. Stories often start with Holmes being sought out by someone in need of help – like Helen Stoner in 'The Speckled Band':

The victim-figures may already be dead (the sister of the young woman who comes to see Holmes in ‘The Speckled Band’), or (like the young woman herself) are in need of Holmes protection and assistance. The plea of Helen Stoner clearly sets up the basic character triangle of the story – and we can feel sure as we read this scene that both the detective and the young woman will stay in the roles they occupy here – neither could possibly turn out to be the source of the evil, and we’re confident that by the end of the story Holmes will have made sure both of the identity of the villain and of the methods he has used to kill and terrorise.

But - and this is an important contradiction - the serial form itself is unresolved and indeterminate - a point that brings us, perhaps, to the second comparison with modernist texts that I wanted to touch on. This has 2 interrelated aspects - the formal quality of indeterminacy, and the actual setting of the Holmes stories - the imaginative geography of the late 19^th/early 20thC city.

(4) Sherlock Holmes's city

Holmes travels around, but London is one of the most characteristic locations of his investigations; the sources of the crimes are various – there is often a threat from some kind of foreign secret society; or there’s some crime committed in the colonies that’s being covered up; in later stories, of course, Doyle pits Holmes against the master criminal, Professor Moriarty. But in the early stories we’re looking at, disorders and threats posed are mainly to established middle-class order – to respectable bourgeois family life - coming from within (or just outside) the family and within the class, springing from selfish greed that cuts across normal family responsibilities – that loosens the bonds of self-control and respectability that hold society together. The fear of social breakdown is always glimpsed behind the Holmes stories: like most classic detective stories (and, of course, like much modernist literature), they are founded on essentially conservative social attitudes.

In the Holmes stories, the ‘pull’ of the ‘first story’ – the story of crime or potential crime – is a tendency towards dissolution – towards loss of these bonds, loss of reliable social forms – towards confusion and disorder; the 2nd story – the story of Holmes’s resolution of the mystery – exerts a pull in the opposite direction – restoring order, clarifying the sources of confusion, putting everything back in a proper place. But London, the site of disorder, obviously doesn’t become any less confused and disordered. I’ve included a Holmes quote from a story not in your collection, ‘A Case of Identity’ – because it so clearly suggests the imaginative relationship between Holmes and London:.

The city itself is imaged as a place of cross-purposes, bizarre cruelties, unsuspected links, extraordinary crimes that are all the time being generated by 'ordinary life'. It's a city that in many ways is very like London as seen by Conrad - except that in the Conan Doyle stories one has Holmes himself - more than ever in this passage a Superman figure - capable of an imaginative fly-over in which he's a sort of gentle, all-seeing, detached guardian who is able to penetrate the truths that are stranger than fiction, is able to make known the hidden connections - and so is finally able to restore comfortable ordinariness. Repetitive disorder& repetitive resolution - these are the formal tensions that organise the detective story, and as I've said, this recurrent disorder is one of the things that links the city of Holmsian detection to the city of literary modernism.

Martin Priestman helpfully characterises the '2 axes' of detective fiction - if you look at the way they're summarised on the handout:

What this points to, I think, is one of the main ways in which the Holmes stories intersect with some of the most characteristic themes of modernism. Raymond Williams, in an often reprinted essay on 'The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism', sums up key ways in which the development of 'the city' into 'the metropolis' was crucial to the formation of modernism - with the theme of urban alienation - which developed in the 19thC in Britain - fostering some very persistent images of the modern city - 1^st, as 'a crowd of strangers' (this, Williams suggests, originates with the mundane fact that people in a crowded street are unknown to the observer, & then interprets this strangeness as 'mystery' - as unknowability); a 2^nd, closely related theme is that of the individual lonely and isolated in the crowd, alienated, involved in repetitive, mechanical activities, bereft of meaningful social contact; &, again related to the sense of the otherness of the 'crowd of strangers', a 3^rd theme is the 'impenetrability' of the 'dark city' - a teeming, maze-like, fog-bound and dangerous environment. It's not hard to see, I think, how closely related Williams' list is to the Holmesian detective story, and if we glance briefly at an example from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, we can see how this kind of conception shapes the narrative. The examples I've included on the handout are from 'The Red-Headed League':

The whole plot of the story is premised on the idea of a mass of strangers converging in response to a newspaper advertisement - a comic but alarming and inexplicable image of countless, faceless, anonymous men converging - a mass from which the individual, Jabez Wilson, is plucked out in an inexplicable way - someone apparently singular in the midst of the vast mass of London (& Holmes ultimate solution, of course, is in part an explanation that in effect reduces the mass of red-headed men to nothing more than a strategem, designed by one individual - the criminal - to draw in another individual - by means of a mass advertisement; and the solution is in part made possible because Holmes, uniquely, is able to discover what it really is that makes Wilson 'singular' - ie, his ownership of a shop backing onto a bank).

Once Wilson has been picked out, the job he is given is peculiar - but at the same time the very image of the soulless, pointless urban routine - arbitrarilt (it seems) set to work (contentedly enough, it's true) copying a mass object, reproducing something that's already endlessly reproducible. But of course because the task is actually part of a very singular scheme it comes to an end when it has served its criminal purpose.

Watson, without any of Holmes superior insight, perceives the approach of the conclusion as confusing and grotesque, involving as it does a descent into the dark, maze-like passages where the mystery will be unravelled. It is Holmes insight into the geography of the city itself that has enabled him to make the necessary connexion: he has connected Wilson's premises (the 'faded and stagnant square') with 'the line of fine shops and stately business premises' which 'presents as great a contrast to [Wilson's shop] as the front of a picture does to the back'. Again, something apparently labyrinthine and amorphous emerges as explicable - isn't any longer dark and mysterious, and so a satisfactory resolution can be reached.

The restoration of order: As at the end of the other Holmes stories, we can count on Holmes to be instrumental in the restoration of order. In 'The Speckled Band' the Doctor - the villain - is conveniently and appropriately killed by his own murderous device; in 'The Red-Headed League' Holmes takes matters in hand with a hunting-crop - and the villain politely acknowledges that Holmes has 'done the thing very completely'.

If we think of some of the other stories, we'll see that the Holmesian expulsion of disorder doesn't by any means always involve direct retribution. He sometimes lets off the transgressor (or potential transgressor) - but only if in doing so he can be assured that the person won't cause any future breaches in the social order.

To emphasise finally, though, my earlier point: the resolution is structurally 'singular' - that is, only one manifestation of disorder is sorted out. The serial nature of the Holmes stories presupposes a society in which disorder is endemic: and so, in a way, the number and 'reproducibility' of the stories is itself something that cuts against the reassuring identification and expulsion of an individual evil. There must be multitudes of evils - since, without them, there wouldn't be further adventures for Holmes to have.

It would be disingenuous, of course, to maintain that this seriality makes the Holmes stories as unsettling as the modernist visions of, say, Conrad or Eliot. But the echoes are definitely there - 'a crowd flowed over London bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many'; 'Unreal City Under the brown fog'; 'At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting' - the urban anonymity, pointless labours and impenetrability of the urban scene of The Waste Land could easily be the setting for a detective story - though one holding out little hope of a restitution of order.

It might be argued, though, that one non-fictional type of intellect that in fact has a good deal in common with Sherlock Holmes is the superior 'solving intellect' of the modernist writer himself - aloof, detached, artistically ordering the random and depressing disorder of modern experience. Just as the isolated rational intelligence of Holmes - the consciousness of the 'private eye' - penetrates the dark recesses of the city, so - the modernist writer looks down, and confers meaning and order on the fragments he observes.