Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

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Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Page 10

by Josef Steiff


  There are a surprising number of mystery elements absent from the novel, however, the most important of which are: the detective is a bodyguard rather than an investigator; there is a complete lack of crime scene work; there is a general lack of detection and deduction; and there is a cast of only three serious suspects (Mortimer, Barrymore, and Stapleton). In the original manuscript, Doyle also erased procedural detail in Chapter 11, when Watson reflects on his interview with Laura Lyons. So it seems there’s good reason to think that The Hound isn’t a pure mystery, but do I really need to insist it’s a horror story when I could call it a crossbreed, a mongrel mystery-horror?

  Close attention to the plot exposes the combination of Gothicism and Romanticism characteristic of classic Victorian horror fiction like Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dracula. In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, Christopher Frayling cites The Hound of the Baskervilles as completing the quintessential gothic horror quartet, and I think he is right. The Hound as horror also explains the host of attempts to account for the numerous differences between the most famous Holmes story and the many others in which he appeared, including early suggestions that Fletcher Robinson had written large parts of the novel, and recent claims that Holmes failed to catch the real villain.

  The engine that drives the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles is the conflict between protagonist and antagonist, a conflict that underlies much—if not all—mystery and horror fiction. The protagonist is obvious: Holmes, ably assisted by Watson. The antagonist appears to be Stapleton, but is really the hound, a monster whose existence is only explained in the final chapter. Where Stapleton has a relatively minor role, the presence of the hound is felt throughout the work: from the title to its first mention in the second chapter to Holmes’s elucidation in the closing paragraphs. Contrast the following two references to the antagonist:

  I told you in London, Watson, and I tell you now again, that we have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel.

  Always there was the feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realised that one was indeed entangled in its meshes.

  Despite what Holmes says, Stapleton is an incompetent antagonist. He chooses an appalling murder weapon; he conducts his personal relationships without discipline (he has a dangerous affair with Mrs. Lyons and his uxorial jealousy almost ruins his plan); and he lacks a definite means of securing the Baskerville fortune in the unlikely event of success (even Holmes admits that Stapleton could not have claimed his inheritance without suspicion). Stapleton is a worthy foe, but only to a master detective who fails to predict fog on Dartmoor.

  The clash of the incompetent criminal and ineffective detective is of only secondary interest, however, because the real conflict is between man and monster. The ultimate triumph isn’t the capture of the culprit, but the slaying of the beast. While Holmes and his allies battle the hound at the climax of the story, Stapleton’s death is an anticlimax, occurring off-stage in Grimpen Mire.

  The Postmodern Condition

  In “Watson’s Weird Tales: Horror in the Sherlockian Canon,” Philip Shreffler writes: “It is the book’s supernaturalism that has brought generations of readers to The Hound.” Holmes’s status as an international cultural icon is also responsible, but he appeared in three other novels, none of which have proved as successful.

  Shreffler’s commentary reiterates the final factor in Carroll’s philosophy of horror, the mass appeal of the genre. Carroll believes that the popularity of horror fiction and film is a symptom of the late-twentieth-century concern with meaning, value, and relativity captured in the term “postmodernism”. The idea that values are relative rather than absolute, and that concepts are created by human beings rather than reflections of things-in-the-world mirrors the horror story’s focus on monsters that defy cultural categories, and our fear and revulsion of the unknown. The prevalence of horror is the popular expression of the postmodern condition:

  Contemporary horror fiction, then, articulates the anxieties attending the transition from the American Century to the “we know not what” for mass audiences, in a manner analogous to the way postmodernism articulates intimations of instability for intellectuals.

  The link with postmodernism is astute, and it explains the dominant position of horror fiction in mass culture through its production in motion pictures. In this respect, the early and repeated appearance of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the mass media of radio, film, and television is a self-fulfilling sign of the fascination the story holds for mass audiences. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) cites twenty-two film and TV productions from 1915 to 2002, and the list is by no means exhaustive.

  With such evidence at hand, I’ll make a further observation in support of Carroll: all four of the Victorian classics exerted a similarly strong attraction at the end of the nineteenth century.

  The period that preceded postmodernism—modernism—was itself characterized by the collapse of certainty. Beginning with The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a series of prophecies about the end of the dominance of Christian values, values which had been exported to the world through the empires of Western Europe and the United States. As civilization slid towards the mass destruction of its first global conflict, no accepted truth about human existence escaped scrutiny. Everything everyone had ever believed was doubted, and intellectuals held nothing sacred: capitalism (Marx), society (Durkheim), religion (Frazer), science (Einstein), language (Saussure), the mind (Freud), and even humanity itself (Darwin). No country prospered from The War to End All Wars, and the resulting disenchantment is revealed in works like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

  For the first time in history, there was constant change, and people didn’t know how to deal with it. We still don’t, though I hope we have learned something from two hot world wars and one cold.

  The Hound of the Baskervilles was written and published at a time of uncertainty. If the narrative reflected that uncertainty, there is no surprise that it is even more popular in an age of heightened uncertainty. Which brings us back to Derrida, who is often considered the arch-postmodernist because his overall philosophical project was to show that truth was something with which human beings could never be acquainted. He used elusive tools like the aporia and the re-mark, and abstruse methods like deconstruction, to illustrate that meaning is not self-sufficient, and that truth itself is flexible. What do we have left without the possibility of truth?

  Anxiety.

  And that anxiety is the essential clue in the solution of the real mystery of The Hound, the secret of its remarkable success. If we follow the novel’s own logic to its conclusion, and identify the dramatic finale in the fog of Dartmoor as an announcement of a genre to which Holmes and Watson do not really belong, we can see how neatly the narrative fits into the category of horror.

  Doyle, it seems, had it right from the very beginning: the real appeal of The Hound of the Baskervilles—now more than ever—is because it’s a real creeper.

  Chapter 8

  The Case of the Dangerous Detective

  Ronald S. Green and D.E. Wittkower

  During an idle hour, we took up the question of why it is that the detective, as a literary figure, is viewed as ‘dangerous’.

  “It is not so strange,” I said, “for the detective is always uncovering facts that guilty persons have very good reasons not to want known.”

  “Yes,” said Wittkower, “but if that were the end of it, there would be little difference between a detective story and a thriller. The hero of a thriller wishes to set things right and escape with her life—but the detective wants knowledge which is itself dangerous, not knowledge which is simply dangerous because it’s somebody’s dirty secret.”

  “I’m not sure I follow. What do you mean, exactly?”

  “Well, take for example the first detective in Western literature: Oedipu
s. In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex—or perhaps we could call it ‘A Scandal in Thebes’—Oedipus must solve a murder. He is warned away from finding the truth by Tiresias, a prophet of Apollo, a god of light and truth. Despite having been told by the god’s representative that he should not seek the truth, he cannot resist his thirst for knowledge, and it is this which brings his downfall.

  “There’s a similar social history throughout antiquity. Those who claim to know a hidden truth about the world are treated as dangerous and are made to pay for their forbidden knowledge, and even seeking such knowledge is viewed as immoral—from the Athenians’ prosecution of philosophers like Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle; to the Roman persecution of early Christians; and to Roman Christian persecution of Gnostics and Pagans. Society, it seems, has long had the habit of putting to death those who ask too many questions.”

  This seemed to me too quick. “But,” I said, “in the cases of the Greek philosophers, early Christians, and Gnostics, each of these groups were undermining political authority by adopting doctrines which went against the religious doctrines of the state. For example, when Anaxagoras claimed that the sun was a giant burning rock, he wasn’t just making a claim about astronomy or physics, as we would interpret this today. Rather, since the Athenian state based its legal tradition on the stories of the gods and heroes, when Anaxagoras said that the sun was an object, not Apollo, he implied that we could get rid of all the stories of the state and replace them with more scientific knowledge. So, he was put to death not because he claimed that the sun was a burning rock, but because he undermined the state by encouraging Athenians to reject traditional knowledge, belief, and authority. In this case, as well as the others you mention—Isn’t this a simple matter of a political crackdown on dissidents?”

  “Surely this is a significant motive,” he said, leaning forward. With a curious, playful look in his eyes, he went on. “But there’s something much more distinctive and unusual in these cases. You said Anaxagoras was ‘encouraging Athenians to reject tradition’—I suppose that’s true, encouraging by example if nothing else, but he wasn’t exactly leading riots in the streets!”

  “No, that’s true.”

  “And the early Christians and the Gnostics as well; they weren’t trying to convert the majority or overthrow the state. Mostly, they were just trying to keep to themselves and maintain their small and unpopular communities of belief.”

  “Yes,” I had to admit, “that is so.”

  “Tell me, doesn’t it seem strange that Western society, which values understanding and knowledge so highly, views some knowledge claims as undermining society itself?”

  “Yes, now that you mention it, this does strike me as a bit odd.”

  “Now, if these ‘dangerous’ claims are false, why didn’t these political authorities simply disprove them?”

  “Why, these claims about fundamental reality and religion aren’t the sorts of things that can be disproved!” I paused for a moment. By prompting me to this response, Wittkower had given me the next step I needed to see what he was getting at. “So, you think these claims are dangerous because they undermine the ideology of society—the basic beliefs about humanity and the world which justify the society’s laws and ways of life, but which can’t be justified, since they can’t be proven or disproven. And this fits with the other evidence we have: the great scandals of knowledge in the history of the West, ranging from persecution of Jews and atheists, to the individualism of democracy and Protestantism, to the ‘scandal’ of Darwin. Some of these forms of ‘dangerous’ knowledge were direct threats to established power, but all of them were threats to foundational ideas about what it is to be human. But how does this explain anything about ‘the detective’ as a character type?”

  “Green, tell me: isn’t there a ‘dangerous’ school of thought that you’ve left out? One that was prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when detective stories really came into their own as a genre?”

  “Yes, hundreds I’m sure. But perhaps you are thinking of Marxism?”

  “Precisely. In the Golden Age of detective stories, most famously including the stories of Sherlock Holmes, the basic premise is that there are dark, violent secrets under the genteel veneer of upper-class English society. Holmes does not simply find a truth that some guilty party tries to hide—by finding an ugly truth in high society, he reveals the far more dangerous truth that the ruling class is not fundamentally better than or different from the lower classes. He is in danger because he goes up against criminals, but he is dangerous because he goes up against the idea that those who are privileged in society are better than those who are downtrodden.”

  “Ah, but surely there are plenty of detective stories where the guilty persons are career criminals, or other ‘outsiders’ . . .”

  “Yes—like the more distinctly American genre of hard-boiled detectives and film noir. If the idea that our society is a just society were being supported, it is true that the criminal would be from a ‘seedy’ element in society, as he often is in these stories. But tell me, is the detective part of established authority?”

  “No, I suppose not. Usually, the detective is a PI—and if not, then he is a police officer who rebels against authority; a ‘cop who plays by his own rules’.”

  “And so here, the claim is that the established power in society—in this case, the police force—is not able to fix society, and only a detective who acts as an outsider can get to the truth. So the hardboiled detective is in danger because he goes against society’s undesirables, but he is dangerous because he shows us that authority cannot deliver on its promise. Stories about by-thebook police work or FBI investigations are thrillers, not detective stories—only the detective, as an outsider, can represent how ideologically dangerous seeking knowledge is.”

  “So, even though these genres are quite different in their mood and their subject matter, in either case the detective is a dangerous figure because he shows that society is unjust, or unjustified.”

  “Yes, Green, you’ve quite got it. And, in that way, ‘A Scandal in Thebes’ never was a detective story, but more simply a tragedy. Oedipus’s story tells this ugly historical truth, but the story is itself part of this social control.” Wittkower paused for a moment, pressing his fingertips together, an abstracted look on his face. “The Oedipus myth speaks the truth when it depicts the foundation of society as a crime. How could the founding of a society, in which some rule and others are ruled, be fair or honorable, when there would not have been any rules or justice agreed to by all before that society existed? And then the myth that the poor and disadvantaged are lazy, or undeserving, or genetically inferior; all this is the alibi and the cover-up.”

  Wittkower sat up, elbows perched against his knees. “Oedipus is a tragic figure because he knows the truth, that society is based on crime, and he suffers from and regrets this forbidden knowledge. In the story this is also expressed in the sexual crime of incest, to represent how forbidden this knowledge is, and how shameful it is to desire this knowledge. And this is what makes Oedipus’s story a tragedy: the audience is meant to identify with him, and to suffer with him, and through that, to be prevented from rebelling against society’s injustices themselves. Aristotle called this ‘catharsis’; I prefer to call it ‘oppression’ and ‘ideological enforcement’. Oedipus questions society’s foundations, and discovers a truth he cannot bear—and so we are told never to question society’s foundations, so we do not discover the truth which society cannot bear.”

  I sat back and considered this novel perspective on a play I have long known. Wittkower, though, had not quite finished his account. “The detective story though, my dear Doctor Green, is no tragedy. The detective suffers in a way from his knowledge. He becomes an outsider, but often he is as much an outsider from his unusual abilities to see the truth as he is from his possession of such dangerous knowledge. He is, on the whole though, an appealing and romantic character rather than a warning
and cautionary figure, and the rise of the detective story may be a sign that a culture is becoming increasingly open to criticism from within.”

  “The detective story is on the whole dangerous and liberal, while the thriller is typically conservative or reactionary.”

  “Perhaps, Green, perhaps. Now, Doctor, you spent time in Afghanistan. What is the view of the detective in Asian traditions of inquiry?”

  “An apt reference for the flow of ancient ideas, perhaps from Mesopotamia to all directions, into Europe and India through Afghanistan. Somewhere along the way speakers of Proto-Indo-European languages must have bade farewell in groups as classical Greek and Latin bear marked resemblances to Sanskrit. They carried, I venture, the seeds of European and Asian inquiry. In the case of India, we might call Vyasa the primal detective as he appears in the earliest of Indian literature, tentatively dated to around 1700 B.C.E., and a man of danger as well.”

  “I’ve never heard of this sleuth Vyasa. Pray continue. What was his most renowned case?”

  “Let us say it was ‘A Case of Identity’. Hereby he established the grounds for three millennia of dangerous detective work that followed. Aiming high, Vyasa set about to hear the cosmic sound a thousand years before Pythagoras.”

 

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