by Josef Steiff
Sherlock Holmes loves truth for its own sake. This is the essence of his spiritual core. He doesn’t want publicity, wealth or accolades although it must be said that he’s not above a bit of pride in his abilities. Watson tells us, “I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.” But this is different than seeking truth or justice for recognition, and in fact Holmes seems to be quite the opposite in that regard. Watson says in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,”
“. . . I have continually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his somber and cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation.”
The Awakened One
Whether consciously or unconsciously Holmes appears to be following The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali in his methods and techniques of deduction. When attention, meditation, and contemplation are exercised together, he achieves perfectly concentrated meditation. Holmes has the ability to set aside his personal limitations and judgment of his perceiving consciousness and can open himself to what can be called the All-consciousness to decipher his dilemmas. This is the place where his discoveries come from and where his spark of genius ignites.
We can’t know if Holmes followed any particular spiritual path or whether he was a Buddhist or simply an agnostic as the lapsed Catholic Doyle defined himself. Later in his life Doyle became an avid Spiritualist believing in and promoting the supernatural, something Holmes disproves again and again. As did his friend Houdini, whom he took on in just such a public debate in the press. His desire to believe in charlatans and to even publish statements claiming Houdini was himself supernatural caused him to lose that friendship.
But what are we to make of the fact that Doyle was familiar with Buddhism and wrote a book called The Mystery of Cloomber the year after the first Sherlock Holmes novel was published, a mystery about a man who murders a Buddhist priest and is then avenged by his students (chelas)? It’s a strange story about how the three chelas let the man live for forty years with an astral bell tolling over his head to keep him in misery. The priest’s name is Ghoolab Shah, a Hindu-Muslim name, and the three students show up wearing red fezzes, so Doyle may not have had any direct experience with any actual Buddhists, but he did document in his autobiography that he’d read A.P. Sinnett’s book, Esoteric Buddhism, which documents the life of the Buddha and his reincarnations and also introduces the laws of karma.
The word “Buddha” means the “awakened one” and this may have been what Doyle was thinking when he described Sherlock Holmes in “The Veiled Lodger” as sitting upon the floor “like some strange Buddha, with crossed legs, the huge books all around him, and one open on his knees.” The yoga sutras suggest that the conscious cultivation of genius, whether the possessor recognizes it or not, is for certain the power and the vision of a spiritual seeker. Sherlock Holmes may not have consciously recognized that his spirit was full of reverence, of self-less devotion to truth, of humility—that his practice of constant awareness was mindfulness and rooted in the divine.
THE TRACING OF FOOTSTEPS
Chapter 28
Why Sherlock Is Like a Good Hip-Hop Song
Rachel Michaels
“I’m Sherlock Holmes, the world’s only consulting detective. I’m not going to go into detail about how I do what I do because chances are you wouldn’t understand. If you’ve got a problem you want me to solve then contact me. Interesting cases only please.
This is what I do:
1.) I observe everything.
2.) From what I observe, I deduce everything.
3.) When I’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how mad it might seem, must be the truth.
If you need assistance, contact me and we’ll discuss its potential.”
—the website of Sherlock Holmes (www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk)
Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson are often solely associated with the British Victorian era and its trappings—gas lights, horse carts, telegrams, petticoats, sexual prudery, the class system; sort of like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol but with more sensational crimes.
But take them out of the 1890s and into the 21st Century, and we find Holmes and Watson still doing quite well. They have starred in scores of scholarly books (including this one), the popular Guy Ritchie steampunk-influenced Sherlock Holmes films, and the BBC television series entitled, simply, Sherlock. This series in particular explores the question many Holmes fans have asked themselves in the middle of the night: WWSHD? If Sherlock Holmes was here, now, what would he do?
Sherlock, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and Martin Freeman as John, speculates that Holmes’s methods and personality would be a great fit for the present day, with such newfangled contraptions as laptops, the Internet, and cellular phones. One hundred and twenty years after the first stories were published, we still need Holmes’s unique abilities. Though the times have changed, the essential characters of Holmes and Watson have not. The way their stories are told, however, is quite different now from the 1890’s. While Victorian readers enjoyed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in the monthly magazine The Strand (tagline: “A monthly magazine costing sixpence but worth a shilling”), modern readers have a multitude of media to get our Sherlock Holmes fix, including books, magazines, television, film, comics, websites, webseries, e-books, interactive tablets, and video games.
Not only are the ways we access the stories much more varied, we also have a century’s worth of Sherlock Holmes stories and images to consciously or unconsciously reference. It’s well documented that Sherlock Holmes stars in more movies that any other character in the world; the Guinness Book of World Records lists two hundred and eleven films with seventy-five actors playing Holmes. The world’s only consulting detective has starred in eight television series, including his canine incarnation as Sherlock Hound (1984); Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (1999), his animated venture into the future; as well as the great 1980s Granada series with Jeremy Brett. Both Sherlock and a comic series called Victorian Undead (“Sherlock Holmes vs. ZOMBIES!”) appeared in 2010. Conan Doyle’s stories have also had innumerable effects on subsequent incarnations of detective and thriller genres in fiction, films, and television.
Conan Doyle’s original tales are straightforward, self-contained, and linear; they begin with a problem and end with its triumphant answer. The language is clear and sufficiently descriptive; the gentle hand of Dr. Watson guides us through all of the story’s stages, from the client’s first interactions with Holmes to the resolution of the case. Holmes applies his methods (“Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth”) to the puzzle at hand, the mystery is subsequently resolved, and the reader finishes the story feeling that reason can, and in fact, does, rule the world.
For better or worse, the twenty-first century doesn’t seem as simple. Our stories are told in ways that combine many different elements; we seem more mixed up. We blend various fragments—stories, visual techniques, genres, and media themselves—into innovative combinations, making new “originals” out of pieces that had not previously been linked. These stories are often told in a non-linear fashion, as well, making the viewer an active part of the process by having to piece together the narrative.
Think of films by Quentin Tarantino—they contain chunks of spaghetti westerns, kung fu, WWII espionage movies, stories of revenge, grindhouse, and American twentieth-century pop music. These movies blend these disparate sources into new, individual works. The material that comes out of this blending is called a pastiche, and once you start looking for them, you see that they are everywhere. Sherlock Holmes is involved in quite a few, including Sherlock (and the comics with the ZOMBIES!), and he would enjoy discovering his new adventur
es in the twenty-first century.
A Case of Pastiche
Postmodernism, like Victorianism and modernism before it, can be studied through its cultural output of stories, images, music, and media. Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in The Cultural Turn that one of postmodernism’s significant features is “the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture.” Postmodernists, Jameson continues, “no longer ‘quote’ such texts . . . they incorporate them, to the point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw” (emphasis mine). Our immense backlog of culture, from opera to comics, has become democratized and blended together. The modern world allows us to pick and choose strands of stories and images from across time; the playing field is now level.
Sherlock knowingly combines ingredients of prior works with new elements to create a unique work: a pastiche. This word is taken from the French language, and was based on the Italian word pasticcio, itself from the late Latin word for “paste,” pasta. This multi-lingual word with multi-layered meanings is appropriate to describe the incorporation of different elements into a single whole. The creators of the pastiche are not only mixing together different pieces from their subconscious, they are consciously referencing and incorporating those elements into their own work.
We’re surrounded by pastiches, from television shows (The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Daily Show, Lost, Glee) and movies (Pulp Fiction, Moulin Rouge!, Marie Antoinette, Carlos, Repo! The Genetic Opera) to genres of music—including hip hop, dub, dubstep, and other forms of electronic, rock, jazz, and pop.
An excellent example of pastiche is hip-hop music, a genre which can combine original beats and spoken or sung melodies with any combination of sounds sampled from other sources. Hip-hop songs are not “adaptations” of other works if they feature a Stevie Wonder horn sample, say, or a bit of a Hans Zimmer film score; they are something unique that has been constructed through the use of different parts. A pastiche is like Frankenstein’s creature: sewn together to create a new being.
The most current—and trendy—term for this mixing of different pieces into new combinations is “mash-up.” These days, anything that combines two different traditions is called a mash-up; a New York Times search of the hyphenated word in their pages includes over ten thousand uses of the term in the past thirty days as I write this, including as a description of the 2011 Oscars, various recipes, music videos, concerts, operas. A mash-up is a pulverized version of pastiche.
The Scientific Use of the Imagination
Sherlock frequently uses technology to illustrate this continuity throughout its first season. Watson’s memoirs have become “The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson.” Sherlock uses texts and emails as the nineteenth century’s Holmes uses telegrams—to communicate and receive information to solve a case. Both the Victorian and modern Sherlocks have a detailed map of London in their heads; now such systems are called GPS. Sherlock uses his PDA for information as Holmes scours the newspaper searching for information on weather conditions, possible cases, and clues.
As impressive as these toys can be, though, Sherlock is very explicit on one point: that modern technology aids Sherlock’s deductions by providing data, but they alone do not solve the crimes. If the newer technology were solely responsible for the deductions, then even Lestrade could solve these cases. It is, of course, Holmes’s singular ability to see a narrative chain from the data, and to draw connections between bits of information that seem otherwise unconnected.
Sherlock and John—we call them by their first names when we’re talking about the new Sherlock series—still also investigate the old-fashioned way—by breaking into apartments, going to the library, visiting museums, and dodging bullets, with each mini-adventure developing their friendship. The Baker Street Irregulars, once a band of street urchins happy to get a shilling per day and a guinea (roughly one Pound Sterling) for an important clue, have evolved into the use of what Sherlock calls his “homeless network,” whose investigative fee has become £50. Fees and technological tools may have changed, but Sherlock Holmes’s ability to solve seemingly impossible cases has remained the same.
Eccentric or Sociopath: You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato?
How can we differentiate “postmodernism” from “modernism” or even “Victorianism?” Can society really have changed so drastically in only 150 years? Fredric Jameson answers this question by suggesting that different time periods do not involve total changes of content but rather a “restructuring of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that have been dominant again become secondary.” Different values and interests become more prominent in one period, then become less culturally relevant in the next. Tendencies present in Conan Doyle’s original stories (Holmes’s misanthropy and superiority complex) are now played up and exaggerated to fit contemporary sensibilities. This is most evident in Sherlock’s portrayal of its main character as a self-proclaimed sociopath (a personality disorder featuring extremely antisocial attitudes and lack of conscience).
Sherlock stays true to Conan Doyle’s portrayals of Holmes, with certain amplifications of his eccentricities that reflect a modern sensibility. Like Ritchie’s films, the quirks and antisocial tendencies of Sherlock are the focus of his characterization. Sherlock describes himself as “a highly functioning sociopath,” and he is indeed a difficult roommate and colleague. A recurring point of discussion between Sherlock and John is Sherlock’s lack of empathy towards, well, anyone, as is his insistence that he solves crimes not to help others but to avoid being crushed by his own boredom. The Sherlock in this series is younger than has been presented before, and is accordingly both full of himself and highly concerned with others’ respect for his abilities. John is able to guide Sherlock in how normal people think and how to speak to them—valuable skills when trying to gather the type of information that cannot be provided through an email.
While the oddities of Sherlock Holmes are certainly mentioned in the original stories—from the seven per cent solution to his lack of knowledge of the solar system to his mood swings—Conan Doyle presents them with more subtlety. The intervening century of psychology, modernism, and antiheroes (including fellow detective Sam Spade, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, and serial killer Dexter Morgan) have led to a greater level of acceptance (even expectation) of a flawed hero. Other parts of Conan Doyle’s character can now be amplified in Sherlock, fitting with common heroes of the present day.
A Study in . . . Pink!
The first three episodes of Sherlock, “A Study in Pink,” “The Blind Banker,” and “The Great Game,” are vivid examples of pastiche. “A Study in Pink” is particularly instructive in the differences between a straight-up adaptation and a postmodernist pastiche. The Jeremy Brett Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series is a straight-up adaptation—each episode’s goal is to be a line-by-line duplication of Conan Doyle’s stories, from dialogue to plot to costumes. “A Study in Pink,” however, freely adapts from many different sources, as the title explains. “A Study in Pink” uses “A Study in Scarlet” as its basic text but tweaks it so much it becomes something different entirely.
The episode begins very much like A Study in Scarlet, with military doctor John Watson returning home from the war in Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. He runs into Stamford, a colleague from medical school, who introduces him to Sherlock Holmes after Watson mentions he is looking for lodging. Sherlock is then introduced to John (and the audience) in the laboratory at St. Bart’s, where he is beating corpses with a stick to verify how bruises may be produced after death. He and John plan to meet the next day to visit the flat in Baker Street.
So far, so not a pastiche. This sequence of events in Sherlock is a direct adaptation of A Study in Scarlet and not a combination of different elements intermingling to create a new text. A “str
aight” updated adaptation of A Study in Scarlet would have continued in the previous vein. Sherlock would be called in to investigate a male murder victim covered in someone else’s blood in Brixton. But the crime takes a different turn in “A Study in Pink;” the victim is female and is found in a shocking pink tailored suit. Sherlock is now in pastiche territory.
Cumberbatch’s Sherlock uses a variety of tools to investigate the empty room where the body was found. He examines the body’s fingers, jewelry, coat, and stockings with a magnifying glass and uses his PDA to obtain weather information. He systematically determines the five letters “Rache” scratched into the floor next to the body to be most of the word “Rachel.” Viewers familiar with Conan Doyle’s story will recognize the “Rache” element. In A Study in Scarlet, the police determine “Rache” to be the word “Rachel” but Holmes establishes it as “Rache,” the German word for revenge. The situation is now reversed in “A Study in Pink”: Sherlock recognizes the word as “Rachel” (later to be determined as the victim’s email password) while the police come to the impractical solution of an angry note having been left in German.
Based on the state of her clothing and the day’s UK weather forecast, Sherlock concludes that the victim is a media executive coming from the popular television center Cardiff, Wales. The pink-clad corpse is identified by Sherlock as the fourth victim in a string of serial suicides heavily covered by the British media. This creates a new storyline for the murders and eliminates Conan Doyle’s plot about nefarious Mormons and an oceancrossing act of revenge.