Abstract
According to a dominant strand in Sherlock Holmes scholarship, Doyle’s detective stories served as a cultural anesthetic in the Victorian era, reassuring readers that all crimes could be cleared up and all riddles solved. By analyzing “A Case of Identity,” the chapter shows that Doyle does not simply posit Holmes’s powers of observation and deduction, but instead subtly asserts the fiction of such powers. Thus, for the attentive reader, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes cannot function as a cultural sedative, but instead exposes the fictionality on which such sedatives are founded. Following this, the author develops the import of fictionality and the imagination in sustaining the image of Holmes’s superior deductive powers through an interpretation of Anthony Harvey’s 1971 comedy They Might Be Giants.
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Notes
- 1.
“A Scandal in Bohemia” appeared in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892); “The Yellow Face” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894).
- 2.
See especially Botz and Clausen.
- 3.
See also Symons (10). Catherine Belsey motivates the stories’ affirmation of the powers of reason and science not as a social need, but, instead, as reflecting “the widespread optimism characteristic of their period concerning the comprehensive power of positive science” (383). Belsey concedes, however, that the belief in reason is not unequivocal (386). Uwe Wirth has shown the various forms of guesswork and lack of knowledge that are crucial to Sherlock Holmes’s detective work. In the end, however, Wirth remains in line with the tradition of scholarship quoted above. Wirth claims that the Sherlock Holmes stories serve to propagate the then new scientific dogma of deduction (303–4).
- 4.
The limits of Holmes’s reasoning powers and Watson’s attempts to cover these limits are a central topic in the recent film Mr. Holmes (2015).
- 5.
The film is based on the play They Might Be Giants by James Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay. The play premiered in the Royal Theatre Stratford East in London where it “was not a success, running only for the scheduled four weeks” (Barnes 216). Alan Barnes points out that Harvey’s film is “by no means the first film to present a ‘fantasist’ Sherlock Holmes” (217). Earlier examples include Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Karl Hartl’s Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war (1937).
- 6.
“A Case of Identity” was published in The Strand Magazine in September 1891, following only “A Scandal in Bohemia” (July 1891) and “The Red-Headed League” (August 1891). In the subsequent year, “A Case of Identity” appeared as the third story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. Prior to these stories, Doyle had already published two Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890).
- 7.
Lesage’s novel, which is itself already modeled on Luis Vélez Guevara’s 1641 novel El diablo cojuelo, was taken up repeatedly throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in satirical novels and plays. See Meglin (294); for a review of nineteenth-century writers who allude to Le Diable boiteux in their work see Saint-Amour.
- 8.
A Study in Scarlet was first printed in Beeton’s Christmas Annual; The Sign of Four was initially published in Lippincott’s Magazine.
- 9.
“A Case of Identity” is the third of a total of fifty-six stories.
- 10.
For the history and cultural context of this method in the late nineteenth century see Ginzburg (7–10, 22–23).
- 11.
There are, of course, several incidents in the canon where Watson points directly to Holmes’s failures, most prominently in A Scandal in Bohemia (see Caprettini, who possibly overstates the exceptional character of Holmes’s failure in this story) and The Adventure of the Yellow Face.
- 12.
Jim Barloon, in contrast, maintains that Holmes’s conclusion in this case is “based on minute observation and iron reasoning” (39).
- 13.
It has repeatedly been noted that Holmes’s deductions are not nearly as inevitable as they are made to appear. See Wirth and Eco (217).
- 14.
Holmes fails a second a time in the same conversation with Miss Sutherland. Again, Miss Sutherland doesn’t notice Holmes’s wrong prediction. When Holmes says to his client “Your opinion is, then, that some unforeseen catastrophe has occurred to him [the fiancé]?” (Doyle 195), Miss Sutherland answers in the affirmative, although she subsequently tells Holmes that she was not thinking of an “unforeseen,” but eminently foreseen catastrophe: “Yes, Sir. I believe that he [the fiancé] foresaw some danger, or else he would not have talked so. And then I think that what he foresaw happened” (195).
- 15.
Ronald Knox listed some striking inconsistencies both between the different stories and within the individual stories already in 1910 in his famous “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” See also Belsey and Hodgson.
- 16.
We may remember that Rex Stout argued already in 1941 for a female identity of Watson.
- 17.
In his essay on “The Speckled Band,” John A. Hodgson discusses the detective work that is required of the readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Disregarding the fact that snakes are deaf and cannot climb ropes, the murder of Julia Stoner in “The Speckled Band” is committed, as Hodgson points out, precisely by a venomous snake that is – or so Holmes explains it – lured by music to climb on a rope out of its victim’s room. Hodgson interprets these factual flaws in the storyline as a literary “crime,” deliberately committed by the writer so that the reader can detect it. The story thus restages the detective work that is its content – Holmes detects a crime – in the relation between reader and text. See Hodgson (345).
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Wagner, M. (2017). Sherlock Holmes and the Fiction of Agency. In: Naidu, S. (eds) Sherlock Holmes in Context. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_8
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