Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

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Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Page 38

by Josef Steiff


  Egon, Ray, and to a lesser extent, Peter, fall into the category of the desocialized, spending the bulk of their time in scientific research and experimentation rather than engaging with the media. Winston, on the other hand, is the everyman of the series—the only Ghostbuster who has not earned a doctorate and is not a scientist. (Although Winston does obtain a PhD at some point between the two films and the 2009 crossplatform video game from Atari, he is not a doctor at this point in the Ghostbusters timeline.)

  Recall in the original film that it was not a passion for the paranormal that compelled Winston to respond to the Ghostbusters’ help wanted ad. When asked during his interview if he believed in “UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster, and the theory of Atlantis,” Winston diplomatically responded, “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.” Winston is willing to work a job for which he has no passion simply for the monetary gain, and despite being a religious man, is reluctant to believe anything outside of his sensory experience or that which the media maintains to be truth. He’s an average member of the modern social order and is therefore the most attuned to the media and the simulacra it perpetuates. Thus it is Winston who necessarily identifies the entities so in fitting with media-saturated simulacra.

  Stepping outside of the text, we see that the Holmes simulacrum present in “Elementary My Dear Winston” is indeed the prevailing depiction of the character in the media at large. As a result, the masses have come to accept the simulacrum as the referent for the reality of Holmes. Thus, the simulacrum has taken precedence over the reality of Doyle’s writings. When this occurs and simulacra become “more real than the real” in the public eye, reality is replaced by an order of the hyperreal.

  I Have a Radical Idea

  The theory of hyperreality is rooted in one of the fundamental concepts of postmodern philosophy, which asserts that universal truth is an impossibility. According to most postmodern thinkers, including Baudrillard, one of the key factors in this is the power of the media, which deals solely in simulations, to subjectively shape society’s perceptions through indoctrination.

  Consider once more the Holmes simulacrum: a distinguished gentleman and self-made sleuth, and again, tall, thin, with deerstalker cap, Inverness cape, and calabash pipe. Within media texts such as “Elementary My Dear Winston,” these are but the signs of Holmes, perpetually referring back to previous mediated texts’ simulations of Holmes rather than Doyle’s writing. And it is this media saturation that allows the simulacrum to subsist. Furthermore, consider how often Holmes and other canon characters appear on television alone, compared to how often the average person picks up a volume of Doyle’s original works. The Guinness Book of World Records cites Holmes as the single most-portrayed character on screen. As such, modern society’s increased reliance on visual media over print has allowed the simulacrum to become the prevailing representation of the character, creating a hyperreality.

  Likewise, in “Elementary My Dear Winston,” when the enigma of the simulacral entities’ existence is posed to Egon, he proposes the theory that they are in fact “belief made manifest.” Pursuing this theory further, Egon speculates that because so many millions of people believe in the simulacral forms of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and the Hound of the Baskervilles, they have achieved a “quasi-reality.”

  Replace Egon’s chosen prefix of “quasi-” with “hyper-” and the concept is the same. These simulacra, empowered by the belief of the media-saturated masses, have murdered the reality that they were fiction and replaced that reality with their own existence. “Murder” is the term predominantly employed by Baudrillard when referring to the process of a simulacrum usurping a reality as referent. It personifies the simulacrum violently overthrowing the order of the real, emphasizing the way in which simulacra can quite literally take on lives of their own. However, the ramifications of this murder are far more devastating than the destruction of their fictional standing.

  Here we must take a leap of faith with Egon’s theory, for it is a stretch to believe that millions believe in Moriarty or the Hound, neither of which is defined by an identifiable simulacrum. The Watson in this episode does adhere to a Dr. Watson simulacrum, which depicts him as being shorter than Holmes, often round, and always with a mustache and a bowler hat—the perfect foil to the Holmes simulcarum. But there is no Professor Moriarty or Hound of the Baskervilles simulacrum as such.

  Although the inspiration for the Hound came to Doyle from British folktales of black, phantom hounds, it has failed to evolve into a simulacrum. The Hound usually appears as a dog with a dark coat of fur, but it alternates between black and brown, with the breed of dog also fluctuating between the average hunting hound and something more akin to a wolf. However, in “Elementary My Dear Watson,” the animators took major artistic liberties with this already extremely loose model, depicting the Hound as a bright yellow, lizard-like beast with an exposed rib cage; a spiked, red collar; and additional spikes protruding from its shoulders and forehead.

  As for Holmes’s arch-nemesis, Moriarty is very rarely depicted the same way twice. In fact, the lack of a Moriarty model is so prevalent that the writers of Animaniacs lampooned the villain for being model-less by depicting him as a kilted Scotsman in a sombrero piloting a flying machine. Moriarty is depicted in yet another unique form in “Elementary My Dear Winston,” looking curiously like Batman’s Solomon Grundy in a top hat. Later in the episode, a woman refers to this Moriarty as “Dr. Jekyll over there. Or was it Mr. Hyde?”, indicating that even Robert Louis Stevenson’s creations are more consistently simulated than Moriarty.

  Murder with a Side of Hyperreal

  Using “Elementary My Dear Winston” as a case study in the effects of hyperreality, let’s assume that everything within the world of The Real Ghostbusters is real at the outset of the episode, save for the hyperrealizations of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and the Hound. Again, the reality murdered by these simulacra is the reality that they were fictional characters. As a result, they take on forms that are at once insubstantial yet “more real than real” as they can shift their molecular consistency from wholly insubstantial to completely solid at will, preventing the real from harming them. As such, the Ghostbusters’ proton packs have no effect on the hyperreal specters, illustrating that once a hyperreality comes to be, the real is rendered powerless against it. After all, recall, hyperreality is the result of simulacra transcending reality—taking precedence over the real.

  With but a single hyperreality identified, a flaw becomes apparent in our initial assumption about the Ghostbusters’ universe. It’s impossible, given the existence of the hyperrealities, to presuppose the presence of any definable realities within the world of The Real Ghostbusters. According to Baudrillard, when one simulacrum achieves hyperreal status, destroying the line between fact and fiction, the realistic standing of all other orders becomes indeterminable. True and false are rendered dubious distinctions; for once an order of the hyperreal is established, anything can become truth, no matter how unlikely or fantastic, so long as the masses believe in it. Thus, the classification of realities is contingent on the most fickle of authorities: human perception. The problem that faces those living in an order of the hyperreal is that anything they perceive to be a reality may in fact be a hyperreality. This creates a paradox wherein, although this person may be able to identify any number of hyperrealities, they can never be completely certain that the truths they invest in are not in fact hyperrealities facilitated by their own beliefs. As we’ll see, this paradox of perception plagues our own society in no small part thanks to Sherlock Holmes.

  From a distanced analytical vantage point, “Elementary My Dear Winston” appears to be a harmless exercise in realizing the catastrophic possibilities of simulation through Saturday morning cartoons. However, it would be more prudent to view the text as reflexive of the world at large, repr
esenting all of reality in today’s media-driven society. Even in this “age of information,” a quick Google search reveals that a constant debate persists surrounding Holmes’s fictional standing. But this is no new trend, for further research reveals that Holmes achieved hyperreal status shortly after his creation. Accounts tell of numerous Britons in Doyle’s time attempting to employ the services of Holmes and Watson (just as our ill-informed DI did in the opening of this text); and upon the publication of Holmes’s death at the Reichenbach Falls in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” many Britons were seen wearing black mourning bands to work the next day in honor of the fallen detective (Sian Ellis, “On the Trail of Sherlock Holmes”).

  The prominence of the Holmes simulacrum in the media has continued to grow ever since. Shockingly, its hyperrealistic proportions have come to mirror those of the simulacral Holmes in “Elementary My Dear Winston.” In 2008, a poll commissioned by UKTV Gold revealed that the speculative ascendancy of Sherlock Holmes detailed in “Elementary My Dear Winston” has indeed occurred in our own universe. The results of this poll, based on a series of questions posed to three thousand Britons regarding their perception of persons both real and fictional, showed that a staggering fifty-eight percent of the sample group believed Holmes to have been a real person. More people were found to believe in Holmes, in fact, than the real-life Twelfth Century figure, King Richard the Lionheart (forty-seven percent believed him to have been mythical), showing conversely how the reality of an actual person’s existence may be murdered, rendering them fictional. Thus, the Holmes of our universe has become hyperreal as a result of media-saturated simulacra in an identical fashion to the Holmes of the Ghostbusters’ universe.

  Recall that, according to Baudrillard’s theories, it takes but a single breach of reality for the whole of reality to be called into question. Such is the “murderous power of images” discussed by Baudrillard, which necessarily invalidates all of reality (p. 5). And certainly the ascendancy of the Holmes simulacrum in our universe represents a grievous breach of the order of the real. This is not to say that the Holmes simulacrum was the earliest simulacrum. Baudrillard cited capital as the earliest example. However, as Baudrillard asserted, since an order of the hyperreal is one without facts, it is also, by proxy, without causality. It then follows that within such an order, effects are not necessarily preceded by causes, making the historical precedence of capital irrelevant. Therefore, regardless of which simulacra achieved hyperreal status first, all simulacra are equally responsible for the murder of reality, including Sherlock Holmes.

  Case Closed

  This lack of a universal truth is a fundamental aspect of the postmodern condition. But how do we function in such a world? What we need, ironically, is a good detective. After all, the archetype of the detective is that of the analytic mind that discovers a reality hidden beneath a surface reality. In terms of this chapter, the detective is a philosopher—Detective Baudrillard, who solved the case of the hyperreal and discovered that at the heart of what we call reality is a series of potential simulacra undermining the very foundation of our reality. Whilst this appears vital to our comprehension of the world around us, it honestly doesn’t do us a fat lot of good, for the question remains, how are we to operate in light of this information?

  Certainly we cannot continue living as though everything we believe is empirical fact. However, we cannot simply adopt an attitude of universal skepticism either; nor can we live out our lives in despair. Surely there is a reasonable way to acclimate ourselves to this postmodern reality, and to this end we must enlist the services of a great detective, someone who can find a truth beneath our very lack of it. Until then, it’s important to remain humble about that which we individually define as reality. Everything we think we know was potentially negated over a century ago by a make-believe drug addict in an earflapped traveling cap.

  Thus our mystery is solved, and the truth of reality’s demise is revealed. In a shocking twist that might have concluded a dimestore pulp novel, the murderer was in fact the very detective who may have otherwise been charged with solving the case. Unfortunately, the Sherlock Holmes simulacrum, along with its accomplice, the Dr. Watson simulacrum, are still at large in the hyperreal, moving from one media text to another. They appear often with different visages, but their distinctive attire and builds render these disguises transparent.

  Chapter 32

  The Game Is Still Afoot!

  Sean C. Duncan

  “But what’s the game, Mr. Holmes—what’s the game?”

  “Ay, what’s the game?” my friend repeated thoughtfully.

  —The Valley of Fear, Chapter 5

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Canon comprises fifty-six stories and four novels that have proven to be both durable and surprisingly malleable over the past century. Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson have thrived across a number of media, from faithful renditions by creators who have striven for verisimilitude with Doyle’s works (say, the now-classic Granada series starring Jeremy Brett or the Soviet productions starring Vasily Livanov) to radical re-envisionings of the events and settings of Doyle’s stories (Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution or BBC’s Sherlock, set in the modern day). Through these many versions and pastiches, there remains a recurring tension—that the Holmes Canon is at once both classic and modern, fixed and changing, created by Doyle and expanded by others through the playful exploration of the Canon that has come to be known as “The Game.”

  Living and Breathing

  The Game is one of the defining activities of a century’s worth of interest in Sherlock Holmes, and can be described as a communal and competitive intellectual exercise based on the conceit that Holmes and Watson were actual, real people, living, breathing, and solving mysteries in the London of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. Perhaps not such a strange idea today, in the era of Twilight fan fiction and enormous Wikis devoted to Lost, but in the early decades of the twentieth century, The Game was a unique way for fans of the Holmes stories to express their love for the material, flex their intellectual “muscles” on problems of interpretation, and to collaborate on making meaning of the worlds Doyle created in his fiction.

  Fans and scholars of Holmes have played The Game for many reasons, including to reconcile the Canon’s many inconsistencies—why, pray tell, does Watson’s wife calls him “James” rather than John in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”? Or, who in the world might a real “King of Bohemia” have been, in “A Scandal in Bohemia”? Taking as an assumption that Holmes and Watson were real people, proponents of The Game have striven to flesh out answers to questions such as these, laboring long and hard to make sense of both the Canon’s conflicting moments, as well as meaningfully tying the stories’ narratives to actual events of the era (say, the Jack the Ripper murders, or early developments in forensic science). The Game, you might be able to tell, is as much about linking the Canon to what people do, know, and believe outside of Holmes fandom as it is an engagement with Doyle’s stories and novels.

  The Game has shaped the experiences of entire generations of readers of Holmes, with some of the most prominent Game-players identified within the notes in the best annotated editions (Baring-Gould’s classic 1968 annotated editions, Leslie Klinger’s recent New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, and Klinger’s more exhaustive Sherlock Holmes Reference Library editions). And, though explicitly a “game” and an overt intellectual exercise regardless of how serious it may seem (or how dryly its players may describe it), The Game’s influence has shaped the current resurgence of interest in Holmes. Modern Holmes variations illustrate the subtle ways Doyle’s creation is still being amended, challenged, and expanded, even in recent Holmes adaptations, say, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films (such as when Watson’s disappearing “bull pup” mentioned in A Study in Scarlet is addressed), and Sherlock’s “A Study in Pink” (which gives us an explanation of what happened to poor James Phillimore, who disappeared after returning home to retri
eve a forgotten umbrella, first mentioned but not explained in “The Problem of Thor Bridge”).

  That The Game has been influential and an important part of being a Holmes scholar, aficionado, and fan seems to be incontrovertible on one level—we’re still talking about it a century after its inception, after all.

  Yet, we’re still left making sense of Game-players, why they do what they do, and what it all means. How can investigating The Game illustrate the ways in which the active involvement of dedicated readers has fundamentally changed the ways that fans of many media make meaning of texts? Can The Game serve as a key example of changing epistemological stances toward media, and give us insight into theories of knowledge? And, what might The Game tell us about games and the role of identity play in everyday interaction with these stories?

  The . . . Game . . . Is . . .

  First, to unpack The Game, we need to address the notion of the term “game” itself, and think a bit about how an understanding of games might give us insight into its Sherlockian namesake. Most likely building off the famous “The game is afoot!” line from “The Abbey Grange,” itself a reference to Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part I, Sherlockians quickly adopted the terminology of a “game” to describe their intellectual enterprise. As it was speculative, recreational, and, well, fun, why not? The playful exploration of the Holmes Canon was one for which the term “game” served to both clarify as well as deepen the meaning of interaction with Doyle’s texts.

 

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