Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  Sherlock crowns himself King of the Carnivalesque.

  Two Bodies—or Two Corpses?

  To be true to Holmes, let’s start with the bodies. Sherlock appears on the scene in an England steeped in centuries of royal tradition. Queen Victoria continues the English political fiction—just as the reigning monarchs before her did—of having “two bodies.” The monarch’s “natural” (physical) body is single, mortal, material, and subject to infirmities, such as decay. It requires care, grooming, dress, modesty, and veneration—the royal treatment. The monarch’s other body—the “body politic”—is collective, immaterial, consists of laws, policies, government, and includes the English people—subjects to the far ends of Empire. It also demands service, loyalty, patriotism, and the deepest veneration. When the Queen’s natural body goes the way of all flesh, the office of Queen continues on in perpetuity through the body politic. The state and its institutions remain a fixed, protected collective—which explains the contradictory shout: “the Queen is dead. Long live the Queen” (Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 7).

  Mikhail Bakhtin, a one-legged, Russian theorist writing under Stalinist rule, also talks about two bodies—not of the monarch, but of the folk. Inspired by the medieval traditions of popular feasts, pageants, fairs, and carnival, Bakhtin identifies what he calls “grotesque realism” in the two folk bodies (Rabelais and His World). A commoner has a “fleeting” mortal body as well as a “collective, ancestral body.” Images of the folk mortal body include anything that degrades, that lowers the “high, spiritual, ideal, and abstract and transfers to the material level.” In other words, the holes, the dips, the jiggling parts: “the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose.” So celebrations (both live and literary) revolve around—what else?—the best things in life (or allusions to them): eating, speech acts, sweating, sneezing, blowing noses, lovemaking, urination, defecation, birth, and death. The line between man and earthly being blurs—orifices are the life of the party. In short, expect a complete liberation of the body.

  Unlike the Queen’s natural body and the body politic, the two folk bodies—mortal and collective—are “indivisible.” The mortal body isn’t a “private, egoistic form,” but an integral part of the whole. Which means that any bodily function of the mortal body, including death, unites the individual to the “universal folk body, representing all the people.” So the folk collective “has a cosmic and an all-people’s character,” and is “growing and renewed” until it becomes “immeasurable . . . in fertility, growth, and a brimming over abundance.” The whole is more than the sum of its (ahem!) holes. This brimming folk collective body revels outside of the Queen’s rule—it thrives in Nature, in the “biocosmic circle of cyclic changes, the phases of nature’s and man’s reproductive life.” Its gods are the changing seasons: sowing, conception, growth, death. The essence of this kind of grotesque realism sports a “double-faced fullness of life”—negation (the death of something old) and affirmation (the birth of something new and better). So the collective romps as a “phenomenon in transformation, a yet unfinished metamorphosis of death and birth, growth and becoming.” The lines between the “body and the world are overcome”: the individual becomes the collective who communes with the cosmos. The folk’s “growing and ever-victorious collective” is the cosmos’s own “flesh and blood.”

  The folk are alive, then dead—but then undead, reborn, always living, always a collective. All for one, one for all. Long live the folk.

  The Body Count Rises

  So how does this apply to our dear Holmes?

  Sherlock Holmes’s London—and England, even to the ends of the Empire—groans in the struggle between the Queen’s royal bodies and the folk’s natural ones. On the one hand are the “serious, unconditional, and indisputable” institutions of the Queen that regulate the body politic. On the other hand are the real lives of the folk—the rising middle class corseted in bourgeois mores, the body’s inborn connection to nature and seasons, the innate desire for liberation, humorous relief, and cosmic expansiveness. The Queen maintains order and decorum by cloaking her physical body in neck to toe modesty—and her body politic in progress, industrialization, and expansion, ensuring that the sun “never sets” on her Empire.

  But Holmes shows us a different view.

  Holmes parades us through tales of one-legged men, poisoned dart-spitting pygmies, ears sent in cardboard boxes, aging fathers who ingest ape serum, snakes that kill daughters, women chained in zoos, beggars with twisted lips, geese that lay blue carbuncles, men who keep court with corpses, pygmysniffing dogs, disfigured women, deranged opium addicts . . . crooked men in every sense of the term. “The more outré and grotesque an incident is,” Sherlock says, “the more carefully it deserves to be examined” (The Hound of the Baskervilles). In an age when the Queen says “light or dark meat” so that no one will have to speak of a fowl’s “breast” or “thigh” in polite company, Sherlock lifts the Victorian petticoat (oh!) and plunges us into the teeming underbelly of the Empire’s grotesque.

  So Who’s the Victim?

  The last time you staged a fake murder (April Fool’s!), dressed up as Lady Irene Adler for Halloween, or crowned yourself King from a trinket found in a Mardi Gras cake, you probably didn’t realize that you, dear Reader, were celebrating centuries-old relics of the carnivalesque—when folk escape from being subjects of authority into a time and space of sheer liberation. The carnivalesque “destroys seriousness, frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities” (Rabelais, p. 49). So this carnival spirit is deeply ambivalent—even subversive—towards official power structures. It defines itself, and invites individuals to define themselves, by unofficial means: laughter.

  For Bakhtin, carnivalesque laughter is “an essential form of truth concerning the world,” and the only power strong enough to oppose the “official tone” of institution. But folk laughter isn’t a giggle, chortle, snort, or guffaw—although these are good starts, and Holmes has his fair share (poor Watson). Rather, it’s a cosmic laughter rooted in a profound celebration of life. Consider it, dear Reader, a deep belly laugh with the cosmos about life itself. Not laughing at or near, but laughing with the order institutions try to put on a life cycle beyond their control.

  The carnivalesque consecrates “inventive freedom”—it liberates from “conventions and established truths, clichés, and all that is humdrum and universally accepted.” In the broadest sense, carnivalesque laughter includes:

  ● communal gatherings in the marketplace—where life and art become one

  ● ritual spectacles—pageants, comic shows, parodies of sacred institutions

  ● comic verbal compositions—parodies of the extracarnival life, oral and written

  ● verbal abuses—curses, oaths, derision, mocking

  ● hierarchies turned upside down—kings debased, clowns crowned

  ● a spirit of disguise—shifting identities, literal or figurative masks

  ● a sense of play—games, riddles, dice, cards, chess, prophecies, soothsaying

  ● timelessness—cosmic temporality, revolutions, seasons

  But it’s difficult to pinpoint the carnivalesque—carnival spirit not only expands into the cosmos, but naturally transgresses boundaries. To define it smells suspiciously of official-ness. How can we contain the uncontainable?

  To consider the carnivalesque, dear Reader, we must be of the carnivalesque spirit. Which means we may set aside reason momentarily (oh!) because we are offered the chance “to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.” When we enter the carnivalesque, we embrace a never-ending process of “becoming and growth”—recognizing that the very nature of being is always and forever incomplete, unfinished, and in a state of change. We must be open to “uncrown” the “prevailing concepts of the world”—the ones the earth itself might shirk off,
in a fit of cosmic, collective folk laughter, in another revolution or two.

  Are you, dear Reader, prepared to topple (or is it tickle) a reigning Queen? Her body politic? Victorian mores? Industrialized time?

  Is Holmes?

  The Adventure of the New Marketplace

  Where do the folk go to escape in Sherlock Holmes’s London?

  For Bakhtin, the center of the carnivalesque is the communal “marketplace”—the town fair, the festival center, the carnival square. Barkers, vendors, hawkers, actors, and clowns shout in cacophony. Speech that sells, speech that tells stories, speech that derides are indistinguishable in the din. All is performance, all a “show.” The marketplace acts as the fulcrum of centripetal and centrifugal forces—it draws everyone in as a “world in itself, the center of everything unofficial,” but also expands out into cosmic, cyclical time by corresponding to feast days, harvests, changes of season, revolutions of the earth. It combines the two folk bodies—mortal and collective, earthly and cosmic. And everyone participates: in the marketplace, actor and spectator are one and the same. It’s not a spectacle seen by the people: the folk “live in it.”

  But Bakhtin’s medieval marketplace is a far, hawking cry from London’s. During Victoria’s reign (1830–1901), London’s population increases from two to six and a half million—the capital of the world’s first industrialized nation and the British Empire. In 1811, the first high-speed press appears; by 1814, The Times is printed on it, inaugurating the age of mass media. Print material—countless newspapers and more than 170 new periodicals by 1860—proliferates through London and sails out through the globe. In it, hawkers, barkers, vendors—in the form of advertisements—sell their wares next to a cacophony of printed personal notices, news reports, society gossip, monographs, and literary and popular fiction. Absent a gathering place for six million people, a new festival is born. Where Victorian industrialization already competes with seasonal time—forcing a five- to six-day work week, with no medieval option of weeks off for seasonal festivals, white-collar Londoners now gather in space and time. They are drawn into a communal, “unofficial,” abstract marketplace—the printed word.

  Consider, dear Reader, how newspapers, journals, periodicals, and other print material litter the floor and the sideboard of 221B (Mrs. Hudson!). Holmes keeps an eye on London, often incognito, from within this print marketplace—watching for crimes (stolen blue carbuncles) and potential clues (monkey thefts). He stays in London even when he’s abroad through print—warning Watson that Lady Frances Carfax is in danger, or knowing it’s safe to return when Colonel Sebastian Moran finally fires his air gun (“The Empty House”). And Holmes decodes secret messages through print—he deciphers what Gennaro signals to Emilia (“The Red Circle”) and outfoxes Valentine Walter’s communications with his accomplice (“The Bruce-Partington Plans”). Sherlock’s anonymous invitations invoke an endless parade through his drawing room, such as when adverts in the evening papers—“Globe, Star, Pall Mall, St. James’s, Evening News, Standard, Echo”—inspire Henry Baker to claim his goose. And, in one telling incident that shows how the new marketplace is life itself, Mr. Horace Harker of the Central Press Syndicate finds himself an almost-victim and reporter of the same crime (“The Six Napoleons”). Holmes himself complains when the newspapers are “sterile”—when his corner of London’s marketplace isn’t bustling (“Silver Blaze”). It’s as if the sun rises and sets on Holmes’s marketplace—so often a case begins with a printed notice of a large pearl or a Red-Headed League, and ends with—EXTRA!—Lestrade or Scotland Yard receiving the credit. And yet it is Holmes, all along, drawing us in and through the new vital media, connecting the unseen dots behind the pica.

  And Watson actively beckons us in to this marketplace—as readers. Against Sherlock’s wishes, Watson publishes the adventures, birthing them into print. Watson uses direct address, “laying facts” before us, the reader. He writes for us, in spite of Sherlock’s perpetual grumblings. Where Holmes (at first) favors “scientific exercise,” Watson gives us “point of view.” Where Holmes prefers “classical demonstration,” Watson shows us “sensational details” that “excite.” Where Holmes would press Watson to “instruct,” Watson clearly chooses to entertain, pitting Holmes as the star (“The Abbey Grange”). Watson draws us in with the intrigue, the excitement, the chase, the riddle, the fun. Perhaps because of Watson’s clever enticements—and the inevitable readership the adventures create—even Holmes has a change of heart. He ends up encouraging Watson to write—and then also uses direct address to pen his own adventure, calling the reader “astute” (“The Blanched Soldier”). So we—along with the original Victorian audience—are not only invited guests to be told a story, but detectives who are challenged to solve the case. Elementary, dear Reader—we are fully-fledged actors in a participatory drama. In this marketplace, we, too, live what we read.

  But Sherlock doesn’t just star in this new marketplace, he revolutionizes it. In 1891, Conan Doyle publishes Sherlock’s Adventures in The Strand—not as serial novels, but as single short stories to be read in “one sitting.” Amidst proliferating periodicals with disconnected stories, for the first time in print history, Doyle focuses on one strong character—our dear Holmes—driving a new, self-contained story written for that particular issue. And The Strand’s circulation increases. This “one-sitting,” cyclical romp at the end of the industrial work day or week quickly becomes festival-like—the new “season” of carnivalesque into which folk escape.

  Because they can, just as easily, leave it to re-enter official, industrial time and space. Another adventure, another “one-sitting” escape, will soon return.

  Extra! Extra!

  Come, Watson! The Game Is Afoot!

  When Holmes tugs at the sleeping Watson’s shoulder—candle shining in his face—to wake the doctor up, to what game does he refer?

  A spirit of play drives the carnivalesque. So, in Bakhtin’s marketplace, games are a high priority—they pull players out of official, man-made time and space and into the timeless, cosmic world of play. Cards and sports, “forms of fortune-telling, wishes, and predictions,” and metaphors of play abound. Games represent the life cycle—moving through “fortune, misfortune, gain and loss, crowning and uncrowning.” Life itself becomes nothing more than a “miniature play,” not to be taken (cosmic laugh) seriously! Games draw “players out of the bonds of everyday life, liberate them from usual laws and regulations, and replace established conventions by lighter conventionalities.” So play “renews” time and player alike (Rabelais, pp. 230–39).

  This spirit of play drives Holmes. He laments, on the fourth, crime-free day of fog in a row, how the “London criminal is certainly a dull fellow.” Does Holmes want Londoners robbed, injured, or dead?

  No.

  And yes, if it means he can keep playing. What is a Chess Master without an opponent?

  Holmes craves an equal, someone to rival his abilities so that he is not bored. Even if that nemesis is “pure evil.” Sherlock sings Professor Moriarty’s praises as his arch rival, the “Napoleon of crime”: “he combines science with evil, organization with precision, vision with perception.” Moriarty is his only criminal “intellectual equal” and Holmes, depressed, bemoans his loss. “Without him,” laments Holmes, “I have to deal with distressed children, pygmies of triviality” (The Eligible Bachelor).5 It is as if Holmes himself has died: “London has become a singularly uninteresting city. . . . The community is certainly the gainer, and no one the loser, save the poor out-of-work specialist, whose occupation has gone.” Moriarty opens the field of play—“with that man in the field,” Holmes says, “one’s morning paper presented infinite possibilities” (“The Norwood Builder”). Most lawmen would welcome the idea of justice being served. But not Holmes: his rival gone means game over.

  Holmes’s craft also suggests a field of play—and he makes the rules. As a self-titled “unofficial consulting detective,” Holmes keeps himself at arm�
��s length from royal authority and Scotland Yard (established just as Victoria assumes her reign). “I follow my own methods,” he says, “and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial” (“Silver Blaze”). And Sherlock operates outside of the law, regularly picking locks, forcing safes, and burgling homes—even risking being a “felon” and time in a “cell” (The Master Blackmailer). And who can ignore Holmes’s beloved “unofficial force”—the Baker Street Irregulars? They “go everywhere and see anything.” Anyone who gets in Sherlock’s way, if not met on his terms—including (pardon, your Majesty!) the Queen’s authority—are as much of an opponent to Holmes as are the criminals on the other side of the chess board. What matters most is not the law but the game.

  And Holmes openly jests—with the police, his clients, Watson. When Lestrade arrogantly taunts Holmes with fresh evidence about Jonas Oldacre’s timber house fire, Holmes fires back. Literally. Holmes stages a fire of his own, smoking out the real culprit—the living Mr. Oldacre. “I owed you a little mystification,” Holmes tells Lestrade, “for your chaff in the morning.” And when Colonel Ross denigrates Holmes one too many times, Sherlock delights at having “a little amusement” at his expense. Holmes brings back a disguised Silver Blaze right before the bewildered Colonel’s eyes, but only unveils the horse after tormenting its owner. Similarly, Sherlock plants the Mazarin stone in Lord Cantlemere’s pocket, then calls outrageously for his arrest. And Sherlock prods Watson with a carnivalesque derision that can only show how warm-hearted he feels towards his friend—Holmes jabs at Watson both for writing adventures as well as for developing his own “powers of deduction.” For all of his grand protestations of science, our dear Holmes surely enjoys having a bit o’ fun at others’ expense.