The Final Problem: Constructing Coherence in the Holmesian Canon

Camilla Ulleland Hoel

doi:10.21825/aj.v6i1.4836

Abstract

The death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, a contrarian reading in which Holmes helps the murderer, and the century-long tradition of the Holmesian Great Game with its pseudo-scholarly readings in light of an ironic conviction that Holmes is real and Arthur Conan Doyle merely John Watson’s literary agent. This paper relies on these events in the afterlife of Sherlock Holmes in order to trace an outline of the author function as it applies to the particular case of Doyle as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The operations of the author function can be hard to identify in the encounter with the apparently natural unity of the individual work, but these disturbances at the edges of the function make its effects more readily apparent. This article takes as its starting point the apparently strong author figure of the Holmesian Great Game, in which “the canon” is delineated from “apocrypha” in pseudo-religious vocabulary. It argues that while readers willingly discard provisional readings in the face of an incompatible authorial text, the sanctioning authority of the author functions merely as a boundary for interpretation, not as a personal-biographical control over the interpretation itself. On the contrary, the consciously “writerly” reading of the text serves to reinforce the reliance on the text as it is encountered.The clear separation of canon from apocrypha, with the attendant reinforced author function, may have laid the ground not only for the acceptance of contrarian reading, but also for the creation of apocryphal writings like pastiche and fan fiction.

Highlights

The death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, a contrarian reading in which Holmes helps the murderer, and the century-long tradition of the Holmesian Great Game with its pseudo-scholarly readings in light of an ironic conviction that Holmes is real and Arthur Conan Doyle merely John Watson’s literary agent
Contributor biography: Camilla Ulleland Hoel is an associate professor of English at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, in which she analysed Sherlock Holmes and unfinished Victorian serial novels, comparing the treatment of the ostensibly finished Holmes texts with that of texts in which authors had died before completing them
The reader can, produce more than one peripeteic plot in the same text, which suggests that the desire for anagnorisis is not necessarily limited to a desire for the specific anagnorisis intended by the author. This becomes apparent in a reading like the one Pierre Bayard performs in his Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, in which he constructs a new plot in The Hound of the Baskervilles

Summary

The Significance of Reichenbach

The import of the ending to “The Final Problem” changed irrevocably when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote “The Empty House” in 1903. The reader can, produce more than one peripeteic plot in the same text, which suggests that the desire for anagnorisis is not necessarily limited to a desire for the specific anagnorisis intended by the author This becomes apparent in a reading like the one Pierre Bayard performs in his Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, in which he constructs a new plot in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Bayard’s reading of Hound, in producing a plot that runs counter to the more common reading in which Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery, rather than destroying the pattern of peripeteia and anagnorisis, reinforces it by presenting the more common reading as yet another false clue While he departs from the perceived authorial anagnorisis, his strict adherence to the text as he finds it reintroduces the question of the author’s authority over the creation of the foundation for interpretation. Knox pointed out that “[a]ny studies in Sherlock Holmes must be, first and foremost, studies in Dr Watson” (147), replacing the personal-biographical author with the fictional narrator as the origin of any inconsistency and thereby reinforcing the reliance on the sanctioned text: Watson is allowed an inattention to proofs and bad handwriting which Arthur Conan Doyle is not, making any error a subtle clue to character rather than an external intrusion on the sanctioned text.

The Great Game

Further Constructions

Works Cited