10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 T obias D öring Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 1. From London to Romance London in the 1890s, the age of high imperialism and a stealthily approaching sense of doom� 1 A young man - a reporter for a London paper - proposes to his love, a charming yet somewhat capricious lady who rebuffs him because she longs for quite a different kind of husband, “a harder, sterner man […] who would look Death in the face and have no fear of him - a man of great deeds and strange experiences” (Doyle, Lost World 8)� Such a man, she tells her suitor, is bound to bring true glory to his wife and make her happy through heroic feats: “Think of Richard Burton� When I read his wife’s life of him I could so understand her love� And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband? ” (ibid�)� Her book-derived enthusiasm for Victorian explorers prompts the young reporter to seek out a chance for performing great deeds of his own, to prove his mettle and take up his role in her story of ideal masculinity� But its last chapter may have long been written� As his editor and boss explains, there simply are no glorious missions currently available: “the day for this sort of thing is rather past� […] The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere” (12). The world, it seems, has finally become a place as thoroughly explored and charted as the local neighbourhood, with no open space, no challenge nor enchantment� The diagnosis is familiar� Romance is a main manifestation of adventure 2 and, as such, desperately missed and missing in modernity� Burton’s or Stanley’s expeditions were the last of their kind� They are therefore invoked in the opening chapter of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World to mark the very different premise on which this twentieth-century novel must proceed� Published in 1912, the novel opens by reiterating a cartographic topos oft employed since late-Victorian times to register civilisation’s progress as well as its discontent� The topos features for example in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), where Marlow’s intradiegetic tale of travel opens with the 1 Thanks to Kathrin Härtl, Martina Kübler, and Franziska Stolz for helpful comments and suggestions� 2 See Frye, O’Connell, Starke� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 260 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 narrator recalling his juvenile “passion for maps” (8) and their blank spaces of delightful mystery, unknown, unnamed, hence all the more attractive� And yet, as Marlow must immediately concede, such glorious dreams have ended as the blanks have filled since his “boyhood with rivers, lakes and names” (7-8)� In this way, Victorian adventurers were caught up in a paradox: they ventured into the unknown only to contribute, unwillingly yet unavoidably, to its inclusion into cartographic systems, thus eliminating opportunities for continuing adventure by diminishing the territories for it to take place� This does not augur well for post-Victorian adventure writing� As indicated with Doyle’s title, the genre cannot but admit to loss and must declare its own improbability: where then can aspiring adventurers turn? The Lost World seeks a radical solution� In order for the romance to proceed, the novel posits the existence of a large plateau somewhere in South America, utterly remote and inaccessible where, allegedly, Jurassic animals exist� A London palaeontologist, appropriately called Professor Challenger, claims to have discovered this uncharted place populated by living dinosaurs� In his professional capacity interpreting the fossilised remains of ancient life, Challenger is as concerned with clues and their significance as his more famous investigative predecessor in Doyle’s fiction, Sherlock Holmes. Like him, he follows traces so as to reconstruct the past� Unlike Holmes, however, Challenger is not at all respected: London society derides and disbelieves him� So, he now heads a South American expedition which is to bring conclusive evidence to verify his allegations - an opportunity, at the same time, for the young reporter, as he joins the team, to enact the kind of chivalry required for his courtship� In this way, a regular adventure plot is set in motion� With the promise of the marvellous plateau where prehistoric creatures long believed extinct apparently survive and still abound, Doyle’s narrative takes its protagonists as well as readers on a course that leads from London strictly towards romance� Yet, for the question of adventure in modernity, its outlook remains bleak� No matter how Doyle’s brave explorers fare, their quest does not succeed in winning the new territory� 3 On the contrary, the novel’s final implication seems to be that the adventure plot in 1912 is as dead as the dinosaurs� 4 My contribution would like to contest this cultural diagnosis� Against the background of Doyle’s early fiction - the first collection of his serialised stories is entitled, after all, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) -, I try to trace residual and resisting ways for early twentieth-century adventure writing to 3 See my discussion in Döring, Caribbean-English Passages 93-97� 4 On issues of adventure and modernity, see the contributions in Grill and Obermayr� Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 261 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 take place in the literary field of modernism. At the same time, I would like to explore how modernist poetics comes into itself by absorbing and transforming what it otherwise rejects: the romance and adventure plots of old� For this purpose, the years immediately preceding the Great War, with the Edwardian literary establishment already in decline and the avant-garde on the rise, offer a good point of departure� When The Lost World came out, thirty-year-old Virginia Woolf was finishing the manuscript of her first novel, another narrative about a trip to South America whose title reads as if it should remind us of traditional tales of seafaring� In fact, The Voyage Out, published in 1915, does not fully follow this tradition, but neither does it deny its shaping influence and so establishes the author’s lasting interest in maritime exploits, as evinced even in her later fiction like Mrs Dalloway (1925), not generally regarded as adventure writing� 5 Throughout her work, Woolf arguably draws on legacies of seafaring, helping to consign them to a distant past even while keeping their effects alive. Modernist fiction, more generally speaking, thus contributes widely to a critical rereading of adventure plots� 6 The same holds true, I would like to suggest, for modernist poetry and poetics� The year before The Lost World, T� S� Eliot, aged twenty-three, sailed for the first time from America to England where he would soon make his home. In 1914 he joined Merton College, Oxford, as a postgraduate in philosophy� From the same year dates a rhymed stanza of eight lines which he wrote and would eventually use in part V of The Waste Land (North 281), the earliest poetic fragment making it into this assemblage which, ten years after The Lost World, became a signature text of the modern age� The stanza includes a mentioning of “reminiscent bells” (Eliot, The Waste Land 7 l� 383) as if to signal further reminiscences and challenge readers to register the poem’s resonances of traditional sounds and forms� Hoping to accept the challenge, my contribution argues that adventure writing is among these forms, thus proposing to draw tentative connections between the texts and cultural contexts briefly sketched� In particular, it sets out to map some common ground between the works of Eliot and Doyle� Even though of different generations and from very different cultural backgrounds, these two authors also share some predilections, like their enthusiasm as young readers for The Boy Hunters or The Scalp Hunters 5 These issues are discussed more fully in my contribution on Woolf and adventure, Döring, “Virigina Woolf”� 6 This point also includes Joyce’s Ulysses, see my discussion in Döring, “Leopold Bloom”� 7 Henceforth, The Waste Land is shortened to WL in in-text citations� The reference, according to the Norton Critical Edition, ed� Michael North, includes line numbers instead of page numbers� 262 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 by Captain Mayne Reid, the popular nineteenth-century American writer of boys’ own fiction, who was a favourite of both (Crawford 15; Doyle, Memories 13)� To ask how Eliot’s poetic sequence may intersect or interact with popular detective series like Doyle’s and how both of them connect to classic modes of romance and adventure seems a useful, though perhaps unusual, question� As The Waste Land keeps insisting, disconnection serves as a pervasive trope in modernist accounts of self-reflection: A heap of broken images (l� 22) I can connect Nothing with nothing (l� 301-302) These fragments I have shored against my ruins (l� 430) What such a state of fragmentation seems to require most of all is the kind of power routinely exercised by Sherlock Holmes and supremely performed at the climax of the tales, when the detective manages to put everything in place: “I only require a few missing links to have an entirely connected story” (Doyle 270), he informs the clueless in The Sign of Four (1890)� 8 While Watson is still puzzling over “an insoluble mystery” (269), a heap of unconnected bits and pieces, Holmes prepares to piece them all together and integrate them into the coherent story to which they belong� Among the bewilderments of modern life, the detective thus embodies a great promise of order and connectedness (Stiegler 49)� Such a promise would indeed be helpful for a text like The Waste Land, whose readers since its publication have been wondering how - or if - it hangs together� But precisely because disconnection, brokenness, fragmentation, ruin, and decay are as frequently experienced when trying to confront this poem as they are reiterated in its self-descriptions, and in modernism at large, we may take them as our cue to seek or construct the kind of coherence they claim has been lost - or at least take them as prompts to question what their diagnosis means� When The Waste Land tells us that “[t]he nymphs are departed” (l� 175), it verbally invokes what is felt missing and so maps out a world like Doyle’s where “there is no room for romance anywhere”� Therefore, Doyle’s and Eliot’s projects share a cultural premise of loss� They proceed on similar grounds, diagnose the same affliction, and, each in their own way, try to deal with the predicament: how to respond to the shambles of modernity� Part of this response, I argue, is to resort anew to adventure writing� The Sign of Four, the second of the early and extended tales by which Doyle introduced his celebrated figure before launching his series of short stories 8 The Sign of Four is cited as SF in in-text citations� Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 263 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 for The Strand, is entirely narrated as a classic and supreme adventure� Not only is Watson’s discourse full of references to “our adventures” (SF 284), “the adventures of the night” (283) or “the final stage of our night’s adventures” (260); the tale also already opens with a morning conversation where Holmes and Watson discuss “romance” (217), in particular the romance involved in Holmes’ first investigative case and Watson’s account of it in A Study in Scarlet� The fact that Holmes disclaims the genre marker should not really distract us� Like Watson, we can see that “the romance was there” (SF 217) and that it has remained and been reiterated as the current case unfolds� The Sign of Four is no whodunit; as Stephen Knight observes (58), it makes “no puzzle of the culprits” and offers “no criminal-revealing denouement” because Doyle is working here “primarily in an adventure mode”� A mode, we may add, that persists and predominates throughout the Holmes canon: in the words of Joseph McLaughlin (45), all “the subsequent adventures of Holmes and Watson produce an image of metropolitan London as a stage rich with romantic adventure”� It is this stage, I argue, on which The Waste Land plays out, too� It is a truth widely acknowledged - not least, by Eliot himself - that The Waste Land owes a great deal to From Ritual to Romance, Jessie Weston’s 1920 study of the grail traditions and their ritualistic roots, vigorously debated in contemporary folklore, cultural anthropology, and medieval studies (Grayson 28-34)� But it is less often acknowledged, though no less relevant I think, that the poem came out in the Golden Age of English crime fiction, which Arthur Conan Doyle (though himself not English) had prepared and pioneered� T. S. Eliot (at the time not English either) was in fact an expert and great aficionado of the genre and, in particular, of Sherlock Holmes� In The Criterion, his literary magazine where The Waste Land first appeared in October 1922, he reviewed more than two dozen detective novels throughout the 1920s, both topical and classical, and in 1950 told the Sunday Times that he never bothered to read contemporary fiction except Simenon (Chinitz 56); other exceptions were Agatha Christie and, above all, Doyle, whose work he often singled out for praise� In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Eliot wrote in 1929, “the late nineteenth-century is always romantic, always nostalgic, and never merely silly” (Prose 602)� What it was that so attracted him - “I cannot think of anything to which to compare to Sherlock Holmes” (ibid�) - and resonated in his own writing, shaping it perhaps far more than hitherto acknowledged, 9 my engagement with his poem would like to explore� How, then, is the modern city turned into a territory for adventure? By which routes can urbanites, unless they actually travel to some unlikely place 9 Two notable exceptions are D’haen (2002) and Schäfer (2017)� 264 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 like Challenger and his team of dinosaur explorers, actually arrive at romance in the modern world? And what consequences do such ventures have for the forms and modes of modern writing? A conjunctive reading of these texts may offer some initial clues� 2. From Romance to Treasure Differences between The Waste Land and The Sign of Four are obvious enough� In their generic shapes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural agenda, the two texts could hardly form a starker contrast� Above all, their audience appeal diverges widely, with Conan Doyle’s exciting story of detection and deduction at the one end of a spectrum on which Eliot’s erudite and recondite and somewhat alienating poem must surely be located at the other� Early responses to The Waste Land show how perplexed and bewildered readers felt when trying to make sense of what they found: a disconnected series of verbal bits and pieces, in various foreign languages and widely different registers ranging from colloquial English to high poetic diction, many of them evidently learned literary citations or in some other way suggestive and allusive, though their true significance is likely to elude most readers. Even appreciative reviews, like Edmund Wilson’s in The Dial, would contemplate the possibility that Eliot had “written a puzzle rather than a poem” (143), whereas less appreciative ones, like Charles Powell’s in The Manchester Guardian, singled out the multiplicity of languages and sources which place the poem “under an enormously composite and cosmopolitan mortgage” (156)� Arcane as opposed to catchy, impenetrable as opposed to accessible, elitist as opposed to popular: the list of oppositions between Eliot’s and Doyle’s projects is easily continued� And yet, this impression should not keep us from questioning the plausibility of a connection and looking for conjunctions between them� Consider the following characteristic: we are dealing with texts which “are allusive and elusive, constantly suggesting connections to other literary works […], while avoiding simplicity and closure by offering us anomalies, incomplete solutions and un-decoded secrets” (Glazzard 236)� What reads like an apt summary of The Waste Land and its riddling qualities is in fact the concluding comment in Andrew Glazzard’s study of the Sherlock Holmes stories� Rather than following conventional wisdom, then, by placing Eliot and Doyle in opposing cultural camps of high versus popular culture, we should ask what happens when, for argument’s sake, we try to see and read their works together� We notice, for example, that The Sign of Four is multilingual, too, with Holmes quoting Goethe (282) and Jean Paul (293) in the German original and Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 265 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 with many Indian or Anglo-Indian words studding the text� Nor are these the only marks of erudition� Throughout, the tale involves highly specialised and learned issues - hence the copious explanatory notes in Leslie Klinger’s great edition - such as distinguishing between the ashes of various tobaccos (the subject of Holmes’ monograph, SF 219), the ethnography of foreign feet with special reference to the “Hindoo proper”, and the “sandal-wearing Mohammedan” (306-307), miracle plays, medieval pottery, Stradivarius violins, and the Buddhism of Ceylon as main topics of Holmes dinner table conversation (324) - or whatever else his “genius for minutiae” (220) might happen to digest� Stronger convergences emerge in the urban topography which both texts construct and clearly share, not just in the general image of a crowded, foggy, dreary, polyglot, and ethnically mixed imperial metropolis but also in the focus on specific London streets or sights, like the Strand, which features both in The Waste Land (l� 258) and The Sign of Four (240)� 10 The most prominent London feature, however, that functions as a central trope in Eliot’s poem as well as in Doyle’s story is the river Thames, to which both keep referring and returning: the vital urban life-line, rich repository of meaning, and reference line for the motivic organisation of their texts� In Eliot, the river is invoked and cited, with echoes ranging from Spenser to Wagner and beyond, as if to tap once more into a flow of cultural significance that has all but dried up in the present age (“The river’s tent is broken”; WL l� 173)� In Doyle, the river gradually becomes the vein of influx where all mysteries gather and unfold, where the climactic chase takes place, and where, finally, the object of desire is sunk: another case of loss� As such, the Thames is more than a familiar local landmark; it is a marker at the same time of the unfamiliar and the dislocating energies at work in the two texts, of the wider horizons they long for and the wider connections they go in search of, a marker, in short, of their desire for adventure� Like in Heart of Darkness, where the Thames is celebrated as the waterway into the imperial world channelling and stimulating also the expansive energies that set Marlow’s tale in motion, the river functions as a promise: a way to leave the present urban dreariness behind, a way out of the everyday, a relief route for the restless and the weary, and for the city to turn into a place of romance� This prospect is especially appealing in The Sign of Four� Essentially a tale about recovering a treasure chest - which colonial officials have brought back from the Raj where they stole it from a motely gang who, in turn, had stolen it 10 The Strand also plays a highly significant role in Woolf’s fiction, see Döring, “Virginia Woolf” 126� 266 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 from a local rajah -, the tale unfolds as the mystery of a damsel in distress in search of her father� Before her entry, boredom reigns� In the opening chapter, we encounter Sherlock Holmes languishing in his apartment, nervously indulging his cocaine addiction and desperately longing for something to happen, some action to begin, some call or case to rescue him from languor and ennui� “I abhor the dull routine of existence”, he exclaims� “I crave for mental exaltation” (SF 217), hence the drug as temporary compensation� The genius of his extraordinary mind feels fettered and imprisoned by the sheer ongoingness of ordinary life� “See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses”, he says to Watson� “What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? ” (224-225)� With the emphasis on the “prosaic”, this scenario corresponds to the opening of The Lost World - “no room for romance” - and recurs with many of the later tales� In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1908), the London fog functions as the veil of commonplace existence that hides from Holmes the thrills he craves: “Look out of this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloud-bank� The thief or murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim” (Doyle, “Bruce-Partington Plans” 1301)� Holmes’ desperate gaze seems to produce a vision of the exotic space that forms the city’s Other, full of violence and danger, where he could find the challenge he is missing and thereby also find himself. For he does not seem to exist outside a case; that is to say, the prosaic would eventually consume him unless some criminal come to his rescue� Holmes lives on crime rather like Count Dracula on blood� The Indian jungle Holmes imagines therefore mainly serves to reinvigorate himself: a defence against pervasive dullness� The Waste Land, interestingly, proceeds on much the same premise, for “dullness” also marks the context in which it first appeared. In October 1922, the first volume of the first issue of The Criterion, the literary magazine Eliot edited, opened with an essay on this topic, “the most abominable thing to find” (2), written by George Saintsbury, the eminent and aged literary scholar, as if to provide background or perhaps a prelude to the poem printed some three dozen pages later - a poem, after all, written by a London city employee and bank clerk contemplating the routine of urban desk workers and their “violet hour” when “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (WL l� 215-217)� In The Sign of Four, the waiting ends when at the end of chapter I “a crisp knock” at the door announces Miss Morstan’s arrival (225), the client who has come to terminate Holmes’ torturing period of the prosaic� At this point, the plot is put on rails and the engine of Doyle’s narrative gains speed� Eight chapters later, with the dramatic climax and four chapters Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 267 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 yet to come, it seems to have reached its desired destination: “It’s a romance! ” we are told� “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged sailor� They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl” (SF 311). Mrs. Forrester here lists all the required figures of chivalric tales, to which Miss Morstan then, referring to Holmes and Watson, adds the rest of their conventional cast: “And two knight-errants to the rescue” (ibid�)� But such a summary may sound a little more exciting and enchanting than what we have actually read� As its semiotic title indicates, The Sign of Four is at heart a tale of sign reading 11 and, as such, a laborious reconstruction of some action in the past� Its present is far more concerned with collecting clues and interpreting what stories they might tell - a chance for Holmes to demonstrate his fabled powers - than with adventurous undertakings� Though essentially a treasure hunt involving a nightly coach ride across London and culminating in a wild chase down the river, the narrative is otherwise remarkably static and stalled by repeated acts of lengthy story-telling: first Holmes’ ingenious story about Watson’s brother’s watch, then Miss Morstan’s story of her father’s disappearance, then Sholto’s story of his father’s and his brother’s fate, and finally Small’s story of his life that fills the whole of the last chapter. The mode is therefore mainly retrospective. All excitement that currently plays out in London is but the tail end of developments that began long ago and far away, especially in colonial India� True adventure, we learn, happens elsewhere� For this reason, and for all the suspenseful entertainment it may offer, The Sign of Four has a reflective and a self-reflexive quality: a narrative made up of several intradiegetic narratives, it folds back upon itself and invites us to consider strategies or conditions of contemporary story-telling and to decide what forms are still available for them� Hence the highlighting of romance as a traditional cultural shape to which the characters repeatedly resort, starting with Holmes’ and Watson’s morning conversation, so as to explore its plausibility and use� Hence also the playful, even parodistic tone in which Mrs� Forrester and Miss Morstan identify and list the elements of romance, as just quoted: as if suggesting that we should decide ourselves how fitting and appropriate the medieval pattern might be for the modern case� From this perspective, the entire tale turns into a trial of tradition� It uses many of the functional features of adventure writing such as the wooden-legged man whom Major Sholto fears (SF 251), clearly recycled from Treasure Island, or the mysterious single footprint in the sand (SF 256), strictly an impossible discovery that re-enacts Robinson’s equally impossible discovery on the beach, 11 See Carlo Ginzburg’s powerful and wide-ranging argument on this point� 268 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 or indeed the figure of the cannibal as the most intense expression of the anxiously desired Otherness adventurers engage with, a generic figure whose manifestations range from Defoe’s Man Friday, via Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym or Ballantyne’s Coral Island, to Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines or Heart of Darkness, and beyond� But in The Sign of Four, the heroes undertake no journey to some foreign coast and into the interior of an unknown continent� Instead, the cannibal comes to the city� The contact zones have been displaced to the metropolis and its less fashionable suburbs� The single footmark is not printed on the beach but in a suburban flower-bed (SF 256)� India is found among “long lines of dull brick houses” and “rows of two-storeyed villas, each with a fronting of miniature garden” (243), and yet it is an India complete with khitmutgar (245) and tiger-skins and hookah (247), “an oasis of art in the howling desert of South London” (246), as Sholto calls his artificial paradise. Doyle’s narrative thus offers us a customised, domesticated form of Otherness� And it activates once more the apparatus of adventure but displaces all its markers so as to make us think about how much of it survives in civilised and modern urban life and how much must be acknowledged, like the dinosaurs in The Lost World, to lie henceforth out of reach� As Doyle knew well from personal experience - in 1880, he sailed the arctic sea for months in search of whales and seals, “the first really outstanding adventure in my life” (Memories 34) -, tracking and hunting are outdoor practices that work best in the wild� So, when he determinedly sets up Sherlock Holmes as a tracker, according to McLaughlin, “the Leatherstocking of London” (41), he might not simply turn the city into wilderness nor simply recall Fenimore Cooper but require us to judge how well such turns and recollections work and how much credit they gain under present circumstances� Prompted by chapter III, which is entitled “In Quest of a Solution”, we can read the whole tale as a classic quest narrative� But its real quest, it now appears, is not for the Agra treasure box but for the forms and frames and means by which modern quests can come about and become narratable� It is this speculative and citational strategy, consciously presenting signs and tokens from a past tradition, that gives The Sign of Four, as several other tales in the Holmes canon, a ghostly quality: an occasion to encounter revenants of adventure� The place whence the more powerful and useful of these ghosts appear is certainly the Raj, backstage to imperial London and vanishing point for all the backstories of urban romance unravelling here, not just a counterspace of luxury and splendour but also an otherworld of risk and fortune, full of potential promise as of violence, betrayal, death� The fabled treasure which is brought from there, stolen from the “four” whose “sign” it bears and kept for years in Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 269 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 the false attic of a fake Indian lodge in Upper Norwood, functions like a grail: the elusive object of the quest and, as such, a sign of the rich romance that this narrative desires but cannot quite deliver� At the end, the treasure box is opened with the fire poker but found empty, its splendid content, like the cannibal who guarded it, sunk to the bottom of the Thames� At this point Miss Morstan, who first set the entire quest in motion, does not regain the treasure but herself becomes the treasure, in Watson’s words (SF 344), by accepting to become his wife� All that remains then of the Indian riches are a few lustrous pearls she used to receive annually through the mail, six altogether (232), tantalising tokens of a marvellous heritage that can no longer be possessed - pointing to the heritage also of classic romance, which Doyle’s tale seeks to court but cannot finally regain. Yet the empty box itself appears significant enough: a heavy, massive iron container “of some value” and quite “pretty”, as Miss Morstan says with understatement, Benares metal-work richly decorated, showing at the front “a thick and broad hasp, wrought in the image of the sitting Buddha” (SF 343); under it, Watson thrusts the poker to gain access to its secret, but in vain� This Buddha, guardian to the treasured content, captures all the aspirations - for oriental wisdom, richness, romance, and delivery from dullness - that drive Doyle’s narrative towards fulfilment and the ultimate frustration at which it arrives. All it can eventually find are husks that once contained them: emptied and discarded now, still pretty but not really functional anymore� The key to Buddha’s box is lost� 3. From Treasure to Waste The Waste Land, too, strives for fulfilment in all things Indian and indeed focusses on Buddha� The subtitle to section III, “The Fire Sermon”, and the “burning burning burning”-chant immediately preceding (WL l� 308), are the first of several clues to point readers into this direction and strengthen what Paul Stasi has identified as “India’s ghostly presence in London” (55). This is not the only point that holds Holmesian resonance� Reading Eliot’s poem against the background of The Sign of Four, we find further features the texts share despite their salient differences, points where they seem to converge or make common cause: above all, as mentioned earlier, the anthropology of modern city life and the view of London they construct, gloomy centre of a glorious empire which once served as a wide space of adventure� Now, such glories wane, and the city turns into an ersatz adventure playground where, in both texts, several of the threats and thrills formerly encountered in the colonies have come to haunt the centre� The cannibal in Doyle’s text - half devil 270 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 and half child and fully contrasted to civilised sophistication - corresponds to the figures of fecundity, primordial growth, and savagery in Eliot’s text that Robert Crawford calls “the savage in the city” and studies as a crucial feature in all of Eliot’s major work: “the uniting of the world of the savage with the world of the city” (1)� So, if the poem forms a contact zone where these two worlds meet, clash, and grapple, we should not be surprised at the affinities it shares with Doyle’s where a world of crime meets and mingles with a world of virtue, and peripheral with imperial figures, without always clear-cut boundaries (Watson remarks more than once that Holmes’ genius mind could easily turn criminal, SF 277)� In The Waste Land, boundaries blur everywhere so that memory and desire, text and pre-texts, here and there, centre and periphery often become indistinguishable� Especially the later sections show, in Stasi’s words, “an explicit inclusion of the periphery into the world of the metropole itself” (55)� The Indian material is part of this inclusive gesture� Beginning with “The Fire Sermon”, Buddha’s words are freely borrowed� Yet their status and potential function - why are they called on? to what effect and end? - remains rather uncertain. This is a general problem here. Throughout, we find many weighty words, religious formulas from The Book of Common Prayer (like the subtitle to section I) or elements of quest literature like the Chapel Perilous (WL l� 388)� But what the poem tries to do with them, what it ultimately strives for, where it is going, what kind of grail or goal it seeks, and whether it seeks any is not easy to make out. For we never find a key to unlock their significance. As regards quest motifs and structures, the key has often been assumed to lie in Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, arguing for the transformed survival of fertility rites in the romance tradition, which essentially deals with the “restoration to fruitfulness of a Waste Land” (12) after a long period of desolation� Eliot’s “Notes” open with the statement that not just the title but the “plan” and “symbolism” of his poem were suggested by this book (21)� On this basis we might say that The Waste Land, as a modern text, is inhabited by romance in much the same way that romance is, in Weston’s view, inhabited by the ancient mystery cults she traces in grail literature: as a distinct but covert presence perpetuated from a cultural context all but lost and now transformed under the changing conditions of time� But with Sherlock Holmes in mind, and with Eliot’s praise for these stories’ “perfect” form (Prose 603), we might also think that it is not so much Weston’s material but her method that the poet finds compelling, a method thoroughly semiotic and conjectural, collecting clues and resemblances (Weston 51), establishing sequences (33), and trying to find all the “missing links” (174) until “the chain is at last linked up” (5). This, surely, is a method quite attractive and conducive also for a poem whose Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 271 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 self-descriptions are as obsessed as this one’s with disconnection and decay, a poem, therefore, that requires Holmesian skills and so turns our reading process into an adventure� The poem’s goal or point of destination, however, remains doubtful for we never quite know when or whether we arrive� This problem is marked by the contrary responses, for instance, of two well-known early readers: the contrast between Cleanth Brooks, who in 1937 found a “statement of positive beliefs” in the poem that emerges “through confusion and cynicism” (210; italics in original), and F. R. Leavis five years earlier, who saw “no progression” and declared “the poem ends where it began” (179-180)� But where does it actually begin? The question is crucial for us because adventure writing needs a strong point of departure, an anchor, rest, and reference place, a Baker Street apartment, as it were� No matter whether this is felt to be a place of comfort or of boredom and unrest, it is this base whence the outward movement starts, the rambling, wandering, voyaging, and questing, and where the adventurer at the end returns� Nostos, or homecoming, is more than a plot convention here: if we regard adventure as a category of narration rather than just of experience, nostos is a structural requirement because only on this precondition can adventure ever become part of story-telling� So, to establish the beginning means to find the point from which everything else follows with necessity. In the case of Eliot’s text, however, notions of home and beginning are radically questioned� The very first line starts with “April” (WL l� 1), a month of spring, of growth and natural renewal, which might seem promising enough. But the first section is entitled “The Burial of the Dead”, which sounds more like an ending and is, for readers conversant with Anglican faith, an echo of the liturgy laid down in The Book of Common Prayer� Nor is “April” really a fresh start� Readers familiar with the English literary canon immediately hear it echoing the start of a medieval storytelling series and pilgrimage narrative, the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The first word of the poem, then, immediately works as a displacer shifting us towards other texts and contexts� The rest of the first stanza is hardly more homely and, to anyone unfamiliar with German or Bavarian landmarks, utterly confusing� Though showing no quotation marks, the stanza evidently presents various bits of dialogue in direct speech� But it does neither make clear how many different voices are involved nor what different languages these speak� As Robert Stockhammer observes (277), the number of speakers is not necessarily the same as the number of linguistic systems: polylinguality transects polyvocality, without representing given codes� In this way, the earliest verbal moves performed here undermine any potential sense of home� 272 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 Characteristically, the first time that a notion of home is established verbatim occurs in the second stanza, at several removes, in the German lyrics of a romantic opera’s version of a medieval romance, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu (WL l� 31-32; italics in original) Thus foreignised and doubly mediated, Heimat turns into a literary phantom, a search item, or a mirage that reappears at certain crucial moments in the text as if to lead us or to lead us on� The passage where it recurs most insistently is the Tiresias speech (again presented without quotation marks) in “The Fire Sermon”, numerically the central lines of the entire poem: I, Tiresias, […] can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins� (WL l� 218-23) With a wistful gesture of remembrance, the sailor “coming home from sea” evokes the great tradition of seafaring and adventure� But with a simple asyndetic shift, the sailor’s nostos turns into the typist’s and so returns here in a daily, perhaps dreary register. Still, the emphasis on fire and food sets up a homely scene of repast and regeneration that might provide the poem with a focus, literally a hearth (for this is what Latin focus means), where its motions come to rest� But then the ensuing rendezvous between “the young man carbuncular” (WL l� 231) and, presumably, the typist appears even more dismal and depressing when all this central place is good for is an act of joyless - in fact, violent - sex� So, we are faced again with just a wasted chance of home� In his “Notes”, the author has declared Tiresias “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest” (23)� There is little in the actual text to support such upgrading and to privilege this one voice over any of the others or to show why and how it should be a uniting force� Or could the Tiresias persona, together with the typist, who enter the poem in an interesting conjunction at this point, be so relevant for other reasons: for the language and the language concept they each represent and practice? What Eliot might espouse is the idea of the kind of speech Tiresias performs: prophecy, an act not just of visionary but of verbal power prefiguring or pre-empting actual events� Since Homer, the blind have long been credited with their ability of worldmaking through language (Mayer), a vatic power that may well be at- Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 273 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 tractive for a modern poet as aware as this one is that literature, in Ellmann’s words, “is nothing but a plague of echoes” (102), i� e� constant repetition and citation� Aspiring to the prophet, the modern poet is nevertheless closer to the typist, less a creator than a copyist and recorder caught up in technologies of writing. Prophet and typist are thus dual, perhaps double figures to debate how language works and how it works on us� The actual typescript of the poem, which Eliot gave to Ezra Pound to read (who famously produced its present shape by cutting more than half and rigorously rearranging half the rest), shows that in Eliot’s original version the typist figured first in a traditionally cross-rhymed iambic quatrain. Pound’s scathing comment on this stanza reads: “verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it” (V� Eliot 45)� With the rejection of traditional form, rhyme is reduced and verse redacted so as to resemble more prosaic language� Other passages of the poem where rhyme remains are mostly either bits of Eliot’s older poetry, like the eight-line stanza he wrote in 1914 and made part of section V (WL l� 377-384), or evident citations like the Wagner lyrics at the outset (l� 31-34)� In this sense, writing The Waste Land might appear to have been an occasion for the poet to assemble and display textual left-overs which he found he could no longer trust or use but still found too good to waste� The emphasis on dryness, barrenness, and infertility we notice in the Weston-derived title and in so much of the imagery suggests a poet figure haunted by the feeling that modern verse - at any rate, his own verse - may not be interesting enough to go on producing much of it� Against this background, then, the poem’s distinct echoes of adventure writing gain new resonance: as determined, perhaps desperate appeals to a tradition and to a period of cultural expression when verse would still be warranted and treasured and romance not yet lost to the prosaic� The evocation of the sailor, in this sense, does not simply involve voyaging� He is also a meta-poetic presence because the sailor crucially evokes an ancient image by which poets - and especially epic poets working in modes of the Homeric and heroic - once used to describe themselves: writing poetry means setting sail� According to E. R. Curtius, who produced the first German translation of The Waste Land (published in 1927) and later studied the rhetorical legacy of Latin classics in medieval literature, this connection formed a topos that recurs from Virgil to Dante and beyond (138-139): an act of literary self-fashioning that makes poetic ventures equivalent to maritime exploits� Yet to transfer such a topos from the classical tradition onto the “heap of broken images” (l� 32) and “fragments” (l� 430) of The Waste Land is a doubtful enterprise, raising more questions than it may help answer� Because of the confusing mass of references and remnants it presents, we never know how much weight or credit we 274 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 should give to any single one of them: does the elusive poet figure use them to authorise his enterprise or, on the contrary, to question the authority they were formerly endowed with? The effect, at any rate, is that we read much of the poem in the constant awareness of other texts that trail and haunt and trouble our reading but cannot always be identified, absent texts we sense distinctly but cannot readily make out� And yet, as ghostly presence they persist, as in the following example: Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you (WL l� 359-362) In the guides and glosses to the poem, this passage is routinely related to the story of the road to Emmaus, told in Luke 24, when two travellers become aware that someone walks beside them but they do not recognise the risen Christ (North 17n7)� Eliot’s “Notes” tell us, however, that he is citing the account of Shackleton’s 1914 polar expedition (25), a heroic though somewhat pointless undertaking that nearly ended in disaster� Crossing the Antarctic snow and ice for miles on foot, the explorers say they felt the presence of another man walking beside them, even though he must have been imagined, the result of cold-induced delusions� Whatever else it may be, this is certainly a powerful adventure fragment included in the poem’s final section as if to declare allegiance to and demonstrate its interest in this genre� But the passage also functions as an allegory of our reading process� We are engaging with a text whose many voices seem to whisper constantly of other texts that make themselves felt - next to us though never making it quite close enough� Thus, The Waste Land is an adventure exercise in reading, as it has us pave our way through verbal scrub� Our main difficulty in this venture follows from the text’s most glaring feature highlighted already in the first reviews (as mentioned earlier) which has, since then, been continuously described and debated: what Tim Armstrong calls the “undergraduate parade of citation” (277) or Maud Ellman calls “verbal kleptomania” (101)� Even if we chose less drastic terms for it, the frequency and range of literary allusion here displayed are surely dazzling and confusing and Eliot’s “Notes” appended to the first book publication have not much helped to defuse the situation� Reading The Waste Land turns into a kind of treasure hunt, without however making sure what the treasure is and whether anyone would want it� Does “Dayadhvam” (l� 411), for instance, bring us any closer to it than “Co co rico” (l� 392), “Twit twit twit” (l� 202), or “h urry uP Please iT ’ s TiMe ” (l� 141)? Are the various echoes of oriental wisdom, like Buddha’s preaching or the Upanishads, which become more and more prominent until the “Shanti Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 275 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 shanti shanti”-chant of the last line, in any way more meaningful or meant to convey greater value than any of the other sounds - pub talk, bird song, or popular tunes - that we manage to identify elsewhere in the echo chamber? Unlike the mystery that Sherlock Holmes eventually solves, The Waste Land, though mysterious in many ways, is not really conducive to a problem-solving approach� What it offers is a hunt without the treasure, going through the motions of adventure, regaining and rehearsing various old auratic forms and figures, like Virgil’s epic seafarer or Buddha’s words or quest motifs, and trying out what may be done with them, or to them, but all the while uncannily suggesting that they have come to waste� 4. From Waste to Words On Sunday, 18 June 1922, Tom Eliot paid a visit to the Woolfs in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury� After dinner, he read them his new poem - or not exactly read it, he rather rendered it in a remarkable vocal performance which Virginia Woolf, evidently quite impressed, described in her diary: “He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it� It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity”� But then she added: “What connects it together, I am not so sure” (178)� Her comment highlights the key issue I have been exploring in my chapter, relevant more generally in modernist poetics: how to work connections and how to make them work� Woolf herself was struggling with the issue at the time, as she was completing Jacob’s Room, her first programmatically modernist novel published in the same month as The Waste Land� “Only connect! ” was the hopeful motto of E� M� Forster’s novel Howard’s End, published twelve years earlier� But, as argued, it might need the intellectual strength and acumen of a mind like Sherlock Holmes’, or Jessie Weston’s, to answer this imperative� Waste, at any rate, cannot be tolerated by such powerful connectors� For Holmes, “[t]he smallest point may be the most essential”, he explains in “The Adventures of the Red Circle” (Doyle 1274), so nothing must be lost or wasted, everything will gain significance, become a link in the chain, and so contribute to the larger story� What not just early readers of The Waste Land felt is lacking - the sense of connectedness by which all the random parts may be integrated, at least retrospectively, into the structure of a greater whole - is in fact a crucial feature of classic adventure tales: they exercise a strategy to come to terms with cultural contingency� 12 From a narratological perspective, ad- 12 The points made in the following sentences derive from Martin von Koppenfels and his proposal for the DFG research group “Philology of Adventure”, from which the present volume has emerged� 276 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 venture writing is so interesting because it tries to mediate between random chance and the order of narration� Unlike forms of providential storytelling, it first requires and desires openness and risk: stuff must happen and must happen unexpectedly for adventure to get going� In terms of the adventurer’s experience, to begin with, chance is therefore constitutive� But in terms of narrative requirements, chance must be domesticated and adventure also needs design, some plan or pattern by which whatever happens is eventually turned into a sequence so that all the separate passages or episodes gain meaning as a series of trials, for example as tests of strength or steps towards fulfilment. As a narrative project, adventure therefore promises to supersede and finally sublate contingency� At the end, chance is excluded and, at the same time, integrated - just as the disconnections in and of The Waste Land, after all, may dialectically work out connections: I can connect Nothing with nothing� (l� 301-2) Whoever “I” may be, we should not shy away from emphasising the positive statement in the first part of this sentence: “I can connect”, not thing with thing, perhaps, but word with word and phrase with phrase and so launch the course of the strange and surprising verbal adventures which are evidently taking place� In 1923, a reviewer described Eliot’s text as a series of separate passages, “not perhaps all written at one time or with one aim, to which a spurious but happy sequence has been given” (Aiken 152): a perfect phrase, it seems, to capture the conundrum� What is more, the question of connections has strong political implications, too� In “Modernism and Imperialism”, Fredric Jameson has shown that early-twentieth-century culture was based on a colonial economy of disconnection� With the metropolis establishing its power on peripheral spaces overseas, the world of empire is fragmented and turns into a disjunct space where evidence for the totality of all its various parts is missing: “For colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere”, he points out (Jameson 11) and argues that modernist literature and art invest in fragmentation because they cannot otherwise address the disconcerting feeling that imperial reality escapes them; a constituent element lies outside and is principally lost� His diagnosis holds special plausibility for The Waste Land and its “unreal city” - unreal, Stasi writes (47), because of the discontinuities built into imperial experience - no less than for the losses registered in Doyle’s fiction. The Lost World ends with the reporter returning from the dinosaur expedition, full of pride about his great adventure and hoping now to win approval Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 277 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 from his love - only to find she has married a local solicitor’s clerk. The Sign of Four ends with the treasure sunk and scattered at the bottom of the Thames where it lies together with the cannibal, its guardian figure. The splendour and the terror of the East: both come from India to the imperial centre but neither can be held nor fully integrated there, except by displacement� The desire for the treasure is displaced onto the woman, Watson’s wife-to-be, while the thrills the cannibal provided with his poisoned darts return eventually with the cocaine, the drug that Holmes consumes and needs again for satisfaction as soon as the case is closed� And yet, the savage cannot strictly be dismissed� It is not just his mortal body that remains in the river� His death is narrated in a chapter called: “The end of the islander” (SF 324)� This curious title may not be sufficiently explained simply by the fact that this cannibal happens to come from the Andamans� For Britain is an island, too, and ‘islander’ has long been a favourite self-designation of the British� In death, the Other turns into a double of the self� “I believe that the ‘Waste Land’ is really the very heart of our problem”, Weston writes in a crucial passage of her study of grail literature and legends� It “will place us in possession of the clue which will lead us safely through the most bewildering mazes of the fully developed tale” (63-64)� No doubt, this clue must be a truly treasurable possession� Eliot’s The Waste Land ends, however, in just the way it has taunted readers all along. The final stanza offers us a dizzying verbal sequence beginning with an English nursery rhyme, seamlessly leading us to some Italian words cited from Dante’s Purgatorio (so the “Notes” tell us), then to some Latin words from an anonymous poem, then some French words from a sonnet by Gérard de Nerval, eventually on to some English words from a Renaissance tragedy, and concluding with the Sanskrit words already cited earlier and translated in the “Notes” as “the Peace that passeth understanding” (Eliot 26) - a bewildering maze of borrowed and fragmented language whose connections are for anyone to figure out. The adventure trail continues, passing our understanding and calling for a celebrated fragment-fighter such as Sherlock Holmes: in the waste land, his heroics of connection finally seem less deliberate than desperate, a last attempt to make everything - or, at least, every word and line we have as clues - cohere� Works Cited Aiken, Conrad� “An Anatomy of Melancholy [1923]�” T. S. 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