G ERO G UTTZEIT 1 “The One Fixed Point in a Changing Age”: Watson, the Narrating Instance, and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 1. Cultural Change, Literary Change, and Detective Fiction Cultural change is notoriously difficult to grasp, bring about, or predict. As a concept, it is highly volatile, mirroring the difficulty of defining the terms ‘culture’ and ‘change’ in isolation. If the question is how literature and cultural change interrelate, one approach is to look at them by viewing literature as a similarly dynamic process as culture overall, and to investigate the interrelations between cultural change and literary change - rather than viewing literature as a fixed object. As a central aspect of literary change, generic change can be analysed particularly well via instances of what John Cawelti has called “formula stories”: “certain types of stories which have highly predictable structures that guarantee the fulfilment of conventional expectations: the detective story, the western, the romance, the spy story, and many other such types.” 2 1 I wish to thank the participants of the Literature and Cultural Change conference at Rauischholzhausen, in particular Daniel Hartley and Jean-Jacques Lecercle, for their comments. I would also like to thank the editors, Ingo Berensmeyer and Sonja Schillings, for their help. As Cawelti, one of the pioneers of popular culture studies, argues: “[t]o come to some insight into their cultural significance we must arrive at some understanding of them as a form of artistic behavior.” Formula stories are a particularly relevant artistic behaviour because of “the cultural patterns [they reveal] and [are] shaped by, and […] the impact formula stories have on culture” (2). What Cawelti called the “mystery” formula (42-44) corresponds to the form of the classic detective story that emerged as one of the most popular genres of fiction over the course of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Due to its formulaic nature, detective fiction is not only highly interesting with regard to generic change in its own right, but also an indication of, or, one might say, a clue to cultural change. In such a vast field, my interest here lies specifically in the significance of the sidekick narrator of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes narratives, namely John 2 John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976), 1. G ERO GUTTZEIT 80 H. Watson, M.D., whose importance for the genre is almost proverbial and yet who has so far been granted relatively little extended scholarly scrutiny. 3 The question of how literary and cultural change relate to one another raises the issue of how best to approach literary texts in the first place. If we take the example of Sherlock Holmes criticism, there are clearly two basic possibilities to approach this ‘canon,’ one focusing on the form of the detective story, and the other on the content of the stories and novels. Looking back on the results of the first major phase of academic Holmes criticism in the 1980s and early 1990s, 4 First, many critics have been particularly interested in the stories as detective fiction: they have pursued inquiries into the detective story’s stress on and exposure of plot, into the detective’s and the reader’s modes of interpretation and how these relate to each other, into the structure, logic, and nature of detection itself. Critics asking some very different questions, meanwhile, have examined the same stories more for their cultural and historical implications and resonances, attending especially to their subtexts of sexual, class, and political relationships. John A. Hodgson notes precisely such two “general emphases” at work: 5 While Hodgson’s 1994 list needs updating in some regards (for instance, with regard to research on Holmes and race), such a dualistic overview has the merit of structuring the field. What should be stressed at this point is that cultural change is not merely a question of the changing contents of literary texts, no matter how complex these are. It is also a question of the changing forms of literary texts, as scholars such as Cawelti or Franco Moretti have argued. While the application of central identity categories such as race, class, and gender can furnish clear examples of the change in cultural values and thus of cultural transformation overall, forms and genres such as the novel or the detective story in their necessarily subtle interconnections of 3 Notable exceptions are Peter V. Conroy, “The Importance of Being Watson,” Texas Quarterly 21.1 (1978): 84-103, and James Krasner, “Watson Falls Asleep: Narrative Frustration and Sherlock Holmes,” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 40.4 (1997): 424- 36. It should be mentioned that Watson has enjoyed decidedly more attention within the quasi-scholarly world of Sherlockiana or Holmesiana, played by Sherlock Holmes aficionados as the “Great Game.” Its central assumption, relevant in the later course of my argument, is that Arthur Conan Doyle was merely the literary agent of biographer John Watson who chronicled the historically real exploits of Sherlock Holmes. As Camilla Ulleland Hoel rightly stresses, some of the materials can be put to good use in serious arguments that do not assume Holmes and Watson to be historical personae. See Camilla Ulleland Hoel, Sherlock Holmes, Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets (2015). 4 “The volume of academic attention to the Holmes stories has suffered under their status as popular or genre fiction, and it is only in the last thirty years that this has changed” (ibid.). 5 John A. Hodgson, “Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes: Biographical and Critical Contexts,” Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. John A. Hodgson (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 12. Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 81 form and content are also indicative of changes in culture. Ideally, then, the question of literature and cultural change would be answered by attending to the relations between the forms of content and the contents of form. My concern in the present article is detective fiction in what one might call the ‘consolidation phase’ of the classic detective story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, i.e. the age of Sherlock Holmes. One of the decisive contributions to this debate, and quite possibly the most explicit treatment of generic change within detective fiction in recent decades, is Franco Moretti’s article “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” originally published in 2000 and republished as part of his collection Distant Reading in 2013. 6 In “Slaughterhouse,” Moretti focuses on what he calls “rivals,” that is “contemporaries who write more or less like canonical authors [...] but not quite,” and who interest him as “representative of the forgotten 99 percent of literary authors.” 7 Moretti asks (211): “[W]hy is Conan Doyle selected [by readers] in the first place? Why him, and not others? ” He hypothesizes that the answer lies in the formal device of the clue; based on a corpus of approximately 150 mystery stories from the 1890s, Moretti concludes that Conan Doyle was the author who made the most - though not in all cases consistent - use of clues. Moretti defines clues according to four criteria of increasing complexity as present, necessary, visible, and decodable (213); Doyle turns out to be the author who used the greatest number and the most sophisticated examples of them. Partially extending and partially contradicting Moretti’s arguments “that what makes readers ‘like’ this or that book is - form” and that with regard to detective fiction it is specifically the clue that leads to the canonization of the Sherlock Holmes narratives (211), I shall argue that the narrating instance in Conan Doyle’s stories is similarly central. Making use of close rather than distant reading methods, I examine the narrating instance John Watson in a variety of Sherlock Holmes stories, comparing him to certain transatlantic competitors. 8 6 Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ 61.1 (2000): 207-227; Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). 7 Moretti, “Slaughterhouse,” 208. 8 The literary history of detective fiction is currently being rewritten with regard to its transatlantic aspects. As Leroy Panek points out, “the modern detective story mainly evolved from the transatlantic literary exchanges that took place from the 1840s onward between the United States and Great Britain. Thus, just as he would influence Conan Doyle, in the 1880s, Poe influenced Wilkie Collins in the 1850s, and then Collins, published in both of Harper’s magazines, went on to inspire American writers to take up the sensation novel in the 1870s and 1880s. More importantly [sic], perhaps, was the flourishing literary market in America that motivated publishers in the United States to buy or borrow detective stories printed in British magazines.” See LeRoy Panek, Before Sherlock Holmes: How Magazines and Newspapers Invented the Detective Story (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 2. G ERO GUTTZEIT 82 The narrating instance is central to the Holmes story formula since it fulfils three central functions: Watson is a representative of the writer, a foil to Sherlock Holmes, and a double of the reader. The first part of this article consists of a reading of Conan Doyle’s first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), contrasting it with novels by the Dutch one-time detective novelist Maarten Maartens and the American “mother of detective fiction,“ Anna Katharine Green. In the second part, developing my argument ex negativo, I treat those Sherlock Holmes stories that do not feature Watson as narrator in order to show the integral importance of Watson’s narrating to the Sherlock Holmes story formula. The final section lays out some of the links between Watson and larger processes of cultural change. What will emerge in the course of the overall argument is that Watson’s writerly, contrastive, and readerly functions effect a prolongation of the dénouement. At the same time, they indicate, mirror and represent cultural changes, particularly with regard to the representation of science. 2. Narratives of Detection, the Sciences, and Allodiegesis Detective fiction has a long and eventful history that is closely interlinked with its sister genre of crime fiction, in which the genesis of a crime, rather than its investigation, is central. After Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” of 1841 as well as Émile Gaboriau’s and Wilkie Collins’s novels, to name but a few, the 1880s and 1890s mark the beginning of the reign of Sherlock Holmes, with the so-called Golden Age of classic detective fiction around the 1920s representing the overall heyday of the genre. The societal and cultural origins of the genre lie in the investigative and legal treatment of crime as well as factual and fictional accounts of crime. 9 Decisive factors are the transitions from torture to criminal investigation, and from confession and testimony to circumstantial evidence, as shown, for instance, in the establishment of a police force in Britain. These processes and the origin of the genre have been linked to the rise of the sciences in the long nineteenth century, either conceived of primarily as historical sciences, 10 natural sciences, 11 or forensic sciences. 12 9 On factual and fictional accounts of crime, see e.g. Heather Worthington, “From The Newgate Calendar to Sherlock Holmes,” A Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). The overall development was famously sketched by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: by the time of Sherlock Holmes, 10 Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). 11 James F. O’Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2013). 12 Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 83 [w]e are far removed indeed from those accounts of the life and misdeeds of the criminal in which he admitted his crimes, and which recounted in detail the tortures of his execution: we have moved from the exposition of the facts or the confession to the slow process of discovery; from the execution to the investigation; from the physical confrontation to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator. 13 For this new ‘subgenre’ of crime writing, Charles Rzepka has suggested the terms “narratives of detection” or “stories of detection.” 14 Rzepka’s distinction links to earlier conceptualisations of the specific difference of narratives of detection. The locus classicus is Tzvetan Todorov’s argument that the detective novel consists of two separate stories, the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. For Todorov, these are representative of the Russian formalists’ basic differentiation of fabula and syuzhet. Not only does Todorov thus make a case for the importance of the detective story as a general model for narratology, but he also argues that, in the case of detective fiction, these two stories “have no point in common.” He states that: “The first story, that of the crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens in the second? Not much. The characters of this second story, the story of the investigation, do not act, they learn.” These terms rely on a distinction between detective fiction as featuring a detective character, containing a mystery element, and focusing on the process of discovery on the one hand, and narratives of detection as narratives which not only exhibit all of these features but, in addition, “directly engage[] the reader’s attention and powers of inference” (12). Sensational novels, for instance, might feature a detective and a mystery, but this doesn’t mean that, in order to involve the reader, they necessarily focus on the process of detection or discovery. 15 It is at this point that Moretti integrates his study of the clue into the theory of the genre of detective fiction. Moretti disagrees with Todorov, arguing that it is precisely the clue that connects the story of the crime to the story of the investigation. For Moretti, it is Doyle’s skill in producing these clues which makes his narratives of detection so successful in comparison with his rivals. However, the strength of Moretti’s quantitative approach to the emergence of the genre is simultaneously its weakness: the focus on the clue shows Conan Doyle to have an edge over his rivals, but it also leaves out other contributing factors. Advancing a more nuanced claim, I argue that besides the clue there are other aspects that explain Conan Doyle’s success 13 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage, 2012), 67. 14 Rzepka, Detective Fiction 7, 12. 15 Tzvetan Todorov, “Typology of Detective Fiction,” The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 45. G ERO GUTTZEIT 84 over his rivals, the most crucial being the narrative mediation by the character of John Watson. Clues are apparently central to the narrative of detection, yet they alone do not constitute its form. Following Rzepka, clues could be said to be the most important temporal devices for the literature of detection, i.e. such devices as function in the manner of Genettian prolepsis and analepsis. But temporal devices are, of course, not the only ones. Applying Genettian terminology to detective fiction, Rzepka argues: The most important [non-temporal device] for the literature of detection is ‘modality’ or ‘mood,’ which controls the reader’s access to information. This is achieved by the narrative’s ‘adopting or seeming to adopt what we ordinarily call the [...] “vision” or “point of view”‘ of ‘one or another participant in the story’ (Genette, 162). The standard detective sidekick, such as Holmes’s Watson or Hercule Poirot’s Captain Hastings, usually performs this modal function in a seemingly natural way calibrated to match his or her presumably ordinary intelligence. 16 Just as the clue plays the role of a connector between the story of the crime and the story of the investigation, so the “standard detective sidekick” also connects these two stories, not in temporal fashion, however, but as a narrating instance. In order to describe the basic relation between the narrator and the storyworld, I adopt a modified version of Genette’s notion of the homodiegetic narrator, as suggested by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, not least since all of these scholars invoke Dr Watson as the prime example of this particular type of narrating instance. When defining the homodiegetic narrator, Genette introduces a distinction between the homodiegetic narrator strictu sensu and the autodiegetic narrator: So [we] will have to differentiate within the homodiegetic type at least two varieties: one where the narrator is the hero of his narrative (Gil Blas) [i.e. an autodiegetic narrator] and one where he plays only a secondary role, which almost always turns out to be a role as observer and witness: [...] Ishmael in Moby Dick, Marlow in Lord Jim, Carraway in The Great Gatsby [...] — not to mention the most illustrious and most representative one of all, the transparent (but inquisitive) Dr. Watson of Conan Doyle. 17 For Genette, Watson is the prime example of the narrator as observer and witness, or the homodiegetic narrator strictu sensu, as contrasted with the narrator-hero, or the autodiegetic narrator. 18 16 Rzepka, Detective Fiction 20. Cok Van der Voort has suggested calling this type of narrator “allodiegetic,” a term that has been taken up by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck in their Handbook of Narrative Analy- 17 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980), 245. 18 The phrase “strictu sensu” is mine, since Genette himself does not offer a term for this witness-narrator. Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 85 sis. 19 3. Watson’s Functions: Writer, Foil, Reader Herman and Vervaeck also mention Watson, stating that “he is a mere witness of the things he relates (which makes him allodiegetic)” (85). Combining these narratological observations, Doyle’s Watson is viewed as the very model of the homodiegetic narrator strictu sensu, or the allodiegetic narrator. Such a general characterization is a first step in the analysis of Watson’s importance for the Sherlock Holmes story formula and beyond. To what use this allodiegetic narrator is put, is the question addressed in the following section. The detective sidekick has been a staple of the genre since its formal inauguration in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” “In the traditional mystery story,” as Frederic J. Svoboda has it, “the sidekick functions as a surrogate for the reader, providing the immediacy of a first-person voice without giving away the case’s solution, which the detective often intuits early on.” 20 The allodiegetic Watson fulfils three functions that are central to the generic form and cultural effect of detective fiction, in which most devices aim to prolong the dénouement and thus to delay intellectual (and moral) gratification until the very end. He functions as a representative of the writer, a foil to Holmes, and a double of the reader. An investigation of the corresponding writerly, contrastive, and readerly functions of the allodiegetic narrator Watson can benefit from a comparison with some of Doyle’s competitors in the transatlantic market of detective fiction, thus shedding light on the similarities and differences of Doyle’s model. John Watson might thus well be called the paradigm of the detective sidekick. In terms of the narratorial characteristics of late nineteenth-century detective fiction, there is a strong contrast between Doyle’s Holmes narratives beginning with A Study in Scarlet (1887) and such autodiegetic detective novels as Maarten Maartens’s The Black-Box Murder (1889). Maartens’s novel is regarded as the first detective novel by a Dutchman, and it is particularly interesting since it was written in English. 21 19 Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005), 84. Maarten Maartens was the pen name of Joost Maria Willem van der Poorten Schwartz, who was popular in Late Victorian times but whose works have not withstood the test of time. What becomes visible in contrasting A Study in Scarlet with The Black-Box 20 See Frederic J. Svoboda, “Detective Sidekicks,” The Guide to United States Popular Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2001), 230. 21 On Maartens, see Hendrik Breuls, “A Comparative Evaluation of Selected Prose by Maarten Maartens” (Ph. D. dissertation, Technische Universität Dresden, 2005), http: / / webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/ ebook/ dissts/ Dresden/ Breuls2005.pdf. G ERO GUTTZEIT 86 Murder is Watson’s “writerly” function. This means that Watson’s role is structurally akin to that of the extratextual writer or author in the double sense of Watson being a reporter of events but at the same time a poet or stylist. This corresponds closely to Watson’s role as Holmes’s biographer, which Holmes himself acknowledges, for instance in “The Blanched Soldier”: “my old friend and biographer.” 22 The full title of Maartens’s novel already gives an indication of its narrating instance: The Black-Box Murder: By the Man Who Discovered the Murderer. The novel features a narrator who is simultaneously the detective, thus combining Watson’s and Holmes’s roles in one. Right from the first lines, the narrator-detective, Spence, posits himself as a reporting witness, distancing himself from any literary claims: In Maartens’s novel, we find an attempt at a similar writerly function which jars, however, with its manner of narrating which veers from allodiegetic to autodiegetic. If I sit down to-day to write my account of what is known at Scotland Yard and among the newspaper people as the ‘Black-Box Murder,’ it is because, truthfully, after long consideration, no man appears to me better qualified than I to speak on the subject. I am not in any way alluding to the literary point of view; literary capacities I never have possessed, and, therefore, wisely shall not seek to acquire. 23 This declared intent, however, proves hard to maintain for the initially allodiegetic narrator. Similar passages foreground the act of narration itself, and their inevitable effect on the reader is to induce reflection upon the narrator’s telling and its quality. This process reaches an early climax in the following passage: The room was cleared, the dead body carried away, and the two ladies walked out in custody. What am I saying? Is this how men write history? The old lady remained unconscious, and they had to lift her up like a second corpse. It was the young one who marched past me, white and erect, with a sergent de ville on either side (17). Because of the strong presence of Spence’s reflections, the reader’s impression of him at the beginning of the novel is very much that of an unreliable narrator. While direct markers of unreliability ultimately disappear, the impression of a strong narratorial presence remains and, in some regards, becomes intensified. Spence’s observations and inferences as well as his personal interactions with the suspects become so numerous that he appears to become the protagonist of the story, leading the narration away from allodiegesis towards autodiegesis. This process is important since it is a way of 22 Arthur C. Doyle, “The Blanched Soldier,” The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Owen D. Edwards and W.W. Robson (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 151. 23 Maarten Maartens, The Black-Box Murder: By the Man Who Discovered the Murderer (New York: John W. Lovell, 1890), 3. Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 87 prolonging the dénouement of the story of the investigation, and this is in many ways how detective novels function: they prolong the conclusion of the investigation. 24 In contrast, as becomes obvious from A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes novel, Watson and Holmes fulfil similar functions to the narrator in Maartens’s novel, but these are split between them. In Doyle’s model, the attempt is made to allocate the factual scientific reporting and the literary stylization of the story to two different characters. Both Watson and Holmes narrate, but Holmes’s narration is - with two very interesting exceptions to be discussed later - embedded in Watson’s. While Watson stylizes the story, Holmes sticks to the facts of the case and reports them in a matter-of-fact manner, thus keeping up the illusion of a factual investigation that is only subsequently made literary - in a secondary process. There is thus a way of using Watson’s function as a writer of the story of investigation to prolong the dénouement. In contrast, Holmes’s comments on Watson’s narration and his own customary statement of the case are kept factual in order to give the reality effect of detection. However, Maartens’s means of doing so - i.e. through increasing Spence’s interior monologues and his interactions with characters - seem rather ill-chosen. This is not, or at the very least not solely, the result of a lack of skill on Maartens’s part. Rather, it is a consequence of the choice of a narrating instance that veers from allodiegesis to autodiegesis. 25 The tremendous importance of this function for the reception of Holmes can be witnessed in the many biographies of Holmes and articles on the stories which purport to regard Holmes and Watson as factual characters - the Great Game of Sherlockians or Holmesians. Chris Redmond, in the second edition of A Sherlock Holmes Handbook, asserts that “Watson thus must be considered first as an ‘author’ (in which case Arthur Conan Doyle is relegated to the status of Literary Agent, a title some Sherlockians have been happy to give him) and then as a character.” The writerly function of Watson thus connects the illusion of factual detection with the literariness of the genre - without any apparent contradiction. 26 24 See the discussion below and Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981) Within Sherlockiana, the role as biographer and Watson’s corresponding writerly function has thus led to the playful establishment of what one might call an inverse editorial fiction. Rather than the author inventing an editor or posing heror himself as editor of an already existing manuscript (as for instance in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose), the author-within-the-work is here supposed to have empowered the author outside of the work. As becomes obvious from this re- 25 On the “reality effect,” see Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: U of California P, 1989, 139. 26 Chris Redmond, A Sherlock Holmes Handbook, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Dundurn, 2009), 46. G ERO GUTTZEIT 88 ception history, if we take the examples of The Black-Box Murder and A Study in Scarlet, then the writerly function can clearly be achieved with more lasting effect in the allodiegetic mode (or, in Genettian parlance, mood). A second characteristic of Watson becomes apparent via a comparison with the narrator of Anna Katharine Green’s novel The Leavenworth Case. The latter, regarded as the first major American detective novel, went on to sell more than 750,000 copies. Green’s title of “mother of detective fiction” encapsulates the importance of her novels for the early phase of the genre: her serial detective, Ebenezer Gryce, makes his appearance in Green’s first novel in 1878, almost a decade before Sherlock Holmes in 1887. The narrating instance in The Leavenworth Case is quite similar to the one in A Study in Scarlet: the case is not narrated by Ebenezer Gryce, but by the lawyer Everett Raymond. This similarity brings out the second function of the narrating agent, which I call ‘contrastive.’ Raymond and Gryce, lawyernarrator and police detective, are carefully contrasted or orchestrated by Green: the young, hasty lawyer Raymond who only has eyes for the main female suspect, complements the old, calm, distanced, all-observant police detective Gryce. The resultant contrast between the two characters is played out, for instance, straight after the dénouement scene, before which Gryce had set up a trap for the main suspects: “Well, [says Gryce] that is the best day’s work I ever did! Your congratulations, Mr. Raymond, upon the success of the most daring game ever played in a detective’s office.” I looked at the triumphant countenance of Mr. Gryce in amazement. “What do you mean? ” I cried; “did you plan all this? ” 27 Raymond’s surprise at the extent of deliberate planning on Gryce’s part contrasts them intellectually. Green’s use of the phrase “triumphant countenance” and the verb “cry” might be viewed as indicative of what is often regarded as the heaviness of Green’s style; but the passage - both in content and form - would also match the Holmes story formula. Patricia Maida, author of the sole scholarly monograph on Green to date, has argued that Green’s narrator Raymond “never becomes a stooge or simply a sounding board for the official detective” like Watson, 28 yet the differences to Watson, who also tends to give “a gasp and a cry of amazement” are not that great. 29 27 Anna Katharine Green, The Leavenworth Case (New York: Penguin, 2010), 305. Due to his romantic involvement in the case, the narrator Raymond might be said to become more autodiegetic than Watson (at least in A Study in Scarlet), but they represent very similar models. 28 Patricia D. Maida, Mother of Detective Fiction: The Life and Works of Anna Katharine Green (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), 14. 29 Arthur C. Doyle, “The Empty House,” The Return of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Richard L. Green (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 14. Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 89 Watson works particularly well as a foil to Holmes because their professions - medical doctor and consulting detective - exhibit strong similarities. Both are professionally engaged in the interpretation of indexical signs: Watson of symptoms of diseases, and Holmes of clues to crimes. Doyle’s own education and practice as a doctor might be adduced as a reason for the prevalence of such inferential processes. So is, of course, the real-life model of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s medicine professor Joseph Bell, who had taught him at the University of Edinburgh. 30 From the writerly and contrastive functions we turn now to the third and most important function of Watson, which is absent from Maartens’s novel and present, though less pronounced, in Green’s novel: Watson’s ‘readerly’ function. Watson is a representative of the writer, a foil to Holmes, and also a double of the reader, particularly the reader’s curiosity. It is this which makes him both “transparent” and “inquisitive” in Genette’s words and which turns the detective story into a narrative of detection sensu Rzepka. This becomes obvious through a variety of factors, of which Watson’s questions are the strongest. If the story of investigation in detective fiction consists of the anatomy of question and answer, as Richard Alewyn once suggested, The fact that Watson, who is by profession an interpreter of symptoms, is so eclipsed by Holmes in the reading of clues, leads to the oft-cited impression of Holmes as a superhuman reasoner. It is precisely because of their similarity, then, that the contrast between Holmes and Watson becomes particularly pronounced. 31 then Watson is the very embodiment of the question; indeed, the very first sentence Watson utters to Holmes in the storyworld of A Study in Scarlet is: “‘How on earth did you know that? ’ I asked in astonishment.” 32 “What ineffable twaddle! ” I cried, slapping the magazine down on the table, “I never read such rubbish in my life.” Watson’s questions, both as a result of astonishment and curiosity, can be said to embody central cognitive effects of the genre of narratives of detection. That these are channelled in particularly readerly ways becomes obvious in the following short exchange about Watson’s actual reader response: “What is it? ” asked Sherlock Holmes. “Why, this article,” I said, pointing at it with my egg spoon as I sat down to my breakfast. “I see that you have read it since you have marked it. I don’t deny that it is smartly written. It irritates me though. It is evidently the theory of some armchair lounger who evolves all these neat little paradoxes in the seclusion of his 30 On Joseph Bell, see, for instance, Andrew Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 178, 50. 31 Richard Alewyn, “Anatomie des Detektivromans,” Der Kriminalroman: Poetik - Theorie - Geschichte, ed. Jochen Vogt (München: Fink, 1998), 53. 32 Arthur C. Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” The Novels, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 3 (New York: Norton, 2005), 21. G ERO GUTTZEIT 90 own study. It is not practical. I should like to see him clapped down in a third class carriage on the Underground, and asked to give the trades of all his fellowtravellers. I would lay a thousand to one against him.” “You would lose your money,” Sherlock Holmes remarked calmly. “As for the article, I wrote it myself.” 33 As a literal reader of Holmes’s arguments, Watson here represents the reader’s potential reluctance to the suspension of disbelief in Holmes’s magisterial intellectual feats - which is, of course, overcome. In the standard Holmes story formula, this occurs at least once in the first meeting with the client and once again when the final dénouement is no longer prolonged. What is revealed directly after this exchange in A Study in Scarlet is Holmes’s actual profession as consulting detective which Watson had been at a loss to discover. The scene of reading thus leads to the dénouement of the first mystery that Watson and, with him, the reader have to solve: the mystery of Sherlock Holmes. That Watson misreads the text and concurrently the character of Holmes, and that, as a result of this misreading, he writes a particular version of Holmes, shows the contrast between him and Holmes, and simultaneously lets us imagine the contrast between him and us. The writerly, constrastive, and readerly functions add up to the central formal effect of a prolongation of the dénouement, a postponement of the solution, or a retardation, as the Russian formalists would have called it. 34 What is important is that the Watson narrator can function as an equally retardatory device as the clues themselves. That this does not merely mean turning Watson into a “perpetual idiot,” as some have called him, 35 33 Arthur C. Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” The Novels, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 3 (New York: Norton, 2005), 41. has become apparent in the three functions he fulfils. While the examples from 1870s and 1880s detective fiction discussed in this section are certainly not exhaustive, they nonetheless serve as an indication that Moretti’s concentration on clues as the sole factor in the transatlantic emergence of detective fiction does not suffice. Rather, the specific allodiegetic narrative mediation by the Watson figure is an additional factor which made the form of Doyle’s detective fiction so successful. This becomes particularly apparent if we ex- 34 I am here following the seminal arguments on the prolongation of the dénouement in Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981). The effect of frustration that Krasner views as a result of Watson’s narration can be interpreted as one emotional aspect of this retardation. Krasner (“Watson Falls Asleep,“ 425) argues: “The stories are [structured] around their narrator’s frustrated desire to behold and comprehend [Holmes’s] detecting. […] The stories can perhaps best be described as portrayals of Watson’s many strategies for biding his time while nothing is revealed because Holmes either does not speak, or will not explain.” 35 Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, 33. Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 91 amine the very few cases in the Sherlock Holmes canon in which Watson is not the narrator. 4. Other Narrating Instances in the Canon If Watson as an allodiegetic narrator with three central functions is integral to the Holmes story formula, then the four stories in which he does not narrate need to be investigated in terms of their narrating instance. In all four narratives, I argue, the Holmes story formula is eroded to the point of breakdown. The stories, published between 1917 and 1926, are late additions to the canon. Two of the stories are heterodiegetic; 36 the other two are narrated by Holmes himself as autodiegetic narrator. 37 It is fitting that the story that breaks with the established formula of the Holmes stories is “His Last Bow,” a tale that has more of the spy than the detective genre. The story, subtitled “The War Service of Sherlock Holmes” in its original magazine publication in September 1917 and set on the eve of World War I, is told in heterodiegetic fashion: Interestingly, these changes appear one after the other: Doyle at first introduces heterodiegetic narration and only towards the very end does he experiment twice with Holmes as the autodiegetic narrator. It was nine o’clock at night upon the second of August—the most terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate earth, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air. The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash, like an open wound, lay low in the distant west. Above, the stars were shining brightly, and below, the lights of the shipping glimmered in the bay. The two famous Germans stood beside the stone parapet of the garden walk, with the long, low, heavily gabled house behind them […] 38 The differences both to Watson’s narrative voice and to the standard setting of Baker Street 221b are apparent. The two Germans are spies, the more famous of whom, Von Bork, is tricked by Sherlock Holmes. We are not let in on 36 This is Genette’s original definition of heterodiegetic narrative: “We will therefore distinguish here two types of narrative: one with the narrator absent from the story he tells, (example: Homer in the Iliad, or Flaubert in L’Education sentimentale), the other with the narrator present as a character in the story he tells (example: Gil Blas, or Wuthering Heights). I call the first type, for obvious reasons, heterodiegetic, and the second type homodiegetic.” Genette, Narrative Discourse, 244-45. 37 I am not discussing the two adventures in which Holmes’s narrative is embedded in Watson’s, namely “The Gloria Scott” and “The Musgrave Ritual,“ which are both in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Owen Dudley Edwards and Christopher Roden (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009). 38 Arthur C. Doyle, “His Last Bow,” His Last Bow, ed. Owen Dudley Edwards. (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 155. G ERO GUTTZEIT 92 Holmes’s plans in any way; the story is focalised through Von Bork’s eyes and the only kind of surprise dénouement occurs when Holmes drops his (rather thin) disguise. While Watson appears as a character, this is more of a cameo appearance. Initially described as “the chauffeur, a heavily-built, elderly man, with a grey moustache,” (162) Watson still partakes in the capture of evildoers. The narrative becomes most interesting when, in the heterodiegetic narration, Holmes laments the state of the world and directly addresses Watson: “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” (172) Holmes’s rather untypical, high-strung religious vision of a struggle and ultimate victory against the Germans turns on images of change: from the wind and the final image of a transformed land to the implied analogy of war to winter. Rather than being contrasted to the heterodiegetic narration in the beginning (“God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world”), Holmes’s voice has taken on the same propagandistic tone that would be highly untypical of Watson’s narration. What makes the passage so interesting in narratorial terms is that, in the very first story in which Watson is not the narrator, Holmes describes Watson as “the one fixed point in a changing age.” Despite Holmes’s assertion to the contrary, Watson has already stopped being the “fixed point” of view of the story: the allodiegetic Watson has been replaced by heterodiegetic narration. The story’s subtitle in the book version, “An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes,” thus presents an apt epithet both for Holmes and Watson (155, 225): the first Holmes story not narrated by Watson marks an attempt to exploit Holmes for propagandistic purposes but beneath this strain the narrating agent and, with it, the generic formula break down. “His Last Bow” is a Holmes story in the sense that Holmes and Watson figure as characters in it; yet it is no longer a narrative of detection. In other words, it is a Holmes story that is no Holmes story because Watson has ceased being Watson. We see a similar dynamic at work in the second of the two Holmes stories that are narrated heterodiegetically, though this differs for medial rather than propagandistic reasons. “The Mazarin Stone” appeared in the Strand Magazine in October 1921, but it still bears the clear mark of its medial origin as a one-act stage play “The Crown Diamond” that premiered earlier in the same year. 39 39 The Crown Diamond opened at the Bristol Hippodrome on 2 May 1921. The villain in that version is Colonel Sebastian Moran who had already made an appearance in “The In the magazine version, Watson initially appears as focalizer: “It was Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 93 pleasant to Dr Watson to find himself once more in the untidy room of the first floor in Baker Street which had been the starting-point of so many remarkable adventures.” 40 The two Holmes narratives completely narrated by the famous detective himself appeared one after the other towards the very end of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series in October and November 1926, respectively. Yet this soon ceases - Holmes sends him to fetch the police and Watson subsequently disappears from the action. In a striking similarity to “His Last Bow,” Holmes also tricks his opponent: rather than using a disguise, here he poses as his own wax figure in order to overhear the criminals conspiring. Thus, both in “His Last Bow” and “The Mazarin Stone,” there is no detection in the narrative and the reader is not actively involved in any inferential process. Once Watson is no longer the allodiegetic narrator, the Holmes stories are no longer narratives of detection. While Watson still appears in these two stories, he completely disappears from the action once Holmes himself takes over as autodiegetic narrator. 41 Thus, the introductory paragraph of “The Blanched Soldier” consists of three parts, all of them focusing on Watson. Holmes invokes the familiar contrast between Watson’s supposedly superficial accounts which are “pandering to popular taste” and the ideal of confining oneself “rigidly to facts and figures.” “The Blanched Soldier” is the earlier of the two and it stays comparatively true to the standard formula: a few words of introduction that place the adventure in relation to others, the appearance of the client, the presentation of Holmes’s observational and inferential skills, the client’s narrative, Holmes’s detection and solution of the case. While Watson is absent from the story level, however, he figures strongly on the discourse level and his invocation is used to justify Holmes’s autodiegetic narration. 42 Empty House.” See The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Owen D. Edwards and W.W. Robson (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 239. Yet, once Holmes has taken up the proverbial pen, there emerge indications of the pressures and strictures of the authorial situation: “I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.” (ibid.). The narrator Holmes then comments on Watson directly (ibid.): “A confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous, but one to whom each development comes as a 40 Arthur C. Doyle, “The Mazarin Stone,” The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Owen D. Edwards and W.W. Robson (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 5. 41 Dermatologist Richard M. Kaplan points out that both stories told by Holmes “seem to demand Watson’s absence because the final elucidation requires skill in cutaneous diagnosis; the presence of a medical man would have, or should have, relieved the dramatic tension of the mystery too soon.” See Kaplan, “The circumstances of the missing biographer or why Watson didn’t narrate these four Sherlock Holmes stories,” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 2 (1982): 1112. 42 Arthur C. Doyle, “The Blanched Soldier,” in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 151. G ERO GUTTZEIT 94 perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book, is, indeed, an ideal helpmate.” While the description almost inevitably reads as ironic if we view it within the parameters of the storyworld (Watson’s greatest excellence is his total ignorance), its more important meaning is metafictional. The danger of someone who is not the criminal foreseeing conclusions is hardly real to the detective himself but it is very much so for the author of the detective story. “A confederate who foresees your conclusions” is an expert reader who will not be duped by any red herrings. Watson’s role of mediator between reader and detective is thus indirectly reinforced while Holmes is constituted as narrator. The initial paragraphs are clearly an attempt to establish a distinctive narrative voice for Holmes, one that is characterized both formally and contentwise by strong contrasts to Watson. But this very opening threatens the established generic model, and later paragraphs make evident the strain beneath which many aspects are placed as a result of the substitution of Holmes for Watson, particularly when Holmes arrives at the insight into the case and does not let the reader in on the ‘secret.’ At this point, Holmes comments: “Alas, that I should have to show my hand so when I tell my own story! ” - without actually showing his hand (164). Thus, the gap in the narrative is marked, yet not filled until the dénouement. And again, the ‘reason’ Holmes gives is based on a reference to Watson: “It was by concealing such links in the chain that Watson was enabled to produce his meretricious finales” (ibid.). Because of this quasi-metafictional foregrounding of Watson’s importance for the Holmes story formula, “The Blanched Soldier” remains the most successful of the untypically narrated stories in terms of the prolongation of the dénouement. The strongest indication of what the lack of Watson’s functions as allodiegetic narrator means for the formula can be found in “The Lion’s Mane,” which is highly untypical of the Holmes canon. Here, the retired Holmes clears up a mysterious death on the beach which turns out to be the result of poisoning by the jellyfish Cyanea capillata, hardly Holmes’s greatest exploit. Yet, since Holmes is the autodiegetic narrator and the dénouement has to be prolonged as far as possible, the narrator Holmes constantly stresses how complicated the case is. It is at this point that the normally superhuman reasoner Holmes becomes similar to the insecure narrator Spence in Maartens’s The Black-Box Murder. Phrases of obscurity and nebulosity abound, reaching their apex in this description by Holmes: My mind was filled with racing thoughts. You have known what it was to be in a nightmare in which you feel that there is some all-important thing for which you Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 95 search and which you know is there, though it remains forever just beyond your reach. That was how I felt that evening as I stood alone by that place of death. 43 In passages such as these, Holmes is no longer the consulting detective and reasoning machine of former days, since he - as autodiegetic narrator - has to fulfil the prolonging function that Watson’s allodiegetic narration had once carried out: in other words, as a result of the narratorial setup, Holmes ceases to be Holmes. What had still worked to a certain extent in “The Blanched Soldier,” because Holmes’s narrative voice is constituted by an invocation of Watson, is no longer functional in “The Lion’s Mane.” Here, the Holmes story formula has lost its narrating instance, the allodiegetic Watson, whose writerly, contrastive, and readerly functions constituted an integral part of its success. 5. Watson as a Clue to Cultural Change Watson is the most famous of the detective sidekicks that played an important role in classical detective fiction from its very origins in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Dupin and his nameless narrator friend are clearly the model for Holmes and Watson. Doyle even acknowledges as much in A Study in Scarlet when Watson says to Holmes: “‘You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.’” 44 What I have called, following Porter, the prolonging effect of Watson’s allodiegetic narration is a staple of many classic detective fiction stories. What makes Doyle’s sidekick particularly relevant is the way in which he serialises the highly-structured, self-contained, and short adventures. As Ed Wiltse has it: “Unlike even the longest-running serial publications, which could eventually be counted upon to end, the Holmes stories, individual, self-contained ‘adventures’ within a continuous diegetic frame, were potentially infinite.” 45 The role of the sidekick as a mediating agent has been traced by Ron Buchanan to the emergence of the modern novel, and he goes so far as to call the sidekick the “modern equivalent of the Greek chorus, performing traditional tasks of providing interludes, reacting as a miniature audience, reinforcing the actions of the major character, providing information about new This quasi-infinity of the diegetic frame, to which the ongoing adaptations and rewritings of the Holmes canon are a clear testament, is also an indication of the larger cultural implications of Watson as quintessential mediator. 43 Arthur C. Doyle, “The Lion’s Mane,” The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 183-84. 44 Arthur C. Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” The Novels, 42. 45 Ed Wiltse, “‘So Constant an Expectation’: Sherlock Holmes and Seriality,” Narrative 6.2 (1998): 106. G ERO GUTTZEIT 96 characters, and marking passages of time from one event to another.” 46 Put simply, the interplay between Holmes and Watson, as shown in Watson’s writerly function, works as a popularizing agent for science. The figure of Watson mediates between Holmes’s cold, machine-like science and the audience. This fact was already central to A Study in Scarlet but emerges repeatedly in other stories of the canon, particularly in this oft-quoted passage from “The Abbey Grange” (1904). Holmes says: If we take into consideration the close connections between the narrative of detection and the development of the sciences, Watson’s mediating position might be connected to the cultural process of the popularization of science that also began in the nineteenth century. “I must admit, Watson, that you have some power of selection which atones for much which I deplore in your narratives. Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite but cannot possibly instruct the reader.” 47 In 1872, fifteen years before the emergence of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the magazine Popular Science Monthly was established, and it continues to this day. The writerly function of Watson as a reporter and stylist of Holmes’s alleged science of deduction might thus be viewed as similar to that of the rise of popular science. As James Mussell argues in his work on popular science writers of the time: “Like a Sherlock Holmes case, the popular science of [Andrew] Wilson, [H.G.] Wells, [Edward A.] Martin and [E.A.] Butler renders the familiar world strange, bewildering the reader before explaining the strangeness of the ‘case’ with a Holmesian dénouement.” 48 The analogy was not lost on contemporaries either. In an article in Nature, H.G. Wells proposed the form of detective fiction as the base for a rhetoric of science: “The fundamental principles of construction that underlie such stories as Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ or Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series, are precisely those that should guide a scientific writer.” 49 46 Ron Buchanan, “"Side by Side”: The Role of the Sidekick,” Studies in Popular Culture 26.1 (2003): 15-26, 25. That Popular Science Monthly regularly featured articles by Charles Sanders Peirce, by all accounts the philosopher who is connected most closely to Sherlock Holmes’s infer- 47 Arthur C. Doyle, “The Abbey Grange,” The Return of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Richard L. Green (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 266-67. 48 James Mussell, “Nineteenth-Century Popular Science Magazines,” Journalism Studies 8.4 (2007): 656-66, 665. 49 H.G. Wells, “Popularising Science,” Nature 50, July 26 (1894): 301. Watson and the Sherlock Holmes Narratives 97 ences, 50 might then be viewed as a further indication of the importance of the Sherlock Holmes story formula but also as a clue to Watson’s significance. 50 Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds., The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983). G ERO GUTTZEIT 98 Works Cited Alewyn, Richard. “Anatomie des Detektivromans.” Der Kriminalroman: Poetik - Theorie - Geschichte. Ed. Jochen Vogt. München: Fink, 1998. 52-72. 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