Reactions to some Sherlock Holmes films I've seen recently.

Over the weekend I watched two film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes - one from 2009/10 and the other from 1993. 

The 2009 adaptation, it turns out, was produced by a studio called Asylum that only produces films straight to DVD that copy the most popular films in any given year.  The hope is that people browsing at a store might mistakenly buy a DVD with a similar title or cover art.  This particular film was trying to cash in on the Guy Ritchie adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. 

Both films are simply titled Sherlock Holmes.  This consumer phenomenon is fascinating on its own, but what was interesting was just how different the look-alike film treated the supernatural.  There were dinosaurs and sea monsters, and they were REAL.  We never got an explanation for the dinosaurs; they were just wandering around London, attacking prostitutes and street urchins.  There was also the invention of Holmes' long lost recluse brother who decides to cure his paralysis with a robot body.  WHAT?!  This film was so over the top and so not in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes.  This is, I guess, where the line between the use of the supernatural I'm talking about and just pure B-movie horror or SF.

The other film, on the other hand, was in the exact opposite direction in terms of using the supernatural.  The plot reminded me of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White because it relied heavily on the woman committed to a mental institution trope (can I call this a trope as long as I see it in more than one place?).  There are three "Ann Cathericks" in this narrative, establishing a serial pattern of crime.  (A nobleman keeps marrying women and disposing of them just to steal their fortunes and keep his estate alive.) 

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 4 - Draft 1 Complete

Chapter 4: Powers of Observation and the Illusion of the Supernatural in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet (1887), Sign of Four (1890), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)

Sherlock Holmes, while identifying himself as a professional detective, is one by way of science. In the first novel to feature Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays the detective as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally perpetuated assumptions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. Even though they are in fact based on observation, Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning are often described by the narrative in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson describes an article written by Holmes, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity" (Doyle). And so Holmes exists in opposition to, say, what Griffin of The Invisible Man represents, shoring up the idea that seeing is in fact the only way of knowing; it’s just a matter of seeing well.

There are also interesting connections to be made with Wells’ The Time Traveller here. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes explains to Watson his theory of deduction, which involves “reasoning backwards” (Doyle). He says, “Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result” (Doyle). This explanation echoes the Time Traveller’s explanation of time travel theory in that human consciousness can account for a particular scientific principle’s unrealistic qualities. Holmes implies in this passage that the average person cannot “evolve from their own inner consciousness” to achieve this advanced reasoning, and that is why his performances of solving cases strike others as magical or inexplicable.

Why not assume that realism contains, regulates, or shuts down the supernatural in these narratives? Science, instead of giving a novel the authority to allow the supernatural to participate in realism, might be a way to tame the beast, so to speak. Looking at the Sherlock Holmes stories casts this doubt on popular fiction most of all, because out of all the texts under discussion here, those by Doyle dispel the supernatural with science rather than representing the cases of the supernatural as realist experiments. Holmes faces several seemingly supernatural cases – a ghostly hound turns out to be a large dog covered in phosphorous in The Hound of the Baskervilles and Indian “mysticism” permeates The Sign of Four. Rather than finding this troubling, I think this makes Doyle’s fiction all that much more important to include so that this project avoids a one-note repetition of the mantra “the supernatural is a part of realism” and instead exists as a complex and nuanced discussion of these texts.

The most recent film adaptation of Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes (2009) directed by Guy Ritchie, while not directly following any of Doyle’s plots, directs one’s consideration of Holmes’ relationship with the supernatural and with science in interesting ways. The film’s narrative opens by introducing a villain by the name of Lord Blackwood who, after being hanged, seems to rise from the dead and escapes. He plans to put all of British parliament under a trance, but, as Holmes exposits at the end of the film, Blackwood’s supernatural feats can all be traced back to chemical and biological experiments as well as innovations in electrical/radio engineering. This is another example of how a film adaptation might facilitate discussions of realism and the supernatural in any one of these chapters.

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 3 - Draft 1 Complete

Chapter 3: Darwin as Super-Naturalist in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896)

This third chapter will discuss two novels – Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – simultaneously because the mad scientist figures from both of their narratives draw from a very specific scientific discourse – evolutionary theory.  The influence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as described in works such as The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man can be found in innumerable corners of Victorian literature, but towards the close of the period, a particular “spin off” of Darwin’s theories called atavism persisted in popular fiction.  Atavism speculates that if Darwin’s theory of man evolving over the ages from more primitivism organisms is true, then there is no reason he might not de-evolve or degenerate as well.  Like Wells’ Time Traveller, the scientists appearing in these two novels adopt the accepted scientific discourse of the day and take them to logical extremes, thus casting “unreal” phenomena as real and pushing the boundaries of reality beyond the belief of surrounding characters and readers.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of a scientist, Dr. Jekyll, who secretly has an experimentally induced split personality, responds directly, in many ways, to atavistic theories.  The narrator not only describes the inner demon, Mr. Hyde, with whom Dr. Jekyll battles as monstrous and violent, but also employs descriptors that cast Hyde as a more primitive and less evolved version of Jekyll.  Characters in the novel, including Jekyll himself, call Hyde a “dwarf” with a “savage laugh” and “ape-like fury” (Stevenson).  Utterson, for example, says that, “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile” (Stevenson).  In his written confession revealed posthumously, Jekyll refers to Mr. Hyde as “the brute that slept within me” (Stevenson).  One would not think it possible for one man to transform into another so radically different – both mentally and physically – but Stevenson’s use of scientific discourse makes Dr. Jekyll’s experiment more than a supernatural horror story, but rather a test of evolutionary theory’s limits.   

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, meanwhile, features two mad scientists, in the form of a major character, Professor Van Helsing, and a more minor character, Dr. Seward.  Dr. Seward, in his study of patient Renfield, who always requests small animals such as spiders, flies, and cats to eat, like Dr. Jekyll, indirectly refers to atavism, as he refers to Renfield as “an undeveloped homicidal maniac.”  And Van Helsing reproduces a Darwinian discourse when he tries to persuade the other men of the existence of vampires – of not only the possibility of them, but the scientific inevitably of them.  He offers a litany of examples to support the ideas that “we all know, because science has vouched for the fact” (Stoker) – of bats that attack cattle and horses to suck their blood and “one great spider [that] lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church, and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps” (Stoker).  His argument in these examples of spiders and bats is that if a behavior can occur in animals, it can also occur in humans.  With this argument, he, like Darwin, uses observations of animals to correlate to humans and corroborate his theories. 

What’s interesting to note for this chapter is that the extent to which theorists like Darwin and the atavism theorists he inspired were themselves considered “mad” has considerably impact on how we might view these texts as questioning the nature of reality.  How much can Van Helsing be an extension of Darwin that tests reality if Darwin himself already was doing so?  Is Darwin himself already participating in the Victorian realist experiment in the ways described here?

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 2 - Draft 1 Complete

Chapter 2: Epistemological Crises in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897)

Only two years later, Wells writes another narrative featuring an epistemological crises caused by the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man.  Griffin, who refers to himself as an “experimental investigator,” tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him. He is not represented in any tangible way. Thus, the epistemological crisis H.G. Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors.  This second chapter will explore, in a similar manner to the last, how both the premise of the narrative and the way that premise plays out challenges the assumption that seeing is knowing, that observation produces an accurate representation of reality. 

Most of the novel features Griffin bitterly battling ignorant villagers who want to arrest him, and the reason the peasants Griffin loathes so much are unenlightened is because they cannot bring themselves to mistrust or question their senses.  They come up with all sorts of more rational explanations for his “appearance” – that he is in a disguise, that he is racially “black,” that he has some sort of skin disease that makes him marbled black and white, that he was in a horrible accident and needs to cover his body in bandages, etc. - as opposed to questioning their ability to “see” and subsequently acknowledging that it is within the realm of possibility that Griffin is invisible.  His invisibility – the fact that they cannot see him – would mean that he is not there, so they must rationalize his strange appearance, which in fact is a lack of appearance, in some other way.

When Griffin reveals himself, they experience the uncanny sensation of “the strangest thing in the world” when they hear a voice coming out of an “empty space,” when in fact the space is not empty, but occupied by Griffin’s body.  The act of seeing in this case is unreliable because even though no one can actually see Griffin, this does not mean that he is not there, does not mean that they cannot know him.  Victorian writer Walter Pater, from whom both Levines draw many of their ideas about realism in Victorian literature, claims that seeing guarantees nothing – it does not equate knowing, but in fact displaces knowledge or obscures it.  The peasants of The Invisible Man fail to understand that even though they see an empty space, that space is not necessarily empty, and this perfectly proves Pater’s point.

On the other hand, The Invisible Man also supports John Ruskin’s more traditionally cited realist notion that imagination is a faulty sense of sight, and that a representation that looks to be an accurate representation – unideal and unimaginative – is realist and therefore preferable.  The peasants plotting against Griffin use only their imaginations and not their powers of reason and observation to reproduce Griffin to each other verbally.  The narrator says, for instance, “Elaborated in the imagination of Mr. Gould, the probationary assistant in the National School, this theory took the form that the stranger was an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives.”  This use of imagination to inaccurately represent someone makes Mr. Gould and the other townspeople fools; the peasant readings of Griffin will strike readers as laughable, therefore locating them in a realist role, scoffing at the anti-realists.  And this positioning of the reader as a participant (or a better participant than Mr. Gould) within a realist project occurs despite the narrative, in its premise, being a supernatural and uncanny tale.  That is, the reader knows that invisible men aren’t possible outside of the novel, but he or she still stands as superior to the townspeople who, in relying on their overactive imaginations, do not know how to properly enact realism.

Annoying quote that I can't find anywhere....

I've looked all over google books and my own notes, and I can't seem to find the exact quote that this partial quote comes from:

Walter Pater claims that seeing guarantees nothing – it does not mean knowing, but in fact “is precisely what displaces knowledge” (Levine).  

WHY ARE THERE TWO LEVINES?!  Sigh.




UPDATE 1/24/12:  Going back through my notes, this quote is actually this: 


this aptly proves Pater’s point that, as Ruth Robbins says, “seeing is not knowing; seeing is precisely what displaces knowledge” (Robbins 186).[1]

---

[1] From Ruth Robbins’ “Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lee’s Androgynous Spectres” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, 2000.

Random thought for later...

An explicit discussion of madness might be necessary at some, particularly in order to acknowledge that both post-experiment Griffin from The Invisible Man and Mr. Hyde from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are both extremely violent and "mad" men.  They are dangerous in a way that the other "mad" scientists are not.

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 1 - Draft 1 Complete

Chapter Descriptions

The following chapters will primarily provide close readings of novels to investigate their usage of the supernatural and discuss how that might locate them in the Victorian realist project.  And since genre is also a critical context for the dissertation, its chapters will also attempt to examine each novel’s narration to see how that might also contribute to the discussion, particularly by way of addressing the frequent labeling of these texts as novellas, scientific romances, shilling shockers, horror stories, etc.  As mentioned previously, the narrative premise of these novels asks the same questions Victorian writers asked of realism, but how such premises are actually carried out narratologically will also be of interest in the context of realism.  If these novels are not attempting to detail every minutiae of life in order to represent reality as more capacious Victorian novels do, then what are they doing instead?  Similarly, the film adaptations discussed alongside the novels, where appropriate, will both use adaptive choices in content or premise as well as stylistic choices in film narration to focus more sharply on the novels themselves. 

Chapter 1: Limitations of Human Consciousness in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895)

An application of science that expands our conception of reality is so central to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that the narrative defines its protagonist strictly in terms of his scientific inquiry by giving him no name other than The Time Traveller.  This implies that he is only important to the reader of the novel insofar as he is able to make his “great discovery” (Wells page #) – to travel in time.  Any other information about his identity is immaterial.  This chapter will focus on this “great discovery” as not a purely fantastical narrative catalyst, as an idea “against reason,” as one of the Time Traveller’s friends, Filby, says, but rather as a way of posing questions about how humans construct, perceive, and represent their realities. 

While the Time Traveller’s method is strictly scientific, complete with “experimental verification” (Wells page #), his conjectures based on such a method questions the very fabric of time and our normal, basic assumptions about how we relate to both time and space.  During the parlor room conversation in which the novel begins, the Time Traveller gives his friends and colleagues a lecture about how time is in fact a fourth dimension of space.  He says, “There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.  There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives” (Wells page #).  By framing the notion of time travel as one that is closely related to or based on pre-existing, scientifically proven notions about “the three planes of Space” the Time Traveller’s theories fit into a realist discourse, even if his conclusion does not seem “realistic.” He also calls our existing ideas about the “distinction between” the dimensions of space and time “unreal,” using the very language his colleagues and readers would to describe his theory of time.      

Feeble human perception prevents the Time Traveller’s conclusion from being realistic; in this same passage, he continues on to say - extremely emphatically to underscore the radical and unbelievable nature of what he posits - that “THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME AND ANY OF THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF SPACE EXCEPT THAT OUR CONSCIOUSNESS MOVES ALONG IT” (Wells page #).  The problem of time travel, according to the Time Traveller, is a problem of perception, and the ability to travel through time as if it were space is an action only limited by human consciousness.  The idea that our “consciousness moves along” time implies that consciousness binds humans to time, making them immobile in it.  In other words, he posits that seeing is not necessarily knowing; in fact it is the assumption that seeing is knowing that prevents us from conceptualizing time and space in such a way that would allow for time travel.     

The act of the Time Traveller telling his own story is just as much a part of Wells’ narrative as his journey into the future itself.  The narrator describes the Time Traveller as a storyteller who is “too clever to be believed” (Wells page #) and “had more of a touch of whim among his elements” to the point where they “distrusted him” (Wells #).  And when the Time Traveller returns from his adventure, he refers multiple times to the act of storytelling.  First he is too hungry to tell the story, then he asks his friends to not interrupt his story, and finally he says, “Most of it will sound like lying.  So be it!  It’s true – every word of it, all the same” (Wells #).  One cannot help but see a connection between the Time Traveller’s awareness of realism in his own narrative and the stake his experiment as a test of reality’s limits has in realism.