There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in the Time Traveller's role as scientist. He, on the one hand, completely relies on scientific experimentation, is obsessed with it to the point of unreal innovation. But then, at the very end of the novel, the narrator describes him as against scientific innovation. He says, "He, I know -- for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made -- thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end." One might assume that his experiences with the Eloi and the Murlochs have influenced him, making him realize that scientific progress isn't always positive, but the narrator makes a point to say that the Time Traveller felt this way "long before the Time Machine was made," meaning that he has always felt this way towards the "Advancement of Mankind" that his scientific experiments contribute to. Why would he feel this way? Is this yet another coexistence of seemingly antithetical discourses? Or might he have been unaware of the irony in his sentiment toward the "Advancement of Mankind," considering his participation in it?
Or, perhaps this explains why the Time Traveller never cares to publicize his findings. He shares his journey with his friends, but when they fail to believe him, he isn't too bothered by it and keeps the Time Machine to himself thereafter. This point of possible contradiction speaks to larger issues surrounding Wells' purporting of the Eloi and Murlochs as, in its projection of the future, its own scientific theory not unlike those of Darwin.
Monday, May 17, 2010
More free writing for Chapter 2 (HG Wells)
While reading Thomsa C. Renzi's H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film, I remembered that a large part of what I want to talk about with The Time Machine is the narrative structure and self-reflexive references to narrative itself.
Possible Chapter Outline:
-Time Machine's historical context (theories of the fourth dimension at the time)
-close reading of fourth dimension as a demonstration of limited human perception --connect to realism
-apply the same thing to The Invisible Man
-talk about the narrative structure of each novel and how it relates to realism - narrative time travel or narrative as time traveling!
-talk about film adaptations? (this will more likely be spread throughout the chapter)
TEXT TO GO DIRECTLY INTO CHAPTER:
When comparing the 1960 film adaptation to Wells' text, Renzi points out that while Wells employs a "frame narrator" director George Pal chooses to represent the narrative frame with a character, David Filby. He says, "The Frame Narrator and Frame Character serve at least two purposes. Their outside viewpoint carries a degree of objectivity and gives credibility to the inventor's Inset Narrative. Second, they ground the story in a reality with which the audience can identify before and after experiencing the wondrous trip in the Time Machine" (Renzi 19). Renzi ascribes this similarity in narrative frame between film and novel to the fact that both narratives need to contain the fantastical portion of the narrative - time travel. The idea of a narrative frame "grounding the story in reality" implies that the the story itself is unreal, assuming an antithetical relationship between the two narrative discourses. I would argue that one could also see the narrative frame as a mechanism for naturalizing time travel. If the reader or spectator is already "grounded in reality" as Renzi says, then that sets up the time travel in the narrative as a logical part of that reality.
Renzi also goes on to say that the return to reality provided by the narrative frame renders the realism of the time travel moot because, "the value of the dream experience is not whether it was real, but that it left an indelible impression." This, I think, shortchanges the intellectual significance of the narrative frame and overlooks the time machine as a product of scientific experimentation. In some ways it actually agrees with the aforementioned argument that the narrative frame naturalizes or real-izes the time travel narrative embedded within in that the reader, according to Renzi, doesn't seem to pay much attention to real and unreal on account of the narrative frame, but I would actually argue that Wells, in creating this narrative frame, hopes for readers to focus their attention on issues of realism, just not in terms of the real/supernatural binary.
Having one time line embedded into another links the actual scientific theory behind time travel and narrative as a representation of time and space. We begin in the Time Traveller's parlor room, explaining the theory behind the time machine, but then, instead of chronologically following the Time Traveller on his journey, the narrative remains in the Time Traveller's home, with his friends and colleagues, in order to receive him and then hear about his journey to the time of the Eloi after the fact.
The actual narrative of the Time Traveller's journey, then, is, not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written only a few years later in 1898, painstakingly told in quotations by the Time Traveller and not by the third person narrator. Of both novels one must ask why have a narrator at all if the majority of the story is going to be told as dialogue from another non-narrator character? For Conrad's work, many critics have argued that it is to emphasize the fact that narratives are inherently unreliable, of history or histories as always subjective and subject to the narrator's ideological, social, and political moorings.
[Probably should bring in some Bakhtin here - both heteroglossia from "Discourse in the Novel" and narrative time from Chronotope essay.]
Even the Time Traveller himself, when the narrative frame comes to a close, remains unsure, for a brief moment, as to whether or not his story is real or was merely a dream. He explicitly tells his colleagues that he does not expect them to believe him - "I know...that all this will be absolutely incredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures" (Wells). One, instead of assuming that the Time Traveller's admission of uncertainty is a way of labeling the middle portion of the narrative as fantastical, might think of the attention drawn to uncertainty as a way of showing that there is no way to discern to what extent any narrative told by any narrator might correlate to "reality." All narratives are always already both dreamlike and real at once.
"I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober." --> THIS IS VICTORIAN REALISM! The telling may be "credible and sober," but that does not exclude "fantastic and incredible" content.
[ADD PARAGRAPHS FROM OLD PROSPECTUS DRAFT, PRE-SHORTENING]
Possible Chapter Outline:
-Time Machine's historical context (theories of the fourth dimension at the time)
-close reading of fourth dimension as a demonstration of limited human perception --connect to realism
-apply the same thing to The Invisible Man
-talk about the narrative structure of each novel and how it relates to realism - narrative time travel or narrative as time traveling!
-talk about film adaptations? (this will more likely be spread throughout the chapter)
TEXT TO GO DIRECTLY INTO CHAPTER:
When comparing the 1960 film adaptation to Wells' text, Renzi points out that while Wells employs a "frame narrator" director George Pal chooses to represent the narrative frame with a character, David Filby. He says, "The Frame Narrator and Frame Character serve at least two purposes. Their outside viewpoint carries a degree of objectivity and gives credibility to the inventor's Inset Narrative. Second, they ground the story in a reality with which the audience can identify before and after experiencing the wondrous trip in the Time Machine" (Renzi 19). Renzi ascribes this similarity in narrative frame between film and novel to the fact that both narratives need to contain the fantastical portion of the narrative - time travel. The idea of a narrative frame "grounding the story in reality" implies that the the story itself is unreal, assuming an antithetical relationship between the two narrative discourses. I would argue that one could also see the narrative frame as a mechanism for naturalizing time travel. If the reader or spectator is already "grounded in reality" as Renzi says, then that sets up the time travel in the narrative as a logical part of that reality.
Renzi also goes on to say that the return to reality provided by the narrative frame renders the realism of the time travel moot because, "the value of the dream experience is not whether it was real, but that it left an indelible impression." This, I think, shortchanges the intellectual significance of the narrative frame and overlooks the time machine as a product of scientific experimentation. In some ways it actually agrees with the aforementioned argument that the narrative frame naturalizes or real-izes the time travel narrative embedded within in that the reader, according to Renzi, doesn't seem to pay much attention to real and unreal on account of the narrative frame, but I would actually argue that Wells, in creating this narrative frame, hopes for readers to focus their attention on issues of realism, just not in terms of the real/supernatural binary.
Having one time line embedded into another links the actual scientific theory behind time travel and narrative as a representation of time and space. We begin in the Time Traveller's parlor room, explaining the theory behind the time machine, but then, instead of chronologically following the Time Traveller on his journey, the narrative remains in the Time Traveller's home, with his friends and colleagues, in order to receive him and then hear about his journey to the time of the Eloi after the fact.
The actual narrative of the Time Traveller's journey, then, is, not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written only a few years later in 1898, painstakingly told in quotations by the Time Traveller and not by the third person narrator. Of both novels one must ask why have a narrator at all if the majority of the story is going to be told as dialogue from another non-narrator character? For Conrad's work, many critics have argued that it is to emphasize the fact that narratives are inherently unreliable, of history or histories as always subjective and subject to the narrator's ideological, social, and political moorings.
[Probably should bring in some Bakhtin here - both heteroglossia from "Discourse in the Novel" and narrative time from Chronotope essay.]
Even the Time Traveller himself, when the narrative frame comes to a close, remains unsure, for a brief moment, as to whether or not his story is real or was merely a dream. He explicitly tells his colleagues that he does not expect them to believe him - "I know...that all this will be absolutely incredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures" (Wells). One, instead of assuming that the Time Traveller's admission of uncertainty is a way of labeling the middle portion of the narrative as fantastical, might think of the attention drawn to uncertainty as a way of showing that there is no way to discern to what extent any narrative told by any narrator might correlate to "reality." All narratives are always already both dreamlike and real at once.
"I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober." --> THIS IS VICTORIAN REALISM! The telling may be "credible and sober," but that does not exclude "fantastic and incredible" content.
[ADD PARAGRAPHS FROM OLD PROSPECTUS DRAFT, PRE-SHORTENING]
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Some freewriting, a part of chapter 2 (HG Wells).
In addition to the Time Traveller's theory of time as the fourth dimension, there is, of course, the much more well known or recognized portion of the novel - the dystopian prediction for the future of human civilization. As a scientific theory of H.G. Wells himself, how does the representation of man's future as a place where cultural and industrial "progress," as the humans in the Time Traveler's time perceive it, is in fact self-destructive, also operate as a realist project or experiment?
Like Darwin's theory of natural selection, the dystopia depicted in The Time Machine is a functional scientific theory that similarly implies projections for the future. As either an application of Darwin's theories (resembling the atavism that will be discussed in Chapter 3) -- if humans evolve to select for certain traits, they may in fact end up like Morlocks and the Eloi. Then again, Wells' proposed future may be a refutation of Darwin's theories, because the traits that have been selected for are obviously the weakest or least desirable - for the Eloi it's an ineffective delicacy, and for the Morlock's it's a hyper-aggressive and "savage" industry. Alexei and Cory Panshin, in "The Reinvention of the Future" write, "The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid. The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor." These two civilizations serve as a cautionary tale that co-opts an existing scientific theory like natural selection for the sake of thinking the unthinkable, the inconceivable.
The Time Traveller even mentions Darwin by name, when he says that those unfamiliar theories like those of "the younger Darwin" don't realize that the sun will get hotter over time, thus accounting for the hotter weather that the Eloi experience. This passing reference to Darwin positions him as a scientist who would back up the Time Traveller in his assessment of the future, as his theory of evolution, extended and adapted for the Time Traveller's purposes, actually means that Darwin's theory would implicitly have to be in agreement with his.
The Panshins go on to say that "It is the Time Traveller's final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of the human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality. But he concedes that even his theory may be wrong. The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything. We do not know what happened. We cannot know. The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery."
[GO BACK AND FIND ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL TO COMPLEMENT PANSHINS]
How is this scientific theory that predicts human civilization's future a realist experiment? Active speculation, according to Caroline Levine, was a key tenet of realism. The only problem is there's no way to test the Time Traveller's -- we only have his narrative, his eye-witness account, to rely upon. Or rather, there would be no way to test Wells' speculation, but his staging of the Time Traveller's narrative is the next best thing.
Like Darwin's theory of natural selection, the dystopia depicted in The Time Machine is a functional scientific theory that similarly implies projections for the future. As either an application of Darwin's theories (resembling the atavism that will be discussed in Chapter 3) -- if humans evolve to select for certain traits, they may in fact end up like Morlocks and the Eloi. Then again, Wells' proposed future may be a refutation of Darwin's theories, because the traits that have been selected for are obviously the weakest or least desirable - for the Eloi it's an ineffective delicacy, and for the Morlock's it's a hyper-aggressive and "savage" industry. Alexei and Cory Panshin, in "The Reinvention of the Future" write, "The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid. The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor." These two civilizations serve as a cautionary tale that co-opts an existing scientific theory like natural selection for the sake of thinking the unthinkable, the inconceivable.
The Time Traveller even mentions Darwin by name, when he says that those unfamiliar theories like those of "the younger Darwin" don't realize that the sun will get hotter over time, thus accounting for the hotter weather that the Eloi experience. This passing reference to Darwin positions him as a scientist who would back up the Time Traveller in his assessment of the future, as his theory of evolution, extended and adapted for the Time Traveller's purposes, actually means that Darwin's theory would implicitly have to be in agreement with his.
The Panshins go on to say that "It is the Time Traveller's final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of the human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality. But he concedes that even his theory may be wrong. The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything. We do not know what happened. We cannot know. The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery."
[GO BACK AND FIND ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL TO COMPLEMENT PANSHINS]
How is this scientific theory that predicts human civilization's future a realist experiment? Active speculation, according to Caroline Levine, was a key tenet of realism. The only problem is there's no way to test the Time Traveller's -- we only have his narrative, his eye-witness account, to rely upon. Or rather, there would be no way to test Wells' speculation, but his staging of the Time Traveller's narrative is the next best thing.
In Pursuit of Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age
Peter Allan Dale
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
"Lewes' approach is different. It is self-consciously Aristotelian, indeed, neoclassical in its focus on mimesis or representation rather than expression and effect. What he wants, above all, to write about is the relation between artistic structures and the real structure of the world; what he wants, above all, to recommend is that that relation to be literal or transparent, not symbolic. In this we may, in fact, find him even more of a positivist in criticism than Mill, who, after all, allowed poetry its symbolic existence, where one might, for a time, escape from the rigors fo scientific analysis. Correlatively, Lewes is still more radically opposed to the romantic aesthetic than is Mill, whose concept of the poetic derives from Coleridge and Carlyle, even as it reduces the symbol's metaphysical referents to psychological ones." (65-66)
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
"Lewes' approach is different. It is self-consciously Aristotelian, indeed, neoclassical in its focus on mimesis or representation rather than expression and effect. What he wants, above all, to write about is the relation between artistic structures and the real structure of the world; what he wants, above all, to recommend is that that relation to be literal or transparent, not symbolic. In this we may, in fact, find him even more of a positivist in criticism than Mill, who, after all, allowed poetry its symbolic existence, where one might, for a time, escape from the rigors fo scientific analysis. Correlatively, Lewes is still more radically opposed to the romantic aesthetic than is Mill, whose concept of the poetic derives from Coleridge and Carlyle, even as it reduces the symbol's metaphysical referents to psychological ones." (65-66)
Victorian Realism and the Supernatural in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Critics and moviegoers alike, upon seeing Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) in theaters this year, groaned, rolled their eyes, and generally denounced the film as a violation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character of the same name. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post, for example, says, “For Downey's Holmes is not just a master of disguise, deductive reasoning and scientific inquiry. Here, he's also a prize-winning pugilist whose brain gets only slightly more of a workout than his fists.” The Nation’s review, while acknowledging “Doyle’s involvement with Spiritualism,” still calls the film a “glorified episode of Scooby-Doo: a mash-up of fisticuffs, fireballs, black-magic rites, ghost-hunting debunkery and also, as an afterthought, a little deductive reasoning.” I could go on ad nausea with these review citations, and all of them would fall under the rubric of what scholars in adaptation studies call the “fidelity studies” model. Ritchie’s film is not fairly judged as a sovereign work, but rather in terms of the degree to which it remains faithful to a “source text” which audiences may or may not already know.
For any given viewer of Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, though, identifying a “source text” is not a simple task. The violence or physicality of Ritchie’s adaptation as well as the prevalence of the supernatural that both of the reviews I have mentioned object to supposedly betray Doyle’s late Victorian popular fiction – his four novels and 56 short stories. But these reviewers, whether they realize it or not, actually refer to the myriad of other film adaptations that have come before Ritchie’s. Descriptions of Holmes as a prizefighter, boxer, martial artist, or swordsman litter Doyle’s stories, and, as I will elaborate on later in this paper, Holmes’ scientific reasoning coexists with or confronts supernatural forces in several of the cases written by Doyle.
Film theorist Robert Stam offers one possible explanation for this discrepancy or confusion of source texts, as he combines Bakhtin’s “dialogism” with Kristeva’s “intertextuality” in order to think of film adaptations as not an attempted imitation of a source text but rather as a text with multiple discourses running through it, one of which happens to be the source novel. Novels already are dialogic, and, according to Stam, films based on those novels can just add to the pile of discourses. The novel-film relationship, then, can be seen as “dense informational network” rather than a parent-child, linear, or uni-directional model. Sherlock Holmes is a prime example of this dense, multi-directional intertextuality. Considering the primacy of film over literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, of new media over old, audiences have adopted not Doyle’s texts but rather a long-standing and well-loved commercial franchise, which includes diverse forms and genres such as film, television, novels, comic books, and video games. Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes in over a dozen films, for example, operates as more of a signified against which all future signifiers could be measured than Doyle’s novels and short stories do. The many adaptations of Doyle’s Holmes have cultivated the prim, proper, and stoic detective who dons a deerstalker hat, and that representation not only circulates alongside any depiction of Holmes in Doyle’s “original” work, but also wields more authority in popular culture.
To make the source-adaptation relationship even more vexed, one might consider numerous reports in anticipation of the film’s release from news sources (such as the LA Times in the summer of 2008) that Ritchie based his film on a comic book written by producer Lionel Wigram and drawn by John Watkiss. There have since been many debates in the Internet entertainment news world about whether or not this comic book or graphic novel actually exists. It seems as though the Watkiss images do exist, but originally appeared in a pamphlet of concept art drawn in a comic book style, created for the studio pitch of the film. Even though this text doesn’t circulate publicly, can we call it a “source text”? I think we can. The fact that this series of images can be found on the Internet, or even the mere fact that they have been mentioned in interviews and news articles about the film, immediately and inevitably positions them as inter-texts that signify on not only the film itself but the film’s adaptation of Holmes. Many film reviewers complain that Ritchie’s Holmes is too much of an action hero, but, in the context of the comic book genre, this makes perfect sense. One might also use Guy Ritchie’s previous films as yet another inter-text. When viewed in conjunction with a film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), or Snatch (2000), Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, again, makes a lot more sense, as a film that operates within several genres in addition to detective fiction or mystery – the caper film, the crime thriller, the buddy film, and British comedy, to name a few.
Then again, one cannot exclusively blame the reviewers of the film for adopting a fidelity studies model. While the narrative of the film itself does not appear to recognizably resemble any one of Doyle’s plots, the film’s end credits, presented in sepia, in the style of early photography and film, still make a point to say that, “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were created by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and appear in stories and novels by him.” On the one hand this statement invites spectators to look for the “original” stories and the “original” characters in this adaptation. But a close reading of the statement can imply otherwise; this end credit inter-title at no point uses the more commonly invoked phrases such as “based on” or “adapted from.” It merely states that the characters that appear in this film also happen to appear in stories and novels by Doyle. There is no implied adaptive process, as Doyle is only credited for the characters of Holmes and Watson and not for the film’s narrative.
To defend Ritchie against the negative reviewers, even though that’s primarily what I’ve done thus far, is beside the point. Genre, and specifically genre as inter-text, provides a far more interesting critical lens through which to view debates surrounding Ritchie’s film. Whether it’s the caper film genre, the comic book genre, or the detective fiction genre, there are always several genres making meaning, adding meaning to a film adaptation simultaneously, each with its own set of conventions, expectations, and rules.
What many reviewers of Sherlock Holmes, film or text, fail to realize is that the late Victorian representations of Holmes already contain complex, ambiguous, and messy relationships between genres. It is not as if Doyle’s novels and stories, even if they were to be designated as a singular source text, exist as the clean, pure, and straightforward representation of Holmes. Detective fiction as a named genre did not even exist while Doyle was writing, for predecessors such as Wilkie Collins, using suspense and mystery, were often classified as authors of sensation fiction, shilling shockers, gothic novels, or scientific romances. A major aspect of a Holmes novel that makes it hard to categorize in terms of genre is the blending of scientific or realist discourses with supernatural or anti-realist discourses. Doyle figures Holmes as a man of science, who relies completely on objectivity and reason, but to such an extreme degree that his talents of deduction appear to be supernatural or inexplicable.
In A Study in Scarlet, for example, a friend of Watson first identifies Holmes as “A fellow…working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital” who is “…a little queer in his ideas – an enthusiast in some branches of science.” When Watson asks if Holmes is a medical student, the friend replies, “No – I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of his out-of-the way knowledge which would astonish his professors.” Holmes is even so dedicated to scientific inquiry, says Watson’s friend, that he would be willing to poison someone, not out of malice, but to render an experimental result. This passage characterizes Holmes as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally accepted notions about reality – he, after all, has never taken “any systematic medical classes” and possesses “out-of-the way knowledge” – that his experiments and results alike seem fantastical.
After this introduction of Holmes, Watson as narrator continues to describe Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in logic. When Watson comments on Holmes’ published article, “The Book of Life,” for example, he says,
It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts… So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes of which he had arrived at them they might well consider him a necromancer.
Linking external perception, “a twitch of a muscle,” with access to another person’s interiority, “a man’s inmost thoughts,” creates a cause and effect relationship between Holmes’ observation and what one can only call mind reading. In addition to being compared to a necromancer, the text ascribes adjectives such as “chimerical” and “inhuman” to Holmes. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson implies that Holmes appears to be a witch, when he says, “My dear Holmes…this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.” When Holmes places handcuffs on a perpetrator in A Study in Scarlet, they “appeared as if by magic upon his wrists,” and, in The Sign of Four, Watson, while lecturing Holmes about the dangers of using cocaine, refers to Holmes’ detecting skills as “great powers with which you have been endowed.”
One might assume that these realist and supernatural discourses, while blended in Doyle’s texts, are antithetical to one another. Another contextual look at the Victorian period, however, throws this seemingly simple taxonomy into question. Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed in Victorian studies, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that, as George Levine says in The Realistic Imagination, “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function. Levine also suggests that Victorians were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today, saying, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20). Victorians are far less interesting, says Levine, if we think of them as merely practitioners of mimesis.
The philosophy adopted in this realist experiment appears all over Doyle’s texts because in order to enact a “self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality,” one must keep an open mind that conceives of reality as potentially exceeding normal human perception. Holmes does this exceptionally well, as he is often the only one to think of the impossible as possible and constantly questions the way things seem. In The Sign of Four, for example, Holmes, in a teaching moment with Watson, asks, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” If we think of Holmes as a realist, the seemingly supernatural nature of his work operates not opposed to truth but the very path to it; only by entertaining conventionally unbelievable events is he able to, more so than anyone else, accurately represent reality.
Several of the cases Holmes and Watson solve also feature supernatural phenomena. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a country doctor, Dr. Mortimer, approaches Holmes and Watson about his friend Charles Baskerville, who has just mysteriously died on his estate. Dr. Mortimer confesses that, as a man of science, he, worried for his credibility, kept his discovery of giant paw prints at the scene of the crime a secret; this evidence would prove true the Baskerville family curse, which dooms all Baskervilles to be haunted by a monstrous hound. In an interview with Dr. Mortimer, Holmes asks, “And you, a trained man of science, believe it to be supernatural?” After Mortimer replies with, “I do not know what to believe,” Holmes explains, “I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world,”…“In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task.” Based on these statements, Holmes might not necessarily throw himself whole-heartedly into the supernatural theory Dr. Mortimer proposes, but he does not rule it out as a possibility, and at no point does he say that supernatural forces do not exist in this world – they just aren’t his specialty.
Later on, Holmes off handedly says, “If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men –” and Watson interrupts him, asking for clarification: “Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.” Holmes’ response to this is one that again does not rule out the possibility of the supernatural’s existence, as he retorts, “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?” It is far too reductive to characterize Holmes as a detective who only believes in science and uses that science to dispel the supernatural, and the same can be said of the narrative he inhabits as well. Even though the hound that Holmes discovers is an earthly beast covered in phosphorous in order to appear otherworldly, readers still experience a ghost story up until that reveal. That is, just because the realist discourse “wins out” in the end does not mean that the supernatural discourse becomes null and void.
In The Sign of Four, there are several instances where the narrative tells an event as if something supernatural were happening, only to reveal a more realistic explanation later. Watson feels “something eerie and ghost-like” as he and Holmes travel with Miss Morstan to their rendezvous point, and there are two scenes where mysterious faces appear in windows, creating an uncanny feeling for the reader. Watson discovers the face of one of their travel companions in a window, the impossibility of which frightens him, but then reveals that said companion has a twin brother, thus explaining the doppelganger moment. Once again, Doyle provides both a supernatural and a realist narrative, explaining those phenomena away with science and technology, while still giving readers the pleasure of a ghost story. These uncanny moments and potentially supernatural occurrences make the Holmes narratives much harder to pigeonhole in terms of genre; they are not simply and rigidly detective stories that exclusively present “scientific inquiry” as the Washington Post review expects, but rather perform the more exploratory and imaginative Victorian realism discussed earlier.
I would argue that Ritchie’s film provides a similar narrative discourse that mixes the scientific and the supernatural and therefore operates under multiple genres. A representative example of this would be the scene where Standish, a dissenting member of the Four Orders, spontaneously combusts. Ritchie does everything he can to cinematically establish cause and effect between Lord Blackwood’s evil will and the pyrotechnic event. The camera begins with a medium long shot of Standish and cuts to a medium close up of Blackwood. We then get a longer shot of Standish drawing his gun, this time with Blackwood’s face in the foreground, glaring. After a few reaction shots in response to the sudden fire, we get a close up of Blackwood glaring, with an engulfed Standish in the background. This downward gaze establishes a relationship between Blackwood’s interiority and Standish’s fiery demise, thus creating naturalized cause and effect. The camera, through this series of shots and its emphasis on including Blackwood’s face in order to build an association between the him and the fire, tells the audience that they have just witnessed supernatural powers at work.
Only later do we get an explanation of the mechanics of Blackwood’s actions.
When Holmes and Blackwood have their final face-off in the dramatic climax of the film atop a partially constructed London Bridge, Blackwood’s impending doom, as he slips off the bridge, builds tension while Holmes offers exposition, saying, “There was never any magic, only conjuring tricks.” When he gets to Standish’s death, he explains, “The death of Standish was a real mystery, until you used the same compound to blow up the wharf. An odorless, tasteless flammable liquid, yet it burned with an unusual pinkish hue. Did Standish mistake it for rain? All it took was a spark. A simple rigged bullet in his gun – ingenious.” Throughout this monologue the camera cuts to show spectators a series of flashbacks –Watson warning Holmes on the wharf, Riordan’s laboratory (first with Holmes investigating it, then with Riordan actually experimenting in it), Standish walking up to the temple, Standish firing his gun and subsequently catching on fire, and Riordan putting the rigged bullet in Standish’s gun. Throughout this flashback montage, in stark contrast to the version of the scene presented earlier, there is no sign of Blackwood and therefore no way to attribute the actions to him.
Based on these scenes one can see how Ritchie, like Doyle, deploys multiple genres in the same narrative; his Holmes case contains both a supernatural and a realist narrative just as The Hound of the Baskervilles does. Not only does this challenge the reviewers who might question the supernatural happenings in the film as inauthentic, but it also shows us that to expect a Sherlock Holmes case to obey the laws of a single genre – a “detective story” is nothing short of absurd. Genre, despite being a category designed to include and exclude, is always already hybrid, multiplicitous, and malleable, rules made explicitly to be broken. I hope the literary-historical context about Victorian genres, including realism and the supernatural, can help us better understand Ritchie’s film, but a challenge for scholars in adaptation studies remains. Even though scholarship in adaptation has pronounced fidelity studies passé, the film industry and media still cling to this evaluative mode. Is there any way to get them to let go and move on?
For any given viewer of Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, though, identifying a “source text” is not a simple task. The violence or physicality of Ritchie’s adaptation as well as the prevalence of the supernatural that both of the reviews I have mentioned object to supposedly betray Doyle’s late Victorian popular fiction – his four novels and 56 short stories. But these reviewers, whether they realize it or not, actually refer to the myriad of other film adaptations that have come before Ritchie’s. Descriptions of Holmes as a prizefighter, boxer, martial artist, or swordsman litter Doyle’s stories, and, as I will elaborate on later in this paper, Holmes’ scientific reasoning coexists with or confronts supernatural forces in several of the cases written by Doyle.
Film theorist Robert Stam offers one possible explanation for this discrepancy or confusion of source texts, as he combines Bakhtin’s “dialogism” with Kristeva’s “intertextuality” in order to think of film adaptations as not an attempted imitation of a source text but rather as a text with multiple discourses running through it, one of which happens to be the source novel. Novels already are dialogic, and, according to Stam, films based on those novels can just add to the pile of discourses. The novel-film relationship, then, can be seen as “dense informational network” rather than a parent-child, linear, or uni-directional model. Sherlock Holmes is a prime example of this dense, multi-directional intertextuality. Considering the primacy of film over literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, of new media over old, audiences have adopted not Doyle’s texts but rather a long-standing and well-loved commercial franchise, which includes diverse forms and genres such as film, television, novels, comic books, and video games. Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes in over a dozen films, for example, operates as more of a signified against which all future signifiers could be measured than Doyle’s novels and short stories do. The many adaptations of Doyle’s Holmes have cultivated the prim, proper, and stoic detective who dons a deerstalker hat, and that representation not only circulates alongside any depiction of Holmes in Doyle’s “original” work, but also wields more authority in popular culture.
To make the source-adaptation relationship even more vexed, one might consider numerous reports in anticipation of the film’s release from news sources (such as the LA Times in the summer of 2008) that Ritchie based his film on a comic book written by producer Lionel Wigram and drawn by John Watkiss. There have since been many debates in the Internet entertainment news world about whether or not this comic book or graphic novel actually exists. It seems as though the Watkiss images do exist, but originally appeared in a pamphlet of concept art drawn in a comic book style, created for the studio pitch of the film. Even though this text doesn’t circulate publicly, can we call it a “source text”? I think we can. The fact that this series of images can be found on the Internet, or even the mere fact that they have been mentioned in interviews and news articles about the film, immediately and inevitably positions them as inter-texts that signify on not only the film itself but the film’s adaptation of Holmes. Many film reviewers complain that Ritchie’s Holmes is too much of an action hero, but, in the context of the comic book genre, this makes perfect sense. One might also use Guy Ritchie’s previous films as yet another inter-text. When viewed in conjunction with a film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), or Snatch (2000), Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, again, makes a lot more sense, as a film that operates within several genres in addition to detective fiction or mystery – the caper film, the crime thriller, the buddy film, and British comedy, to name a few.
Then again, one cannot exclusively blame the reviewers of the film for adopting a fidelity studies model. While the narrative of the film itself does not appear to recognizably resemble any one of Doyle’s plots, the film’s end credits, presented in sepia, in the style of early photography and film, still make a point to say that, “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were created by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and appear in stories and novels by him.” On the one hand this statement invites spectators to look for the “original” stories and the “original” characters in this adaptation. But a close reading of the statement can imply otherwise; this end credit inter-title at no point uses the more commonly invoked phrases such as “based on” or “adapted from.” It merely states that the characters that appear in this film also happen to appear in stories and novels by Doyle. There is no implied adaptive process, as Doyle is only credited for the characters of Holmes and Watson and not for the film’s narrative.
To defend Ritchie against the negative reviewers, even though that’s primarily what I’ve done thus far, is beside the point. Genre, and specifically genre as inter-text, provides a far more interesting critical lens through which to view debates surrounding Ritchie’s film. Whether it’s the caper film genre, the comic book genre, or the detective fiction genre, there are always several genres making meaning, adding meaning to a film adaptation simultaneously, each with its own set of conventions, expectations, and rules.
What many reviewers of Sherlock Holmes, film or text, fail to realize is that the late Victorian representations of Holmes already contain complex, ambiguous, and messy relationships between genres. It is not as if Doyle’s novels and stories, even if they were to be designated as a singular source text, exist as the clean, pure, and straightforward representation of Holmes. Detective fiction as a named genre did not even exist while Doyle was writing, for predecessors such as Wilkie Collins, using suspense and mystery, were often classified as authors of sensation fiction, shilling shockers, gothic novels, or scientific romances. A major aspect of a Holmes novel that makes it hard to categorize in terms of genre is the blending of scientific or realist discourses with supernatural or anti-realist discourses. Doyle figures Holmes as a man of science, who relies completely on objectivity and reason, but to such an extreme degree that his talents of deduction appear to be supernatural or inexplicable.
In A Study in Scarlet, for example, a friend of Watson first identifies Holmes as “A fellow…working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital” who is “…a little queer in his ideas – an enthusiast in some branches of science.” When Watson asks if Holmes is a medical student, the friend replies, “No – I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of his out-of-the way knowledge which would astonish his professors.” Holmes is even so dedicated to scientific inquiry, says Watson’s friend, that he would be willing to poison someone, not out of malice, but to render an experimental result. This passage characterizes Holmes as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally accepted notions about reality – he, after all, has never taken “any systematic medical classes” and possesses “out-of-the way knowledge” – that his experiments and results alike seem fantastical.
After this introduction of Holmes, Watson as narrator continues to describe Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in logic. When Watson comments on Holmes’ published article, “The Book of Life,” for example, he says,
It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts… So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes of which he had arrived at them they might well consider him a necromancer.
Linking external perception, “a twitch of a muscle,” with access to another person’s interiority, “a man’s inmost thoughts,” creates a cause and effect relationship between Holmes’ observation and what one can only call mind reading. In addition to being compared to a necromancer, the text ascribes adjectives such as “chimerical” and “inhuman” to Holmes. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson implies that Holmes appears to be a witch, when he says, “My dear Holmes…this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.” When Holmes places handcuffs on a perpetrator in A Study in Scarlet, they “appeared as if by magic upon his wrists,” and, in The Sign of Four, Watson, while lecturing Holmes about the dangers of using cocaine, refers to Holmes’ detecting skills as “great powers with which you have been endowed.”
One might assume that these realist and supernatural discourses, while blended in Doyle’s texts, are antithetical to one another. Another contextual look at the Victorian period, however, throws this seemingly simple taxonomy into question. Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed in Victorian studies, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that, as George Levine says in The Realistic Imagination, “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function. Levine also suggests that Victorians were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today, saying, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20). Victorians are far less interesting, says Levine, if we think of them as merely practitioners of mimesis.
The philosophy adopted in this realist experiment appears all over Doyle’s texts because in order to enact a “self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality,” one must keep an open mind that conceives of reality as potentially exceeding normal human perception. Holmes does this exceptionally well, as he is often the only one to think of the impossible as possible and constantly questions the way things seem. In The Sign of Four, for example, Holmes, in a teaching moment with Watson, asks, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” If we think of Holmes as a realist, the seemingly supernatural nature of his work operates not opposed to truth but the very path to it; only by entertaining conventionally unbelievable events is he able to, more so than anyone else, accurately represent reality.
Several of the cases Holmes and Watson solve also feature supernatural phenomena. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a country doctor, Dr. Mortimer, approaches Holmes and Watson about his friend Charles Baskerville, who has just mysteriously died on his estate. Dr. Mortimer confesses that, as a man of science, he, worried for his credibility, kept his discovery of giant paw prints at the scene of the crime a secret; this evidence would prove true the Baskerville family curse, which dooms all Baskervilles to be haunted by a monstrous hound. In an interview with Dr. Mortimer, Holmes asks, “And you, a trained man of science, believe it to be supernatural?” After Mortimer replies with, “I do not know what to believe,” Holmes explains, “I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world,”…“In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task.” Based on these statements, Holmes might not necessarily throw himself whole-heartedly into the supernatural theory Dr. Mortimer proposes, but he does not rule it out as a possibility, and at no point does he say that supernatural forces do not exist in this world – they just aren’t his specialty.
Later on, Holmes off handedly says, “If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men –” and Watson interrupts him, asking for clarification: “Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.” Holmes’ response to this is one that again does not rule out the possibility of the supernatural’s existence, as he retorts, “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?” It is far too reductive to characterize Holmes as a detective who only believes in science and uses that science to dispel the supernatural, and the same can be said of the narrative he inhabits as well. Even though the hound that Holmes discovers is an earthly beast covered in phosphorous in order to appear otherworldly, readers still experience a ghost story up until that reveal. That is, just because the realist discourse “wins out” in the end does not mean that the supernatural discourse becomes null and void.
In The Sign of Four, there are several instances where the narrative tells an event as if something supernatural were happening, only to reveal a more realistic explanation later. Watson feels “something eerie and ghost-like” as he and Holmes travel with Miss Morstan to their rendezvous point, and there are two scenes where mysterious faces appear in windows, creating an uncanny feeling for the reader. Watson discovers the face of one of their travel companions in a window, the impossibility of which frightens him, but then reveals that said companion has a twin brother, thus explaining the doppelganger moment. Once again, Doyle provides both a supernatural and a realist narrative, explaining those phenomena away with science and technology, while still giving readers the pleasure of a ghost story. These uncanny moments and potentially supernatural occurrences make the Holmes narratives much harder to pigeonhole in terms of genre; they are not simply and rigidly detective stories that exclusively present “scientific inquiry” as the Washington Post review expects, but rather perform the more exploratory and imaginative Victorian realism discussed earlier.
I would argue that Ritchie’s film provides a similar narrative discourse that mixes the scientific and the supernatural and therefore operates under multiple genres. A representative example of this would be the scene where Standish, a dissenting member of the Four Orders, spontaneously combusts. Ritchie does everything he can to cinematically establish cause and effect between Lord Blackwood’s evil will and the pyrotechnic event. The camera begins with a medium long shot of Standish and cuts to a medium close up of Blackwood. We then get a longer shot of Standish drawing his gun, this time with Blackwood’s face in the foreground, glaring. After a few reaction shots in response to the sudden fire, we get a close up of Blackwood glaring, with an engulfed Standish in the background. This downward gaze establishes a relationship between Blackwood’s interiority and Standish’s fiery demise, thus creating naturalized cause and effect. The camera, through this series of shots and its emphasis on including Blackwood’s face in order to build an association between the him and the fire, tells the audience that they have just witnessed supernatural powers at work.
Only later do we get an explanation of the mechanics of Blackwood’s actions.
When Holmes and Blackwood have their final face-off in the dramatic climax of the film atop a partially constructed London Bridge, Blackwood’s impending doom, as he slips off the bridge, builds tension while Holmes offers exposition, saying, “There was never any magic, only conjuring tricks.” When he gets to Standish’s death, he explains, “The death of Standish was a real mystery, until you used the same compound to blow up the wharf. An odorless, tasteless flammable liquid, yet it burned with an unusual pinkish hue. Did Standish mistake it for rain? All it took was a spark. A simple rigged bullet in his gun – ingenious.” Throughout this monologue the camera cuts to show spectators a series of flashbacks –Watson warning Holmes on the wharf, Riordan’s laboratory (first with Holmes investigating it, then with Riordan actually experimenting in it), Standish walking up to the temple, Standish firing his gun and subsequently catching on fire, and Riordan putting the rigged bullet in Standish’s gun. Throughout this flashback montage, in stark contrast to the version of the scene presented earlier, there is no sign of Blackwood and therefore no way to attribute the actions to him.
Based on these scenes one can see how Ritchie, like Doyle, deploys multiple genres in the same narrative; his Holmes case contains both a supernatural and a realist narrative just as The Hound of the Baskervilles does. Not only does this challenge the reviewers who might question the supernatural happenings in the film as inauthentic, but it also shows us that to expect a Sherlock Holmes case to obey the laws of a single genre – a “detective story” is nothing short of absurd. Genre, despite being a category designed to include and exclude, is always already hybrid, multiplicitous, and malleable, rules made explicitly to be broken. I hope the literary-historical context about Victorian genres, including realism and the supernatural, can help us better understand Ritchie’s film, but a challenge for scholars in adaptation studies remains. Even though scholarship in adaptation has pronounced fidelity studies passé, the film industry and media still cling to this evaluative mode. Is there any way to get them to let go and move on?
Friday, May 7, 2010
more unused quotes
“’At this instant a horrible change came over his expression his eyes stared wildly, his jaw dropped, and he yelled, in a voice which I can never forget, “Keep him out! For Christ’s sake keep him out!” We both stared round at the window behind us upon which his gaze was fixed. A face was looking in at us out of the darkness. We could see the whitening of the nose wehre it was pressed against the glass….My brother and I rushed towards the window, but the man was gone.”
Watson says, “Moonlight was streaming into the room, and it was bright with a vague and shifty radiance. Looking straight at me, and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was in shadow, there hung a face – the very face of our companion Thaddeus” (turns out to be his twin brother)
Watson says, “Moonlight was streaming into the room, and it was bright with a vague and shifty radiance. Looking straight at me, and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was in shadow, there hung a face – the very face of our companion Thaddeus” (turns out to be his twin brother)
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Some Sherlock Holmes quotes
Collecting these for my conference paper, but I won't use them all, so here is where I shall store them for safe keep. As you can see, these are all examples of describing Holmes' scientific practice/theory in supernatural/mystical terms.
Holmes is first described to Watson by a friend, who identifies him as “A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital”… “He is a little queer in his ideas – an enthusiast in some branches of science.”
“A medical student, I suppose?”
“No – I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of his out-of-the way knowledge which would astonish his professors.”
He is so dedicated to scientific inquiry that he would be willing to poison a friend, not out of malice, but to discover something in the experimental results. (Study in Scarlet)
“I have a vivid recollection of that instant, of Holmes’ triumphant expression and the ring of his voice, of the cabman’s dazed, savage face, as he glared at the glittering handcuffs, which had appeared as if by magic upon his wrists.” (Study in Scarlet)
“Sherlock Holmes drew a long breath, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “I should have more faith,” he said; “I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation. Of the two pills in that box one was the most deadly poison, and the other was entirely harmless. I ought to have known that before I ever saw the box at all.”’ (Study in Scarlet)
In describing “The Book of Life”: “it attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way. It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts. Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes of which he had arrived at them they might well consider him a necromancer.”
“The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical – so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.” (Study in Scarlet)
“Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?” (Sign of Four when Watson yells at Holmes for doing cocaine)
“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (Sign of Four)
“There is something positively inhuman in you at times.” (Sign of Four)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)