For this blog post, I thought I'd take a moment to respond to the previous class discussion by looking at the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," and seeing if it answers (or complicates) any of the questions that were brought up in class. It seems to me that the ideas of the reader's expectation, and also what might be called the reader's participation, were something many people were concerned with when we were trying to unpack out notions of genre, and the detective genre in particular. I'd like to know whether, after reading the first Sherlock Holmes story (or stories), anyone has any new or changed ideas about what it means to be a reader of detective fiction.
I found it interesting that in this story there was already the assumption of a Holmes readership - not only with the general feeling of the story starting without preamble or explicit introduction to the two main characters, but in the outright naming of a previous story, the Study in Scarlet. Holmes references Watson as his "Boswell," which, according to wikipedia (sorry!) was an 18th century Scottish biographer whose name "passed into the English language as a term for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print." Given our discussion about Watson as a possible stand-in for the reader, what do you think these mentions of Watson as author say about our notion that he is in some way 'safe' or 'reliable'? Watson is specifically characterized as a biographer-companion, someone who is both present at the moment of action but also relied upon to record, and thus reflect, upon that action. The character as biographer notes that this case is different from "the two crimes which [he] has elsewhere recorded;" ie. the two previous novels. Can Watson be both the writer and the reader?
Janie, I like the description of Watson as a "biographer-companion," a character whose direct involvement in the "action" of the story is often minimal, yet has quite a lot of power in terms of shaping the story for his readers. (Of course, Watson isn't always on the sidelines, but in "A Scandal in Bohemia," aside from the moment in which Watson throws the smoke rocket into the window, at Holmes's direction, his main duties do seem to be listening, observing, and transcribing.)
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, Watson is quite influential as the story's "writer." He has much more power than Holmes to editorialize, to reflect, to assign varying levels of significance to the story's components. Even the way he arranges the story, the order in which he records things, shapes our perception of the narrative. I was thinking about this story's "moment of telling" when I reread the opening paragraph: "To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name.... [T]here was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler..." By the end of the paragraph, before we know anything about who Irene Adler is or what this case is about, Watson has already overtly informed us of Ms. Adler's special place in Sherlock Holmes's esteem. (Note: I was going to add here that it's curious that Watson mentions her death in the first paragraph, without explaining that later, but apparently there is some confusion about whether the "late Irene Adler" in the first paragraph refers to her subsequent death, prior to the point of the story's telling, or to the fact that her name changes to Irene Norton following her marriage. I suppose the latter explanation makes more sense). In any case, in answer to your question, I suppose yes, in some ways, Watson can be both the writer and the reader. He is certainly the "writer" of these stories, and yet his (fictional) authorship seems to anticipate the questions and reactions of his (nonfictional) readers in such a way that his perspective functions as an intermediary or stand-in for the reader.