Sherlock Redux

He's baaaack.  But since we last read Doyle we have walked Ratcliffe Highway, travelled all over India, the Galapagos and Africa, the mean streets of Dickens's London, the far-from-peaceful English countryside, and Cloisterham (defies an adjective).  Is Holmes the same as we last found him?  How and how not?

Possibilities for Cloisterham

Last class we spent a lot of time discussing what the half of Drood we have suggests about the state of England.  The tone of the book is, like most late Dickens, caustic and dark, and also, notably, perhaps more editorial than ever before; but, upon investigation, the facts of this case don't provide  grounds for hope, either.  Unless Datchery is a professional detective, the guiding hand of a national government seems absent from Cloisterham; the Church, in the form of the ubiquitous church tower, is very present, but doesn't seem to offer much of a system of support (Jasper, after all, is one of its staff); there are few - or no - happy, functioning families; and the town's children are ragged and bestial.  The town itself, as a constellation of the animate and inanimate, Dickens writes again and again, has a soporific atmosphere; it's even, in some instances - one thinks of Durdles - difficult to tell the animate and inanimate apart.

Of course, we can't say whether Cloisterham would have been saved - whether a marriage between Rosebud and, maybe, Tartar would have brought new life to the town; whether justice would have been done to Jasper, or whoever was responsible for Edwin's disappearance; whether Edwin would have turned out to be alive.  The kind of pastorship that Lauren Goodlad writes about might have appeared, perhaps in the form of Tartar, or Crisparkle, or Datchery.  Or, private individuals, like the Cheerybyles in Nickleby, might have - preposterously but not impossibly, given Dickens's many manic authorial moments - made everything right in the end.

What strikes me about what does happen in the book, however, is that Cloisterham's stagnation seems to reach such a pitch that it's the stagnation itself that appears to provoke the novel's action.  It's his his boredom, his cramped and monotonous lifestyle, that drives Jasper to the opium addiction that - it seems - make it possible for him to - at least attempt to - murder.  And it's, again, boredom - the sense of inevitability and inertia - that leads Edwin and Rosebud to call their marriage off.  One act - the possible murder - is horrible, and other - the breaking of the engagement - might lead to new, and better, choices, but the stagnation itself drives both acts.  If Cloisterham is a microcosm of England, or of a part of England, I wonder if Dickens's suggestion is that, no matter what, something is going to happen to England - things are incapable of going on the way they have been.  Is, then - I wouldn't want to call it hope, exactly, but - possibility buried within the inertia of the novel?  And is the question for England, then, not are things going to change, but how are the English people going to handle changes that are coming?

Miss Clack and the Problem of Belief

I wanted to begin where our class ended yesterday: in considering how The Moonstone is a novel consumed by the problems how one grounds belief. The novel certainly suggests that there is a crisis of belief occurring for the characters, as well, perhaps for its author. The novel must summon “evidence” from the professional detective’s observations, the feelings and experience of the family, Mr. Blake’s international education, Mr. Bruff’s legal expertise, Rosanna Spearman’s unrequited love, Dr. Jennings and his experiments with opium, and the testimony of one, young, goggle-eyed witness to solve the crime of the missing moonstone, and they are still too late to prevent a murder, or the jewel’s continued disappearance. Apart, each mode of belief, whether grounded in “moral” or empirical evidence, is insufficient to meet the challenge of solving the mystery; together they are only barely passable as a complete document.

One character who seems certain of her position and the validity of her interpretations is, of course, Miss Clack. With her tracts and her ostentatious evangelical Christianity, Miss Clack is an obvious figure of satire, but, more than that, she represents the dangers of being someone who subscribes to a totalizing belief system, and refuses to consider other modes of knowledge. She focuses so completely on her mission as a Christian woman that she makes herself ridiculous (and obnoxious) to the reader. She also remains the sole writer who, she implies, will never fully believe in Rachel’s innocence. Because she refuses to question a belief system that declares Rachel to be a “bad woman” and Godfrey to be “Our Christian Hero,” Miss Clack is denied access to the novel’s final “truth” about the moonstone. She will remain certain of her own rightness (and righteousness) even as the evidence piles up around her. Adhering to only one, totalizing system of belief, creates blindness.

Miss Clack is not, however, the only character who puts too much faith in one form of belief - at first, Rachel completely trusts her eyes, which give her only a partial view of events, despite “knowing” her cousin’s character.  Rachel is willing, however, to revise her belief when new evidence comes to light that supports her own desires and previous knowledge of Franklin Blake’s character. We could call this logical - a simple weighing of proof - but it is important to note that Rachel’s revision and Miss Clack’s refusal to revise both support their inner judgments. Rachel’s love for Franklin may be seen as no more “truthful” than Miss Clack’s dislike of Rachel. They both, therefore, see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe.

The emphasis on the instability of all systems of belief brings me back to Holmes (as everything must, in this course). Holmes has a simple and totalizing method. He observes, he deduces, he is almost always correct. His efficacy is usually demonstrated at the beginning of each tale, like a magic trick. He reveals the method of the trick, and we are therefore sure of his conclusions. In changing from the communal detection of The Moonstone to the singular deductions of Sherlock Holmes, the detective novel becomes more convinced of its own grounding for belief. I’m interested in considering both what is lost by this change, and what is gained.

Professionals and Amateurs in The Moonstone

I wanted to pick up on something that came up very briefly in class: the question of how we read The Moonstone in terms of the development of the detective figure. In his 1-pager, Paul observes that “The novel’s narrative structure puts each of the characters in the position of feverish detective,” which he noted in class results in a lot of both amateur and professional detectives and detective work. While I’m not sure I agree that every character catches detective fever – Miss Clack, for instance, seems almost an accidental detective, happening upon information during her feverish pursuit of her charitable and religious work – I am very intrigued by the division of labor between amateurs and professionals in the novel.

From Holmes, the model of the professional detective we get is of a detached investigator, able to discern vast amounts of information about people and their behavior with no prior knowledge of them or their actions. He is not emotionally invested in the outcome of his case; rather, he is driven by a fascination (or obsession) with solving the problem. Looking at the earlier appearances of detective’s we’ve been discussing, we saw this detachment at work in Dickens’s detective journalism, but not in Lady Audley’s Secret: Robert Audley is personally and emotionally invested in his investigation in a multitude of ways (his relationship with George, his concern for his uncle, his desire not to disappoint Clara, and his own attraction to Lady Audley), and he is not satisfied by having solved the problem. These seem to present two opposing models of the detective: one, professional and detached, the other amateur and emotionally-invested. What I find interesting about The Moonstone is that both seem to be necessary to the resolution of this mystery.

Sgt. Cuff is a perfect model of the professional detective: he is efficient, intelligent in his dealings with others (he gets the servants on his side when the local Superintendent has alienated them), and he is able to decode the significance of apparently trivial details that prove to be crucial to the case. Cuff (apparently based on Inspector Field) is also our first pre-Holmesian example of a celebrity detective: his investigative prowess is well enough known that Franklin Blake, who has been living abroad for years, knows that “when it comes to unraveling a mystery, there isn’t the equal in England of Sergeant Cuff!” (106, Penguin edition). While he initially fails to solve the mystery, I think it’s important that we remember that the only reason he is wrong is because he wrong interprets Rachel’s character – his interpretation of all of the clues, and of Rosanna Spearman’s behavior, are accurate – and Rachel is, as we are constantly reminded, an unusual woman. Once he knows the true cause of her behavior, he is able to solve the mystery almost immediately. In this case, the amateur detectives can make progress where the professional does not because they have the necessary prior knowledge – they know Rachel Verinder. It would seem that the claim this story makes is that the Great Detective figure alone cannot solve the crime – that the spread of “detective fever” is necessary to solve the crime as well as to assemble the narrative. I’m wondering, though, if that conclusion isn’t being a little hard on Sgt. Cuff, given how much time the various narratives spend telling us how exceptional Rachel is. It is her unusual character that trips up the professional detective – perhaps the necessity for amateur assistance is not a rule, but is in itself an exceptional circumstance.