Haunted by Leo Braudy

Author:Leo Braudy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300224726
Publisher: Yale University Press

A CASE OF IDENTITY

In Thomson’s despairing poem the crowded modern city inspires depression and thoughts of suicide, but for others the city is a place of possibility and discovery, where new identities can be fashioned, and where ambition and the rise to fame is as possible and as alluring as anonymity and disguise. The Holmesian detective preeminently exploits both of those kinds of resources. He is a magnet for those who have mysterious events or crimes they wish to understand as well as a master of masquerade, who can be equally at home in a fashionable party or an opium den. The most obvious aspect of the detective is his ability to command arcane sorts of knowledge, his epistemology. But it is also his ontology, his unique identity, that makes him memorable. Holmes remarks that his art of detection is “an impersonal thing, a thing beyond myself.” The detachment rationality requires may also serve as protection against the irrational, rather than something in itself, but there is also something irreducible in the detective’s subjectivity. Some time before science and sociology fully understood the observer effect, by which the presence of an engaged spectator changes the phenomenon being observed, the detective story had built it into its basic assumptions.11

In order to ascertain the truth of the mysteries Holmes has been handed, he must therefore practice a kind of emotional repression, which brings us to another aspect of the detective that has passed on to its legacy over the decades—his problematic relation to women. To the basic quartet of the detective, the sidekick, the unimaginative official policeman, and the criminal, Doyle adds two further figures—the megalomaniacal master of crime James Moriarty and the elusive female criminal Irene Adler. Moriarty appears in only one story, “The Adventure of the Final Problem” (1893), as well as in the last novel, The Valley of Fear (1914), and some critics have argued that his prime function was to help Doyle kill off the Holmes character he was getting tired of writing about (for only a time as it turned out). But the idea of the combat between the master of crime and the master of detection had a resonance and a legacy beyond Doyle’s immediate purposes, reaching down into the master criminals who want to rule the world, from Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu to the antagonists of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Doyle calls Moriarty “the Napoleon of crime,” and the combat of charismas between him and Holmes on the cliffs above the Reichenbach Falls resembles the two aspects of the gothic villain, the repellently tyrannic and the melancholic sympathetic, struggling with each other for dominance. Moriarty in this way may also remind us either of Satan or of the Wholly Other God, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans postulated by so much of affective religion, now secularized into a kind of mega-gangster.12

Criminals with gangs who seek to conquer the world will become more familiar in reality in the twentieth century and beyond. To fight them, the detective or the spy or the innocent bystander must armor himself and sally forth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.