We are very pleased to run another guest blog today, this time written by Dr Matt Hills, a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. Matt is a scholar of fan cultures and cult media, and is the author of both the excellent Fan Cultures and 2010′s Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-first Century (required reading for any fan of the Eccleston/Tennant/Smith eras). We’re thrilled to have him contribute to Sherlocking, and hope you enjoy his thoughts on Sherlock, knowledge, and fan sites!
Much has been written about the style of Sherlock, and its updating for a twenty-first century TV audience. I want to focus on something slightly different: the way the series engages with questions of knowledge. There is a major shift from the Canon’s initial view of detection – exemplified by John Watson’s humorous summary of Holmes’s areas of expertise in ‘A Study in Scarlet’ – to depictions of know-how in Sherlock. This can be glossed as follows: Conan Doyle depicts a world in which Holmes knows what he needs to know. By contrast – and it announces this most strenuously in ‘The Great Game’ – Sherlock challenges any omniscient hierarchy of ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ knowledge. Always a matter of context, no form of knowledge can ever be consigned to the waste bin (or the Trash icon of Holmes’s mind-as-computer). Trivia saves lives; gossip can be as valuable as a professorship, and indeed both modes of knowing – the untutored and the schooled – are instrumental to cracking the mystery of the Lost Vermeer. And so, too, is networked knowledge, as Sherlock scrolls through menu options on his smartphone, or goes online to learn from Connie Prince’s fandom: “fan sites. Indispensable for gossip.”
‘The Great Game’ is, in fact, structured around a very specific rewriting of ‘A Study in Scarlet’. Whilst it is fair to say that Gatiss’s script draws on a range of texts from the Canon, unlike Moffat’s more singular reworking, this third TV episode is nevertheless premised on critiquing ‘Scarlet’. Its running gag, that Sherlock doesn’t realise the Earth goes round the Sun, is meant to refer to events from ‘A Study in Pink’, though it actually cites ‘Scarlet’, where Holmes announces of the Copernican Theory: “What the deuce is it to me?… if we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.” Holmes even tells Watson, “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it”, in order not to clutter the attic of his mind with pointless “lumber.” Conan Doyle has John list Holmes’s knowledge of Literature, Philosophy and Astronomy as “nil,” whilst the detective displays an “immense” knowledge of Sensational Literature. This enumeration of Sherlock’s limits is playful, perhaps aimed at eliciting a wry smile from the reader, but it is nonetheless set out as a Holmesian approach to knowledge.
‘The Great Game’ doesn’t just joke about Holmes’s limits. It goes a step further and exposes them, making astronomy crucial to solving its key mystery and buying Sherlock a poolside meeting with Jim. Luckily, the “Van Buren” phenomenon is mentioned during the Planetarium presentation, enabling Holmes to make the link via empirical observation of detail and an exercise in memory. Freeman’s Watson drives the point home, though, for us and for him – Holmes can’t know in advance what will be relevant to his detective work. A world of fixed value, of ‘useful’ furniture of the mind versus ‘lumber,’ no longer holds up in the media culture of the twenty-first century. Holmes even has to be introduced “to crap telly” when daytime TV forms a part of the investigation. No forms of know-how are off-limits, or to be ultimately derided as valueless. Important forms of knowledge are all around, embedded in academia, astronomy, trashy TV… and fandom.
Literary theorist Franco Moretti has observed of the Canon that:
All Holmes’s investigations are accompanied and supported by the new and perfect mechanisms of transportation and communication. Carriages, trains, letters, telegrams, in Conan Doyle’s world, are all crucial and always live up to expectations. They are the tacit and indispensable support of the arrest. Society expands and becomes more complicated: but it creates a framework of control, a network of relationships, that holds it more firmly together than ever before (from the essay ‘Clues’, in Signs Taken for Wonders, 1988:143).
And communications are ever more “indispensable” to Sherlock‘s ratiocinations in 2010, whether these are the texts of fan postings, or searchable weather data. The “network of relationships” engaged with by Sherlock is a wiki world, one where required expertise can be called up at the tap of a touch-screen. Embodied knowledge remains in the mix, to be sure, this time in the shape of the ‘Homeless Network’ invested in by Holmes, but media are repeatedly central – a recording in the Planetarium, a news piece on the Vermeer glimpsed by Watson prior to the main story of Baker Street’s explosion, or a moment drawn from Connie’s TV show.
In ‘The Great Game,’ media texts are always meaningful: every bit of apparent background is actually the plot’s foreground. Gatiss may be following a screenwriters’ rule of narrative non-redundancy, but the impression that’s fostered is one of a media culture permeated with clues and vital knowledge. As such, Sherlock exaggerates and intensifies the Canon’s logic where, as Moretti notes, communications and technology always deliver the goods. Through this intensification, the Gatfat series ultimately becomes a critique of Conan Doyle’s “radiant empiricism,” that world of detail awaiting Holmes’s expert decoding (Michael Atkinson, The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes and Other Eccentric Readings, 1998:109). Because in a world where all forms of knowledge can be archived and accessed via cloud computing, Conan Doyle’s provocative hierarchies of knowledge melt into air. This Holmes doesn’t need to know in advance what he needs to know, because he’s networked – he can consult digitally at the scene of the crime.
Cumberbatch’s Holmes requires access to all forms of knowledge, all of the time, since anything and everything might furnish the contemporary detective’s revelation. Even Copernicus. In today’s narratives, Holmes really would be lost without his blogger… and without those “indispensable” fan sites.
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