Intertextuality in Many Happy Returns
“ Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. Intertextual figures include: al
Intertextuality in Many Happy Returns
Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody. An example of intertextuality is an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. (x)
When Lestrade pays a visit to John in Many Happy Returns he brings a box of mementos he’s kept, objects from cases, Sherlock’s objects that he’s decided to give to John. Lestrade’s only in-story concern is with the DVD of the birthday video he forced Sherlock to make for John. The much more interesting and problematic object in the box, however, is the mask of the “yellow livid face.” I wrote about the mask when the mini episode first aired but it deserves more attention from all of us.
Lestrade is clearly referring to the DVD when he says: “There’s something here. I wasn’t sure if I should have kept it in.” But notice that the yellow face mask lies barely concealed under the DVD and is as prominently featured as the DVD in the shot. The yellow mask refers to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Yellow Face,” but it’s no in-joke. Its presence is decidedly not funny. There are many compelling political reasons why Mofftiss would consciously choose never to reference the story in their modern adaptation so my burning question is why in the world did they keep it in?! Why is “The Yellow Face” a case Sherlock and John even experienced and how did they experience it and why did they do it off-screen apart from the obvious reasons.
Obvious? Read the original story. The mask is worn in ACD by “a little coal black negress” who is the mystery at the center of the case set in Norbury. A man, Grant Munro, comes to Holmes and Watson because he is puzzled and troubled by the secretive behavior of his wife, Effie. Holmes incorrectly deduces that the woman’s first husband, an American, didn’t die as she’d claimed and appeared in England to wreak havoc with his wife and her new husband. We learn that Effie’s first husband did indeed die, but her daughter did not. (The clues are all there in the story but Holmes overlooks the mention of the child’s birth certificate.) Effie has been hiding the little girl, her ruinous secret, because her first husband was black. She told Holmes, Watson and Munro:
It was our misfortune that our only child took after his people rather than mine. It is often so in such matches, and little Lucy is darker far than ever her father was. But dark or fair, she is my own dear little girlie, and her mother’s pet.
Doyle’s story ends with Munro, upon a few moments of reflection after his wife’s revelation, magnanimously accepting the girl:
It was a long ten minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.
“We can talk it over more comfortably at home,” said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”
Doesn’t that just ring of Lestrade’s words about Sherlock in A Study in Pink?
Because Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one.
“The Yellow Face” is one of the few cases where Holmes’s deductions proved spectacularly wrong:
“Watson,” said he, “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.”
It makes sense that Lestrade would keep the memento– both to recall a case that Sherlock actually bungled and as a reminder that not-very-good men can become better. (Of course Lestrade wasn’t present in ACD’s story when this was uttered but intertextuality is rarely so literal.) But what of the issue of race? I’ve written at length before about the racism of The Blind Banker. Is “not being sure about keeping the mask in” acknowledgement on the part of the writers that they bungled race in that story? (Probably not.) So why did they leave the mask in? Is it a kind of foreshadowing for S3, that Sherlock will begin to overlook obvious clues as Holmes did in “The Yellow Face”?
The Doyle story of miscegenation is too problematic to update for a contemporary audience although racism is just as important of an issue today as it was when “The Yellow Face” first appeared. (TBB is evidence enough!) I think we’ve seen the only references to the story that we’ll get in Sherlock. So what can we make of the mask with “strangest livid tint”?
We’re left to make our own canon-inspired head canons here. Why did Sherlock keep the mask? Why was it in Lestrade’s care? Did Sherlock’s case of “The Yellow Face” involve Sally Donovan in any way? Why might Lestrade want to remind John of it?
Most importantly, what are we, the contemporary audience, to learn from its appearance?
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