#metafictional monday

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While the famous meeting of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, M.D., is well documented (in A Study in Scarlet), the meeting of Conan Doyle and Dr. Watson remains in the imagination. Perhaps these two young writers met in Edinburgh; perhaps they attended some literary society meeting together; or perhaps their similar medical backgrounds led them to the same lecture.

The World of Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger

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We regret, Anon, that this format of submission is only semi-functional, as illustrated by what can be seen of your ask. As discussed in the admin tag, this blog’s mod and its creator are different people, which means that the ask box is not accessible by the person making/queuing posts. That person is @oldshrewsburyian​ (greetings.) If you want to ask a question, you can either tag @teaformrholmes​, the most efficient method, or hop over to the mod’s ask box if you insist on the cloak of anonymity.

“Facts about Sherlock Holmes” is not a straightforward thing to request, moreover! There are always Watson’s famous lists in STUD, but those were made before he knew Holmes very well... and that’s before even touching the Watsonian/Doylist question, and the question of how much the good doctor is telling us, and what he might be concealing or altering in his narrative, and why.

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Orlando di Lasso’s Penitential Psalms, for anyone who’d like to investigate the subject of one of Holmes’ little monographs

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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Some Blue Carbuncle analysis in this festive season!

[teaformrholmes]

“Pray compose yourself, sir,” said Holmes, “and let me have a clear account of who you are and what it is that has befallen you.”

“My name,” answered our visitor, “is probably familiar to your ears. I am Alexander Holder, of the banking firm of Holder & Stevenson, of Threadneedle Street.”

The name was indeed well known to us as belonging to the senior partner in the second largest private banking concern in the City of London. What could have happened, then, to bring one of the foremost citizens of London to this most pitiable pass? We waited, all curiosity, until with another effort he braced himself to tell his story.

“I feel that time is of value,” said he; “that is why I hastened here when the police inspector suggested that I should secure your co-operation. I came to Baker Street by the Underground and hurried from there on foot, for the cabs go slowly through this snow. That is why I was so out of breath, for I am a man who takes very little exercise. I feel better now, and I will put the facts before you as shortly and yet as clearly as I can.”

Pictured above is the Bank of England, in Threadneedle Street, at the heart of the City of London’s financial district. When the distraught Mr. Holder comes to consult Holmes, in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” he’s using the most up-to-date public transport infrastructure to draw in unconventional aid in an extraordinary situation. Threadneedle Street, attentive readers may remember, is also where Isa Whitney plies his incognito craft in TWIS. The National Library Of Scotland has digitized late Victorian O.S. maps, allowing us a closer look at Holmes’ London: 

You can see the Bank of England, the Exchange, and, all over these blocks, banks. If Mr. Holder falls into disgrace, and takes the reputation of his bank with him, his disaster will be instant, public, and the gossip of the exchange. In addition to the prosperous churches visible here, there’s a large synagogue just on the left edge of the map.

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Metafictional Monday: Tristan und Isolde

I promise that this is not merely a veiled plea for more fic authors to include Tristan in their Holmesian works.

This blog has already covered some of Holmes’ love for grand opera, so now it’s time for a deep dive into Wagnerian music drama. Tristan und Isolde is not explicitly referenced in canon (according to this database, at least), but REDC tells us that Holmes was a Wagnerite:

‘Well, Watson, you have one more specimen of the tragic and grotesque to add to your collection. By the way, it is not eight o'clock, and a Wagner night at Covent Garden! If we hurry, we might be in time for the second act.'

I have, I realize, long headcanoned this Wagner night as a night for Tristan und Isolde, because of all Wagner’s works, it’s Tristan where you really want to be in time for the second act. It’s also an opera that’s often spoken of, in hushed and reverent tones, as changing music. (It’s a reputation widespread enough to have found its way into this charming article on electromagnetic physics, written by a kindred spirit of Holmes’, it would seem.) It broke the rules of operatic structure. It broke the rules of musical harmony. It is reliably taught in music history courses, because you can’t not teach Tristan. It opens, you see, with an unresolved chord. The entire overture leads the audience to expect its resolution; it seems to be leading inevitably up to it... and instead, the curtain rises on a sailor singing about his distant lover, lamenting their separation.

That chord remains unresolved for all four hours of the opera... until the end, the ecstatic end, when Isolde sings that impossible resolution into being, as she proclaims her oneness with Tristan and with the universe.

Oh yes. This is arguably the most erotic of operas; it is also an opera in which sex never takes place, in part because the two lovers will be satisfied with nothing less than complete spiritual oneness. “Doch dieses Wörtlein: und!” laments Isolde, in Act II (”But this little word, and!”) It’s too much of a division. What they are seeking is a physical and spiritual consummation in which, fully, it is both or none... and, following the Schopenhauer-influenced logic of the opera, it can only truly be at once both and none, through a final union that is also dissolution.

For 1865 opera audiences -- used to orchestras representing physical love in all sorts of ways -- this was just beyond the pale. It was experienced as a physical and spiritual crisis; it was written about as a moral scandal. (Wagner infamously wrote it inspired by his own adulterous affair, which didn’t help matters.) Even now, 150 years on, when everyone entering the opera house knows what they’re getting into, it is a unique experience. The sheer physical and mental tension of waiting for that resolution (for four hours) is not to be underestimated. In a good performance, the emotional tension is excruciating; in a great performance, it redefines the limits of the bearable. Did I mention that the great central love duet of the second act, in which the chord never resolves, lasts for 25 or 40 minutes, depending on whether you define it as lasting from the entrance of the tenor or the moment where the lovers beg night to descend on them? They beg, in this central moment of their love, to be released from the world, to be set free, to be allowed to forget everything outside their love, in order that they might truly live.

Ahem. And this -- this -- is what is referenced in at least two canon adaptations, to my knowledge. In Bert Coules’ justly famous radio series, it’s invoked in connection with the Cornish landscape that is such an important element in the opera, by Merrison’s Holmes in “The Devil’s Foot.” The episode has opened with Holmes and Watson’s mingled, panting breath; they’re half-drowned. When they go to Cornwall for Holmes’ recovery, he grumbles that dying would have been indistinguishable from survival... thus invoking one of the opera’s key themes, the dissolution of the boundary between death and life. Watson, bless his heart, protests that the landscape is romantic; Holmes responds by quoting part of that love duet: “so might we die, in order to [live] undivided, without awaking, without fear, namelessly surrounded by love.” The episode translates the words less exactly, condensing the text of the opera: “So let us die and never part, together for the rest of time. No more waking, no more feeling -- nameless, endless, loving, sharing, existing only in each other, wrapped in love and death and darkness.”

In the second Tristan-invoking adaptation, Granada’s “Red Circle,” the final sequence is inaugurated by Brett’s bitter pronouncement: “The law is what we live with, inspector; justice is sometimes harder to achieve.” Watson, as ever more optimistic, comments that “English justice looked kindly” on the young couple involved in the death of the piece’s villain. But Holmes -- Holmes goes to the opera. The stagehand he knew there was Italian, as were the other protagonists of the drama. It doesn’t make intrinsic sense to have this opera, this pair of lovers invoked, though there is the canon reference to the Wagner night. And this is indeed an ideal opera to invoke if what you’re talking about is impossible desire, and you want a pair of lovers for whom gender is immaterial (W.H. Auden once famously remarked that Tristan and Isolde reminded him of a pair of lesbians.) So we get Holmes, standing motionless and trembling behind Watson at the opera, weeping, anguished, as Isolde sings about a love only she can see as possible, as that chord remains unresolved, blending instead into a version of the show’s own music.

Tristan und Isolde did not premiere in London until 1882. Earlier reports in the English press had deplored it as “ugly” and having “no melody.” A cartoon responded to the premiere by representing the editor of a musical periodical as disheveled in his distress, entirely nonplussed by The Tristan Chord. (Yes, the chord has a name. It’s that special.) A later review, more measured, refused explicitly to pass judgment on the work’s “absolute and relative merit,” but did pronounce that “the unity of feeling and expression, the continuity of unremitting passion here displayed, are probably unprecedented in the history of music.” It’s a judgment in which many subsequent critics have concurred.

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Darwin Library; Title ID a413792

"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.”

A recent article (abstract free to view here) discusses Reade’s significance within the late Victorian debates about human identity and human purpose. This particular quote from STUD is teased out for debate in both BBC Sherlock and Elementary. In canon, Holmes’ declarations about the purpose (or lack thereof) of human existence are inconsistent, but indicative of the fact that he was wrestling, without reliance on ecclesiastical orthodoxies or social conventions, with several interrelated late Victorian debates, tied to advances in science, changes in religious culture, and (not least) imperial anxieties. 

Winwood Reade’s view of human history was one of teleological progress, in line with Holmes’ contemplation of the rose and praise of Board schools in NAVA. Elsewhere, though -- in CARD, VEIL, and ABBE, for instance -- we see the perfect reasoner of Baker Street much less confident, airing his uncertainties for Watson with a very poignant frankness.

[teaformrholmes]

Metafictional Monday: Holmes as Medievalist and Musicologist

Sherlock Holmes’ little monographs are a fixture of the canon, and usually on topics related to his detective work, e.g. bicycle tire marks, cigar and cigarette ash. Then there is the “magnum opus of [his] latter years,” his treatise on beekeeping (LAST.) There are hints that Holmes’ prodigious mental energies may sometimes -- perhaps fleetingly -- be focused on an arcane topic that catches his attention, like the possible relation of Cornish to Chaldean (!) in DEVI. But there is another topic to which Holmes clearly devotes considerable time. 

In GOLD, which is set in late 1894, Holmes spends a rainy winter evening “engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest.” Any medievalist will sympathize with the less-than-thrilling results of his hours of poring over the difficult text: “So far as I can make out it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey’s accounts dating from the second half of the fifteenth century.” Poor Holmes. This cannot be a casual pursuit: he would have needed to obtain the manuscript from a dealer, for one thing, and he would also have to have had training not only in Latin (standard for an Englishman of his level of education) but also in medieval Latin and in medieval handwriting, which were not standard. So several kinds of specialized knowledge were required.

Almost exactly a year later, in November 1895 (BRUC), Watson tells us that Holmes had “recently made [the music of the Middle Ages] his hobby.” Since, for myriad reasons (neumes! Latin and medieval handwriting again!) this is a challenging topic to specialize in, we may hypothesize that Holmes was already interested in it when looking in that palimpsest for something more interesting than an abbey’s bookkeeping. Codices kept by monastic houses sometimes did bind multiple kinds of texts they were using together; though the separate uses of music and accounts make this comparatively unlikely, a thrifty scribe might have jotted down the bookkeeping on the leaf of a no-longer-used antiphonal. (The jotting down of things by medieval scribes in odd places is practically a field of study to itself.) It was, moreover, extremely common for early modern antiquarians to bind multiple texts from the same house together, since these texts no longer had separate uses. So what is Holmes studying? In BRUC, it’s specifically “the polyphonic motets of Lassus.” Lassus is now more usually called by his name in the vernacular, Orlando di Lasso. Also, he’s not a medieval composer; he lived in the sixteenth century. Maybe Holmes couldn’t get Watson to absorb this distinction of periodization. 

Lassus was, in any case, a prolific composer of both sacred and secular music. And he was very funny. In his motets, he plays around a lot with both musical and dramatic expectations. In this one, for instance, a man sings beneath a woman’s window, explaining that he doesn’t know classical or contemporary poetry... however:

Se ti mi foller bene, Mi non esser poltron,  Mi ficcar tutta notte,  Urtar come monton.

If you really want me, I won’t be a lazy fellow -- I’ll fuck all night and thrust like a ram. There... there really isn’t a more polite way to translate that. Lassus used this form in many ways, though; another of his secular motets sets Virgil’s text for Dido’s dying speech, remembering her doomed love for Aeneas. Here you can see how the setting for that works:

The motet is a fascinating subject in its own right, and a rich and complex one. You can find more of Lassus’ motets here (on the prophecies of the Sibyls.) And here is a sacred but sexy motet on the text of the Song of Songs: He shall kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. Watson informs his readers that Holmes’ monograph “is said by experts to be the last word upon the subject.”