The Literary, Televisual and Digital Adventures of the Beloved Detective
Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse
In the fanvid “Whole New Way,” vidder Mr. E. Sundance brings together footage from a wide range of representations of the famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes and his loyal supporter John Watson. The video intertwines the classic illustrations of Sidney Paget from The Strand with images from comic books, from the 2009 film adaptation, and of course from the new BBC series Sherlock (2010- ). In addition, the vid includes images from fan artwork, fan video, and screen captures of online fan fiction. Through the use of this broad scope of source texts, this vid at its base exemplifies the wide reach, breadth, and multiplicity of Holmes and Watson (or Sherlock and John) as cultural figures meaningful to authors and fans, and to fans turned authors. Indeed, through the intersection of these various sources, old and new, combined with the music of The Scissor Sisters, the vid “Whole New Way” proposes that the recent incarnations of Sherlock offer avenues of fan devotion and investment that may seem new because of their location within digital culture, but in fact have long histories in Sherlock Holmes fandom and in the original Conan Doyle narratives. The new BBC Sherlock has reactivated engagement with Sherlock Holmes within digital contexts, and yet Holmes has been with us all along, or at least since he came on the scene in 1887 in Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet.
Our collection focuses on the BBC’s recent televisual reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes in the series Sherlock, and on its reception, but does so with great awareness of the rich history of Sherlock Holmes as a figure and as an expansive transmedia text. The essays in this volume collectively paint a picture of Sherlock Holmes as an evolving transmedia figure, at the center of myriad cultural intersections and diverse representational and fan traditions. Essays consider the literary, media, and reception histories informing Sherlock, the industrial and cultural contexts of Sherlock’s release, the text of Sherlock itself as adaptation and transformative work, and Sherlock’s critical and popular reception. This collection’s investigation of Sherlock and its reception offers insight into not only the BBC series itself, but also into its literary source, and with it, into the cultural and international resonance of the Victorian detective and his trusted sidekick. With only one series aired so far (BBC 2010), the show succeeds in looking forward and backward at the same time: staying close to Conan Doyle’s canon and its sense of history while at the same time looking forward with a 21st century sensibility and the promise of more adventures in the future. As such, studying the latest incarnation of arguably the oldest of media fandoms also allows us to look at the relationship between different fan traditions and reception cultures. Fan studies has long sidestepped investigation of the impact of Sherlock Holmes fandom on the evolution of fan communities and fan engagement; Sherlock promises a compelling contemporary route to bridge this gap. It is our intention that this collection contribute to both long-standing conversations about Holmes as a literary and cultural figure and to current debates in fan studies.
When the BBC premiered Sherlock, it re-envisioned a character who had been adapted and re-adapted in multiple media forms for over a century. One hundred and thirteen years earlier, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes in his first serial incarnation. The logical detective solving unsolvable crimes became a key archetypal figure in the mystery and detective genres, spanning media and centuries. Innumerable adaptations have since crossed media and genre lines, from television to film, from professional novels to comics, from Dressed to Kill (1946) and Sherlock Holmes (2009) to The Great Mouse Detective (1986) and Without a Clue (1988). The figures of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have become synonymous with a range of cultural referents and meanings; key images and phrases, such as Holmes’ pipe and hat, “Elementary my dear Watson” (which did not originate in Conan Doyle but emerged in later adaptations and interpretations) and “the game is afoot” (an intertextual Shakespeare reference in itself) have entered into the wider lexicon of recognizable phrases and images, inseparable from the figure of Sherlock Holmes yet carrying their own cultural weight.
The series recasts the famous detective as a millennial thinker, showcasing his youthful technological expertise as he easily navigates flows of digital information that others would find confounding. Indeed, in depicting Sherlock as a millennial technowizard, the series updates and bolsters the basic canonical vision of Holmes’ internal deduction as logical yet somehow still magical. The new, millennial Sherlock still uses the standard processes of deduction made famous by Conan Doyle, but at the same time he unpacks contemporary crimes via digital tools. By visually highlighting Sherlock’s digital know-how through the layering of text on image, the series draws attention to this millennial Sherlock’s modernized skill set: hand in hand with his traditional deductive prowess, Sherlock demonstrates his intuitive use of operations such as the interrelated actions of search and filter, two key digital tools so embedded in our culture that they have become fundamental cultural logics. The processes of searching and filtering impact the way we as a culture understand our relationship to both information and visibility. Search and filter convey the rendering of insight through the sorting of information and the making visible of preferred or more relevant findings. Sherlock’s dependence on the protocols of search and filter in his deductive processes highlights the way in which, according to Lev Manovich (2001), digital logics become cultural logics become personal logics.
Indeed, the introduction of digital logics like search and filter into Sherlock Holmes’ tool set impacts what we might mean by Sherlock’s “science of deduction,” even as arguably these digital logics may have their roots in Holmesian deductive reasoning. In a sense, the series posits that a Sherlock of today could not embody the necessary cultural brilliance without extreme digital literacy. But, as Matt Hills and Roberta Pearson, among others in this volume, suggest, this digitization of Sherlock’s cultural know-how necessitates either an epistemological shift or collapse. Sherlock’s knowledge is no longer located in his “brain attic” but in the digital “cloud.” Much of this new millennial Sherlock’s skill is now based not in honed internal perfection, but rather in knowing how to navigate digital data quickly and instinctively in order to arrive at insight into a given mystery. Through its invocation of such logics as interface, operations, gameplay, and ludic exploration, the digital thus necessarily saturates this modernized Sherlock, determining the narrative landscape and constituting the larger frameworks of Sherlock’s deduction.
However, as creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis have emphasized, this re-envisioning of Sherlock as a fully modern figure is in a key sense not a re-envisioning at all, but rather an updating of a character who was crucially modern within his original Victorian context. The original Sherlock Holmes was a modern man of his time, in touch with the popular culture of the late Victorian period, and employing if not inventing state of the art scientific methods. Likewise, the BBC’s Sherlock is fully immersed in and dependent on close knowledge of his space and place, including its digital dimensions; thus his deductive logics and skills are necessarily reflective of their contemporary (digital) contexts. The digitally-informed dimensions of the BBC’s adaptation of Sherlock manifest in the series’ use of televisual language. The program renders Sherlock’s thought processes as both audio and visual layers, with text layers serving as representations of his digital navigation. This televisual breaking down of details in video and audio are not new to television, but rather have been popularized in recent procedurals such as the CSI franchise. The series uses this technique to highlight Sherlock’s knowledge of space and exploration of details through visuals of his thought processes, which serve doubly to tie the viewer to Sherlock’s unique subjectivity.
The televisual dimension of Sherlock, where audio, text, and image in counterpoint all invite the viewer into the workings of Sherlock’s mind, reveal one way in which Sherlock arguably deviates from previous renditions of the Holmes narrative. No longer is John Watson our sole guide through the narrative as he was in the Conan Doyle original. Watson still provides a primary point of entry, framing our official introduction to the character of Sherlock Holmes. But we, as viewers, are also tied televisually into Sherlock’s experiences and have access to his thought processes. Our first encounter with Sherlock takes the form of a series of text messages authored and signed by him, displayed not only on diegetic cell phones but layered on the image as text. This textual/digital introduction paves the way for the multidimensional representation of Sherlock’s viewpoint.
Where Conan Doyle framed Holmes’ voice as part of Watson’s writings, and film and television adaptations allowed audiences to see and hear Holmes explain to Watson his reasoning, in Sherlock we do not only hear his explanations but see, in the layered imagery and digital texts, his thought-processes made visual. Thus in addition to explaining Sherlock’s reasoning, the show makes us privy to his use of operations (search and filter), as his navigation of search engines manifests as text layers on the screen. Through these multiple levels, he becomes an accessible (if still somewhat magical) millennial televisual protagonist. This increased emphasis on character accessibility is also manifest in the series’ move from last to first name, from Watson and Holmes to John and Sherlock, perhaps a more crucial shift for the character of Holmes than for John Watson, who was already rendered accessible. Here the whole series is presented as “Sherlock,” announcing the more human presentation of the character.
Sherlock makes obvious narrative use of digital tools as it re-imagines the Sherlock Holmes narrative. Watson writes up Holmes’ investigations in blog form rather than publishing Holmes’ exploits in hard copy print as in Conan Doyle’s original. Thus, Sherlock updates the in-story mode of dissemination to its modern, digital context. Watson is depicted as an inexperienced blogger using a standard interface akin to blogger.com, thus making him an everyday (albeit not extraordinarily skilled) digital citizen.
In addition to John’s blog, Sherlock himself maintains a web site. Rather than simply publishing the results of his knowledge as academic treatises, as in Conan Doyle’s canon, Sherlock uses his web site, “The Science of Deduction,” as a digital home for his consulting service, where he offers his expertise and interacts with potential clients. Thus, alongside the unfolding televisual narrative, the storyworld also suggests within it two additional narrative threads or perspectives, both (again, within the storyworld) maintained on digital spaces, one explicitly as a narrative (John’s blog), another as a more disparate collection of related information and online social interactions (Sherlock’s site). Indeed, at key moments in the narrative, characters communicate via Sherlock’s web site, or attain important information from having read John’s blog.
Given the centrality of these two fictional online spaces to the series’ narrative, it is perhaps unsurprising that the BBC has developed both John’s blog and Sherlock’s site as transmedia narrative extensions (and have also added two peripheral in-world transmedia sites as well), so that the viewer can visit either John’s blog or Sherlock’s site to explore their digital traces beyond the bounds of the televisual program. However, these official transmedia extensions do not encourage (or actually even allow) fan engagement with the characters or story directly, nor do they host a forum to allow for fan engagement with other fans—indeed the web sites function as hermetically sealed transmedia extensions. The sites do offer Alternative Reality Game (ARG)-like (though limited) puzzles, but fans must turn to other interfaces such as the question/answer structure of about.com in order to team together to solve the self-contained mysteries offered in these official transmedia extensions.
However, far beyond about.com, Sherlock fans have congregated in a host of other online interfaces to engage with the series and with each other, building their own transmedia webs of text and image. Indeed, the online fandom for Sherlock has grown at break-neck speed, only after the fact encouraged in part by official frames such as the PBS-sponsored twitter event that accompanied the initial U.S. airing of the series. Sherlock fandom has manifested visibly in a wide range of online spaces, from livejournal.com to denofgeek.com, from twitter.com to tumblr.com, from archiveofourown.org to fanfiction.net.
In 2007, Henry Jenkins defined transmedia storytelling as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience (March 22, 2007; www.henryjenkins.org; see also Jenkins 2006). More recently, scholars have debated whether transmedia narratives necessarily need to be dispersed “systematically” by official authors, or whether audience engagement across platforms intended and unintended could also constitute transmedia. A looser definition of transmedia would suggest that audiences as well as official authors co-construct transmedia narratives, storyworlds, and frames for engagement, and indeed we hope that our study of the multifaceted, deeply interwoven Sherlock text and fandom will demonstrate the value of this more expansive definition of transmedia.
For a canon storyworld that has been hailed as transmedia in its original form, and a televisual re-envisioning that has at its core digital and transmedia logics, the most visible transmedia paratexts are limited in scope and do not invite direct audience participation, though they certainly have not precluded the breadth of audience engagement elsewhere in more organic online forms of participation. Accordingly, studying Sherlock within its transmedia context is compelling in part precisely because of its wide range of fan-instigated transmedia authorship, held in tension with its surprising limitation and control in terms of official transmedia extensions.
The quick and extensive growth of online Sherlock fan activity should come as no surprise. Most obviously, of course, the series cultivated the interest of already-dedicated Sherlock Holmes fans, including fans of the books, of the various adaptations—especially the long-running series starring Jeremy Brett, and fans of the recent Sherlock Holmes (2009) film, starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. The series unites participants in the highly active traditions of Sherlock Holmes fandom with long-time fans of Holmes who have not acted on that fandom in community contexts. These diverse fans come together with those from other communities, such as science fiction, slash, and anime fandom. The series also has capitalized on its close association with the fan/cult favorite, Doctor Who; Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat has been the lead writer and executive producer of Doctor Who from the relaunched fifth series onward, and Sherlock co-creator/actor Mark Gattis is a Doctor Who writer and actor. Because of this direct connection with Doctor Who, Sherlock has drawn on the highly-active Doctor Who fandoms. In addition, the series’ focus on the close relationship between Sherlock and John and its playful address of their relationship means that it has tapped into the extensive web of slash fandoms invested in reading a romantic relationship in a series featuring two central male characters.
The literary heritage of long-time Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle fans situates them in an interesting space between traditionally scholarly and fannish reading practices, a position that is challenged with the influx of new Sherlock fans whose traditions have developed from a range of media fandoms, bringing with them their own rules and terminologies. Transformative works are called pastiches, for example, among Sherlockians/Holmesians whereas most other media-based fandoms call them fan fiction. Thus Sherlock fandom combines not only different fan groups and their particular interpretations but also their varied backgrounds and traditions.
This collection brings together essays that consider the literary and reception histories informing Sherlock, the industrial and cultural contexts of Sherlock’s release, the text of Sherlock itself as adaptation and transformative work, and Sherlock’s critical and popular reception. Consequently, the intended audience for the book encompasses a range of disciplines and interests: literary Victorianists, Conan Doyle scholars, and detective fiction academics may particularly be interested in the ways the character of Sherlock Holmes and the detective genre has been re-envisioned with Sherlock; TV and new media scholars may be interested not only in this particular televisual adaptation but also the transmedia aspects within and beyond the show; finally, fan studies scholars may be particularly interested in the focus on the coming together of various fan communities and fannish engagements.
Writing for such diverse audiences offers certain challenges: Sherlockians, media fans, literary and media scholars not only have different backgrounds and expectations but also different styles and terminologies. As Roberta Pearson (1997, 2007) describes in her overviews of classic Sherlock Holmes fandom, the terms Sherlockian and Holmesian are often used to distinguish between British and North American Conan Doyle aficionados, yet most of the contributors do not differentiate among the two. Likewise, the term canon has a very specific meaning within Sherlock Holmes fandom, similar to the way media fandom uses the term to describe source texts but also, as Ashley D. Polasek describes in this volume, alluding to a very specific approach to Conan Doyle’s stories and the Grand Game of reading the stories as documenting actual historical events. In turn, many terms familiar to media fans and their scholars may seem foreign to Sherlockians: whether it is the choice of using fan or aficionado, fan fiction or pastiche, similar concepts circulate with different names depending on the specific discourse communities. Indeed, fan fiction writers have created an extensive vocabulary describing their stories, whether by genre (slash, hurt/comfort, AU [alternate universe]) or formal aspects (challenge fic, drabble, fix-it).
And yet it is important to remember that regardless of terminology and self-understanding, diverse Sherlock fans share many key impulses, investments, and practices. Fans old and new are united not only in their love for Sherlock Holmes but also in their ways of engaging with this character and his world. In an influential blog post about fandom and fan authorship, fan obsession_inc affixed the terms affirmational and transformational to describe different forms of engagement with the source text: whereas the former analyzes and interprets the source text, creating shared meaning and characterizations, the latter aggressively alters and transforms the source text, changing and manipulating it to the fans’ own desires (June 1, 2009; www.dreamwidth.org). Sherlock Holmes fan communities exhibit wide ranges and creativities, both affirmational and transformational, be it within more traditional fan communities such as the Sherlock Holmes Society or the Baker Street Irregulars, or in the most recently developed communities such as livejournal’s sherlockbbc and Tumblr’s fuckyeahsherlock.
The Sherlock series provides the opportunity to explore the intersection of personal and community fan histories, as well as the convergence of different generations and modes of fandom. In this way, the transmedia fandom that has developed online offers a unique and at times disparate combination of a wide range of fannish investments, histories, and trajectories, including fan/interpretive communities historically separated by gender. It is partially because of this diversity and unique combination that we have decided to embark upon this book project, as we feel Sherlock offers an unusual opportunity to study the anatomy of a fandom that contains highly visible multiplicity at its center, and extends outward to a complex, multifaceted web of cultural and textual practices and fannish histories. Likewise, as a reflection of this multiplicity, the various authors contributing to this volume represent not only a diverse set of interdisciplinary scholarly interests and areas of expertise, but also a diverse set of fannish affiliations, experiences, and investments.
As the scope of intersecting topics demonstrates, this collection brings together concerns of literary studies and literary traditions with explorations of new directions in televisual and transmedia authorship and reception. The synthesis of concerns, old and new, emerges directly from the duality of the series’ own project and modern re-envisioning of an embedded cultural figure. Likewise, it was our intention that the creative process of this collection mirror this duality. As Matt Hills argues in this volume, our modernized Sherlock draws on networked logics of knowledge specific to digital culture. Likewise, this volume has been written with a belief in the value of networked academic and fan knowledge. We worked with MediaCommons to employ a process of closed-community, peer-to-peer feedback, to which we also invited external peer reviewers. All of the authors involved in this volume participated in an ongoing dialogic process in which they not only provided feedback to each other but also entered into conversations that informed rewrites. It was our intention that this approach would bind the different essays together by giving authors the opportunity to explore the commonalities and distinctions in their arguments. We now feel that this collection represents a coming together of individual and collective knowledge, and at the same time unites and brings into dialogue a wide range of in some cases deeply felt positions about Sherlock Holmes as a figure and storyworld, Sherlock as an adaptation, and the many communities and creative works that have circulated and continue to flourish around the detective in all his incarnations.
Furthermore, we especially value the union of digital and hard copy that this volume represents. It has been our intention to marry digital processes of critical dialogue with the traditional literary circulation of a finite hard copy, thus echoing the Sherlock series’ layering of old modes of knowledge, as embodied in Sherlock Holmes’ deductive methods, onto new modes of knowledge production through digital media. In so doing, we hope to model new possibilities for collective, peer-to-peer review that take advantage of the strength of community knowledge and modes of constructive critique modeled in transmedia fandom.
Various thematic threads resonate through all sections of this book. Throughout the book, essays engage with questions of paratexts, intertexts, and cross- and transmedia engagement; Sherlock as inheritor of long traditions of cross-media fandom; Sherlock fan engagement with the series’ digital-savvy aesthetic and narrative; expansions of the already transmedia Sherlock in multimedia fan texts; and fannish intertextuality between Sherlock and other media texts. Rather than relegate discussion of digital media and transmedia extensions to only one section of the book, essays throughout explore questions of transmedia and digital extensions. Likewise, the tension of a Victorian source in a contemporary context generates myriad issues about individual identity and representation that carry through the collection: gender, race, and sexual identity are some of the concerns repeatedly addressed by different essays and writers. The particular Englishness of both Conan Doyle’s world and Sherlock’s 2010 London invoke themes of place and national identity. Essays throughout explore the series’ careful construction of London as a synthesis of Victorian and contemporary aesthetics and discourses of nationality in Sherlock fandom and fan texts.
Fundamentally, as the title suggests, this volume merges two key preoccupations: (1) the persistent figure of Sherlock Holmes in all his myriad incarnations and the fans who love him and (2) the transmedia web of paratexts and intertexts that bring Sherlock and his world into continued being. The first theme encompasses the collection from front cover to the afterword, from the first glimpse any of us had of Sherlock Holmes to our anticipation for the second series of Sherlock, from the initial idea of creating this collection to writing the index. Lyndsay Faye’s prologue “Why Sherlock?” raises the question we all continue to grapple with even as none of us can answer it in a way that fully satisfies. As a fan of the old and the new Sherlock alike, affirmational society member and transformational pastiche writer, Faye celebrates our love both for the character and for fannish engagements with Conan Doyle’s world.
Whereas the first theme connects all contributors (and hopefully readers) emotionally, the second serves as a thread thematically: we understand transmedia not only in terms of the industry’s transmedia extensions but also include the text’s digital and transmedia logics and the way transmedia features heavily in audience reception and creative fan responses. In so doing, Part One, “Transmedia and Collective Intelligence,” opens up the conversation and outlines the terrain the other essays will explore. Both authors begin with the famous Sherlockian pursuit of the “grand game,” the (mostly) tongue-in-cheek pretense that Sherlock Holmes actually existed and Conan Doyle was simply chronicler of his exploits.
Matt Hills looks at ways knowledge, information, and intelligence play out (extra-)diegetically in the series in his “Sherlock’s Epistemological Economy and the Value of ‘Fan’ Knowledge: How Producer-Fans Play the (Great) Game of Fandom.” He argues that Sherlock’s central appeal is the way it models an “epistemological economy” as it presents a knowledge and inquiry-driven world that fan discourses in turn replicate and expand. Analyzing the way media texts and information technology function within Sherlock, Hills suggests that the show exemplifies a contemporary approach to knowledge where ready access to and easy searchability of data is more important than comprehensive intelligence or superior memory. Within such an epistemological economy, fan intelligence—especially as it relates to Conan Doyle’s texts—must both be expanded and policed. In so doing, the series’ creators can simultaneously assert their awareness of canon (which Hills calls “heretical fidelity”) and their ability to creatively move beyond that canon, thus reasserting their own authorial power and separating them more clearly from (other) Conan Doyle fans. Where Hills uses Sherlock’s heretical fidelity to show how it strengthens authorial discourses, Ashley D. Polasek’s “Winning ‘The Grand Game’: Sherlock and the Fragmentation of Fan Discourse” examines the ways such a return to (and reimagining of) Conan Doyle’s canon complicates the collective intelligence of Sherlockian’s Grand Game. In the game, fans presume a non-fictional Holmes, using historical rather than literary research to expand knowledge. Updating (and thus aggressively dehistoricizing) Holmes and Watson results in a change in fan approaches, Polasek argues. Looking at fan fiction in both Holmes and Sherlock fandom, she suggests that the contemporary setting as well as the already transformative aspect of Sherlock more readily invite fans to engage in transformative play rather than the affirmational engagements of the Grand Game.
Neither The Grand Game nor BBC’s Sherlock series could even be conceivable without Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations. Part Two, “Sherlock Then and Now,” looks specifically at the relationship between Conan Doyle’s fiction and the 2010 BBC series Sherlock. In so doing, the three contributors explore the ways Moffat has reimagined the characters, plots, the setting and tropes, always balancing the nostalgic harkening back to a supposedly more ideal and homogeneous England with an awareness that such nostalgia necessarily invokes oppressing Otherness in all its forms.
Much has been written about the startling scene in “The Great Game” where Sherlock expresses his ignorance of the solar system even as he obtains and uses necessary astronomical knowledge soon after. Ariana Scott-Zechlin uses this scene (and its canonical precursor in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet) in “‘But It’s the Solar System!’: Reconciling Science and Faith Through Astronomy” as a route to consider a broader historical tension between scientific inquiry and methodology on the one hand and faith in larger metanarratives on the other. She suggests that whereas Holmes illustrated Victorian ideals of scientific and technological progress in opposition to concepts of faith and religion, Sherlock more accurately represents our current awareness of scientific teleological certainty as all but another belief system. Fan fiction plays out this more complicated, less binary relationship between faith and science as it exemplifies and extrapolates in multiple ways the interplay between faith and science underlying the show itself. As Scott-Zechlin contrasts 19th and 21st century versions of Sherlock Holmes, she finds that it is his changing relation to arch-nemesis Moriarty that perhaps most pointedly highlights the ever more complex ideological nexus of this new Sherlock. In turn, Ellen Burton Harrington concentrates on the changing role of Moriarty in her “Terror, Nostalgia, and the Pursuit of Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock.” Moffat’s version enhances Moriarty’s role, emphasizing the doubling of Holmes and Moriarty in the original series by making Moriarty author of all of the crimes Sherlock encounters in Sherlock. Not only has Moriarty become Sherlock’s greatest fan, but he also ultimately scripts all of the crimes Sherlock solves. In so doing, Sherlock’s 21st century reinvisioning of the detective/criminal relationship suggests an implicit connection between the criminal and the author, but more specifically aligns the criminal and the fan-author, as Moriarty shares the “fan” title with many Sherlock viewers (and indeed, with Moffat and Gattis, who also proclaim themselves to be long time Sherlock fans). Like Hills in the first essay, Harrington thus suggests the show’s uneasy contemporary relationship with its own transformative origins and its contested relationship with its fans over the past century.
The complex relationship between Victorian Holmes and contemporary Sherlock is likewise explored in Anne Kustritz and Melanie E. S. Kohnen’s “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City: Visions of Security in Holmes’ and Sherlock’s London.” Kustriz and Kohnen examine Sherlock’s representations of the city to address how the supposed changes from Holmes’s 19th century to Sherlock’s 21st century London (namely, as they describe, “from industrial to post-industrial, scientific to digital, and imperial to neo-colonial”) are not as dramatic as one might expect or hope. In its stead, they present a Sherlock who in turn succeeds and fails in updating his previous modes of inquiry to a world that doesn’t easily follow linear inferences. In so doing, the show questions not only Sherlockian methods in the present but retroactively undermines Conan Doyle’s ordered universe of the past. Moreover, by presenting the city as a fully digitalized space, the series foregrounds surveillance technologies which have become central to Sherlock’s inquiries. And yet the slick and modern fully digital London only exacerbates the Orientalist images that connect the 21st to the 19th century thematically and ideologically.
As one of the oldest and most diverse fandoms (and, at this point, mostly out of copyright), Sherlock Holmes has spawned thousands of official novels and short stories; films, stage, and radio play; art, board, and video games. Such works range from the dedicated to-the-letter adaptations of the Jeremy Brett version to the irreverent homage of the U.S. medical procedural House, M.D.; from Holmes encountering Jack the Ripper in various films and novels to becoming a hologram on the USS Enterprise; from early silent films to Sherlock’s 21st century version of the detective.
All three essays in Part Three, “Adaptations and Intertextuality,” shape the specifics of a given interpretive adaptation. Elizabeth Jane Evans’s “Shaping Sherlocks: Institutional Practice and the Adaptation of Character” looks at the significance of industry framing of Sherlock Holmes as authored franchise. She explores the relationship between production companies’ policies and practices (in her study, Warner Bros., BBC, and Asylum) and the particular Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and argues that in the case of the BBC adaptation, Holmes becomes a product of contemporary public service broadcasting, straddling two traditions of “quality” television and encapsulating the BBC’s practice of bridging the gap between heritage and modernity. Focusing on one particular intertext, CB Harvey’s “Sherlock’s Webs: What the Detective Remembered from the Doctor About Transmediality” investigates the specific relationship between these two central figures of British popular culture. Harvey traces the influence of Conan Doyle’s Holmes on the character of Doctor Who, only to show how indebted the new Sherlock is to Doctor Who, not only in terms of characterization but also of visual aesthetics and narrative logics. Returning to the central thread of transmedia, Harvey closely analyzes Sherlock’s transmedia extensions and their seamless intersection with fan cultures to show how to read the new Sherlock series within convergence culture. Like Evans, Tom Steward illustrates how industrial and media contexts shape the adaptation of fictional characters. In his “Holmes in the Small Screen: The Television Contexts of Sherlock,” he reads the show within the context of its televisual format and industrial location, considering Sherlock as one instance in a history of televisual adaptations of the famous sleuth. This essay examines how Sherlock bears the imprint of the BBC’s televisual needs (BBC programming conventions, questions of time slot, intended audience, network branding, etc.) and also of its creators’ specific styles as TV auteurs (as indicated in their previous texts, most importantly, their work on Doctor Who).
Moffat and Gattis have described London as a central character in their adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, and indeed Holmes as a cultural figure is deeply embedded in his British cultural context, just as Sherlock is very visibly a product of the BBC. However, at the same time, Sherlock was co-produced with WGBH Boston for the American Masterpiece anthology series, and thus is transnational from its inception. More broadly-speaking, Holmes is a figure who has been disseminated internationally over his history, circulating in many different national and transnational contexts, and indeed Sherlock has aired in Britain, the U.S., Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany, not to mention its unofficial but ubiquitous circulation through peer-to-peer file sharing. With this breadth of circulation in mind, Part Four of the book, “Interpreting Sherlock,” explores the ways in which specific viewing contexts and interpretive communities affect individual receptions. Roberta Pearson addresses the heterogeneous international response of online fans as she explores various forms of reception and fan interaction online in “‘Good Old Index’; or, The Mystery of the Infinite Archive.” Recounting her own confrontation with the expanses of online fandom, Pearson contrasts the seemingly comprehensive knowledge gathering and overseeable fandom of Sherlockians with the overwhelming data flow of Sherlock fandom online with its rhizomatic structure and its ever growing contradictory approaches to the source text. Mirroring Holmes and Sherlock’s differing approaches to research, Pearson moves from comprehensive data collection to a focus on organizational fannish structures and the way such structural protocols dominate and organize fannish infrastructure and, ultimately, content itself.
Despite its seemingly global reach, our awareness of the British context for Sherlock Holmes can only be heightened in Moffat’s 21st century adaptation, and more specifically the series must engage with a specifically post-Imperial Great Britain. Moreover, as the contributors in this section illustrate, audiences are strongly aware of Sherlock’s specific national and cultural identity, and thus different audiences indeed respond differently, not only based on their differing emotional relationship to Conan Doyle’s canon or their familiarity with other intertexts, but also based on their own identity in relation to Great Britain. Paul Rixon looks at the British reception specifically in “Sherlock: Critical Reception by the Media.” Analyzing the critical responses to Sherlock by the British national press, Rixon explores how reviews respond to paratextual publicity material and engage and reinforce a variety of underlying cultural values. In so doing, the journalistic press illustrates the way Sherlock, with its updated version of a quintessentially English hero, mirrors anxieties about national culture and identity as it cathects a nostalgic reminiscence of England’s glory days. In contrast, Nicolle Lamerichs offers a specific case study of a group of foreign Holmes fans in “Holmes Abroad: Dutch Fans Interpret the Famous Detective.” Using personal interviews, she explores how individual readers use their personal experiences, reading, and backgrounds to create specific and individual readings in a process she defines as “naturalizing.” Unlike fans who often share interpretive communities with similar intertexts, Lamerichs’ viewers show a diversity of responses, which are not clearly filtered through their similar national background, but which reflect their more individualized cultural repertoires. All three essays in this section, then, emphasize the interplay between official and unofficial, public and private, shared and personal media receptions; together, these essays paint a nuanced picture of how reception contexts influence viewer engagement.
Throughout this collection, contributors have addressed the changes that have or have not been wrought by transplanting the essentially British, fundamentally Victorian Holmes into the 21st century. Kustritz and Kohnen, for example, argue that Sherlock replicates central flaws of Conan Doyle’s source text in terms of race, and Rixon showcases the way Sherlock’s critical reception plays out against the backdrop of a post-Imperial Britain in need of reclaiming a nostalgic identity. In Part Five, “Postmodern Sherlock,” the contributors take seriously the notion of a Sherlock written and presented against a postmodern framework in order to explore where the show may ultimately find its limits, and where fan responses may indeed fulfill the project of Sherlock’s postmodernity in ways the show itself cannot. Balaka Basu’s “Sherlock and the (Re)Invention of Modernity” questions the seemingly postmodern facade of the new Sherlock and suggests that the show instead constructs a thoroughly nostalgic reclamation of an idealized retrofuturity. Drawing from visual aesthetics, characterizations, and narratives, Basu argues that the show is torn between respecting and updating Conan Doyle’s canon in a way that prevents it from fully interrogating itself and its underlying ideology. Situating the fan writer in this modern/postmodern dynamic, Basu mirrors Hills’ suggesting that ultimately Sherlock remains on the side of author(ity) rather than the postmodern freeplay of multiple authorships even as they pretend to embrace authorial multiplicity. Where Basu illustrates Sherlock’s failure to fully understand and ultimately acknowledge the fan, Francesca Coppa focuses on fan responses instead, showing how fandom uses the internal contradictions and complexities this Sherlock offers to create a truly postmodern, in fact, a Cyborgian protagonist. In “Sherlock as Cyborg: Bridging Mind and Body,” she frames Doyle’s narrative, consequent adaptations, and media fandom response within a modernist relationship of body/mind dichotomies. Confronting canon’s belief in the power of Sherlock’s mind with fandom’s obsession with his body, Coppa complicates both the modernist dichotomy and the traditional focus on Holmes’s mind only. In so doing, Coppa counters Polasek’s more formal argument about Sherlock’s appeal to transformative fans by suggesting that it is that very conflicted and ambivalent relationship of mind and body that appeals to the predominantly female fan fiction fandom. A mind constantly at war with its body, Sherlock in her reading becomes the protagonist in a “literature written by (and for) the sexual mind and the intellectual body.”
As we suggested from the outset, there are certain insights addressed and explored by most if not all of the contributors: the heretical fidelity to Conan Doyle’s texts and the complex interplay both canon adherence and transformation create; the complex relationship of all acknowledged and unacknowledged influences of a TV show like Sherlock, be they national ideology, industry demands, fan expectations, or multimedial intertexts; the transmedial nature of not only the commercial presentation but also the internal logics within the show itself. At the same time, there are fundamental disagreements among the contributors, especially in terms of how successfully Sherlock balances its jump from 19th century Victorian London to its 21st century incarnation of a multicultural, metropolitan urban center and about how successfully creators Moffat and Gatiss handle and negotiate their authorial control. At its best, interpretation—like transformation—doesn’t aspire to identifying a single truth, but instead thrives on multiplicities, complementarities and even contradictions. So even if we can’t agree whether Sherlock has fully been successful in its 21st century adaptation, we can agree that fandom in all its myriad affirmative and transformative creativity has taken this modern Sherlock and made him fully and unapologetically postmodern, and in the process he has become a shared entity, potent in his very multiplicity. Just as the fanvid “Brand New Way,” with which we opened this introduction, brings to bear the productive transformativity spurred by our continued fascination with Sherlock Holmes, we hope that this collection reflects the dynamism of the multiple perspectives of its authors, woven together through the digital processes of peer-to-peer dialogue and debate.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The language of new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pearson, Roberta. 1997. It’s always 1895: Sherlock Holmes in cyberspace. In Trash aesthetics, ed. Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan, 143–61. London: Pluto Press.
_____. 2007. Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies and Sherlockians. In Fandom: Identities and communities in a mediated world, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 99–109. New York: New York University Press.