Balaka Basu
Abstract—Sherlock sells itself as a modern adaptation of Sherlock Holmes eminently suitable for contemporary times. Using Fredric Jameson’s theorization of the postmodern, and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a framework, I argue that unlike its textual progenitor, Sherlock consistently gazes back rather than forward, projecting a carefully manufactured illusion of the modern “now,” while actually producing a retrofuturistic narrative that constructs the present only from the perspective of an imaginary, idealized past and is eventually incapable of clearly distinguishing between the two. Because it is invested both in replicating the familiar affect of the original text and in being fashionably relevant, the program exists in a state of belatedness, unable to interrogate its own ideology fully and take part in a progressive, critical discourse that is truly contemporary.
In the same year in which Sherlock Holmes returned to the small screen in the BBC’s Sherlock (2010– ), he experienced another resurrection in print within the pages of the pseudonymous Barry Grant’s The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes. In this somewhat bizarre novel, the intrepid detective is flash-frozen by an alpine avalanche (where else but in Switzerland?) in 1914, only to be fortuitously discovered some ninety years later, by which time he can be thawed with some combination of cryonics and stem cell research (where else but at St. Bart’s?) and left to resume a quiet life in the small Welsh book-town of Hay-on-Wye. Here, he assumes a new identity as the eccentric Cedric Coombs, but this disguise is easily penetrated by his new Watson (now called Wilson), who finds his flat-mate’s idiosyncratic avocations—violin-playing and cocaine naturally among them—as well as his appearance to be somehow familiar. This recognition doesn’t seem due to any unusual perspicacity on Wilson’s part; the ubiquity of Sherlock Holmes in popular culture is so great that almost any reader, or indeed, any alert media consumer in similar circumstance might conceivably do the same. Interestingly, despite its barefaced deployment of improbable sf (speculative or science fiction) tropes, The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes is actually far less strange than Sherlock, which likewise purports to thrust Sherlock Holmes bodily into the postmodern “now,” but actually places him in a pre-modern never-was, as removed from our own time as the 19th century itself, and twice as fictional. By collapsing the Victorian era into the 21st century, Sherlock’s setting becomes a fantastical backdrop upon which the narrative reinvents the wheel of modernity while seeming to believe it is doing so, not belatedly, but for the first time.
Sherlock’s premise is simple: the program touts itself as a contemporary re-imagining that “blows away the fog of the Victorian era” as the “classic detective Sherlock Holmes enters the 21st century” (October 3, 2010; collider.com). Co-creator Steven Moffat claims that in this series, “everything that matters about Holmes and Watson is the same. Conan Doyle’s original stories were never about frock coats and gas light; they’re about brilliant detection, dreadful villains and blood-curdling crimes—and frankly, to hell with the crinoline” (March 3, 2010; www.bbc.co.uk). In other words, the program is meant to be not so much an adaptation as a temporal translation: keeping the heart of the story intact while discarding the “fog” of retrograde Victoriana, which Moffat and co-creator Mark Gatiss deem to be trivial ornamentation, irrelevant to the story and easily rendered into modern parlance. Indeed, the term modern is hard to escape in any conversation having to do with Sherlock; the whole point of the update is to dispense with everything old and ostensibly stodgy, and bring in all that is new and indisputably sexy—otherwise, it might as well have been set in the last decade of the 19th century, rather than at the beginning of the 21st. Vocabulary-wise, the substitutions are certainly ingenious. By some fortune, there is still a war in Afghanistan for John Watson to be wounded in, and instead of inheriting an engraved pocket watch from a brother Harry who died after taking to drink, he can use a similarly engraved mobile phone pressed upon him by an alcoholic sister of the same name. His memoirs transform into a blog, as do telegrams into text messages and monographs into web sites. Unfortunately, not all the crinoline is so easily thrown away.
Using a theoretical framework of postmodernism and modernity that relies upon the work of Fredric Jameson and Walter Benjamin, I want to demonstrate that Sherlock is not the modern adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories that it repeatedly claims to be. We are expected to believe in the program’s modern character because of its lavish use of postmodern and contemporary technologies, but these merely obfuscate the ways in which Sherlock displays a retrofuturism that imagines the present solely in terms of the future of an outdated past. In other words, it projects the image of a postmodern visual aesthetic, which only superficially disguises its essentially conservative, pre-modern message. As a result of this commingling between past and present, the program fully endorses neither, and therefore is unable to comment on or even really acknowledge its own perspective, ideology, or genre. This means that it lacks the self-reflective awareness that ought to permeate a postmodernism relevant to a progressive cultural discourse. Finally, I will show how Sherlock’s updated interactions with the figure of the fan can function as metonymy for the way in which the program chooses to eschew the real issues of contemporary society and how, in doing so, it produces a reification of the retrograde and the nostalgic, which suggests that the past is actually the present.
Sherlock’s London is a world where the intervening time between the Victorian era and the 21st century seems to have been collapsed, or indeed, has never taken place. The landscape is either glass-and-steel or Victorian—the purpose-built architecture of a post–World War II era and the second half of the 20th century simply do not exist. The “modern” glass-and-steel architecture that makes up the program’s contemporary scenery is reminiscent of the structure and poetics of the arcade in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, that imaginatively forward-looking construction of the modern in the nineteenth century. In his section on mirrors, Benjamin locates the narcissism of modern identity in the profusion of liminal reflective surfaces that litter 19th century Paris, as well as, incidentally, Sherlock’s landscape.
Egoistic—“that is what one becomes in Paris, where you can hardly take a step without catching sight of your dearly beloved self. Mirror after mirror! In cafés and restaurants, in shops and stores, in haircutting salons and literary salons, in baths and everywhere, ‘every inch a mirror!’” [1999, 539].
In fact, for Benjamin, mirrors signify boundary destabilization; they expand, or at least deceptively seem to expand space into infinity, at once charting identity and reflecting merchandise into an endless series of desire. All lenses including the eye itself become ocular mirrors, meaning that any gaze is to be interpreted as a “perspective on infinity” (538) with its infinitely fractured succession of images, and this is amply exemplified by Sherlock’s cinematography and art design. So far, Sherlock’s mirrors literally illustrate the ‘modern’ reflective landscape envisioned by Benjamin. But has our conceptualization of the modern really remained unaltered since Benjamin’s prehistory of the 20th century? Has time stood still since then? Perhaps so.
Frederic Jameson prophetically argues in “Progress Versus Utopia, or: Can We Imagine the Future,” that it often feels as if the 21st century no longer really has a modernity of its own to which it can look forward. He writes
We can no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly ‘science-fictional’ futures.... These visions are themselves now historical and dated—streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals—while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past ... [science fiction’s] deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future [Jameson 1982, 151].
In light of this thought, however, Sherlock’s 21st century seems almost like a reconstruction of the 19th century’s version of the future, not the present in which we actually live. Sherlock’s neo–Victorian setting, like Benjamin’s arcade, is outside of time; it “knows no history” and in it “events pass ... as always identical and always new”; its “most modern is ... ‘the eternal return of the same’” (Benjamin 1999, 546). The subtle difference between the two, however, is that in Benjamin’s work, the arcade’s mirrors are seen to reflect future progress, but in Sherlock, the reflective surfaces literally display a wavering, blurred image of Sherlock Holmes that is not progressive, but regressive. His outline is not that of utopian futurity; it does not show what Marx calls the “anticipation and imaginative expression of a new world” (637); instead, it is the past, conservative and idealized—it even seems to be wearing a frock coat.
If we examine the flawlessly constructed costumes and cinematography of Sherlock, it becomes clear that the Victorian aesthetic is still very much with us. Disparaging comments from the creators on crinolines aside, the costumes are unmistakably designed to be evocative of 19th century clothes; Sherlock’s ever present scarf works as a cross between an ascot and a cravat, and his coat, with its “pronounced collars and raised lapels” is, as noted by The Independent’s fashion commentators Paul Bignell and Rachel Shields, clearly a “modern re-working of ... Victorian designs” (August 8, 2010; www.independent.co.uk). As well, the wintry setting of the episodes allows for the layering of suit-jackets and coats, creating a formal Victorian silhouette for John as well, emphasized even more when the two protagonists are filmed, as they frequently are, such that they appear only as black shade-blocked figures in relief against a lighter background. These shots give the impression of a Victorian cameo in negative, while the color filter used often resembles that of daguerreotype photography. And when Sherlock is actually reflected in the program’s numerous mirrored surfaces, the result is only to recall an older, Victorian Holmes.
Similarly, as we observe the cinematography of Sherlock’s second episode, “The Blind Banker,” for example, we begin to notice that the London pictured here seems to have only black and white cars, the vast majority of which seem to feature the rounded, bulging lines that characterize traditionally English automobiles from some nostalgic, reified past. Through the glass windshields of the London black cabs in which Sherlock and John ride over and over again, we can observe how the color tint bleeds into sepia, and from there into black and white. As each frame dissolves into the next, through the cab’s window an address on The Strand becomes visible, telling us subtly that we have not really stirred from the pages of the old print magazine in which this narrative was first nurtured. Only a few minutes later, another shot is framed, with reflections of the action dancing over large brass metal knobs, the reflected images flickering like the flame within a gas lamp’s sphere.
However appealing and evocative the imagery, and pleasurable Benjamin’s “eternal return of the same” may be, ideological progressives will find a problem with collapsing the Victorian period into our own in the unexamined, retrofuturistic way that Sherlock does so. It actually serves to ensure that history has no context and therefore both the past and the present become wholly fantastical, idealized constructs that have little to do with reality. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Jameson suggests that the world of postmodern art has become pastiche, “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum” (1985, 115). Ironically, through its continual resurrection of the past in lieu of futurity, this kind of postmodernism provokes the loss of history itself, because it promulgates narratives, languages and aesthetics of the past as if they were current, rather than in their appropriate context. Jameson argues, for example, that the setting of Body Heat (1981), which recalls The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), thoroughly undermines discussion of the contemporary, constructing the film as “a narrative set in some indefinable nostalgic past, an eternal ’30s, say, beyond history” (116–118). He goes on to point out that the attempt to gain access to the past through fantasies about that past paradoxically makes certain that historical authenticity is essentially unattainable and that this destruction of time signifies the disturbing quality of the postmodern condition.
So far, Sherlock’s temporality-annihilating aesthetic seems to encapsulate both Jameson and Benjamin’s conception of the postmodern completely. And indeed, practically every part of the program’s visual composition seems designed to shout “postmodern.” Consider the moment in the first episode of the series, “A Study in Pink” when Sherlock examines the murder victim’s wedding ring and the words “dirty/clean” appear across the screen with the curve of the ring as divider: this seems to be a literal illustration of a poststructuralist binary and is just one example in a veritable sea of such moments. In fact, regardless of its actual content, the floating text that appears superimposed on the screen to communicate both unspoken thoughts and other unvoiced text is a continual feature of the show, and further emphasizes a postmodern union of word and picture. As well, throughout the series, figures repeatedly come to life to illustrate Sherlock’s explanations—as in the third episode, “The Great Game,” when a black ghost appears to represent Sherlock’s account of the assassin known as the Golem—demonstrating that this is a world which consistently draws attention to the embodiment of its own stylistic mechanics, and therefore its own artifice.
Even the most basic device of film, the frame, is similarly embodied, as the screen is repeatedly divided into segments, often by distinct lines such as a yellow police line or the outline of a car’s windshield. Each of these segments frequently runs its own reel, displaying the ongoing scene from several angles often separated by perspective and time, and theoretically at least, fracturing the closed cohesion of the screen into postmodern multiplicity (Deleuze 1993, 173–80). The resulting collage of image-layers makes us feel that Sherlock and John might have simply been pasted into the narrative’s plane and might not really be there at all.
What is missing from Sherlock’s postmodernism, however, is the vast panoply of uncontrolled signs, verging on information overload, that reject hierarchy or what Jameson defines as schizophrenia: “an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence” (1985, 119). For Jameson, the postmodern is noisily achronological, and its lack of order is what condemns us to the perpetual present. Thus, Sherlock’s careful construction—its perfectly chosen backdrops and design elements; Sherlock’s reliance on the normative, totalizing laws that permit him to make his deductions without error—actually works against its postmodernism. Sherlock’s thought processes, as illustrated on our screens, purport to be unordered, but are still subject to the anti-pluralistic idea that only one interpretation fits the facts. The presentation of information flow is deceptively overwhelming, but only seemingly disunified; in reality, it is so streamlined and ordered that it includes almost no cultural “white noise” that might work against the reactionary hierarchies that its cautiously selected elements subscribe to, whether unconsciously or not. As we shall see, the result is to illustrate, with a visual aesthetic that only appears postmodern, content that is anything but.
Even a cursory examination of the novels and short stories shows that Holmes was designed by Conan Doyle to be of the scientific vanguard, looking forward to the future. Moffat and Gatiss’s Sherlock, despite his contemporary trappings and much vaunted similarity to his predecessor, is clearly meant to be nothing of the kind. A Study in Scarlet introduces us to a 19th century Holmes who performs revolutionary experiments in forensic science such as “beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick ... to verify how far bruises may be produced after death” (19). Though “A Study in Pink” presents us with an ostensibly identical scene, where a 21st century Sherlock is depicted beating a cadaver with a riding crop and saying to the pathologist, Molly, “I need to know what bruises form in the next twenty minutes, a man’s alibi depends on it,” the two situations carry entirely different valences. In the first case, Holmes is actually experimenting; in the second, Sherlock is merely investigating a question, the answer to which is already well established by contemporary forensic medicine. Sherlock’s actions are obviously not scientifically motivated; instead their intent seems to be purely masturbatory, whether for the character himself, who clearly gains some fetishistic entertainment in taunting Molly with sado-masochistic paraphernalia, or for the audience-members who have read Conan Doyle and are thus provided with a pleasurable frisson of nostalgia from the scene’s familiarity. Thus, the experiment, which denotes Holmes’s scientific progression in the novel, here demonstrates Sherlock’s gaze backwards.
This nostalgic perspective is carried thematically throughout the series. “The Blind Banker,” which takes its inspiration from “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” revolves around the decryption of yellow spray-painted symbols in which messages of mysterious provenance are encoded. As soon as we first encounter the symbols of the code, Sherlock informs John that today—presumably unlike in the 19th century—the “world’s run on codes and ciphers ... from the million-pound security system at the bank to the PIN machine you took exception to. Cryptography inhabits our every waking moment.” Luckily, however, he can tell that this particular code is “an ancient device” that can’t be unraveled by “modern code-breaking devices.” It becomes clear that the mysteries that Sherlock and John are going to solve can’t really be modern ones; in order for Sherlock’s methods to work (and for the adventure to produce the affect of recognition), the universe must provide problems with “ancient” solutions instead.
This reification of the past is further underscored by other, frankly racist elements of “The Blind Banker”: in its first few minutes, we see Sherlock battling a mysterious, turbaned Arabic antagonist who is inexplicably armed with a scimitar. Leaving aside for the moment the thoroughly outdated and offensive stereotypes that overwhelm this particular episode—which also features practically every Yellow Peril Orientalist trope imaginable—is it rational to expect an Arabic antagonist of today to be armed with a sword instead of the equally offensive but more au courant bomb? But in fact, the sword may signal the program’s privileging of archaism; despite its reliance on text messages, mobile phones and other modern technologies, it is possible to read Sherlock as having an essentially conservative ideology—a natural byproduct, perhaps, of its nostalgic desires.
Indeed, with its emphasis on clear resolutions, the fixing of identity and guilt, and the elevation of order, the genre of the detective story itself is a naturally conservative one that does not tend toward postmodern figurations of ambiguity, instability, fluidity and multiplicity. In order to update the universe in a way that would make it more relevant to contemporary discourse, these elements would have to be problematized and complicated. Sherlock seems as if it is doing so, with its nods towards intertextual postmodern pastiche, but doesn’t actually follow through in a substantive way. For instance, though Sherlock’s position as hero is called into question by the police force on numerous occasions throughout the series, the narrative never seriously demands that we question his alignment or worry about whether he will throw in his lot with the villains. If he did, he wouldn’t be Sherlock Holmes, and Moffat and Gatiss are thoroughly invested in making sure that he is Sherlock Holmes or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. No real uncertainty as to outcome or character seems possible, and without this narrative instability, it’s hard to recognize Sherlock as a representative of anything but a belated modernism. Wherever or whenever Sherlock takes place, it doesn’t seem to be now.
But how could it? “Now” is in some sense a product of the immense popularity of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Like the best of hard science fiction, such as that of Conan Doyle’s beloved Jules Verne, the original stories imagined and anticipated the future, and in some ways, helped to construct it. As Ronald Thomas states in his book, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, authors like Conan Doyle
often reflected and popularized contemporary scientific theories of law enforcement, the detective stories they wrote also sometimes anticipated actual procedures in scientific police practice by offering fantasies of social control and knowledge before the actual technology to achieve either was available. At times, these texts seemed to call those technologies into being. It became commonplace for early criminologists to attribute inspiration for their theories to the methods of Sherlock Holmes or an Auguste Dupin. In developing what he called “a new police science” which focused on the examination of microscopic particles on the criminal body, for example, the pioneering French forensic scientist Edmond Locard went so far as to instruct his colleagues and students “to read over such stories as ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and ‘The Sign of the Four’” in order to understand the basis of the principles he was recommending [1999, 4–5].
It’s easy, then, to read the detective story and its most famous representative, Sherlock Holmes, as implicated in the very fabric of modern culture; the genre itself seems to be wound deeply into our conception of science and philosophy, our sense of truth and order in the universe, and our ability to know them. Therefore when Sherlock is ostensibly set in a universe in which there has never yet been a Sherlock Holmes, the alternate universe created by his removal from literary history ought to be—and is, in my opinion—immediately recognizable as a fantastical one. It’s not just that the tube station at Baker Street, currently papered wall to wall with images of a fellow with a pipe and deerstalker hat, would look completely different, but that many of the seminal texts that regularly inform our popular discourse like Star Trek, Batman, and CSI would have an entirely different form if they existed at all, and thus so would our cultural landscape.
Moffat and Gatiss tacitly claim that their Sherlock retains everything essential about Conan Doyle’s universe, that it takes place “today,” and that this “today” exists in a time-line in which there has never before been a Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, all three claims cannot be true. Sherlock’s creators want to rely on the myth of Holmes to produce affect on the part of the audience, while simultaneously asserting that their text stands alone, and that the myth we are familiar with never actually happened. Having to believe all of these things at once strains credulity as well as the narrative’s integral continuity and while this threefold suspension of disbelief may produce a sense of delight on the part of Sherlock’s audience, it comes at the price of being officially evicted from the story. Though this version of Sherlock Holmes could not exist without the Holmes fandom, the fandom itself is negated and pre-empted, ironically, by creators who are themselves fans.
Sherlock is not the first of Moffat’s temporal translations; the mostly brilliant Jekyll (2007) also took a foundational Victorian text and moved it into the present. Unlike Sherlock, however, Jekyll does not suggest that it exists in a universe absent Robert Louis Stevenson and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; though it retells the narrative, it doesn’t overwrite it. In fact, the existence of the classic narrative is indispensable to the new one, and as a result, despite the essentially supernatural nature of the story, there is no suggestion that the time-line in which Jekyll takes place is not our own. Conversely, Sherlock’s timeline cannot be the same as ours, and this means that though it might not seem so at first glance, and contrary to its advertising, Sherlock’s modern is not ours either.
Instead, Sherlock’s “now” is not located in time, but in aesthetics. It manifests the 19th century without being in the 19th century and thus has no real obligation or allegiance to historical accuracy; it is neo–Victorian in every sense of the word as it resembles, revives, and is reminiscent of the period. Jameson, as I have discussed earlier, seems to suggest that all such retrofuturistic texts are postmodern, because any such text would express the condition of the perpetual present, and the death of history and futurity in one fell swoop. I have argued that Sherlock, though retrofuturistic in aesthetic, is not postmodern in content because its careful construction does not display the uncontrolled and schizophrenic atemporality that might conceivably reject cultural hegemony. I want to suggest as well, more optimistically, that although I believe Sherlock does not quite succeed in doing so, it is entirely possible for a retrofuturistic text to remain relevant if it actually interrogates the issues of the present, albeit in a pseudohistorical setting. While it may remove history from its own context, it need not unmoor the present as well.
Writing on the 19th century roots of steampunk, a subgenre that is also often neo–Victorian, scholar Jess Nevins suggests that the locus of such retrofuturistic writing is often found in the Victorian period because, more than other historical time-frames, this period resembles and models our own, and thus can be deployed more easily to comment on our own circumstances than those set in other time frames. He writes that the Victorian era is
extremely useful for ideological stories on subjects such as feminism, imperialism, class issues, and religion, as well as for commentary on contemporary issues such as serial murderers and overseas wars ... without the authorial straining of allegorical novels set in previous historical eras [Nevins 2008, 8].
Thus, though I find Sherlock particularly conservative, it is not solely or even mainly due to its retrofuturism. It is because while the substitutions employed by Sherlock are made possible by the way our period mirrors the Victorian era (such as the fact that there’s still a war in Afghanistan), the writers do not utilize this mirroring to comment on the valence of the present, merely congratulating themselves on having escaped the oppressive yoke of Victorian mores, while simultaneously demonstrating that they haven’t actually done so. Sherlock’s misogyny (as evidenced by the way he humiliates the pathologist Molly, who has a crush on him) and classism (as evidenced by his conversation with the murderer in Minsk, during “The Great Game,” where he seems more concerned by his potential client’s class as demonstrated by his diction and grammar than by his situation), are taken directly from Conan Doyle’s 19th century and deposited whole into this contemporary retelling, but Sherlock presents these elements without comment, just as it presents the offensive Orientalist tropes in “The Blind Banker.”
In many ways, Sherlock’s neo-liberal philosophy seems very much the same as its source material. As a consulting detective, Sherlock’s practice is a triumph of the free market and the private sector; he performs all tasks better than the public servants who are employed by the State. Even public transportation is for other people; Sherlock rides in taxis. In fact, the individual comes out on top of any conflict with a collective community that takes place here. This is a Britain that may well have never experienced the welfare state or the social revolutions of the 20th century; it is only imaginable as a Victorian dream of the future. Just as one would expect, therefore, in this universe, all problems still have rational solutions based on the sorting of information, all of which is tangible; indeed, totalizing explanations of all history, science, and culture are not only possible, but essential. Sherlock’s deductions rely on them, as well as upon the myths of social and cultural unities, the invariable distinctions of class hierarchies, universal ethnic as well as national values, and a master narrative of technological progression. The idea of contingent truths and pluralized disunity does not seem to inform the program at all. Ideologically speaking, Sherlock seems to depict disturbing normative hierarchies unabashedly and without interrogation. It wants, apparently, to retain the comfortable traditionalism of Conan Doyle’s world, combined with what it perceives as the streamlined sexiness of ours. As a result, it cannot afford to recognize or reflect on the regressiveness of either, for fear of sacrificing the myth of clarity in favor of the contemporary reality of mutually contradictory truths.
In his meditation on postmodernism, Postmodernist Culture, Steven Connor writes that
self-reflection is, if anything, more significant than the reflection upon, or description of contemporary culture which seemed to be offered in postmodernist critical theory. Postmodernism finds its object neither wholly in the cultural sphere, nor wholly in the critical-institutional sphere, but in some tensely renegotiated space between the two [1997, 7].
By implicitly claiming that their program takes place not in this Victorian/21st century mash up, but in a “now” where we are apparently post-homophobic, post-racial, post-nationalist, post-misogynist and so on, it seems like Sherlock wants the trappings of postmodernism without being willing to do any of its self-reflective cultural work; it does exactly nothing to reject the dominant paradigm.
In “A Study in Pink,” for instance, the question of whether Sherlock and John are queer (as has frequently been wondered about Holmes and Watson over the years) is raised explicitly. Everyone around the two men seems to assume that they are, including Sherlock’s brother, their landlady, and various strangers. Finally, in a restaurant, they have a conversation about the matter, but only in order to dismiss the possibility. In interviews, when asked about this exchange, the producers explain that the characters are not actually queer, and certainly not for each other. Moffat remarks,
It’s just that thing of two blokes hanging around together living together—in this nice modern world it leads to people saying, “Oh, are they a couple?” And that’s nice. I thought how the world has changed, there is no disapproval. How much more civilized the world has become [July 25, 2010; www.digitalspy.com].
But has it really become more civilized? In some ways, we could read the Victorian text, which never alludes to sexual orientation explicitly, as more open to queer possibilities because there a reader could imagine that such possibilities remained unvoiced only because of the constraints of the period. Here, where the text can refer to the subject forthrightly, we might interpret the dismissal of queerness as “homosexual panic”: the writers know that when two men live together these days, questions about sexual orientation will be raised and they must explicitly deny the possibility. I would argue that this is only the illusion of postmodernity; when we talk about queerness openly, but it is never really on the table as a feasible alternative, how far have we truly come?
For instance, when Sherlock is deducing the situation of Watson’s sibling from the handed-down mobile, he (unlike Holmes in an analogous circumstance during The Sign of Four) actually gets one part of it wrong: he does not account for the possibility that Harry may be a lesbian sister. Their ability to deduce people’s situations correctly from the minutest detail is evidence that both Sherlock and Holmes live in a world of social conformity; the fact that Sherlock is unsuccessful here might argue that Sherlock’s world isn’t as normative as the Victorian era, although Sherlock himself may be. But Harry is invisible; much like the conversation between Sherlock and John, queerness is gestured at, but never actually present on screen. It is a choice that can’t be followed through, any more than it could in a pre-modern world. Queer readings may exist, but they remain unauthorized, exerting no greater force on the text than they ever have.
The teasing of queer possibility on Sherlock—complete with lack of follow-through—does not end with Sherlock and John, however. Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty makes his appearance on the program complete with an assumption of queerness that also contributes to the totalizing discourse that infuses the program. Although queerness in a myriad of forms (for example, homosociality taken an extra subversive step, polysexuality, multiple identities) is often a marker of the postmodern, Moffat and Gatiss use its presence as a tactic to close off subversive readings and keep tight control of the narrative, while seeming to do the opposite; queerness here is tied to specifically controlled signs that only permit one interpretation and this determinate language is used by Moriarty to communicate with Sherlock. Moriarty’s “gay” underwear, for instance, is a morpheme with only a single possible definition. Like the other gestures towards queerness I mention, it is only the image of a doorway, not the door itself.
Of course, sometimes fans choose to cut their own entrances into the narrative, regardless of the authors’ intent. Fandom and its choices, in fact, have been tied to the story of Sherlock Holmes practically since its inception: the readership of Conan Doyle’s mysteries—and therefore of Watson’s memoirs—was probably its first example. Holmes’s death in “The Final Problem” at the hands of Professor Moriarty caused distraught readers to wear black armbands in unprecedented mourning for a fictional character; the outcry was so severe that in 1903, the reluctant Conan Doyle was forced to bring Holmes back to life with “The Adventure of the Empty House,” demonstrating for perhaps the first time, the power that readers can exert over a narrative in which they are invested. Sherlockians in particular can be very invested in their ownership of the narrative, as they play The Great Game, where Holmes and Watson are assumed to have really lived, and Conan Doyle to be no more than their literary agent. The ludic potentials of such fannish activity and its postmodern toppling of authorial dictatorship are fairly well established, and have been so for some time (Tobin 2006, 83).
When we think of such subversive fan work (and play) today, however, we’re usually thinking about reading ostensibly straight narratives with a queer lens and more specifically slash fiction, which can be defined, according to critic Henry Jenkins, as “one of the most pervasive and distinctive genres of fan writing [positing] a romantic and sexual relationship between same-sex characters drawn from film, television, comic books, or popular fiction” (2006, 61). Fan writing in general, and perhaps slash in particular, is a postmodern project: it challenges the domination of the author over the text with an overwhelming plurality of signs, readings and potentially subversive queer interpretations. With dissemination over the Internet, it also utilizes the instant technologies that seem to be emblematic of postmodernism in the popular imagination. Opening the door on queer possibilities only to close it, as I have suggested Sherlock can be read as doing, seems like a rejection of this phenomenon, but fan writing is not so easily silenced, and there is still an immense body of it based on the program. However, it’s interesting that although Holmes and Watson continue to live a rich and varied extra-canonical life (of which Sherlock itself is only one example), the narrative of this supposedly postmodern program includes a portrayal of fandom, which seems quite condemnatory.
In “The Great Game” we discover that Watson’s blog and Sherlock’s web site have attracted a new reader: Moriarty. Described by Sherlock as “a fan,” he follows the detective on the Internet just as a contemporary fan would. However, though he uses social networking tools to create an in-universe narrative, he is doing so in order to lure Sherlock and John toward their confrontation with him. Thus, in one stroke, the fannish reader has been conflated with the villain of the piece; instead of saving Sherlock Holmes and bringing him back to life, his reader/fan is trying to kill or defeat him. Through this device, the reader’s power over the narrative has been rendered malign and, undoubtedly, impotent—since it is clear that Moriarty’s scheme is not going to work in the end. Elsewhere in this volume, Ellen Burton Harrington makes a beautifully nuanced argument that also reads Moriarty—a proactive rather than reactive figure—as a fan who constructs the plot; she concludes that his resonance with the show’s creators/plotters, themselves fan writers, playfully celebrates fan writing itself. However, Moriarty’s malevolence and the show-runners’ resistance to fan readings that are not their own make it hard for me to read him as a celebratory authorial representation. I think Moffat and Gatiss reposition Moriarty as a fan in order to take the professional author’s side against fandom, in an argument that was definitively lost in 1903 no less!
This impression of authorial control, which undercuts and chokes off alternative readings with its universalizing discourse, does not lend itself to a postmodern authorial model of plurality. It does, however, mirror all the other ways in which the show-runners gesture towards multiplicity while simultaneously asserting their own “one true narrative.” Just as Sherlock’s universe seems to long for a simpler future-of-the-past, where every problem has a single solution, the program’s interaction with its fandom seems to demonstrate a nostalgic yearning for a past in which the author could act as benevolent despot, determining by fiat how the text was to be read and completed in the mind of the reader.
It’s ironic that the potential democratization of the narrative has been subverted in this adaptation of the very text that first inspired the fannish impulse. But this should come as no surprise; it’s like all the other dazzlingly flashy postmodern gestures and theoretical challenges to the dominant paradigm in Sherlock’s narrative. While the program constantly points to its contemporary exterior, it’s all smoke and mirrors endlessly obscuring and reflecting a vision of the past in order to make us think it’s the present.
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