Literary
Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption:
Double
Coding in “The Six Napoleons”
Nils
Clausson
There must be something
wrong in me or I would not be so popular.
—R.
L. Stevenson to Edmund to Gosse (1886)
Holmes had the impersonal joy
of the true artist in his better work, even as he
mourned darkly when it fell
below the high level to which he aspired.
—Watson, in The Valley of Fear
The distinction between
“high” and “low” (or “mass” and “popular”) culture is
based partly on an evaluation
of the difference between unique and mass-produced
objects. —Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New
Sensibility”
To the man who loves art for
its own sake . . . it is frequently in the least important
and lowest manifestations
that the keenest pleasure is to is to be derived.
—Sherlock Holmes in “The
Adventure of the Copper Beeches”
… working as he did for the
love of his art rather than for the acquirement of wealth . . .
—Dr. Watson on Holmes in
“The Speckled Band”
Clearly one of the great—perhaps
tragic— characteristics of the modern age has been
The progressive alienation
of high art from popular art.
—Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, ‘Popular Art and Mass
Culture” (1964)
I
Criticism of the
Holmes stories over the last few decades has been dominated by historical
approaches, which have tended to read them either in the context of the rise of
criminology and forensic science at the end of the nineteenth century,1
or from the perspective of late nineteenth-century British imperialism.2
These approaches have unquestionably contributed to our historical
understanding of the stories. My concern with them is not that they are
historical and hence ignore the aesthetic (their aim has not been to
re-evaluate the stories artistically), but that reading the Holmes stories only
in these historical contexts has militated against our recognition of their
aesthetic and literary value; indeed, it has made it almost impossible to
imagine that they could have literary
value, or even that establishing such a value would be a desirable critical
goal. The dominant historical reading sees the stories as reflecting the
changes taking place in society’s response to crime, such as rationalizing the
study of crime as a science, or even as contributing to that rationalizing
process by providing fictional examples that might then influence
criminological practice, as Catherine Belsey suggests when she says that the
Holmes stories “have been deservedly influential on forensic practice” (112).
But reading the Holmes stories in the historical context of the rise of
forensic science and modern criminology, or the new science of criminal
anthropology, has not raised their literary value; they are still seen
as belonging to a sub-literary genre. The solution to this problem, however, is
not to abandon an historical reading of the stories in favour of a purely
formalist or aesthetic approach. We cannot simply ignore history.
The solution, in
my view, is to adopt an historical approach that will necessarily foreground
the aesthetic properties of the Holmes stories. Such an approach will result
not only in a fresh historical reading of the stories, but even more
importantly, in a higher valuation of them as literature. So as well as reading
them in the (illuminating) criminological context of Sir Francis Galton’s Finger Prints (1892), Alphonse
Bertillon’s anthropometry, and Alexandre Lacassagne’s pioneering work on
ballistics, I am proposing that we also read them in the cultural context of
the widening gap that developed between literary and popular fiction in the
late nineteenth century. To illustrate this approach, I propose of offer a
re-reading, which will also be a revaluation, of two stories, “The Adventure of
the Blue Carbuncle,” the seventh Holmes story to appear in the Strand Magazine, and “The Sixth
Napoleons,” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. These readings will
reveal these two stories to be cunningly crafted, double-coded narratives—at
once popular and literary—about the fate of art and the artist in a society of
mass-marketed popular fiction. But such a reading will require us to abandon
our presuppositions about what we “already know” we are supposed to find in a
Sherlock Holmes story. We must set aside all presuppositions we have about
them.
The historical context in which I propose to
read these two stories is that provided by three related developments in the
1880s and the 1890s: the dilemma that the rise of popular periodical fiction
during this period presented to the literary artist; the emergence, at the same
time, of the writer as a professional for whom writing was a career rather than
a calling; and, finally, coinciding with Conan Doyle’s early career, the rise
of the Aesthetic Movement. The publication of the Holmes stories in July 1891
in the newly founded Strand Magazine
coincided with a huge increase in the number of similar mass-market periodicals
which provided aspiring writers with a ready-made mass market for their work,
provided they could meet the editorial requirements of these magazines to
satisfy the tastes and expectations of their readers. This situation inevitably
raised questions about literary standards (would the bad drive out the good?),
as well as the possible deleterious effect of popular fiction on the readers
who consumed it. “The eighties and nineties,” Frank Kermode trenchantly
observes, “saw a huge expansion in the reading public, or, if you like, an
enlarged market for trash” (11). This situation is nicely encapsulated by the
reply Conan Doyle got from the publishers Ward, Lock and Company when he sent
them the MS of A Study in Scarlet in
the fall of 1886: “We could not publish it this year, as the market is flooded
at present with cheap fiction” (Stashower 81). The detective story in
particular was perceived as the very type of popular ‘literature’ written for a
mass audience. Despite its invention by Edgar Allan Poe, the form lacked a
respectable literary pedigree. It was too close to Gothic, sensation fiction
and journalism to be taken seriously as literature. An author who wrote detective
stories, or any type of formula fiction, was likely to be perceived as
pandering to the masses and hence as having abandoned any claim to literary
merit. “Throughout his career,” says
Diana Barsham, “Doyle had insisted that the popularity of Holmes had been
damaging to his reputation as a serious writer, bifurcating and weakening his
literary identity” (99). Peter Ackroyd has made a similar point: “Their very
popularity,” he says of the Holmes stories “may have predisposed [Conan Doyle]
against them; the fact that he could compose them easily may have led him to
consider them somehow flawed or worthless” (Ackroyd xiii).
As a suddenly
successful writer—the phenomenal popularity of the Holmes stories could not
have been anticipated—Conan Doyle was becoming aware of the conflict between
writing for art and writing for money and the masses. During the early years of
his success as a writer, says one of his biographers,
Conan Doyle
liked to imagine himself at the center of a community of writers. “At that time
I was practicing in a small way as a doctor,” he was to say of his Southsea and
London years, “and in a draper’s shop close by H. G. Wells was an assistant.
There was also a raw-boned Irishman rolling about London. His name was Bernard
Shaw. There was another named Thomas Hardy, and there was a young journalist
struggling for a living in Nottingham, whose name was [J. M.] Barrie.”
(Stashower 134)
Conan Doyle claimed to have killed
off Holmes at the end of 1893 so that he could devote his time to writing more
historical novels, which he considered a literary rather than a popular form
and which he hoped would win him the esteem of the writers he admired. This conflict between the literary and the
popular in Conan Doyle’s fiction is usually seen as a conflict between his
(literary) historical fiction and the (popular) Holmes stories. (Ironically,
Scott’s historical romances inspired a spate of imitators and made the
historical novel one of the most popular genres of the nineteenth-century.)
“Doyle’s many accounts of Sherlock Holmes,” says Barsham, “all emphasize a
polarity between the popularity of Holmes and Doyle’s wish to be taken
seriously as a historian” (99). But, as I hope to show, that polarity is
inscribed within two of the Holmes stories themselves. Although “The Blue
Carbuncle” (1892) and “The Six Napoleons” (1904) may have appeared to most
readers of the Strand as nothing more
than popular detective stories made from an increasingly familiar mold, they
also address serious issues about the status of literary art in a culture
increasingly coming to treat fiction as a commodity to be marketed to consumers
like any other product.
The emergence of a mass
market of consumers coincided with the professionalization of the writer,
signalled by the establishment of The Society of Authors in 1884, and by Walter
Besant’s lecture “The Art of Fiction” to the Royal Institution the same year, a
lecture that prompted Henry James’s famous reply with an identical title. As
Stephen Arata has pointed out, “The Society of Authors […] was explicitly
interested in redefining fiction as a profession analogous to the law,
medicine, certain sciences, and other of the arts. “If the ‘fine arts’ like
painting or sculpture enjoy a status
denied to writers, [Besant] contends in the lecture, that is because they are
organized into culturally-sanctioned professional institutions” (246). In “The
Art of Fiction” Besant, who was instrumental in organizing The Society of
Authors, urged novelists to look after their financial interests by considering
their products first as marketable commodities and only secondarily as art. But
in the view of his detractors, most notably Henry James and Robert Louis
Stevenson, Besant “had succeeded primarily in degrading fiction-writing from a
sacrament into a trade. […] For many writers Besant’s position was scandalous,
akin to the mercenary views confessed by Anthony Trollope in his recently
published autobiography (1882)” (Arata 246). The publication of the Holmes
stories beginning in the summer of 1891 marked the emergence of Conan Doyle as
a thoroughly professional writer in the sense that, for the first time, he was
able to support himself solely by means of his writing. This success created a
tension between the artist and the professional in him, a tension that surfaces
in Holmes in the form of a conflict between detection as a science and
detection as an art pursued as an end in itself. “Holmes,” says Watson in “The
Black Peter,” “like all great artists, lived for his art’s sake, and, save in the
case of the Duke of Holdernessse [in “The Priory School,” published the
previous month], I have seldom known him claim any large reward for his
inestimable services” (“Black Peter” 134). As a matter of fact, Holmes receives
£1000 from the King of Bohemia in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The dilemma faced by
Holmes—money versus art—is, I shall argue, the same dilemma that Conan Doyle
faced as a writer and one that he obliquely inscribed in “The Blue Carbuncle”
and “The Six Napoleons.”
The first
twenty-four Holmes short stories coincided not only with the expansion of
periodical fiction and the professionalization of writing but also,
paradoxically, with the art for art’s sake movement. The robust cricket player
and author of The White Company
appears, at first sight, to have nothing in common with The Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, and the drawings of Aubrey
Beardsley. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle
admired Dorian Gray and, as several
critics have pointed out, the early Sherlock Holmes would have been at home
with the aesthetes of the Fin de Siècle.
Holmes’s love of music (he both plays the violin and composes music), his
descent on his mother’s side from a French artist, his skill as an actor, and
(in The Hound of the Baskervilles) his interest in modern Belgian
painters and knowledge of English painters all testify to his “artistic
temperament.” As Daniel Stashower perceptively remarks, “With Sherlock Holmes,
Conan Doyle intended to elevate the science of criminal investigation to an art
form. To do so, he needed to cast his detective as an artist rather than a
simple policeman” (103). Peter Ackroyd makes a similar point: “We may even see
[Holmes] as an artist, then, concerned with the plangent and lachrymose poetry
of crime and detection” (Ackroyd viii). But Conan Doyle did not only intend to
raise criminal investigation to an art form, he also aspired to elevate the
lowly detective story to an art form. Contrasting the novel to the short story,
he said, “It takes more skill to carve the cameo than the statue” (Stashower 120).
The Aesthetic
Movement responded to the question of the place of art in a utilitarian and
commercial culture by drawing a clear distinction, one that Modernism inherited
and reinforced,3 between the popular and the literary, a distinction
that was often expressed as an opposition between the unique and the
mass-produced: the genuine work of art is one of a kind, unique; a work of
popular fiction is virtually indistinguishable from others of its kind because
it has been mass-produced according to a formula (hence the pejorative term
‘formula fiction’). Viewed in terms of this binary opposition, popular writers
like Conan Doyle wrote to entertain the masses and to make money for
themselves, whereas aesthetes like Wilde wrote for the sake of Art. In his essay
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1890), Wilde wrote:
A true artist
takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent.
He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or
sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist. (260; Wilde’s italics)
As well as separating the artistic
from the popular, the art for art’s sake movement also separated art from
morality. “No artist has ethical sympathies,” said Wilde in the Preface to Dorian Gray. “An ethical sympathy in an
artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” A parallel separation appears in
the Holmes stories, most noticeably “The Blue Carbuncle”: Holmes solves the
mystery for detection’s sake and not for such utilitarian motives as making
money, lowering the crime rate, or even securing justice. Solving a crime is an
end in itself: “Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical
problem,” says Holmes at the end of the story, “and its solution is its own
reward” (170). Oscar Wilde would have agreed.
In “The Six
Napoleons” Holmes uses his skills as a detective to solve a crime not only as
an end in itself but also to enrich himself by deviously acquiring “the most
famous pearl now existing in the world” (196), the black pearl of the Borgias,
a gem with a criminal history. This contradiction reflects the central conflict
shared by Holmes and his creator: art versus money. Although “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Six
Napoleons” appear to be popular detective stories, the serious issues that they
raise—the role and status of the writer in society and the relation of art to
morality—are ones that they share with such contemporary literary fiction as
Henry James’s “The Real Thing,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and “The Private
Life.” Both of these Holmes stories are thus double-coded. On one level they can be read as trivial
pieces of entertainment: “The matter is a perfectly trivial one,” Holmes tells
Watson in “The Blue Carbuncle.” But on another level they are works of literary
fiction that affirm their status as unique works of art in a society that
mass-produces cheap fiction for mass consumption by a mass readership.
II
“The Blue Carbuncle”
As a double-coded story, “The Blue Carbuncle”
explores the conflict between the literary and the popular, the unique and the
mass-produced, the true artist and the commercial writer. This conflict is
prefigured by the contrast, in the opening sentences of the story, between the
obviously aesthetic Holmes, smoking and lounging like an aesthete in his “purple
dressing gown,” and the “crumpled morning papers” that he has been reading: “He
was lounging upon the sofa,” says Watson,
in a purple
dressing gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of
crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the
couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and
disreputable hard felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several
places. (149)
Holmes is most Holmes-like when he
is portrayed in deepest thought, as he is here, lounging on the sofa while he
detachedly examines the hat. Yet the “crumpled morning papers”—through which
the known facts about the theft of the gem are later mediated to Holmes and to
the reader—appear as the first obvious sign of the mass culture that literary
fiction, in contrast to the sub-literary detective story, was coming to define
itself against. In contrast to the aesthetic Holmes, the newspapers “near at
hand” are part of the “seedy and disreputable” material out of which the unique
work of art, “The Six Napoleons,” will be fashioned. “The Press,” Holmes tells
Watson, “is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it” (SN
188).
In addition to
the newspapers, which are as ephemeral as much genre fiction, there are two
other examples of the mass-produced in this story. One is the “battered
billycock” (150), a felt hat similar to a bowler, which Holmes is carefully
examining as the story opens. Doyle’s choice of a drab, utilitarian billycock
is not fortuitous, for it reiterates the contrast between the mass-produced and
the “absolutely unique” (155). According to the derivation of the word given in
Richard Lancelyn Green’s Oxford edition of The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is supported by the etymology given in
The American Heritage Dictionary (1st
ed.), the first billycock was in fact unique, for it was designed and
custom-made in 1850 for William (“Billy’) Coke, nephew of Thomas William Coke,
Earl of Leicester. The new style caught on and soon “billycocks,” so named
after Billy Coke, were being cheaply mass-produced. Anyone with a few shillings could buy one.
Even if this etymology is historically inaccurate (it is not given in the OED), the fact still remains that this
etymology was widely believed, and Henry Baker’s “very ordinary” billycock was
almost certainly mass-produced rather than custom-made for him by an expensive
hatter catering to the upper classes for it bears “no maker’s name” (BC
151).
The most obvious
and the most important examples of mass production in the story, however, are
those delectable geese produced for the Christmas market (the story takes place
during the Christmas season) by Mrs. Oakshott, egg and poultry supplier, of 117
Brixton Road. Her geese are raised and
fattened for the sole purpose of being consumed by Londoners at their Christmas
dinners. They are not country-bred, but urban geese, raised right in London.
And they are indistinguishable. So alike are two of them that Mrs. Oakshott’s
brother, the inept jewel thief James Ryder, mistakes a virtually identical one
for the one in which he hid the blue carbuncle by forcing it into the bird’s
gullet. Indeed, the geese are so alike that even Mrs Oakshott can’t tell them
apart! In the story, then, the unique, priceless jewel, the blue carbuncle, is
concealed in a common Christmas goose that is indistinguishable from all those
other Christmas geese that contain nothing unique or priceless in them and will
be consumed by Londoners who, from the
poultry seller’s point of view, are indistinguishable from one another. Read as
a popular, mass-market detective story, “The Blue Carbuncle” is aesthetically
valueless, indistinguishable artistically from the countless other mysteries
commercially marketed in the Strand
Magazine and similar periodicals. As Suzanne Ferguson points in her
illuminating essay “The Rise of the Short Story in the Hierarchy of Genres,”
“works of popular art”—like Christmas geese—“are regarded by both their
creators and their audience as consumable.
Designed for immediate gratification, they are not expected to give pleasure
and edification over a long period of time” (177; italics added).4
But if “The Blue Carbuncle” is read as a literary story, it will be seen to be
not only about such a “seedy and disreputable” subject as crime, but also about
the struggle of the artist to be true to his calling in a society that insists
on treating art as just another consumable.
The connection
between Mrs. Oakshott’s geese raised for the Christmas dinner tables of
Londoners and the formula stories written for consumption by readers of
mass-market periodicals like the Strand
Magazine finds support in a famous comment Conan Doyle made about being
sated with the Holmes stories. “Poor Holmes is dead and damned,” he wrote in a
letter to David Christie Murray; “I couldn’t revive him if I would (at least
not for years), for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him
as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of
which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to
this day” (qtd. in Green, “Introduction” xii). Strictly speaking, of course,
Conan Doyle is saying that he has had too much of Holmes, just as earlier he
ate too much pâté. But the production of pâté is impossible without the mass
forced feeding of geese. This association may have been an unconscious one in
the story, but the later comment certainly suggests that geese, at least
indirectly, had unpleasant associations for Holmes.5
In
contrast to the mass-produced newspapers, billycocks and Christmas geese stands
the “absolutely unique” blue carbuncle. But why a carbuncle, and why a blue
one? The detective plot of the story does not require a particular kind of
gemstone, and certainly nothing as improbable or unnatural as a blue carbuncle.
All that is required is that it be valuable enough to be a target for thieves.
A rare, valuable diamond, or even a violet amethyst, would do just as well. But
in this double-coded story, the priceless gem has to be double-coded too. It
has to serve the needs of both the manifest detective story and the latent
literary story that together form “The Blue Carbuncle.” Whereas the detective
story requires only that the stone be valuable, the literary story requires it
to be not just valuable but rare, unique: the (unique) stone is a metaphor for
the (unique) literary story that bears its name.
An ordinary
carbuncle is a semi-precious stone, not at all rare, and therefore not
valuable, like most mass-produced detective stories. What makes this carbuncle
so valuable is that it is unique. Carbuncles are most commonly red but can be
any colour—except blue. Thus the blue carbuncle is not just any valuable stone
that a jewel thief might be interested in. “It’s more than a precious stone,”
says Holmes. “It is the precious stone.”
He adds, “It is absolutely unique, and its value can only be conjectured, but
the reward offered of a thousand pounds is certainly not within a twentieth
part of the market price” (155). The stone is “absolutely unique,” which is
precisely what one would say of a genuine literary work of art, as opposed to
works of formula fiction mass-produced and sold to middle-brow periodicals like
the Strand Magazine for consumption
by a mass audience, like so many fatted geese. A central binary opposition in
the story, then, is the one between the “absolutely unique” and the
mass-produced, between the unique work of art and the mass-produced piece of
formula fiction. A blue carbuncle is
thus a contradiction, like a literary detective story. It also appears to violate
the laws of nature, and is therefore aesthetically connected to that most
notorious unnatural rarity, and symbol of the Fin de Siècle—the green carnation associated with Oscar Wilde. The
similarity between Holmes and Wilde has been noticed by John MicBratney: “Doyle
may have modeled Holmes . . . on Wilde,
a writer and man he admired. Holmes is, like Wilde, a witty aesthete, a lover
of the outré, and a seeker after fresh sensations that sometimes shock
the bourgeoisie” (161).
As a
double-coded story, then, “The Blue Carbuncle” can be read either as a popular,
mass-market detective story, or as literary short story. When it is read as a
literary story, Holmes the detective becomes a surrogate for the artist Conan
Doyle. The challenge facing Holmes the detective—how to find in a seedy and
disreputable common robbery an “intellectual problem” (150) that is “striking
and bizarre” (149) and thus worthy of his talent—is analogous to the challenge
facing Conan Doyle the artist: how to transform a “disreputable” sub-genre of
mass-produced fiction, the lowly detective story, into an original work of art.
He does this by making this challenge the latent subject of his double-coded
story. The manifest content of “The Blue Carbuncle” is the story of a valuable
gem criminally concealed in a commercially produced and marketed goose. But if
it is read for its latent literary content, it becomes the story of a unique
work of art artfully concealed within a commercially produced piece of
consumable formula fiction. Something rare and beautiful has come out of
something common and ordinary, which is exactly what Holmes says of the blue
stone that emerges from the goose’s gullet: “[A] most remarkable bird it
proved. I don’t wonder that you [Ryder] should take an interest in it. It laid
an egg after it was dead—the bonniest, brightest little blue egg that was ever
seen” (166).6 If laying an egg is a metaphor for creating
art—think of a beautiful Fabergé egg—then Conan Doyle has created the artistic
counterpart of the blue carbuncle. By double-coding his work so that it will
satisfy the claims of both Art and the marketplace, Conan Doyle has it both
ways: he satisfies his mass audience with yet another seemingly formulaic
Holmes story (the sixth to appear in the Strand
and superficially just like all the others) and he satisfies himself and his
like-minded readers by creating a kind of allegory of the fate of art in mass
society. In this witty, clever and comic story, Conan Doyle appears to be a
Grub Street Mrs. Oakshott, turning out yet another consumable story, identical
in form to the previous ones, for the popular fiction market—but this one turns
out to be an “absolutely unique” one, like a blue carbuncle “whose value can
only be conjectured” (155).
Notes
1 See, for example,
Ronald R. Thomas’s Detective Fiction and
the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999),
especially chapters 5, 10 and 13; and Marie-Christine Lep’s Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of
Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), especially chapters 7, 8 and 9.
2 See Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire (Urbana: Univ.
of Illinois Press, 1993), which contains a perceptive reading of The Sign of the Four. See also Catherine
Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle: British
Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and
the Gothic (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002; and Susan Cannon
Harris, “Pathological Possibilities: Contagion and Empire in Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes Stories, Victorian Literature and
Culture, (2003): 447-466.
3 The standard analysis
remains Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great
Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1986).
4 William J. Scheick
makes a similar point in The Ethos of
Romance at the Turn of the Century
(Austin: U of Texas P, 1994) about what he calls “eventuary romances” (popular
narratives that focus on plot and action): “Eventuary romances use the
conventional matter of the genre chiefly to emphasize plot and action. These
works are designed to entertain, to sell. The reader of eventuary romance is
supposed to buy and consume the story
as a treat of transient and renewable pleasure. Ideally, the reader’s addictive
appetite for such trifles should demand more of the same kind—sequels, in fact”
(42; Scheick’s italics). Scheick uses H. Rider Haggard’s romances as his
primary example, but he could just as easily have chosen the Holmes adventures.
5 Even Conan Doyle’s
seemingly innocent use of the word “overdose” is (again perhaps unconsciously)
suggestive: reading mass-market fiction has often been compared, by Q. D.
Leavis for example, to an addiction. Reading popular fiction is often figured
as a form of bodily consumption—ingestion or injection—whereas reading elite
fiction is figured as a form of disengaged mental contemplation, figured by a
seated figure reading a book or in a rapt posture viewing a painting or
sculpture.
6 There is probably a reference here to the “The Goose That
Laid the Golden Egg.” The Holmes stories were truly a golden goose for Conan
Doyle, creating more wealth for him than he ever dreamed of and enabling him to
buy a sixteen-room house in the middle-class suburb of South Norwood.
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