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Ways of reading Sherlock Holmes:
the entrenchment of discourse blends
Vera Tobin, University of Maryland, USA
Abstract
Current work on conceptual integration and literary texts often features detailed
analysis of a single reading of a text in terms of the conceptual integration networks
involved in constructing that interpretation. However, a single linguistic form can
inspire manifold readings. This article takes a historical view of the conceptual blends
involved in a range of different literary interpretations generated by different groups of
readers of a single set of texts, the Sherlock Holmes detective stories by Arthur Conan
Doyle. First, it examines the case of the numerous and diverse historical readers who
took these fictional texts to be non-fiction, and how their conceptions mirror and
diverge from the ways readers become immersed in texts they know to be fiction. This
is followed by an analysis of the early ‘Sherlockian’ essays, criticism operating under
the pretense of a historical Holmes and a historical Watson who recorded his
adventures with varying accuracy. In the Sherlockian tradition, something very like the
naïve believer stance independently emerges from this playful and parodic novel blend.
The history of this stance among its practitioners is then shown to be an example of the
routinization of a blend within a discourse community. These complex discourse
blends turn out to have much the same capacity for entrenchment and semantic change
as any grammatical construction.
Keywords: blending; cognitive stylistics; Doyle, Arthur Conan; mental spaces;
narrative viewpoint; reception history
1 Introduction
From the first publications of Sherlock Holmes stories in the late 1880s, readers,
editors, advertisers, and wags have been speaking of Holmes as if he were a real
person. For some of these people, this belief was purely sincere. Doyle
biographer Martin Booth (1997) reports that the British post office had received
letters addressed to Holmes until at least 1950. As early as 1890, Doyle marveled
that a tobacconist in Philadelphia had written to his editor, J. M. Stoddart, to
inquire ‘where he could get a copy of the monograph in which Sherlock Holmes
described the difference in the ashes of 140 different kinds of tobacco’ (Green,
1986: 4). Booth also tells an anecdote of his own which, even if he romanticizes
slightly, indicates the widespread and continuing nature of this belief. When
Sherlock Holmes came up in conversation at a hotel where Booth was lodging at
Naini Tal, in the Himalayan foothills of India,
‘Ah, yes!’ [the proprietor] exclaimed. ‘Shur-luck Homes! You know he
came to Naini Tal?’
ARTICLE
Language and Literature Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 15(1): 73–90
DOI: 10.1177/0963947006060556 http://lal.sagepub.com
‘You mean’, I corrected him, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle came to Naini Tal?’
‘No, sahib. It was Shur-luck Homes.’
When I asked why he had come, the proprietor did not know. It had happened
before the war, before he was born. His father had told him about it. (1997:
xi)
There is also a lively tradition of intentional ‘believers’ in the existence of
Holmes and Watson. These fans of the stories, popularly called ‘Sherlockians’,
write scholarly articles, squibs, and entire books under the conceit that Holmes
and Watson were real people (and sometimes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a
fictional one, as well). Michael Saler, who has written about this brand of literary
appreciation as a cultural product of modernism, refers to this category of reader
as the ‘ironic believer’, as opposed to the ‘naïve believer’ represented by the
Philadelphia tobacconist (Saler, 2003: 609), and I will adopt his terms throughout
this discussion.
Much of the current work on conceptual integration and literary texts involves
the detailed analysis of a single interpretation, or reading, of a text in terms of the
conceptual integration networks involved in constructing that interpretation. This
means that it often sidesteps a phenomenon that reception theorists, reader-
response theorists, narratologists, and many practitioners of applied linguistics
consider one of the central attributes of textuality: the multiplicity of readings
available for a given text, and the way that those readings may be encouraged,
discouraged, and conventionalized within a culture or community. The fact that
interpretations do differ across communities, individuals, and even a single
person’s multiple encounters with the same text is an important, verifiable datum
about language use as it happens in the world.
This observation is not, in itself, a departure from Fauconnier and Turner’s
conceptual integration theory as developed in Turner and Fauconnier (1995);
Turner (1996); and Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2000, 2002). Nor is it foreign
to the theory of mental models and meaning construction that blending theory
incorporates, mental spaces theory (Fauconnier, 1985, 1997). Indeed, one of the
key arguments of mental spaces theory is that language underspecifies cognitive
structure; that is, any linguistic expression is likely to be compatible with many
different mental space configurations. What meanings a hearer or reader
constructs in keeping with the relatively slender instructions encoded in a given
linguistic prompt may be resolved in part by general pragmatic considerations of
discourse coherence, relevance, and so on, and in part by her personal
predilections, store of background knowledge, and other idiosyncratic elements
particular to her personality and state of mind at the moment she happens to
encounter the prompt.
Fauconnier and Turner are careful to mention the potential for variation in the
mental space networks that assorted real people might construct in response to
the same prompts. For example, in the course of their analysis (2002: 156) of the
conceptual mappings prompted by the sentence Prayer is the echo of the
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darkness of the soul, they point out: ‘. . .it is up to the imagination to construct an
appropriate space. . . and again the imagination may make many different
choices, any of which could later be revised’. Yet even they consistently settle on
a single one of these potential choices for the sake of their analyses, for the
obvious reason that showing individual possible configurations is the best way to
illustrate the mechanisms involved in conceptual integration and emphasizing the
‘general operations for the construction of meaning that cut across all these levels
and make them possible’ (2002: 18). But it is important, too, to pay attention to
the patterns that emerge when we compare an assortment of different blends that
arise in response to the same linguistic prompts.
In order to engage with the phenomenon of manifold readings inspired by the
same linguistic form, this article takes a historical view of the conceptual blends
involved in a range of different non-canonical interpretations generated by two
groups of readers of a single set of texts, the Sherlock Holmes detective stories
written by Arthur Conan Doyle. One of these groups is composed of the many
diverse readers who have mistakenly read the stories as non-fiction – and whose
interpretative experiences are both tantalizingly similar to and yet not identical
with the temporary experience of the ordinary reader who is ‘lost in a book’ as
she reads. The other group is the subset of fervent fans of the stories who call
themselves ‘Sherlockians’, who adopt for playful purposes the pretense that they
share the first group’s misapprehension that Holmes was a historical figure, and
Watson his real biographer and author of the tales, and produce a vast quantity of
mock-scholarly articles under this conceit.
The Sherlockians comprise a discourse community in the sense proposed by
Swales (1990): they have common public goals, they have mechanisms for
communication and information exchange among their members, they make use
of community-specific genres and specialized terminology, and the group
features a high general level of relevant expertise. The former group is not a
discourse community in this sense, nor is it a speech community in the
sociolinguistic sense used, for example, in Labov (1972). Outside of their
common conception of the non-fictional status of the Holmes stories, these
readers do not necessarily share any special linguistic or social norms nor do they
generally communicate with one another or even know of other people who share
their interpretations.
I argue that the history of the Sherlockian stance is an example of what
happens when a blend is routinized within a discourse community. In lexical
semantics, the routinization of an expression (Haiman, 1994; Traugott and
Dasher, 2002; Hopper and Traugott, 2003) is associated with signal
simplification and semantic bleaching. For example, the English word ‘goodbye’
has undergone both kinds of changes since its origins in the phrase God be with
you. Its form is reduced phonetically, and the meaning has become more abstract;
some of the original semantic content of the phrase has been ‘bleached’ away.
Similarly, as the Sherlockian community dedicated to producing and
disseminating works that adopt this stance has solidified its institutional status,
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WAYS OF READING SHERLOCK HOLMES 75
the explicit ironies and parodies that were the original raison d’etre of the form
have atrophied. As the blend and associated forms become entrenched in the
discourse of the community, the ironic dimension of the stance may be de-
emphasized or abandoned altogether. The result is parodies in which the object of
parody is underspecified or absent, and increasingly earnest iterations of a form
with its roots in satire and comedy. These readings invoke a historically ironic
frame that has been bleached of much of its ironic meaning.
The analysis begins with a discussion of the conceptual structures involved in
naïvely reading these fictional texts as if they were non-fiction, and how these
conceptions mirror and diverge from the ways readers become immersed in texts
they know to be fiction. Next, I look at the case of the first Sherlockian essays, in
which something very like this naïve believer stance emerges independently from
a playful and parodic novel blend. Finally, I proceed to analyze the routinized
and increasingly sincere approach that pervades contemporary Sherlockian
publications as an example of how a complex blend underlying an idiosyncratic
reading stance can become conventionalized within a discourse community.
2 Discourse situations and reading stances as conceptual blends
Contemporary theoretical approaches to culture and literature such as post-
colonial theory and cultural studies take a particular interest in the way that texts
construct their ideal readers, the flip side of the equally common observation that
readers in some sense construct all texts. Both of these kinds of construction do
take place in the blends that readers enact and texts prompt. On the one hand, the
reader has a great deal of agency in constructing meaning in response to the
prompts of a text, but the text itself and the reader’s repertoire of culturally
acquired genres act as a powerful source of pre-defined roles into which the
reader inserts herself in the blend.
As language users engage in a discourse, they have a view of several different
aspects of the activity in which they are participating. The participants in the
discourse, their roles, their relationships to one another, the genre(s) of discourse
they are taking themselves to be engaged in, the setting in which the discourse is
taking place, and the status of what they can take to be common ground between
them are all elements of the discourse situation they understand themselves to be
interacting within. These elements of discourse situations exist in the physical
world, outside of the minds of the participants – both the physical and the
cultural circumstances of a discourse setting
1
are vital components of the
participants’ experience – but it is in the participants’ conceptualizations of those
circumstances that they are meaningful as situations, and, as with any conceptual
content, discourse situations can be framed (Goffman, 1974; Fillmore, 1982) in a
variety of different ways.
The classic interactional frames discussed in Goffman (1974) can be thought
of as the answers people continually attempt to provide to the question ‘what is it
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that’s going on here?’ (1974: 8) – how should I conceptualize the activity I’m
taking part in? Should I apply the waiting-for-a-bus frame? The watching-a-
horror-movie frame? The testifying-in-court frame? All frames are schematic
cognitive structures that organize the perception and representation of reality, and
the process of ‘framing’ specific elements within those schematic frameworks is
itself a process of conceptual integration. In a simplex network, the relevant part
of a frame in one input space is projected as an organized package of roles, while
elements from another input space are projected into the blend where they serve
as values of those roles.
And so, among the many other complex blends readers must construct in
order to read a book and understand themselves to be reading a book
2
, they also
construct a blend with a frame for a particular type of discourse situation in one
of the inputs, and themselves and the other individuals they will take to be
participants in this discourse in another. The way that a reader applies a generic
frame to a given discourse and the way she understands the participants in that
discourse situation to inhabit the roles in that frame – that is, her deployment of
the framing blend – constitutes what I will call her ‘discourse stance’. If the
organizing frame that the reader invokes for this interpretive act has separate
roles for ‘author’ and ‘narrator’, for example, her understanding of the
participants in the actual discourse situation as it is construed in the resulting
blend will differ from the version that would result from a simpler discourse
frame in which there is but a single authorial role.
Any of these discourse frames is itself the result of blending the very
schematic frame of a basic communicative scene with more constrained roles and
relationships particular to one or more communicative genres – genres being a
subset of Goffmanian interaction frames specific to communicative events, ‘a
more or less standardized communicative event with a goal or set of goals
mutually understood by the participants in that event and occurring within a
functional rather than a social or personal setting’ (Swales, 1990: 58). So-called
derivative settings, such as jokes, movies, news reports, and dictation, all require
multiple nested framings in order to make sense – that is, in Fauconnier and
Turner’s (2002) terminology, they rely on a ‘megablend’ of compounded
mapping networks. Written narratives are universally complex in terms of the
discourse situations they invoke (though some are certainly more complex than
others). These can, implicitly or explicitly, involve not just readers, authors,
narrators, and characters, but also narratees, implied authors (Booth, 1961) and
implied readers (Booth, 1961; Iser, 1978). Similarly, in order to understand
rhetorical effects such as irony, allegory, sarcasm, and homage, language-users
must be able to appreciate different levels of communicative activity and draw
analogies and disanalogies between them.
The simplex blend involved in understanding the author–narrator relationship
between Arthur Conan Doyle and Watson is very similar to the blend involved in
understanding a dramatic performance on stage. In a play, the person on stage is
a blend of one person, the actor, and another, the character who is being
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WAYS OF READING SHERLOCK HOLMES 77
portrayed. The vital relation of representation (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002)
links these two entities across the input spaces; the gestures, speech, and
movements of the actor represent those of the character. In the blend, this relation
is compressed into one of uniqueness; the actor is the character. An integration
network that recognizes this relationship allows the viewer to keep multiple
different framings in mind: one in which an actor is performing on stage, and
another in which the character is performing similar actions within the story
world of the play. In the standard, or assumed, reading of texts like the Holmes
stories, the author and narrator have a similar relationship. In this reading, cues
to the reader such as the byline prompt the construction of a conceptual
integration network in which the ‘I’ of the stories represents the narrator Watson,
while the author Doyle, a separate person, performs the part of Watson, much as
an actor might perform the part of Hamlet
3
. The Sherlockian stance, to be
explored in more detail below, is another such deployment, selected consciously
as an alternative to some more ‘natural’ or ‘accurate’ approach. So too is the
stance of the naïve believer, though in this case the stance does not reflect any
deliberate strategy or choice on the reader’s part.
3 Naïve believers
Fictions famously ‘transport’ their readers; we get ‘lost in a book’, ‘discover new
worlds’, or maybe only ‘suspend our disbelief’ when we read a compelling story.
When we are emotionally engaged with a novel or movie we seem for the time
being to behave less and less as if there is any difference between represented
events and the real world we experience directly. Recent work in cognitive
psychology, neurology, and linguistics suggests that there may well be a concrete
physiological basis to this intuition. Research by Tomasello (1992), Gibbs
(1994), Richardson et al. (2003), and Barsalou (1993, 1999) among many others
indicates that motor and perceptual structures in the mind are activated in
language comprehension and production tasks, and that competing motor or
visual tasks and language describing motion or related visual content interfere
with one another. These results support a ‘simulation semantics’ view in which
producing or understanding language of any kind involves a direct neural
simulation of what the words describe. Meanwhile, psychologists such as Dolf
Zillmann and collaborators (Zillmann et al., 1975; Zillmann and Cantor, 1977;
Zillmann, 1980, 1991, 1994, 1996) suggest that affective responses to fictional
narratives, such as the experience of suspense, function by virtue of an empathy
that relies on readers’ feeling themselves to be participating as direct witnesses in
the narrative events they read about. Studies such as Graesser et al. (1999) also
suggest that the immersed perspective is foremost in readers’ experience: even
third-person narrators are generally not nearly as accessible in memory as first-
person narrators and non-narrator characters. Clark (1996) addresses this
phenomenon from a discourse perspective, saying that the ‘topmost’ layer of a
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complex, multi-level discourse scenario is typically what is in focus; supporting
layers are generally latent, and the more successful a piece of fiction, the more
fully immersed readers are in the frame associated with the top layer.
And yet the most interesting thing about these phenomena is not merely that
they exist – that reading is in fact immersive and that there is a level on which
people are demonstrably simulating the experience of witnessing things from the
domain of the narrative, sometimes even overriding their direct experience of
their own surroundings and experience. The curious thing is that reading is
immersive, but also non-immersive. Stories do their trick partially, incompletely,
in such a way that the reader is not deluded about the distinction between
representation and reality.
Consider a situation in which a person directly witnesses a man named
Sherlock Holmes searching a room for clues. Her construal of this scene is
organized by conceptual frames for the activities of a search and of detecting, in
which certain objects may have significance as the object of a search and a clue
with respect to the solution of some mystery. Similarly, it is within these frames
that Holmes’ particular actions may be understood as searching and as a
detective, and so on. But all of the elements that figure as values for these roles
are directly susceptible to the actual senses of our witness, and the scenario may
be represented in a single mental space, pictured in Figure 1. In a scenario in
which these events are being reported to the conceptualizer by a third party, the
relatively simple witnessing scene from Figure 1 emerges again, this time as the
result of an imaginative blend. As with any case of understanding representation
– for example, recognizing a photograph of myself as ‘me’ – one input
corresponds to the represented events, and the other to the elements representing
them. In this case, the latter input is a discourse event in which the
conceptualizer is reading or hearing linguistic descriptions of people and events.
In the blend, these representational mappings between the represented and the
representing are compressed, and elements from the reported events and the real
discourse space are projected into a single scene with the emergent structure in
which there is a witness to these events, namely the addressee/conceptualizer.
The conceptual content of a blend is that of the entire blending network, not
only the contents of the blended space, and so although the bottom line of
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WAYS OF READING SHERLOCK HOLMES 79
Figure 1 The conceptualizer witnesses an event
running this blend is indistinguishable from the conceptualization in Figure 1, the
two are worlds apart. The thinker in the second case is under no overwhelming
illusion that she is in the circumstances of the first case. Yet at the same time she
is licensed to use the same kind of sentences to refer to the antics in question,
and her emotional responses and even the action of her visual cortex will bear a
striking resemblance to what they would be if she were in fact witnessing the
events that she knows full well she is not. Just as the integration network suggests,
the immersive witnessing scenario is neither inaccessible nor unavoidable.
However, this analysis still does not account for the difference between a
reader who believes the narrative she is reading refers to real events and the one
who believes it is fictional. In some respects, the difference is slight. A person
reading the text as a fiction will still allow many kinds of projection from the
fictional blend backwards into her conceptions of the world in which it was
written and in which it is read. She will likely assume that technical details about
diseases, machines, and laws are accurate; she may put the words of a character
into the mouth of the author (‘as Robert Frost said, “Good fences make good
neighbors”’); she may also assume that author and protagonist share any number
of character traits. Yet there is still a substantial difference of kind between her
understanding of the book and the understanding of the reader who categorizes it
as non-fiction.
In the interpretive experience as shown in Figure 2, the discourse situation is
represented very simply: the conceptualizer listens to some speaker describe the
actions of one Sherlock Holmes. But as we have seen, this conceptualization of a
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Holmes (h) searches for a clue.
C: Conceptualizer
s: Speaker
h
1
: Holmes
C listens to s talk about h
1
Figure 2 The immersive experience of narrative
discourse situation is itself an act of sophisticated conceptual integration. When
we categorize, or frame, a piece of discourse, we have at our disposal all kinds of
schematic information that we can use to organize our conceptualization of the
elements of that discourse. By recognizing a Sherlock Holmes story as an
example of written detective fiction, a reader gets, among other things, a set of
roles she will use to structure her understanding of the participants in the
discourse involved: not just Watson, but fictional narrator Watson, and so on.
The ‘naïve believer’ of the Sherlock Holmes stories exists in both apocryphal
and verifiable forms. On the less empirically supportable side are the reports of
this sort of reader in the London Times, which tended to attribute these quaint
beliefs primarily to foreigners (Green, 1986; Saler, 2003): Turks, Danes, and
other people in ‘certain backward countries’. These reports have a distinct flavor
of the urban legend about them – similar stories crop up many times in different
guises, with vague sourcing at best (‘we have heard. . .’). While they may be
rooted in real incidents, the details of these accounts reveal more about the biases
and preoccupations of the cognoscenti than about the naïve believers themselves.
It appears from the existing documentary evidence that the largest source of
true naïve believers in the early 20th century, at least, happened to be the ranks
of the British working classes, whose literacy and resultant participation in the
reading public had been on the rise since the Education Act of 1871. These
readers were enthusiastic consumers of the weekly Tit-Bits, where publisher
George Newnes reprinted the Holmes stories after their publication in his more
middlebrow magazine The Strand. Sorting fact from fiction in this environment
could be more difficult than one might expect. The editorial material surrounding
the stories included letters and squibs that referred to Holmes as if he were a real
person, or were coy about the question, as in this passage from 1892:
As a matter of fact we have not made the personal acquaintance of Mr.
Sherlock Holmes, but we have read so much of his doings that we have made
up our minds that if ever there is a mystery in connection with this office we
shall endeavour to find out the whereabouts of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and
employ him to investigate it, and if when that time comes we should find that
no such person is in existence we shall then be very much disappointed
indeed. (Quoted in Green, 1986: 64)
Furthermore, the literary training that many of these readers received failed to
outfit them with all or even many of the conventions of fiction. It did, however,
frequently equip them with a well-reinforced alternate template for interpretation.
While the naïve readers of myth – the conventional, quaintly ignorant figures of
fun to be found in the pages of the London Times – were simply too dim to make
any distinctions between fact and fiction, the historical credulous readers were
actively engaged in framing the texts that they read.
The historian Jonathan Rose, who has made a detailed study of the reading
habits and intellectual cultures of Great Britain during the 18th and 19th
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WAYS OF READING SHERLOCK HOLMES 81
centuries, reports the ubiquity of these naïve readerly beliefs among working-
class adult readers in this period. He cites memoirs and diaries that describe
again and again the experience of reading and believing even the most fantastic
tales ‘as ripping yarns, but also as gospel truth’ (2001: 95). There are two
important elements to this habit of reading. First, Rose argues, ‘there is
something powerfully compelling in a new and unfamiliar medium of
communication. Its dazzling and novel capacities for transmitting information
may so impress an audience that they must learn all over again how it can be
manipulated’ (2001: 99). The limited range of texts to which these readers were
exposed could have a powerful and lasting effect on the way they interpreted
new ones. Most importantly, working-class readers in the 19th century, especially
those outside of large cities, might easily encounter few books other than the
Bible, which they were taught to read as ‘gospel’ truth, a frame whose
entrenchment is evident in linguistic forms like the one in this very sentence.
Those other texts that they did encounter during their early reading experiences
did not tend to cast doubt on one another’s veracity. As a primary and heavily
reinforced experience of the reading activity, the ‘gospel truth’ cultural blend
provided a template that many of these readers then applied to the next texts that
they encountered, resulting the interpretive patterns that Rose catalogues.
Given the striking similarities between the end results of the naïve believers’
interpretive blends and those of their Sherlockian counterparts, one might expect
that the latter group was explicitly echoing or mimicking the strategies of the
first, such as those outlined above. Michael Saler (2003: 606) suggests that these
so-called ‘ironic believers’ were ‘not so much willingly suspending their disbelief
in a fictional character as willingly believing in him with the double-minded
awareness that they were engaged in pretence’. This characterization would
suggest that they were in fact self-consciously enacting the processes that naïve
believers performed spontaneously. For Saler, a literary historian making an
argument about the way that these strategies illustrate Holmes’ importance as a
vector for ‘re-enchant[ing] the modern world’ (2003: 616), this description
usefully highlights two things: the playfulness of the first Sherlockians, and the
way that playfulness is facilitated by various features of the stories themselves
that are also perhaps responsible for fooling those readers who end up mistaking
them for factual accounts. But as it happens, the development of the Sherlockian
stance among its practitioners tells a story in which the historical practices of
naïvely credulous readers are marginal at the start, and curiously more and more
closely approximated even as direct reference to them becomes increasingly
attenuated.
4 The Sherlockian stance: novel and entrenched
Sherlockians are fans of the Holmes stories who have been inspired to come
together into an offbeat interpretive community where they collectively and
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protractedly treat the characters as real, writing playful and resolutely deadpan
essays regarding the ‘truth’ of various matters described or alluded to in the tales.
Aficionados of this literary game are historians of the canon (or Canon, as the
works of Arthur Conan Doyle are called in their terminology), and for its
purposes pretend that Watson was the living chronicler of the adventures of a
living Sherlock Holmes. Doyle is by convention explained away as merely
Watson’s literary agent, a figure of little consequence.
The task of the Sherlockian is to adopt a mixture of the methods of Sherlock
Holmes and those of an academic historian to analyze the stories.
Inconsistencies, omissions, and offhand remarks provide the grounds for their
investigations, the goal of which is to determine the ‘facts’ of Holmes’ life and
related fictional matters. Popular topics include the question of what college
Holmes attended, the name and number of Watson’s wives, the details of
Holmes’ drug use, the events of the period during which Holmes was in hiding
after the events of ‘The Final Problem’, and the location of Watson’s war-wound.
To the uninitiated reader, the resulting essays can be difficult to distinguish from
sincere confusion over the veracity of the tales. The final blend in both cases
features a Watson and Holmes who live in the real world, where Watson is the
author of factual reports about their adventures together, and so on. But the ironic
Sherlockian stance involves a different integration network as a whole, with
inputs to which the naïve reader has no access.
In 21st-century popular culture, with its multitude of fan communities for all
kinds of novels, television shows, comic books, and the like, many of which
produce reams of material in a similar mode, this kind of readerly stance is
relatively common. In the first half of the 20th century, however, it was far less
familiar, and its conventions were quite new. The spectacle of supposedly
rational adults engaging in such play was distasteful to many. Edmund Wilson
(1967: 290), for example, called it ‘infantile’, while Clive James (1975: 17–18),
who was more jaded about such matters, termed it ‘drainingly inconsequential’,
‘interminable’, ‘coy’ and ‘depressing’. But the first Sherlockian essays fit clearly
into a genre that was well within the bounds of appropriate behavior for
sophisticated readers: the academic parody.
A famous early example, widely cited in today’s Sherlockian community as
the seminal work in the genre, is Ronald Knox’s 1911 lecture ‘Studies in the
Literature of Sherlock Holmes’ (1968), which is widely considered the seminal
work in the tradition, though it does not conform to all of the eventual
conventions of the form. Knox’s essay is primarily a parody of the analytical
style it adopts, that of the Biblical ‘higher criticism’ associated with David
Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur, and Ludwig Feuerbach, among
others. This approach to theological criticism sought to apply Hegelian theories
of history to biblical criticism, with such goals as determining the sources of,
authenticating, or discrediting the various books of the Old and New Testaments.
The amusement value of Knox’s essay lies largely in the satirical substitution of
such a frivolous subject as Sherlock Holmes for such elevated theological objects
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of study. While Knox certainly knew his Canon, later Sherlockian writings put far
less, if any, emphasis on spoofing the preoccupations and stylistic mannerisms of
academic prose, and far more on the particulars of the Holmes texts.
‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’ presents a novel blend to its
audience. In service of its novelty, and in order to coordinate this framing
effectively in the common ground between the author and the expected readers, it
makes liberal use of explicit signals regarding its ironic status. These are
widespread conventional signifiers of what Haiman (1998: 28) calls ‘the
metamessage “I don’t mean this”’. Two kinds of sarcastive markers are
particularly prelevant in the Knox article:
(a) Hyperformality in the use of formal diction, syntax, and gratuitous scholarly
jargon, particularly in contexts highlighting a clash between formality and
subject matter: ‘To this criticism I assent: I cannot assent, however, to the
theory of the deutero-Watson’ (1968: 153); ‘A more serious question is that
of Watson’s breakfast-hour.’ (1968: 157). Orthographic honorifics fall into
this category as well: ‘Yet this error gave the original impetus to
Backnecke’s theory of the Deutero-Watson’ (1968: 148).
(b) Represented intonational exaggeration in the use of italics and exclamation
points in a manner incongruous with the subject matter and the norms of
academic discourse: ‘As if we had forgotten that it was in a blue dressing-
gown that Holmes smoked an ounce of shag tobacco at a sitting, while he
unraveled the dark complication of the Man with the Twisted Lip!’ (1968:
153).
Knox’s methodological preoccupations also work to highlight the parodic and
ironic elements of the adopted, proto-Sherlockian stance, by frequently drawing
attention to the ways that the expressed content of the article contrasts with
elements of the world outside the discourse:
(a) All cited sources are patent fictions, with humorous names and invented
quotes: ‘thus M. Piff-Pouff represents it as an old dodge of the
thaumaturgist. . . In fact, M. Piff-Pouff’s verdict is thus expressed:
“Sherlockolmes has not at all fallen from the Reichenbach, it is Vatson who
has fallen from the pinnacle of his mendacity”’ (1968: 150).
(b) The points of dispute – assessing the relative authenticity of different
Holmes stories and dating the texts ‘so far as it can be determined by
internal evidence’ (1968: 155) – are selected for their resemblance to the
arguments that preoccupy the higher criticism. They are introduced as a
pretext for further parodic riffs, rather than raised out of an independent
interest in their resolution.
The use of such markers indicates that the sarcastic or parodic aspect of the
discourse situation is prominent in the blend as it is invoked here. This is a
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84 VERA TOBIN
straightforward and highly productive blend in which one input contains the
represented events of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the same input to be found in
either a fictional or a non-fictional construal of the tales, as outlined in section 3
of this article. Another input is the domain of serious scholarship current at the
time of Knox’s writing, including a wealth of detail about the tropes of and
participants in particular fields of inquiry within that domain. Importantly, the
naïve-believer scenario itself is not one of the inputs to this blend. Instead, the
‘believing’ stance is part of the emergent structure of the blend, arising from the
projection of relationships from the Higher Criticism frame, in which the goal of
all commentators is to sift through documents written by the fallible hands of
mankind in order to find the true facts of the events described therein. Knox thus
plays the part of a stereotypical Higher Critic, and the text of the stories is taken
to hold the same problematic relationship to the ‘true’ represented events. At the
same time, the canonical understanding of the stories as fiction must also be
available for the sake of recognizing the humorous contrast.
In this blend (see Figure 3), the ‘scholarship’ input space is rich with detail
and contributes prominently to the final blend; analogies and disanalogies with
respect to this input are central to the parodic effect. Furthermore, this space and
its abundant contents are subject to what Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 49, 308)
call backward projection. Inferences about various scholarly strategies can be
projected onto the original Higher Criticism, its adherents and the institutions
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WAYS OF READING SHERLOCK HOLMES 85
Z(a1, b1)
Scholarship: the Higher Criticism(HC)’s
stance on the relationship between
events(e) and their representations(r),
plus many other characteristics (x, y, z)
of contemporary academics
Figure 3 The Sherlockian blend in Knox (1968). Interpretive frames and other rich
content are projected from the scholarship input space to create a blend in which the
historical status of Holmes with respect to the Conan Doyle texts is humorously
contrasted with the standard fiction view. The exaggeration and absurdity in the blend
project backward to provide satiric commentary on both the stories and the scholarship.
that support them. This kind of projection back onto the input domains
contributing to the blend is what enables the kind of social criticism associated
with many successful satires – a parody or satire is not merely an amusement in
itself but a commentary upon the original.
In later Sherlockian products, however, the blend is both more entrenched and
more immersive, so that this element is less overt. More and more references are
internal to the extended discourse within the Sherlockian community, and
markers of non-seriousness are far less frequent. All of these features point to
increasing routinization of the blend. For example, a typical recent article in the
Baker Street Journal, Darak (2000) focuses on the question of what Holmes got
up to in the period between his retirement in 1903 and the publication of ‘The
Problem of Thor Bridge’ in 1922. This subject is not a means of targeting some
object of parody, as were the arguments of ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock
Holmes’. Instead, it is more importantly connected to an ongoing discussion of
the canonical fabula taking place within the Sherlockian community. The author
gives credit for competing theories among his fellow Sherlockians, and all
citations are of the stories themselves or of other analyses published in the pages
of the BSJ.
Furthermore, there are no striking formal indices of non-seriousness in these
articles. Compare the patently humorous snippets from Knox above with this
characteristic passage from Darak (2000: 29):
Lellenberg says that Holmes, a well-known amateur, is not the kind of person
the British government would be sending out into the enemy’s country on a
dangerous mission. This ignores the fact that Holmes had already just
accomplished a dangerous mission over a long period of time, presumably
often working with enemies who would not shrink from killing a spy.
The difference in tone is, I think, evident, and it is characteristic of the shift of
attitude that had obtained for this stance over the course of the 20th century. In
the routinized blend, the specific and detailed input space referencing many
particulars of individual works of serious scholarship, assumed to be common
ground between Knox and his readers, is replaced by one populated by the
conventions manifest in earlier essays produced within the Sherlockian discourse
community. The blend involved now typically involves little more than invoking
an unusual but conventional frame for the discourse.
This increasing seriousness, in which the original motivating parodic context
for the blend is partially bleached away, makes sense within the history of the
increasing institutionalization of the stance and the discourse community where it
might be indulged. Originally, the community of Sherlockians was small and
intimate, and the earliest Sherlockian essays were published in settings where a
sizeable portion of the audience was likely to be unfamiliar with the form. The
Knox article was published at Oxford as a one-off spoof; essays by the original
small cohort of the Baker Street Irregulars, in the 1930s, were often published in
the pages of the Saturday Review of Literature, where the founder of the club,
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Christopher Morley, was an editor. Under these circumstances, there was limited
opportunity for the stance to get heavily routinized outside of a small circle,
continually in the position of enacting it for audiences who would find it novel.
The society had only moderate institutional reality. In the 1940s, however, Edgar
W. Smith took over the leadership of the Baker Street Irregulars and began the
publication of the Baker Street Journal, which has been publishing continuously
since.
4
Today there are dozens of societies dedicated to this particular mode of
Holmes appreciation. This institutionalization directly supports the entrenchment
of the blend; once a discourse community and its interpretive frames are
established and reified in this way, there is a pre-existing framework in which all
Sherlockian writing makes sense; it doesn’t have to be a joke in order to avoid
being cast out as an error. For its practitioners, the stance has become
unremarkable, and need not be accompanied by any markers of a sarcastic or
otherwise unserious attitude on the writer’s part; indeed, there is no requirement
of facetiousness for current practitioners of the form. The stance can be non-
literal without being unserious.
The case of the ‘ironic believers’ of the Holmes stories illustrates one way that
a set of interpretive blends can develop and disseminate through a culture. The
texts produced by this community of readers invoke an elaborated integration
network in which the organization of the blended space has a great deal in
common with the results of the simplex blend described in the stance of the naïve
believer, but the decompressions involved in the two interpretive stances are
distinctly different. Through its development and refinement within the
Sherlockian community, this framing of the stories has undergone a kind of
ritualization within the discourse community, with the result that elements of the
original blending network have become less accessible and vital as it has been
recruited repeatedly over time.
Like the imaginative immersion involved in private reading, these creations of
the members of Sherlockian societies such as the Baker Street Irregulars in the
USA and the Sherlock Holmes Society in the UK do represent a protracted and
elaborated engagement with the text at an ‘immersed’ level, where the reader’s
focus is on the story world of the text, rather than the discourse setting in which
that world is being represented. However, the Sherlockian stance criterially
retains an ironic distance and self-awareness with respect to that immersion. But
much as an immersed reader may pay little attention to the foundational layers of
the discourse situation associated with, for example, the implied author, today’s
members of the Baker Street Irregulars do not necessarily focus on the ironic and
self-conscious dimension of their Sherlockian adventures. Once the form has
been repeated and conventionalized, it becomes closer to ritual. Once again,
practitioners of the blend can ‘live inside’ it. As the expression or enactment of
the blend becomes routinized, various formal elements associated with its
expression may persist while elements of the blend that originally motivated
them are de-emphasized or abandoned entirely.
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WAYS OF READING SHERLOCK HOLMES 87
5 Conclusion
Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 393) write: ‘Culture elaborates blends that are
complex and hard to discover but relatively easy to manipulate and learn’. Once
we have learned a blend, it tends to seem ‘simple and inevitable’ (2002: 211).
The historical examples I have examined here illustrate some of the processes
that obtain in the course of the cultural elaboration of blends. On the one hand,
these blends can be overextended as people feel their way towards new
understandings. The case of the ‘naïve readers’ demonstrates that the process of
fitting new experiences to old frames, with its attendant revisions and shifts in
conceptualization, is not always effortless and automatic. Meanwhile, the
evolution of the Sherlockian stance demonstrates some ways in which blends are
not merely elaborated, but ritualized. These complex frames for discourse
structure turn out to have much the same capacity for, and many of the same
symptoms of, entrenchment and semantic change as any grammatical
construction. I hope, in addition, to have made a case for the notion that
cognitive studies and reception history have a great deal to say to one another.
The kinds of detailed portraits of historical reading communities and the different
reading practices that arise within those communities that reception history can
give us make for a rich source of observations about language users in the world.
These observations can enrich and challenge the theoretical claims of cognitive
science, which in its turn can help to explain the processes that literary historians
observe.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Joshua C. Birk, Barbara Dancygier, and an anonymous reviewer
for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
1 My use of ‘setting’ in this passage follows Clark (1996: 3–11), which itself draws on Hymes
(1974).
2 See Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 210–11) for an overview of the complex and fundamental
integration networks humans must master in order to become proficient readers and writers.
3 The circumstances of the Hamlet scenario are of course themselves complicated by the fact that
the speaker of Hamlet’s lines is not also the author of those utterances. For a classic discussion
of the internal structure of the canonical speaker role, see Goffman (1981), particularly pages
144–46.
4 This history of the Baker Street Irregulars is drawn from the society’s own collections of
personal reminiscences, society artifacts, and letters published in Lellenberg (1990 and
1991).
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Address
Vera Tobin, 10900 Euclid Avenue, 712 Crawford Hall, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland,
OH 44106, USA. [email:vtobin@umd.edu or vera.tobin@case.edu]
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