Metafictional Sensation - Harte's Parody of Wilkie Collins

 “No Title by W-lk-e C-ll-ns” by Bret Harte is an urban mystery (Collins’s No Name was published in 1862). The story opens with three newspaper clippings that “appeared in The Times on the 17^th of June 1845.” (p198) From the start, the story takes place in a world familiar to its (American) readers (as they imagined Britain to be?). And from the start the story presents them with a challenge: 

“To find the connection between the mysterious disappearances of the elderly gentleman and the anonymous communication, the relevancy of both of these incidents to the letting of a commodious family mansion, and the dead secret involved in the three occurrences, is the task of the writer of this history.” (p199)

The parody makes fun of Collins’s favoured method of multiple first-person narratives consciously emulating witness statements. The first narrative belongs to Mary Jones:  “I am upper housemaid …” (p200). It is followed by “The Slim Young Man’s Story:” “I am by profession a reporter …” (p204). After this we have an interval of mysterious happenings at “No 27 Limehouse Road.” The story culminates in “Count Moscow’s Narrative:” “I am a foreigner. Observe! To be a foreigner in England is to be mysterious, suspicious, intriguing.” (p210), followed by “Dr Digg’s Statement” on medical matters (p213). The story concludes with the “Statement of the Publisher” and a meta-fictional twist: “On the 18^th of June Mr Wilkie Collins left a roll of manuscript with us for publication … since which time he has not been heard from.” (p215)

Collins himself made much of his innovative narrative technique; at the start of his ‘Preface’ to The Woman in White in 1860, he writes: “An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book. They are all placed in different positions along the chain of events ….”

Collins said of this narrative method that it both “forced me to keep the story constantly moving forward; and it has afforded my characters a new opportunity of expressing themselves …” The multiple internal narrators have the same impact in Harte’s parody: the story gallops on jumping gleefully over any gaping chasms in the narrative logic and the widely differing styles of expression let Harte parody a range of stock characters in sensation fiction. Harte also uses some additional tricks that this narrative method facilitates.

The first narrative snippet gives voice to Mary Jones, the housemaid, who, by her own admission, does not know much:

“I have been requested to tell my story in my own langwidge [sic.] … I think my master is a brute. Do not know that he has ever attempted to poison my missus. .. Do not know whether he ever forged a will or tried to get my missus’s property. … Cannot say whether my master and missus were ever legally married. … Do not know of any lovers missus might have had. … Have never seen arsenic or Prussian acid in any of the private drawers, but have seen paregoric and camphor.” (pp200-203)

Harte parodies the central role of servants in sensation fiction. Sensation novels famously brought the literature of the kitchen into the drawing room, and they also successfully mixed characters of different social classes on their pages. Servants, ever present and intimately knowledgeable about their employers’ foibles and sins, are powerful characters in sensation novels. However, it is worth noting that we do not often find them in the position of a narrator. Even when servants play an important role in a story, say Lady Audley’s maid Phoebe, they do not very often get to tell the story.  In The Woman in White (which Harte is parodying) Collins includes “The Housekeeper’s Narrative” as well as second hand testimonies of Hester Pinhorn, Count Fosco's cook, and Fanny, Lady Glyde's maid.

Equally noteworthy is how through a long list of denials Harte manages to introduce a whole host of sensational ideas into the reader’s head.  It is not clear whether these ideas originate in Mary Jones’s own imagination or they are answers to suggestive questions put to her. There is no reason to think that any of the mentioned immoralities have actually taken place, but by simply denying any knowledge of any of them, Mary Jones’s statement creates their possibility and a suspicion in the reader’s imagination.

The “Slim, Young man,” is an interesting version of another stock character of sensation fiction: the heroic amateur detective. This role usually goes to a young relative and/or a young professional man often with a romantic interest in the heroine (Franklin Blake, Walter Hartright, Robert Audley all come to mind).  This time, the detective character is semi-professional, a news-hound with an interest in the sensational: “I live in Putneyville. I have always had a passion for the marvellous, and have been distinguished for my facility in tracing out mysteries, and solving enigmatical occurrences.” (p204) The “Slim Young Man” has a mysterious meeting with “an elderly gentleman” (p205). Later, he stalks a house at “No 27 Limehouse Road” and notes down a strange code written on the fence: “S-T-1860-X” (p209). If you can decode this, please let me know.

There is no professional policeman in “No Title.” Despite the appearance of Inspector Bucket on the scene in 1852 when Dickens’s Bleak House was first serialized, in the early 1860s it was still perhaps too early for Harte to see the police detective as a common character in sensation fiction. “No Title” was penned before the arrival of Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone (1868) and before the genre of detective fiction started to emerge from the sensation novel.

The character of Count Moscow, a friend of Mary Jones’s “brute” of a master and, according to her “a Russian papist” (p203) bursts off the page in an explosion of verbal fireworks, much like his flamboyant and (literally) larger-than-life model,  Count Fosco. Like Fosco, Moscow is a master of words and drugs, in equal measure, and he uses both to manipulate his victims:

“I write with ease and fluency. Why should I not write? Tra la la! I am what you English call corpulent. Ha ha! I am a pupil of Machiavelli. (p210) … People call me a villain – bah! (p211) … I hinted to him he had another wife living. I suggested that this was balanced – ha! – by his wife’s lover. … That he regularly beat his wife in the English manner, and that she repeatedly deceived him. … I carelessly produced a bottle of strychnine and a small vial of stramonium from my pocket, and enlarged on the efficiency of drugs.” (p212)

Moscow’s narrative is peppered with poisons, sex and violence, secrets and deception. It is saturated with sensation. Strychnine is a familiar poison, but what is ‘stramonium’? According to Pears’ Shilling Cyclopedia (1910 edition), this “common wild herb” smoked like cigarettes to ease asthma and whose seeds are used against rheumatism, “is a substance, the use of which may make more mischief than it can correct, and so should not be used unless prescribed.” A most useful substance, then, for a villain like Count Moscow.

Moscow’s narrative if followed by a dry, medical statement by Dr Digg – medical conditions, drugs and medical opinions are naturally important in sensation fiction, after all, this is fiction that aims to impact the sympathetic nervous system.  While Count Moscow excites, Dr Digg has a calming influence: “Tinct. Val., Ext. Opii, and Camphor, and prescribed quiet and emollients.” (p214).

The drugs Harte has slipped into his narrative parody the numerous medical substances featured in Collins’s narratives, who himself consumed these products on an almost industrial scale.

As a parody should, Harte’s “No Title” takes Collins’s narrative method used in The Woman in White and later in The Moonstone, one step further and tips it into meta-fiction. These novels, structured as compliations of witness statements collected and arranged by the male heroes have a level of textual self-awareness. Harte’s makes this explicit and takes it to the extreme, when he ends his parody with the "Statement of the Publisher":

“… it is feared that the continuity of the story has been destroyed by some accidental misplacing of chapters during its progress. How and what chapters are so misplaced, the publisher leaves to an indulgent public to discover.” (p215). 

The mystery of “No Title” is a textual mystery more than a sexual or a criminal one: the challenge is to make sense of the text. The reader is very firmly put in the place of the detective and in this way, is drawn to actively participate in the story. The tale will not work, unless the reader does her part.

From the twenty-first-century perspective, Braddon, Wood and Collins are usually lumped together as the three ‘classics’ of Victorian sensation fiction. If nothing else, Harte’s parodies demonstrate how wrong this is. The fiction of Wood and Braddon are combined in the same parody “Selina Sedilia,” which has many features of a more traditional melodrama and the Gothic novel. This story seems to be harking back to traditions of earlier fiction.

Collins’s work parodied in “No Title” is seen as something much more innovative and modern.  It seems to be looking towards the future and exploring a new sense of itself as fiction. Both parodies contain the key ingredients of sensation: sex, love, crime, family relationships, money. “Selina Sedilia” reminds us of a fairy tale with its castle, aristocratic lovers and supernatural elements. “No Title” has more proximity. It may have a melodramatic villain, but it also has science, journalism and familiar people (a house maid and a medical doctor).  Most of all, “No Title” is modern and reminds us how innovative Collins's writing was; it displays awareness of itself as a piece of sensational fiction.

Sensational Sherlock - Part 3 - Ambiguities of Morals and Method

Sensation fiction is a mix of attention to detail and wild abstraction: “The typical sensation novel was a catholic mixture of modes and forms, combining realism and melodrama, the journalistic and the fantastic, the domestic and the romantic or exotic.” (Pykett, 5) The sensation novel depicts tiniest nuances and singular objects as clues to underlying secrets and guilt. At the same time, characters’ emotions are overwhelming: “everything in a sensation novel is larger than life … Humanity is seen in extremis, perpetually at the point of crisis.” (Hughes, 22) Sensation novels combine domestic realism and older forms of Gothic romance and melodrama (Brantlinger, 1). This is reflected in the narrative style, which alternates precise descriptive detail of setting, objects and external characteristics with tempestuous and hyperbolic expressions of emotion and sensation. This “violent yoking of romance and realism” (Hughes, 16) is also present in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.

Holmes’s irrational excitement about detective work and his scientific, analytical method of detection are the most striking example of this combination of romance and realism. Watson observes Holmes at the crime scene in A Study in Scarlet:

“… he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards though the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent.” (A Study in Scarlet, Part ,1, Chapter3)

Holmes is performing a forensic examination of the scene, analyzing the footprints, the blood stains and the tobacco ash. In the process Holmes himself appears to have lost his senses, he is so excited. A similar combination of realism and romance is, of course, built into the concept of proximity as shown in the depiction of the crime scenes. Mysterious, terrific and fantastical murders are discovered in houses located at common-sounding suburban addresses. It can also be argued that a mix of realism and romance is built in to the formula of detective fiction: fictional crime and mystery are always romantic; clues to its resolution tend to be the realistic detail spotted by the skillful detective. When Holmes criticizes Watson’s narrative as too romantic and Watson claims it is realistic (The Sign of Four, Chapter 1), Conan Doyle draws attention to this tug-of-war of realism and romance which permeates both novels. 

Watson is seemingly recording the triumphs of his friend’s science of deduction – logical and analytical, hence realistic, reasoning. But the nature of the events - mysterious, exciting and sensational – is pulling his narrative in the direction of romance. Examination of the murder scene in The Sign of Four is a good example of this (The Sign of Four, Chapter 6). In it Holmes points out the various clues. Watson interprets them initially as terrifying and strange (“That is not a footmark.” “It is absolutely impossible.” “a child has done this horrid thing.” “I cannot conceive anything which will cover the facts”), and Holmes keeps dismantling the mystery with his interpretation (“It is the impression of a wooden stump.” “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” “but the thing is quite natural. … You know my methods. Apply them.”)

Throughout the two narratives there is a tension between the romantic, melodramatic experience of the exciting events, and Holmes’s apparent realistic interpretation and handling of them.

The most dramatic fault line between the realistic and the romantic in both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, is the maligned ‘Gaboriau-gap’, so called because it is thought that Conan Doyle copied the narrative device from Emile Gaboriau’s novels. When the culprit has been caught and Holmes is ready to reveal the reasoning that led him to solve the mystery, the narrative is suddenly hijacked by the story of the criminal and his growing obsession for revenge. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes says: “we have reached the end of our little mystery. You are very welcome to put any questions you like to me now, and there is no danger that I will refuse to answer them.” (A Study in Scarlet, Part 1, Chapter 7) You turn the page and find yourself “on the Great Alkali Plain” (A Study in Scarlet, Part 2, Chapter 1) and meet a grizzled cowboy with a little girl in “dainty shoes and smart pink frock” (Ibid.). The transition is dramatic and disorienting – 221b Baker Street has been whisked away and we are in a strange, distant land, where a romance develops and turns into murderous monomania of a heart-broken lover. In The Sign of Four the ‘Gaboriau-gap’ is better integrated; it is presented as the culprit’s own words (The Sign of Four, Chapter 12).

 

The stories of the culprits are wildly melodramatic, exotic and romantic. One involves a forced marriage and a broken heart, the other an Indian treasure and imprisonment on tropical islands inhabited by cannibals. In the narrative structure, Watson’s realistic narrative of Holmes’s detective investigation is overwhelmed by the romantic drama of the criminal’s experience.

Watson says of Holmes: “So swift, silent, and furtive were his movements, like those of a trained bloodhound picking up the scent, that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its defence.” (The Sign of Four, Chapter 6) The ‘Gaboriau-gaps’ develop a thrilling parallel between the criminals and the detective.

Holmes and the culprit he pursues are both obsessed by the same crime. Both lose their human features in their feverish, agitated, excitement. Jefferson Hope is “human bloodhound, with his mind wholly set upon the object to which he had devoted his life.” (A Study in Scarlet, Part 2, Chapter, 5). Jonathan Small, too, experiences “an overpowering, absorbing passion.”(The Sign of Four, Chapter 12): “To escape, to track down Sholto, to have my hand upon his throat – that was my one thought.” (Ibid.) Tonga,  Small’s companion, the extension of his murderous passions, is a “little hell-hound,” “the little devil,” (The Sign of Four, Chapter 11) “as venomous as a young snake” (The Sign of Four, Chapter 12). The murderers, like the detective, are “hounds.”

Holmes, Hope and Small all have knowledge of dispensing drugs. We are familiar with Holmes’s chemical experiments (A Study in Scarlet, Part 1, Chapter 1; The Sign of Four, Chapter 9). In A Study in Scarlet, Hope describes himself as “a fairly good dispenser” as he tells how he made two pills, one lethal and one harmless, for his Russian roulette by poison. In the Andaman Islands, Small learns “to dispense drugs.” This allows him to save Tonga’s life and as a result he becomes Small’s inseparable companion. This chemical knowledge allows both criminals to commit their crimes by providence and coincidence. Hope’s pills are a rather unreliable method of murder which leaves the judgement to Providence. Small’s rescue of Tonga leads to Sholto’s death when he is unable to control Tonga’s violence.

Both crimes and detection in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four are morally ambiguous. First, the victims are immoral and their demise is a result of their own bad behaviour. Secondly, drugs introduce into the narratives “a hand of fate,” a supernatural agency of justice so familiar in sensation fiction. Thirdly, the detective’s motivation for detection is self-gratification – to get a kick, to get high on crime. Fourthly, the experience of crime is similar for both the detective and the criminal, they also share chemical expertise.

There is some of the ‘doubling’ typical in sensation fiction in the parallels between the detective and the criminals. But more significantly, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four display the moral ambiguity that sensation novels were so criticized for: “Partly because of its moral ambiguity, the sensation novel was felt to be dangerous by many of its first critics” (Brantlinger, 5; also Hughes, ix).

Watson as a narrator neatly solves the classic problem of detective fiction: how to tell a story without giving its secrets away too early. This is the perverse requirement of any story with mystery which may sensation novelists struggled with: “The narrative satisfactions of the sensation novel depend to a great extent on the gradual uncovering of the central secret(s). To this end the most effective sensation writers developed techniques of narrative concealment and delay or deferral.“ (Pykett, 5) These “new narrative strategies were developed to tantalize the reader by withholding information rather than divulging it.” (Brantlinger, 1-2); see also Hughes, 26)

Conan Doyle’s technique was to introduce Watson as an internal narrator and a Boswell to Holmes’s Dr Johnson. Watson tells us all he knows and therefore gives the impression of a reliable narrator. Holmes occasionally keeps information from Watson, teases him and keeps him guessing to theatrical effect. In this way, Conan Doyle can withhold information from the reader without aggravating her. We do not mind being kept in the dark, because Watson is there with us.

“Whatever the technique adopted the result was the same: a modification, in some cases quite radical, or the omniscient narrator’s role as the reader’s guide, guardian and friend. Without this helping hand, the reader is left to make provisional moral judgements as the narrative unfolds. The result is a considerable degree of moral ambiguity.” (Pykett, 6)

Moral ambiguity here are the intermediate moral judgements we make (which are often wrong) while reading a sensation novel. Because we are no longer supported by an omniscient, reliable narrator, we cannot immediately know the significance and moral value of each event or the true moral nature of each character we encounter.

“At the same time as the narrator of a sensation novel seems to acquire authority by withholding the solution to a mystery, he or she also loses authority or at least innocence, becoming a figure no longer to be trusted. … the narrative persona must now become either secretive or something less than omniscient” (Brantlinger, 15)

Secretive narrators are unreliable by definition. Less than omniscient narrators are fallible. Watson is fallible, but his less than omniscient narration is bolstered by Holmes’s superb intelligence and deductive skills. Holmes and Watson work as a double act to provide a solution to the most significant problem with narrative technique created by sensation fiction: the incompatibility of a traditional omniscient narrator with a plot involving mystery.

To summarize my reading of Conan Doyle’s two stories: how many boxes of ‘sensation fiction’ can we tick for A Study of Scarlet and The Sign of the Four?

Plot: √Crime, √Mystery, √Proximity, Sex, √Doubles, √Coincidence.

Characterization: √Deviant characters; √Irrational character motivation; √ Abnormal mental states

Style: √Accuracy of detail, √Expressions of emotion, √Melodrama, √Mix of realism and romance

Ideas: √Moral ambiguity; Uncertainties about gender roles

Form: √ Fractured or insecure narrative voice (narrative omnipotence problematic)

Conan Doyle’s first two Holmes stories are sensation novels, only he pretty much left out women.

Sensation Defeats Science of Deduction

 “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea such individuals did exist outside of stories.”

“Dupin was a very inferior fellow.”

“Have you read Gaboriau’s works? … Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”

“Lecoq was a miserable bungler, … he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill.”

This conversation takes place at 221b Baker Street in chapter one of A Study in Scarlet (1887), very soon after Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson have come together to share lodgings. Holmes’s view of his (equally) fictional colleagues is scathing.

In 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a 27-year-old, newly married GP in Southsea, Portsmouth. He had published a few short stories in magazines and he was dreaming of greater literary fame.

“At the time I first thought of a detective – it was about 1886 – I had been reading some detective stories, and it struck me what nonsense they were, to put it mildly, because for getting the solution of the mystery the authors always depended on some coincidence. …. I read half-a-dozen or so detective stories, both in French and English, and they one and all filled me with dissatisfaction.” (“A Gaudy Death” in Tit-Bits, December 15 1900)

It is widely recognized that Conan Doyle used his medical training at Edinburgh University to his advantage here. The surgeon Joseph Bell is perhaps best known as the model for Holmes’s feats of drawing spectacular conclusions from almost invisible details of mundane life. Holmes’s first words to Watson, “How are you? … You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” (A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 1) are an illustration of his skills. Bell may have given Holmes his analytical eye for detail, toxicologist Sir Robert Christison (1797-1882) (he is my personal favourite of Victorian Edinburgh professors), who is much less known as an influence on Holmes, gave the detective a truly flamboyant flair for experimentation.

Stamford mentions to Watson that Holmes “has been beating the subjects in the dissecting rooms with a stick … to verify how far bruises may be produced after death.” (A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 1). This is exactly what Sir Robert Christison did during the Burke and Hare case in 1829 in order to determine the cause of death of the body-snatchers’ last victim. Stamford and Watson find Holmes in St. Bartholomew’s chemical laboratory, where Holmes has just created a reliable test for identifying blood stains. “the Sherlock Holmes test,” of which we hear no more. (Ibid.) Christison was also involved in experiments with blood. Stamford says of Holmes:

“Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes – it approaches cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness.” (Ibid.)

Again, Holmes here seems to be channelling the scientific spirit of Sir Robert Christison, whose cocaine experiments in 1875 (published in 1876) were world-famous. He took the drug himself and also sent his students, fortified with cocaine, to climb up Ben Nevis, in order to measure the stimulating and strengthening effects of the drug. Sherlock Holmes himself, of course, also uses cocaine in The Sign of Four (1890), although not in A Study in Scarlet. Much more could be said of Sherlock Holmes and drugs, but I will save that for my paper at the 6^th annual conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association 6-8 July 2014 (link: http://victorianpopularfiction.org/)

Sir Robert Christion's portrait at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

(Sir Robert Christison’s sons edited The Life of Sir Robert Christison, in two volumes, 1885 – just in time to inspire the creation of Sherlock Holmes).

Shelock Holmes was going to be a new kind of a scientific detective. He would not rely on instinct or fate or luck. He would not even rely on that good old basis of police work: knowing the criminal fraternity. Conan Doyle’s detective was going to be superior, his methods scientific and his approach rational. The reader would be able to follow the detective’s reasoning, which would all be based on evidence presented in the narrative. Conan Doyle had Holmes practice, indeed develop, the Science of Deduction.

A Study in Scarlet progresses almost like a scientific formula for the detective genre. The chapter headings from the beginning run as follows: “Mr Sherlock Holmes,” “The Science of Deduction,” “The Lauriston Garden Mystery,” “What John Rance Had to Tell.” The chapter headings reflect a straight forward plot-progression: introduction of the detective hero, an explanation of his scientific method, statement of a case to which this method will be applied and then demonstration of this application starting with an interview of a witness.

I would now ask you to perform an experiment. We can call this the “Edwin Drood –test.” Read A Study in Scarlet until you get to the end of chapter Six in Part Two. Stop before chapter Seven “The Conclusion” and examine your state of mind. Then answer this simple question: do you really need to keep on reading? Would A Study in Scarlet be just as good, just as entertaining and thrilling, even if the last chapter was missing and the story was unfinished?

In the very last chapter of A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes explains his masterful, clever deductions that allowed him to figure out who the culprit is. I am tentatively forwarding the hypothesis that you do not really care how Holmes did it. The charm and power of A Study in Scarlet is not in Holmes’s science of deduction. In fact, there is nothing more boring that reading about Holmes pontificating upon the significance of cigarette ash or square-toed boot-prints. Holmes’s deductions from hats, cuffs, calloused hands and handwriting simply do not make good reading. This may be for two reasons: first, there is no action and excitement in it because the analysis often leads simply to descriptions of external circumstances of characters. Secondly, they are retrospective and explain events after the fact. They tell a narrative of something that has already taken place within the scope of the narrative. We do not make the discoveries with Holmes. He examines the murder scene in A Study in Scarlet in chapter three, but we get his reading of the scene only in the very last chapter of the book. The delay is too long and we are no longer interested.

If Conan Doyle’s aim was to create a new kind of a scientific detective who wows his audience by his science of deduction, and does not pull a solution to the mystery out of thin air like most of his predecessors in sensation fiction, he failed spectacularly. I would like to suggest that A Study in Scarlet (and also the next Holmes novel The Sign of Four) does not succeed because Holmes’s method of detection is fascinating and engaging for the reader. They succeed because they tell exciting stories of crime, romance, mystery and adventure. Holmes stories are exciting not so much because of Holmes's detective skills, but because of the circumstances where he gets to exercise those skills. In short, Conan Doyle’s detective stories are so good because they are sensational. A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four are very much sensation novels.