Horizon

Any chance of pasting it in?

Probably not (librarian's kid and all) but I'll try and post a summary with excerpts soon.

Eh?

The Chabon essay I'm talking about is actually the second of two in the NYRB. The first essay is free here but I like the second one better.

The second essay starts out calling attention to the use of the word "Adventure" in original versions of the Holmes stories -- "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," etc. Chabon writes, "It has become commonplace to view the Holmes tales, and the detective story tradition that they engendered, as fundamentally conservative" -- for which he cites to this online article. Chabon prefers, however, to see Holmes as the Chandler type of detective hero who "operates in a disordered and fluctuating world that can never hope to be restored, in which social position is transient, the law a hopeless fiction, and morality flexible at best."

Chabon suggests Holmes is less a defender of Victorian orderliness than he is often considered to be, although of course he is a famously systematic thinker and an admirer of Her Majesty, and "Especially after the first two Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, and beginning in 1891 with the first great short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia,' Conan Doyle gradually abandoned most of the louche, Wildean touches with which he had initially encumbered the character of Holmes..."

Then Chabon is on to the notion that Conan Doyle, not Poe, invented and perfected the detective story and made it a wonderful "way to fold several stories, and the proper means of telling them, over and over into a tightly compacted frame, with a proportionate gain in narrative power" -- the Holmes stories being by their nature full of stories within stories. Holmes and Watson start out by their fire at home; the prospective client comes in and states the problem; the investigation and possibly the endgame bring out more stories; and all this fits inside the frame of the two friends' ongoing relationship. "Conan Doyle, in other words, invented a way to tell stories about the construction of stories without the traditional recourse to digression, indirection, or the overtly self-referential."

Another thought closes this section of the essay: that the Victorian era saw the demystification of a lot of formerly romanticized frontiers, so readers found it appealing when Conan Doyle put forward, as semi-substitute, the notion of a dangerous lawless "jungle" existing right at home in London.

Much of the rest of the essay explores at length the way Holmes is aware, within the stories, of Watson's having written about him for the public, and the way this jokey self-referential approach has fed the long-running tradition of Sherlock Holmes fandom in which Watson is claimed to be the true author of the tales and Conan Doyle merely his assistant.

This whole essay being purportedly a review of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Chabon here begins talking about the editor and annotator of same, Leslie S. Klinger: "He has a day job as a Los Angeles tax and estate-planning attorney, but at night, one imagines, he dons the Inverness cape and deerstalking cap, and plays the great Sherlockian game."

Klinger, it seems, is one of those who enjoys the pretense that Watson is the author of the tales. Chabon finds it strange the way he swaps back and forth between annotations that uphold the Watson-as-author fiction and other notes describing aspects of Arthur Conan Doyle's biography that have clear importance to some of the Holmes stories.

Hence:

It's an awkward project, this New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. It's as if the distributors of a Star Trek DVD had invited the leading speaker of Klingon to provide all of the extra features and commentary, appearing in full Klingon garb to explain that the episodes represent actual transmissions from the future, and that Gene Roddenberry was just some shnook who used to write for Have Gun, Will Travel. It's also, I'm sorry to say, a superfluous project, because as fine as Klinger's factual and purely explanatory annotations can be, we already have, from Oxford University Press, an excellent, multi-volume, annotated Holmes; one that furthermore is a lot easier to read in bed.

The rest of the essay -- another 14 inches or so of copy -- is all about fan fiction and the suggestion that Holmes fandom is behind all the rest of the amateur enthusiasts who have given themselves permission to write "further adventures of" their favorite heroes. He writes, "All enduring popular literature has this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure...." (Wonder if that's true.) "...In this sense the Sherlockian Game anticipated, and helped to invent, the contemporary fandom that has become indistinguishable from contemporary popular art; it was the Web avant la lettre."

Further:

And yet there is a degree to which, just as all criticism is in essence Sherlockian, all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom's notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me. Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining of the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving -- amateurs -- we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us... ...All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Fun stuff, isn't it?

'Fun stuff, isn't it?'

A bit up its own arse for my liking and while he has some truth in it there's a whiff of specious reductionism going, though without having read the whole thing I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at what ideology he's servicing with that reductionism. As for Bloom, he's good value: anyone who's still up for making judgements on the art and not the identity politics of who makes it, is fun in my book.
Still baffled as to why you couldn't paste and email or paste and post.

Little thing called copyright law, my friend, that's why not.

Dunno about Harold Bloom. Can't recall ever hearing he's said a single fresh or engaging or non-pompous thing about actually enjoying or thinking about literature as opposed to worshipfully embalming the stuff -- but maybe you can convince us otherwise?

I recently stumbled on another NYRB essay in the archives by Harold Bloom. It was a review of a "bible as literature" book put together by the excellent Frank Kermode and some other literary critic whose name escapes me. I was actually a little surprised at how much I enjoyed Bloom's review. On the whole he made reasonable criticisms obviously based on an extensive knowledge of his subject. Bloom sounds a little to me like some of the New Critics, and while I think that his style of criticism only goes so far, and while it's true that ultimately it rests mainly, if not entirely, on the critic's own prestige, it was refreshing anyway.

My impression is that Bloom and similar critics (like, maybe, Helen Vendler), really do write a kind of secondary literature; criticism which invokes and requires judgement based on mainly literary criteria. It's disappointing in some ways but also has its place.

'copyright law'

Some rebel you'd make.

'Bloom'

I read 'How To Read and Why' and enjoyed it. He is austere but he is an enthusiast, just not an enthusiast for bending the entire history of literature to suit a very particular, late 20th century brand of left-wing cultural politics. That's probably what gets up your hooter about him.

Getting back to Chabon. I liked:
"operates in a disordered and fluctuating world that can never hope to be restored, in which social position is transient, the law a hopeless fiction, and morality flexible at best."

Reminded me of life in England today.

Reminded me of life in England today.

Sorry to break it to you, but that's life in general, often as not. Sometimes we can do better for a while is all. The complicating bit being that the way we often manage to do better is by choosing to believe otherwise against all evidence.

Alan H -- thx re: Bloom. Can anyone recommend further reasons to take back what I said about him?

Sorry to break it to you, but that's life in general

Life's fucked up? Yes thanks I knew that. The law's a hopeless fiction? Hmmmm, I still kind of think some of it is ok...

Hogue wrote:

'based on mainly literary criteria. It's disappointing in some ways but also has its place.'

Why is that disappointing?

If I believed the law were a hopeless fiction I wouldn't have sworn a rather solemn oath to uphold it. It's just that the rule of law is not the normal state of things; it's something one has to keep trying to create. It's especially difficult to do so because quite a few varieties of "law and order" activity are actually detrimental to the equal protection of the laws. Unfortunately, the equal protection of the laws is still something to aspire to, not something achieved.

Hogue wrote:

'based on mainly literary criteria. It's disappointing in some ways but also has its place.'

Why is that disappointing?

It's disappointing to me because I think there are good reasons to study literature and art systematically. Criticism like the bit of Bloom's I've read tells you more about his personal opinions than anything. That can be pleasant and his erudition make that more worthwhile than it would ordinarily be, but I don't think it helps advance our knowledge of the subject very much.

The vast majority of "theorists" working these days are not doing any better.

Can you explain what you mean by "systematically"?

Can you explain what you mean by "systematically"?

If you have Booth's edition of Shakespeare's sonnets I recommend looking at some of the essays in the back. That's not a bad place to start. It's the best edition of them anyway, so good to have.

We've been over this territory before, so I'll leave it at that.