After a long absence, the Blog is back. I’ll update you on "What I Did on My Summer (or rather, Autumn) Vacation" in a later post; for now may it suffice to say that I’ve been working on a very big project that I’ll tell you about as soon as it’s finished.
Anyway! An interesting piece was posted on Donald Bain’s homepage, written by Joella D. Hultgren of the The Illustrious Clients, a society of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts located in Indianapolis, Indiana (I’m not sure how it came to Mr. Bain’s attention; I suppose that is a mystery for another day). The title of the article, “Sailing Super Sleuths,” is a reference to Mr. Bain’s book Murder on the QEII; her thesis, that Jessica and a character she meets aboard the legendary cruise ship, Mary Ward, represent a Holmes-Watson relationship, though not a typical one. What is atypical, she argues, is that unlike most Holmes-Watson partnerships that remain stable and static, this one shifts over the course of the book as Jessica, initially in the lead role as Holmes, cedes her position to Mary Ward, eventually taking a step down to become Mary’s Watson. The correctness of Ms. Hultgren’s postulate is not in question – she has plenty of evidence from the book to back up her point. What is more debatable is whether it was Mr. Bain’s intention to turn this particular Holmes-Watson relationship on its head when he first set out to write it.
Ever since I was sitting in my English Lit classes in college, I have wondered how much authority a reader, critic, reviewer, or professor of English Literature can claim when reading subtle themes into a book without knowing the author’s intentions. One can observe a turn of plot, or a development of character – but if we then try to ascribe a larger intended meaning to these things, that is, I think, when we venture into dangerous waters. I suppose this makes me a much more literal interpretive than imaginative interpretive reader at heart. Making assumptions about the intentions of an author without the author’s input - reading more into a story than is actually there - is like the sound of one hand clapping. Or, to put it another way: if a literary reviewer claims there is an underlying theme to a book and the author is not around to hear it, does it make a sound? (Actually, it can make a very loud sound, heard by a great many people, depending on who the reviewer is and what book we are discussing.)
Ms. Hultgren does not presume to guess whether the changing status of Jessica and Mary Ward in their Holmes-Watson relationship was an intentional move on the author’s part or not; she makes her (very astute) observations, and leaves it at that. However, her article did raise an interesting opportunity to learn first-hand from the author himself whether what she observed was, in fact, the result of intention on Mr. Bain’s part. It was reader Kathleen W. who posted the question thusly:
“… When [Ms. Hultgren] demonstrates the reversal of Jessica and Mary Ward's roles in their archetypal Holmes/Watson relationship, was that a conscious goal that you set out to accomplish with your character development, or more of an unintended (though not uninteresting) consequence of the progression of the plot?”
Mr. Bain responded, “When I wrote Murder on the QE2 I never once thought of Holmes and Watson. I intended the character, Mary Ward, to play a minor role in the story, but as it developed I became more infatuated with and fond of her. That she ended up taking the lead in solving the murder was simply an example of how a novel, no matter how carefully plotted, can take on a life of its own along with its characters.”
This proves my point. If, hypothetically, Murder on the QE2 were being discussed in an English Lit class, the students would even now be picking apart (or writing papers about) a Holmes-Watson relationship that was a) never an intended theme of the author’s, b) arose quite by accident, and c) didn’t even exist in the author’s mind until it was pointed out to him by an outside party, the author of the article. These three things being the case, does the Holmes-Watson relationship of which Ms. Hultgren writes legitimately exist at all?
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
