The Post-Sherlockian Moment?

During WWII, Universal Pictures trotted out Basil Rathbone and Sherlock Holmes for propaganda purposes--quite often.  This particular stop in Holmes' twentieth-century career is never referenced explicitly in either Michael Chabon's The Final Solution or Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, even though both novels are set during or immediately after WWII and, more importantly, both represent Holmes' inadequacy in the face of the war's most horrific events.  Unlike Caleb Carr's The Italian Secretary, Chabon's and Cullin's efforts are meta-pastiches: reflections on Holmes' ongoing appeal, on the need for a figure like Holmes, and on the relationship between Holmes-the-character and twentieth-century history.  Strictly speaking, there's nothing new about subverting Holmes; leaving aside the weighty burden of Sherlockian parody, pastiche itself has often tried to humanize or even demolish Holmes.  (Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes does the former; M. J. Trow's Inspector Lestrade series, the latter.)  But Chabon and Cullin are less interested in writing a "Sherlock Holmes mystery" than in examining what a Sherlock Holmes mystery might mean. 

Between Holmes' wartime service and the ongoing deluge of pastiches and parodies devoted to his exploits, it seems a bit hubristic to argue that what the Great Detective represents no longer "works."  It's true, as I said when discussing Carr, that contemporary authors have to update Holmes' methods to fit the expectations of the modern mystery reader--groomed (consciously or not) on Knox's Ten Commandments of Detection.  But even revealing the method behind the magic doesn't invalidate the character's appeal.  Chabon and Cullin, nevertheless, are after bigger game.  In Chabon's slender novel, the unnamed detective seeks to restore a parrot to a mute Jewish refugee; the boy gets his parrot back, but the detective doesn't grasp the meaning of the numbers it repeats (not a code, but the numbers of trains carting Jews off to the concentration camps).  That is, Holmes solves the mystery, but it's not the right mystery: "'I doubt very much,' the old man said, 'if we shall ever learn what significance, if any, those numbers may hold'" (129).  He sees (a mute child), but does not observe (the horrors that stripped the child of his voice in the first place).  Cullin's more ambitious novel is a pastiche-within-a-pastiche, set after the nonagenerian Holmes returns from a visit to postwar Japan.  The inner pastiche consists of Holmes' account of a really rather insignificant mystery, but one which nevertheless changes his life through the mystery of romantic attraction.  This narrative ends "unsatisfactorily," for it finishes with inexplicable death instead of a comfortable, happy conclusion; similarly, in the outer narrative, there is no way to explain the meaningless death of Roger, the son of Holmes' housekeeper.  But during his visit to Japan, Holmes in effect creates another pastiche: a story to explain the disappearance of his host's father, who may well have visited Holmes in 1903.  (The only record of this visit was in Watson's diaries--which Holmes, now suffering from memory loss, had torched after Watson's death a few years earlier.)  Whereas Chabon's Holmes "fails" because his powers of observation cannot adapt to a world in which the Holocaust can happen, Cullin's Holmes "fails" because, quite literally, he is being written into a story by someone other than Watson.  Nevertheless, Holmes' pastiche offers genuine comfort to his host: "You've shed light on one quandary of my life--perhaps I haven't received every answer I've sought, but you've given me more than enough--and I thank you for assisting me" (222).  Holmes' plausible fiction "solves" a mystery with more emotional effectiveness than the rational, empirically-based solutions he offers for the novel's other deaths.

For both versions of Holmes, the real trauma lies in the discovery of a larger, existential mystery, one that cannot be solved by any application of reason.  Chabon's Holmes, musing on the code freaks of the world, thinks that "[o]ne might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst.  That it was the insoluble problems--the false leads and the cold cases--that reflected the true nature of things.  That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot" (131).  Unfortunately for this line of argument, there's actually a chapter written from the parrot's POV; even though the parrot doesn't understand the "train song's" meaning, he is capable of rational thought.  And, after all, the train song does have a meaning, as the people who stole the parrot in the first place know quite well; it's just that neither Holmes nor the parrot (nor, for that matter, even the boy) can decipher it.   In other words, Holmes' sudden anxiety about a world in which meaning becomes entirely subjective is itself based on partial information; he mistakenly equates the unsolved with the insoluble. 

You could make a case, then, that Chabon's novel--for all the grimness of its subject--is arguing that Holmes represents an outdated approach to making sense of the world, not that the world itself no longer makes sense in the wake of the Holocaust.  (Someone else with more interest in Holocaust fiction might want to ask to what extent Chabon is also revising that genre's conventions; as Ernestine Schlant points out, symbolic muteness is a mainstay of Holocaust fiction.)  In Cullin's novel, though, the detective discovers that the true horror at the center of modern life is man's absolute solitude:

And what did it matter if, eventually, everything was to be lost, vanquished, or if there existed no ultimate reason, or pattern, or logic to all which was done on earth? For she was not there, and yet I remained.  Never had I felt such incomprehensible emptiness within myself, and just then, as my body moved from the bench, did I begin to understand how utterly alone I was in the world. (253)

Cullin's Holmes thus goes down the same path as Chabon's, but to an even darker end.  World-historical meaning (or the lack thereof) proves irrelevant beside the pain of a single, inexplicable death--what Holmes has experienced repeatedly over the novel's course.  Watson, Holmes tells Mr. Umezaki, was "better with fiction than fact" (75), and the belief that Holmes could somehow make everything better derives from Watson's storytelling powers.  As he realizes when faced with the grief of Roger's mother, "he knew he couldn't fabricate an appealing falsehood to ease her suffering, as he'd done for Mr. Umezaki; nor could he fill in the blanks and create a satisfactory conclusion, like Dr. Watson had often done when writing his stories" (240).  Here is what Cullin's novel tries to puncture: not so much Holmes-the-character (although this Holmes reflects quite openly on his status as a "character"), but the comfort readers associate with Holmes.  The stories may offer the reader reassurance--Holmes will solve the case, injustices will be righted--but, in a sense, the endings are false.  Even if Holmes successfully explains the mechanics of the fatal event, he cannot fill the void left by the person gone missing.  Is Cullin suggesting that we've lost the ability to rest contented with happy endings?