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by The Hounds of the Internet Following are two messages from HOUNDS-L which capture, I think, the essence of why Sherlockian's play "The Game." For those of you who are not familiar with this term, The Game refers to treating Holmes and Watson and real people with real biographies rather than as literary creations, And Arthur Conan Doyle as the "literary agent" of Dr. Watson, not the author of the tales. The drunken-looking groom aka Les Moskowitz wrote, re Dakin's attribution of most stories in the Case Book to Watson but some to Conan Doyle:
> I, personally, find this taking the concept of "playing I think "the game" is mainly motivated by the inconsistencies between the earlier stories and the post WW1 ones in particular, and Dakin's conclusion is an inevitable result. All it really is a reductio ad absurdum: trying to preserve the integrity of an inconsistent set of texts means you have to believe impossible or contradictory things. The real question for me is, what is at stake? The original outline of the game by Ronald Knox was an amusing swipe at the silliness of textual scholarship, especially where religion is involved. I don't have a copy to hand, but I think Knox is really satirizing the way scholars use different sets of assumptions to defend the authenticity of texts that suit their position within a doctrinal dispute. Spotting the hand of intermediate editors is an essential part of this. Editors are normally seen as working with the authority of the original author (so that the canon is still authentic) but introducing silly mistakes (so that the real author remains authoritative). A further level of analogy when Knox wrote, though maybe less now, is that scholars also tried to identify the actual words of Jesus, or Socrates, and the facts about their lives, from the works in which they appear as characters, just as people clearly at least half believed that Sherlock Holmes was a real person with a biography. I think this is now definitely only a rule of the game. But I don't think many who play the game are really in the business of sending up textual scholarship. Comparatively few people seem to be aware that that was the original point, in fact. (Though we have at least one expert player on the list, Phil Meckley.) I suspect quite a few enjoy the intellectual game without realizing its origins, and treat it as a starting point for a much more open-ended exploration of ideas, following up topics with which they are familiar with reference to the stories, for example . But if the game is really open ended, nothing can logically be too far (except when it's illegal or immoral for real-world reasons, of course -- finding an incitement to murder in the text of the stories, for example). But I think that most people treat the game as a form of virtual reality -- one that is more soothing and perhaps more intellectually respectable, because it can involve the study of history, for example, than fantasy games. And the stories are certainly rich enough to support this, amazingly for purely commercial fiction. (This is different from the academic business of trying to reconstruction and examine the fictional events created by the stories.) Treating the world evoked in the stories as super-charged reality, the world you actually prefer to be in for a time, actually pushes you up against the problem of authenticity: the stories don't quite hold together, implying that they are not real. So you have to tell more stories to make them hold together, and then preserve the authenticity of the secondary stories with quasi-doctrinal fervour, otherwise your virtual world falls apart. Knox's insight was truly brilliant. Regards, The Brixton Ghost
H.E. Elsom Along with much else, the Brixton Ghost wrote:
>Treating the world evoked in the stories as super-charged reality, the Is Sherlockian scholarship really an attempt to hold a fractured fictional reality together? I'd have to disagree with that point ... as the bulk of Sherlockian scholarship doesn't deal with the inconsistencies at all. It takes the reality of Holmes and Watson and explores the areas that remain hidden. A single word from Watson, a single idea unmentioned at any later date, can be extrapolated from in a number of ways: the historical approach (doing research into the actual records of Victorian times), the personal approach (trying to understand Holmes and Watson through our own views on things), or the imaginative approach (wild theorizing that's often more fancy than fact). Each approach is more an exploration of the Canon than a patch-up job, and those three aren't the whole of it. The key to the Game, to me, has always been the attempt to use a version of Holmes's own methods on the small facts we have of his life. Holmes would look at facts, imagine as many possible explanations for the events as possible, then whittle away at them until he'd found the one possibility that covered all the facts. Since the Canon gives us facts without answers, without complete data, it's the perfect board to play this game on. It also makes a nice Rorschach test for finding what's in the brains of your fellow Sherlockians. The Canon is different things to different people. Ronald Knox played his own personal Game and Dakin played his own version, as did Rosenberg and every other Sherlockian scholar to come down the pipe. A few silly folk have attempted to put rules on this marvelous free-form hobby, but in the end we must each wind up playing with our own house rules. Like life itself, the Game is what you make it.
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