Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Part 4

Deconstruction involves the identification of a pair of opposing concepts in a piece of writing. For example, we might examine an encyclopaedia entry on liberal democracy and recognise that the term contains a necessary tension between the freedom of the individual and a requirement for social justice. Usually, where there is a set of oppositions in a work, one will be given priority. In this case the author might define liberal democracy as a political system that maximizes individual freedom. A deconstructive reading involves a re-conceptualisation of the distinction with the aim of showing how the language of the text undermines the selected priority. Just like what is at play in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The novella is presented as a mystery that borrows elements from the horror genre. There is a relationship between mystery and horror in the work, the distinction mystery-horror, where mystery seems dominant. Derrida's idea in deconstruction was that the text would contain a specific point beyond which its inherent logic could not progress, and he called this the aporia. So the aporia in The Hound would be the pa.s.sage which exposes how the narrative undermines the apparent dominance of mystery in mystery-horror.

So far, so good. Derrida also believed that every piece of writing contained a re-mark, which was an indication of the genre of the work by the author, a feature of the law of genre, whereby every piece of writing belonged to a particular category. We should find at least one part of The Hound which explicitly announces that it is a detective story. But Derrida didn't achieve his reputation for complexity by accident: his distinctive idea was that the re-mark was paradoxical because it was itself outside the genre that it marked. The re-mark was thus both a part of and apart from the writing. Now The Hound is a particularly good candidate for a deconstructive reading because the aporia and the re-mark interlock in the single pa.s.sage above.

The dog is a very poor murder weapon, one that is only able to kill victims with weak const.i.tutions (Sir Charles) or bad balance (Selden). In the first murder, the savage, starved hound doesn't even take a nibble of its quarry. Holmes explains to Watson: "Of course we know that a hound does not bite a dead body and that Sir Charles was dead before ever the brute overtook him." Could Doyle-highly intelligent, widely-travelled, and a qualified doctor-really have believed that dogs only ate live prey? Had he never seen a tame, replete dog gnawing the last sc.r.a.p of flesh from a raw bone? The novella's logic fails at the aporia of the dog that doesn't bite as a murder weapon.

Holmes's especial energy in saving Sir Henry is due to his sense of responsibility for the events described. He has arranged for the aristocrat to walk across the moor at night in order to present Stapleton with an opportunity to use the hound. The ruse is risky, as Holmes is aware that the beast has been trained to target Sir Henry specifically, and that the death of Selden was caused by the fact that he was wearing Sir Henry's clothes. Given this harsh lesson in failure, one would expect the master sleuth to have prepared for every possible contingency.

Yet, when the fog on the moor begins to obscure Holmes's view of Merripit House, he says to Watson: "Very serious indeed-the one thing upon earth which could have disarranged my plans." Doyle is asking us to believe that a brilliant detective has constructed a plan that fails to account for the possibility of fog-on Dartmoor, at night-despite having recently spent several nights upon the moor himself. Anyone who has ever visited any of England's moors will understand how ludicrous the idea is, and Dartmoor is renowned for being one of the most inhospitable in the country. This impossible oversight by Holmes is the re-mark that announces the genre of The Hound. The fact that the oversight is made by an ineffective detective-that mainstay of the mystery genre-meets Derrida's criterion that the pa.s.sage which announces the genre of the work as horror is itself apart from that genre.

The Philosophy of Horror.

Why horror? Even if I have convinced you that The Hound is a seriously flawed mystery, why should it be a horror story when there are plenty of other genres from which to choose? I think the context in which the work was created provides several clues. The genesis of the novel is the subject of heated debate, but it seems as if the idea was suggested to Doyle by his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson while they were golfing in Norfolk in April 1901. Doyle had laid Sherlock Holmes to rest in 1893 in order to concentrate on his literary historical romances, and the new project was envisaged as a collaboration. There appear to have been three main sources of inspiration: the legends of black dogs and Wisht hounds widespread in the British Isles; "Followed" (1900), a short story by Dr. Robert Eustace and Mrs. L.T. Meade; and "The Brazilian Cat" (1898), one of Doyle's own horror t.i.tles.

Doyle was already an accomplished author of tales of supernatural horror, and amongst his numerous and varied contributions to the genre was "Lot No. 249" (1892), which is the first appearance of a reanimated Egyptian mummy as a monstrous antagonist in literature. He twice used the phrase "a real creeper" to describe his work in progress, but made two important decisions at some time prior to August 1901. First, to introduce Holmes into the story; and second, to write the novel on his own (with an acknowledgement to Fletcher Robinson). The choices may well have been related, and the selection of Holmes as the protagonist-likely motivated by financial considerations-would effectively disguise the tale as a mystery.

Amongst his many other achievements, Noel Carroll is the leading philosopher of film, and one of the foremost writers on genre. He claims that although different genres are identified in different ways, mystery, suspense, horror, and melodrama are designed to elicit specific emotions. In The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Carroll identifies horror as part of a wider family of stories about monsters, and monsters as "beings that do not exist according to the lights of contemporary science." Horror is distinguished by involving monsters that disturb the natural order, and the essence of horror is that it produces a compound reaction of fear and disgust.

For something to disgust rather than scare us, it must be impure or grotesque, and this can occur in three ways.

First, we have an aversion to incompleteness. The long list of fictional villains who either have parts missing (like Captain Ahab in Moby-d.i.c.k) or parts that don't work (like Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life) reflects the real-life discrimination with which physically disabled people have to contend.

Second, we're uncomfortable with contradiction. The reanimated mummy in "Lot No. 249" is not just frightening because of the physical threat it poses, it is revolting because it is un-dead, dead and alive.

Third, and related, is that we not only react to contradiction, but to creatures that cross accepted cultural categories. The mummy is a cross-contamination between "live things" and "dead things" in the same way that a crab is a cross-contamination between "things that live in the sea" (which usually swim) and "things that walk" (which usually live on land).

The hound straddles the distinction life-death in the same way as Doyle's mummy. Throughout the novel the monster is identified both as a fearsome physical antagonist and as a frightening otherworldly creature. The following descriptions come immediately before and after the slaying of the hound respectively: an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. . . . Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more h.e.l.lish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face . . .

In mere size and strength it was a terrible creature which was lying stretched before us.

The hound produces fear by being physically strong and revulsion by being a crossbreed dog-ghost. In addition to this compound reaction that defines horror, Carroll notes four factors that provide supplementary support for his theory: the prevalence of monsters with insufficient strength to instil fear in protagonists, a geography that locates monsters in marginal or unknown places, a predominant concern with knowledge, and the link with ma.s.s aesthetic satisfaction. All of these are relevant to The Hound of the Baskervilles.

There is a sense in which the hound should not inspire fear. Either Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade are facing a real dog that they are well-equipped to kill, or a ghost dog that cannot wound them. We have already seen that the hound, whatever it is, doesn't bite. Nonetheless, Watson-frequently noted for his bravery-feels fear, an emotion which is, I imagine, shared by many readers. With regard to the geography of horror, the hound is a denizen of Dartmoor, a grim, lonely, and forbidding landscape. The moor is very much one of the "marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites" that Carroll mentions as figurative spatializations of the unknown lurking beyond cultural categorisation. The effect is increased by the hound's kennelling in Grimpen Mire (grim-pen). The habitat is not only the most secluded place on the moor, but deadly to living creatures because of the bog holes.

So, 1.The combination of remarkable success and flawed mystery should make us think twice about what kind of story The Hound of the Baskervilles. really is.

2.A horror story is a plausible alternative: there's a monster in the story, and the characteristics of this monster match those that Carroll identifies as definitive of horror.

3.There is further evidence for The Hound as horror in the irrational quality of the horror induced and the geography of horror.

Convinced? Not yet? Then let's look at the rest of the evidence.

Re-Solving The Hound.

The third supplement to Carroll's definition is his description of horror-story plots as repet.i.tive and having a link with knowledge, and he categorizes the two main structures as the discovery and overreacher plot cl.u.s.ters. The latter is the well-known "mad scientist" story, made famous by Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. A case could be made for The Hound of the Baskervilles as a version of the former, where the protagonists discover that a monster is responsible for unexplained deaths. If we consider the novel in terms of the typical sequence Carroll identifies (onset, discovery, confirmation, and confrontation) the idea is very tempting. But the discovery plot structure overlaps with many mysteries, so this seems more like an instance of Derrida's law of genre-where hybrid genres are the rule, not the exception-rather than proof that The Hound of the Baskervilles is a horror story.

There are a surprising number of mystery elements absent from the novel, however, the most important of which are: the detective is a bodyguard rather than an investigator; there is a complete lack of crime scene work; there is a general lack of detection and deduction; and there is a cast of only three serious suspects (Mortimer, Barrymore, and Stapleton). In the original ma.n.u.script, Doyle also erased procedural detail in Chapter 11, when Watson reflects on his interview with Laura Lyons. So it seems there's good reason to think that The Hound isn't a pure mystery, but do I really need to insist it's a horror story when I could call it a crossbreed, a mongrel mystery-horror?

Close attention to the plot exposes the combination of Gothicism and Romanticism characteristic of cla.s.sic Victorian horror fiction like Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dracula. In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, Christopher Frayling cites The Hound of the Baskervilles as completing the quintessential gothic horror quartet, and I think he is right. The Hound as horror also explains the host of attempts to account for the numerous differences between the most famous Holmes story and the many others in which he appeared, including early suggestions that Fletcher Robinson had written large parts of the novel, and recent claims that Holmes failed to catch the real villain.

The engine that drives the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles is the conflict between protagonist and antagonist, a conflict that underlies much-if not all-mystery and horror fiction. The protagonist is obvious: Holmes, ably a.s.sisted by Watson. The antagonist appears to be Stapleton, but is really the hound, a monster whose existence is only explained in the final chapter. Where Stapleton has a relatively minor role, the presence of the hound is felt throughout the work: from the t.i.tle to its first mention in the second chapter to Holmes's elucidation in the closing paragraphs. Contrast the following two references to the antagonist: I told you in London, Watson, and I tell you now again, that we have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel.

Always there was the feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realised that one was indeed entangled in its meshes.

Despite what Holmes says, Stapleton is an incompetent antagonist. He chooses an appalling murder weapon; he conducts his personal relationships without discipline (he has a dangerous affair with Mrs. Lyons and his uxorial jealousy almost ruins his plan); and he lacks a definite means of securing the Baskerville fortune in the unlikely event of success (even Holmes admits that Stapleton could not have claimed his inheritance without suspicion). Stapleton is a worthy foe, but only to a master detective who fails to predict fog on Dartmoor.

The clash of the incompetent criminal and ineffective detective is of only secondary interest, however, because the real conflict is between man and monster. The ultimate triumph isn't the capture of the culprit, but the slaying of the beast. While Holmes and his allies battle the hound at the climax of the story, Stapleton's death is an anticlimax, occurring off-stage in Grimpen Mire.

The Postmodern Condition.

In "Watson's Weird Tales: Horror in the Sherlockian Canon," Philip Shreffler writes: "It is the book's supernaturalism that has brought generations of readers to The Hound." Holmes's status as an international cultural icon is also responsible, but he appeared in three other novels, none of which have proved as successful.

Shreffler's commentary reiterates the final factor in Carroll's philosophy of horror, the ma.s.s appeal of the genre. Carroll believes that the popularity of horror fiction and film is a symptom of the late-twentieth-century concern with meaning, value, and relativity captured in the term "postmodernism". The idea that values are relative rather than absolute, and that concepts are created by human beings rather than reflections of things-in-the-world mirrors the horror story's focus on monsters that defy cultural categories, and our fear and revulsion of the unknown. The prevalence of horror is the popular expression of the postmodern condition: Contemporary horror fiction, then, articulates the anxieties attending the transition from the American Century to the "we know not what" for ma.s.s audiences, in a manner a.n.a.logous to the way postmodernism articulates intimations of instability for intellectuals.

The link with postmodernism is astute, and it explains the dominant position of horror fiction in ma.s.s culture through its production in motion pictures. In this respect, the early and repeated appearance of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the ma.s.s media of radio, film, and television is a self-fulfilling sign of the fascination the story holds for ma.s.s audiences. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) cites twenty-two film and TV productions from 1915 to 2002, and the list is by no means exhaustive.

With such evidence at hand, I'll make a further observation in support of Carroll: all four of the Victorian cla.s.sics exerted a similarly strong attraction at the end of the nineteenth century.

The period that preceded postmodernism-modernism-was itself characterized by the collapse of certainty. Beginning with The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a series of prophecies about the end of the dominance of Christian values, values which had been exported to the world through the empires of Western Europe and the United States. As civilization slid towards the ma.s.s destruction of its first global conflict, no accepted truth about human existence escaped scrutiny. Everything everyone had ever believed was doubted, and intellectuals held nothing sacred: capitalism (Marx), society (Durkheim), religion (Frazer), science (Einstein), language (Saussure), the mind (Freud), and even humanity itself (Darwin). No country prospered from The War to End All Wars, and the resulting disenchantment is revealed in works like T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

For the first time in history, there was constant change, and people didn't know how to deal with it. We still don't, though I hope we have learned something from two hot world wars and one cold.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was written and published at a time of uncertainty. If the narrative reflected that uncertainty, there is no surprise that it is even more popular in an age of heightened uncertainty. Which brings us back to Derrida, who is often considered the arch-postmodernist because his overall philosophical project was to show that truth was something with which human beings could never be acquainted. He used elusive tools like the aporia and the re-mark, and abstruse methods like deconstruction, to ill.u.s.trate that meaning is not self-sufficient, and that truth itself is flexible. What do we have left without the possibility of truth?

Anxiety.

And that anxiety is the essential clue in the solution of the real mystery of The Hound, the secret of its remarkable success. If we follow the novel's own logic to its conclusion, and identify the dramatic finale in the fog of Dartmoor as an announcement of a genre to which Holmes and Watson do not really belong, we can see how neatly the narrative fits into the category of horror.

Doyle, it seems, had it right from the very beginning: the real appeal of The Hound of the Baskervilles-now more than ever-is because it's a real creeper.

Chapter 8.

The Case of the Dangerous Detective.

Ronald S. Green and D.E. Wittkower.

During an idle hour, we took up the question of why it is that the detective, as a literary figure, is viewed as 'dangerous'.

"It is not so strange," I said, "for the detective is always uncovering facts that guilty persons have very good reasons not to want known."

"Yes," said Wittkower, "but if that were the end of it, there would be little difference between a detective story and a thriller. The hero of a thriller wishes to set things right and escape with her life-but the detective wants knowledge which is itself dangerous, not knowledge which is simply dangerous because it's somebody's dirty secret."

"I'm not sure I follow. What do you mean, exactly?"

"Well, take for example the first detective in Western literature: Oedipus. In Sophocles's Oedipus Rex-or perhaps we could call it 'A Scandal in Thebes'-Oedipus must solve a murder. He is warned away from finding the truth by Tiresias, a prophet of Apollo, a G.o.d of light and truth. Despite having been told by the G.o.d's representative that he should not seek the truth, he cannot resist his thirst for knowledge, and it is this which brings his downfall.

"There's a similar social history throughout antiquity. Those who claim to know a hidden truth about the world are treated as dangerous and are made to pay for their forbidden knowledge, and even seeking such knowledge is viewed as immoral-from the Athenians' prosecution of philosophers like Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle; to the Roman persecution of early Christians; and to Roman Christian persecution of Gnostics and Pagans. Society, it seems, has long had the habit of putting to death those who ask too many questions."

This seemed to me too quick. "But," I said, "in the cases of the Greek philosophers, early Christians, and Gnostics, each of these groups were undermining political authority by adopting doctrines which went against the religious doctrines of the state. For example, when Anaxagoras claimed that the sun was a giant burning rock, he wasn't just making a claim about astronomy or physics, as we would interpret this today. Rather, since the Athenian state based its legal tradition on the stories of the G.o.ds and heroes, when Anaxagoras said that the sun was an object, not Apollo, he implied that we could get rid of all the stories of the state and replace them with more scientific knowledge. So, he was put to death not because he claimed that the sun was a burning rock, but because he undermined the state by encouraging Athenians to reject traditional knowledge, belief, and authority. In this case, as well as the others you mention-Isn't this a simple matter of a political crackdown on dissidents?"

"Surely this is a significant motive," he said, leaning forward. With a curious, playful look in his eyes, he went on. "But there's something much more distinctive and unusual in these cases. You said Anaxagoras was 'encouraging Athenians to reject tradition'-I suppose that's true, encouraging by example if nothing else, but he wasn't exactly leading riots in the streets!"

"No, that's true."

"And the early Christians and the Gnostics as well; they weren't trying to convert the majority or overthrow the state. Mostly, they were just trying to keep to themselves and maintain their small and unpopular communities of belief."

"Yes," I had to admit, "that is so."

"Tell me, doesn't it seem strange that Western society, which values understanding and knowledge so highly, views some knowledge claims as undermining society itself?"

"Yes, now that you mention it, this does strike me as a bit odd."

"Now, if these 'dangerous' claims are false, why didn't these political authorities simply disprove them?"

"Why, these claims about fundamental reality and religion aren't the sorts of things that can be disproved!" I paused for a moment. By prompting me to this response, Wittkower had given me the next step I needed to see what he was getting at. "So, you think these claims are dangerous because they undermine the ideology of society-the basic beliefs about humanity and the world which justify the society's laws and ways of life, but which can't be justified, since they can't be proven or disproven. And this fits with the other evidence we have: the great scandals of knowledge in the history of the West, ranging from persecution of Jews and atheists, to the individualism of democracy and Protestantism, to the 'scandal' of Darwin. Some of these forms of 'dangerous' knowledge were direct threats to established power, but all of them were threats to foundational ideas about what it is to be human. But how does this explain anything about 'the detective' as a character type?"

"Green, tell me: isn't there a 'dangerous' school of thought that you've left out? One that was prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when detective stories really came into their own as a genre?"

"Yes, hundreds I'm sure. But perhaps you are thinking of Marxism?"

"Precisely. In the Golden Age of detective stories, most famously including the stories of Sherlock Holmes, the basic premise is that there are dark, violent secrets under the genteel veneer of upper-cla.s.s English society. Holmes does not simply find a truth that some guilty party tries to hide-by finding an ugly truth in high society, he reveals the far more dangerous truth that the ruling cla.s.s is not fundamentally better than or different from the lower cla.s.ses. He is in danger because he goes up against criminals, but he is dangerous because he goes up against the idea that those who are privileged in society are better than those who are downtrodden."

"Ah, but surely there are plenty of detective stories where the guilty persons are career criminals, or other 'outsiders' . . ."

"Yes-like the more distinctly American genre of hard-boiled detectives and film noir. If the idea that our society is a just society were being supported, it is true that the criminal would be from a 'seedy' element in society, as he often is in these stories. But tell me, is the detective part of established authority?"

"No, I suppose not. Usually, the detective is a PI-and if not, then he is a police officer who rebels against authority; a 'cop who plays by his own rules'."

"And so here, the claim is that the established power in society-in this case, the police force-is not able to fix society, and only a detective who acts as an outsider can get to the truth. So the hardboiled detective is in danger because he goes against society's undesirables, but he is dangerous because he shows us that authority cannot deliver on its promise. Stories about by-thebook police work or FBI investigations are thrillers, not detective stories-only the detective, as an outsider, can represent how ideologically dangerous seeking knowledge is."

"So, even though these genres are quite different in their mood and their subject matter, in either case the detective is a dangerous figure because he shows that society is unjust, or unjustified."

"Yes, Green, you've quite got it. And, in that way, 'A Scandal in Thebes' never was a detective story, but more simply a tragedy. Oedipus's story tells this ugly historical truth, but the story is itself part of this social control." Wittkower paused for a moment, pressing his fingertips together, an abstracted look on his face. "The Oedipus myth speaks the truth when it depicts the foundation of society as a crime. How could the founding of a society, in which some rule and others are ruled, be fair or honorable, when there would not have been any rules or justice agreed to by all before that society existed? And then the myth that the poor and disadvantaged are lazy, or undeserving, or genetically inferior; all this is the alibi and the cover-up."

Wittkower sat up, elbows perched against his knees. "Oedipus is a tragic figure because he knows the truth, that society is based on crime, and he suffers from and regrets this forbidden knowledge. In the story this is also expressed in the s.e.xual crime of incest, to represent how forbidden this knowledge is, and how shameful it is to desire this knowledge. And this is what makes Oedipus's story a tragedy: the audience is meant to identify with him, and to suffer with him, and through that, to be prevented from rebelling against society's injustices themselves. Aristotle called this 'catharsis'; I prefer to call it 'oppression' and 'ideological enforcement'. Oedipus questions society's foundations, and discovers a truth he cannot bear-and so we are told never to question society's foundations, so we do not discover the truth which society cannot bear."

I sat back and considered this novel perspective on a play I have long known. Wittkower, though, had not quite finished his account. "The detective story though, my dear Doctor Green, is no tragedy. The detective suffers in a way from his knowledge. He becomes an outsider, but often he is as much an outsider from his unusual abilities to see the truth as he is from his possession of such dangerous knowledge. He is, on the whole though, an appealing and romantic character rather than a warning and cautionary figure, and the rise of the detective story may be a sign that a culture is becoming increasingly open to criticism from within."

"The detective story is on the whole dangerous and liberal, while the thriller is typically conservative or reactionary."

"Perhaps, Green, perhaps. Now, Doctor, you spent time in Afghanistan. What is the view of the detective in Asian traditions of inquiry?"

"An apt reference for the flow of ancient ideas, perhaps from Mesopotamia to all directions, into Europe and India through Afghanistan. Somewhere along the way speakers of Proto-Indo-European languages must have bade farewell in groups as cla.s.sical Greek and Latin bear marked resemblances to Sanskrit. They carried, I venture, the seeds of European and Asian inquiry. In the case of India, we might call Vyasa the primal detective as he appears in the earliest of Indian literature, tentatively dated to around 1700 B.C.E., and a man of danger as well."

"I've never heard of this sleuth Vyasa. Pray continue. What was his most renowned case?"

"Let us say it was 'A Case of Ident.i.ty'. Hereby he established the grounds for three millennia of dangerous detective work that followed. Aiming high, Vyasa set about to hear the cosmic sound a thousand years before Pythagoras."

"Good heavens!"

"Quite. Examining the extent of knowledge itself, which is called 'Veda' in Sanskrit. He splits knowledge into four categories which became the four written Vedas, perhaps the oldest writings in any Indo-European language."

"What was his mode of examination?"

"Vyasa turned his search within, like an ancient Descartes but with a rather different conclusion. The 'I' of the "I think" was, for Vyasa, not the true self. As the story goes, he risked it all and lost it all, transcending his own beliefs about who he was and who we are by moving to a depth of his heart which lay outside of word-thoughts. For lack of a better descriptor, he thereby heard the cosmic sound, the vibrations that are the essence of matter. By transcribing this into a language we might understand, the Vedas were penned."

"This talk of exalted visions and, I imagine, spa.r.s.e monklike lifestyle does remind me of Holmes, and not a little of you I confess."

"I thought you were the Holmes character here. But never mind that for now. Have a pinch. You're on to something vastly more interesting." I noticed the "o" symbol on the wooden snuffbox Green proffered, as both stood in contrast to his homely and simple lifestyle. Something in this question of ident.i.ty also rang true, for I had become the narrator.

Green continued, "In Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks of two distinct paths for conducting investigation, each with its own a.s.sumptions and motivation but ultimately leading to the same outcome. The simpler of these involves deductive reasoning. A consequence of this path in various cultures has been versions of Cartesian dualism, such as found in the ancient Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy. An adherent to this is very formulaic in approach, strictly following set steps of inquiry."

"Somewhat like Holmes, I'd say. Appropriate for dealing with large crimes and academic undertakings."

"Somewhat. But while the larger crimes may be simple to solve using such methodology, Holmes regarded the finer ones as more interesting. Krishna says Samkhya's proclivity for formulae springs from the desire to secure better positions in this world and in future lives if such should come about."

"Why, that's little else but enlightened self-interest, then!"

"Precisely. However, Krishna considers the desire for material gains to be contrary to the better path. The better path is to do good things because those things are good."

"On what basis are we to judge which things are good and which lesser?"

"Krishna says both the realization that this is the better path and the understanding of what is good are achieved through meditation. Meditators proceed from the vantage point of selfknowledge and may disregard rules that appear in doctrinal writings, quite a dangerous task considering the inst.i.tutions that penned and protected the sanct.i.ty of those doctrines. Such a person alone, he says, deserved to be called a yogi."

"I must object that this sounds most anti-intellectual and not at all like Holmes, although he did at times disregard social standards in pursuit of truth."

"It is only anti-intellectual in the terms historically imposed on this mystery that is consciousness. Although we would be remiss to impose the term yogi on Holmes, let us also admit that Watson awarded him the grade of zero in philosophy, called him eccentric in chemistry, unsystematic in anatomy . . ."

"Yes, and as I recall a self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco," said Green, grinning at these entries to the list. "Here we come to another Indian version of the prototype for dangerous detectives," he said. "While Vyasa deals with matters outside of ordinary social acknowledgments, his discrimination makes the extraordinary accessible to the ordinary. This means the "cosmic sound" he heard was not really heard. It was the experience of absolute unbroken monism without the differences that make our reality comprehensible, differences such as you-me, day-night, past-present, material-non-material and so forth. He makes this indescribable experience intelligible through ordinary language that uses such categories. However, in the same Vedas, a different type of dangerous detective appears. These long-haired ones are given to ecstatic flight in the opposite direction. Away from the mundane, their detective work is by way of enduring fire, gazing full on heaven while drinking poison from a cup."

"This does sound remotely like Holmes. But is this not simply dangerous to one's well being and ultimately to mental health?"

"We find something of a counterpart in Euro-American literature detective stories, in the psychic detective or psychic who a.s.sists the detective. The "existential detectives" in the film I Huckabees also operate outside methods ordinarily considered logical. The detective in the film Zen Noir proceeds in accord with the modus operandi of the genre before abandoning the noir method upon realizing its shortcomings in terms of examining his life."

"This intuitive or non-discursive detective indeed differs from the tragic hero, the film noir PI, and from Holmes," I said. "It reminds me a bit of Monk, from the television series by that name. I'm not sure his is always the logical method. But these people are harmless and nigh-invariably turn out to be frauds, at least in Euro-American writing."

"Danger sometimes seems to be in the eye of the beholder. In the late 1990s the Chinese government arrested and tortured members of the group Falun Gong on charges of sedition for practicing a mystical form of Tai Chi in the parks of Beijing. It is in a similar vein that the long-hairs of the Vedas appear to threaten the orthodoxy by challenging not only the need for sacrifice which is at the core of Brahmanical social structure, but also the underlying dualistic worldview that most of us share, the view that there is a gap between self and other which Derrida says we can never bridge. Care for that pinch now?"

"The rantings of a few demagogues hardly seem so consequential," I objected, waving off his snuff box. "Such is not so dangerous to a sound of mind, I should say. Although history might not bear me out, as I think of it."

"There's more than that at issue. Consider a counterexample in the most famous of Indian epics, that exemplary case of The Ramayana."