The enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes
When the future seems more than usually uncertain and there’s something troubling in the present, it’s natural to look to the past. Could that be why the figure of Sherlock Holmes is once again in our minds?
Brilliantly re-imagined in the new BBC series, Holmes uses the power of his luminous intellect to solve seemingly insoluble riddles. He is described as relying on reason, employing a science of deduction that enables him to explain events that have so far proved baffling. Yet it’s not the methods used by the fictional detective that fascinate us. It’s the contradictory figure of Holmes himself.
100 years on from the setting of the last of the Sherlock Holmes stories, we’ve witnessed a succession of failed experiments in using reason. It’s not just the collapse of communism followed by upheaval in free market capitalism – both of them systems based on theories that were supposed to be rigorously rational. In everyday life, systems that were designed to be infallible – from the security software we install on our home computers to the mathematical formulae used by hedge funds to trade vast sums of money – have proved to be dangerously unreliable.
As a result of these failures, faith in reason has been dented. The idea that the intellect alone can be our guide in life is weaker than it has been for many years. At the same time, Sherlock Holmes – a symbol of the power of intellect if ever there was one – is as powerful a presence in our imagination as he’s ever been. It’s a contradiction worth exploring.
It’s not the science of deduction that gives Holmes his power over us, since he doesn’t in fact use it. In The Sign of Four, Holmes declares: “I never guess. It is a shocking habit – destructive to the logical faculty”. Yet the type of reasoning which Holmes uses in most of Conan Doyle’s stories includes a good deal of guesswork.
It’s not cold logic but a clairvoyant eye for detail that enables him to solve his cases. Holmes has the knack of knowing where to look, asking the right questions and crafting theories to account for what he has found.
What’s striking is that Holmes relies on guesswork and imagination, supplemented and corrected by observation, as much as on reasoning. Like a good doctor, Holmes bases his inferences on evidence, but he reaches his conclusions by using his judgement. And he doesn’t rely on his judgement only in the work of detection. He’s ready to disregard legal rules when they seem to him unfair or out of place in the circumstances at hand.
Most of us now accept that reason can’t give meaning or purpose to life. If we’re not content with the process of living itself, we need myths and myths very often contain contradictions. Holmes is one such myth. Seeming to find order in the chaos of events by using purely rational methods, he actually demonstrates the enduring power of magic.
An exemplar of logic who lives by guesswork, a man who stands apart from other human beings but who is moved by a sense of human decency, Holmes embodies the modern romance of reason – a myth we no longer believe in, but find it hard to live without.
John Gray. Internet: <www.bbc.co.uk> © BBC News Website.
Reproduced with permission.
Based on the text, judge the item from.
The author argues that the figure of Holmes is contradictory. One example of Holmes’s contradictory nature is “In spite of his natural intuition for details, Holmes uses only logic to solve his cases”.
