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Sherlock Holmes and Art Bell
Perhaps this is also reflective of a broader set of public tensions: the struggle between
scientific trust and mystical/religious faith; the sense that knowledge is obtained
through a orderly process and the view that it is continually shifting, elusive, and
often willfully obscured; the need for a pervasive skepticism and the desire to
believe virtually anything; finally, the desire to arrive at the truth via the method of
abduction and the desire to experience an abduction and receive the truth thanks to
an alien interlocutor. Perhaps, a realization of these striking and resilient tensions
is the ultimate conclusion that emerges from a comparison of the two figures. Not
a properly Holmesian resolution nor a Bellian mystical epiphany, necessarily, but
a starting point for a better understanding of the complex intersection of popular
culture, scientific (and pseudo-scientific) knowledge, and the final location of “the
truth.”
York University, Toronto, Canada
Steve Bailey
Notes
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5.
6
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10
11
O f course, this question is the basis of much o f the oeuvre o f Michel Foucault.
See, for example, his autobiography The Art o f Talk.
The most famous involved a horrifying tragedy in which his son was kidnapped and raped by a
neighbour.
Interestingly, Doyle received his knighthood for his own service to the empire in support o f the
Boer War.
Harrison points out that there were 50,000 more licensed establishments in 1900 than in 1972
(40).
Conan D oyle’s enthusiasm for the supernatural will be discussed near the end o f the paper, but it
is worth noting that his interest in such un-Holmesian material is sometimes explained by the loss
o f family members in World War I (see Hitchens 278).
The non-judgemental and relatively anonymous character of the end-to-end network was a key
virtue o f the Internet and often thought to be critical to the impact o f this new medium (see Lessig
12).
This is the premise, o f course, of the most famous Holmes pastiche, Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven
Per Cent Solution, in which Holmes battles his cocaine addiction with the help o f Sigmund Freud.
The rhizome is the key figure for the scattered and free-ranging sym bolic character o f the
postmodern in Deleuze’s most famous works, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, both co
written with Felix Guattari.
Interestingly, the violently negative reviews o f B ell’s book within the scientific community mirror
the similarly vituperative treatment by Baudrillard by many sectors o f contemporary philosophy
and social criticism.
See Meikle, “ ‘Over There’: Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiritualism.”
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Palo Alto, Ca.: Stanford U P, 1995.
— . The Perfect Crime. Trans. C. Turner. London: Verso, 1996.
— . The Transparency of Evil. London: Verso, 1993.
Bell, Art. The Art o f Talk. New Orleans: Paper Chase P, 1999.
— . The Quickening. New Orleans, Paper Chase P, 1997.
Bell, Art and Whitley Streiber. The Coming Global Superstorm. New York: Pocket Books, 2000.