Page 9 - Ruminations

7. Historicizing Holmes

Writers of fantasy should know what they are doing, in terms of
projecting themselves and their era into imagined realms ostensibly
containing neither. This may be called a sort of historicizing, often
invisible to the creator and his audience, in the way fish would be
unable, were they to compose fantasies, to set them in a non-aqueous
environment. At the nuts-and-bolts level, material culture thus
portrayed can shriek “anachronism!” even to the least observant. In
subtler matters of manners, morals, verbal and body language, and
other implicit aspects of zeitgeist, it takes a bit more awareness to
detect the gaffes, but they are ultimately just as damning.
The further one gets in time from such productions the more
obvious and bizarre those projections appear. The easiest medium in
which to witness the phenomenon is film. The same literary work
cinematized in 1920, 1950, 1980 and 2010 points it out quite clearly.
“Authenticity” is a gloss, usually declining rapidly from the time and
place the original work first appeared. The Sherlock Holmes stories
are a case in point.
Yet “real” historical artifacts survive: words and images (sound
recordings and movies, as well, since the end of the nineteenth
century) can give us a feel for what it was like sometime and
somewhere else. Of course, the fantasies of those bygone eras exhibit
the same historicism as any other art or literature: no matter how they
attempt to portray a different world, they cannot avoid revealing their
own. Again, most of us learn about the past through exposure to both
its extant intentionally non-fantastic remnants (objective, but requiring
modern-day explanation) and its imaginative fragments (needing even
more interpretation). As the fantasies are permeated with the same
contemporary ideology as the “realities,” writers here and now (not
academic literature specialists) accept those different but related
worlds of fact and fiction as relatively undifferentiated. And so do
their readers.
The latest Holmes lives in the world of “steampunk,” a fantasy
genre based on representations of the late nineteenth century. It is
influenced by the intervening decades of science fiction, written and
filmed. It will, in due time, be seen as unavoidably tinged with
elements of our era: irony, self-reference, paranoia, role-playing,
celebrity culture and the fetishizing of technology. There is no escape.