Steven M. Finkelstein

     It is late at night as I write this, and the house is generally quiet, making only the inexplicable noises a house makes. The solitude one feels at night is universal, I think, but the solitude felt by the writer is of a particular kind, one that I’m not sure everyone can relate to.  Or, if the solitude is universal, then perhaps what makes the experience of it unique to the writer is that the writer attempts to alleviate it, and the loneliness that comes with it, through the writing. And this is not easily done, because writing is by necessity a product of solitude, and it is the afterbirth, what solitude leaves behind. So it is that when a writer looks back over their collected works, they are looking at the accumulation of a series of solitudes, of times spent alone. And much of time spent alone is time spent lonely, and time spent lonely is the worst kind of time there is. There are those who believe in purgatory, and those who believe in hell. Of the ones who believe in hell, the more unimaginative picture flame and demons and pitchforks. But I think this version of hell, if it is what waits for eternity, would be a pleasure compared to isolation, for if you are being tortured for your misdeeds, at least you have for company your tormentor. How much worse is it, and how much worse it would be, to be bereft and robbed of sensation, and to know that you would remain conscious of yourself but be alone, eternally alone, with nothing but a wide open space and the big quiet. To know that you would never again hear sound, even if it be a derisive call in the voice of one’s most hated enemy. No, that truly would be hell for me, to be always and forever alone, until I had progressed so far beyond madness that I had reached a kind of sanity after sanity, where the clarity of vision had so advanced that I could see things about myself and my surroundings and the universe that mortal human was not ever meant to see.

     Why such bleak thoughts? The isolation of the night, only? I think part of it might be that these past few weeks have been my first experiences with “blogging,” and there’s something about the process that is unsettling to me. When I write using a computer, that is to say write fiction in any of its many forms, I am using the computer merely as a substitute for paper and pencil, for the sake of convenience. Though technology has always been my enemy, due to my inability to ever make it do the things I want it to, in this day and age a computer is more or less a necessity, and I have accepted that. But when I write a blog, like this one, I’m not writing it with the eventual thought that it will be printed out and be a story that I can hold in my hand and read by turning the pages, as a story was meant to be read, but rather that I will press a button and it will be “published,” (I find this very term laughable, as it is not what I consider publication at all) to the web; it will be sent out into cyberspace like a capsule launched out of earths’ orbit, and it is the inky blackness of whatever is out there that will receive it. For, as I try to picture what cyberspace is like, I can’t help but break the term down to its root word “space,” a place and thing about which much is theorized, but precious little is actually known. “Space” is real; we have visited it, albeit in fragile metallic shells while the vacuum roared and the crushing cold slid pressingly by outside, but “cyberspace” is like Never-Neverland, a place of invention to which we may desire to travel, but which we might never truly attain. There is no vehicle in which we might traverse the void of cyberspace, and that, I think, is why I become nervous with the prospect of writing these thoughts and shooting them off into the nothingness, not knowing what alien life forms might be reading them, or if they understand the meaning of the words.

     Yes, technology now is strange to me, though I am still deemed young in terms of modern life expectancy. I have no doubt that as I grow older it will become more so. I will struggle to keep up- in this I feel I also have no choice, and so this will not be the last time I try to acclimate myself to a new medium. But I have only dread of the future, in terms of the technological advancements it promises, for I feel that they will become only more unknowable, more vaguely defined, more alien. And if hell for me is a nothing that stretches forever, without human contact and without even the semblance of form, and the cyberspace I picture in my head is in every way similar to that, is it not a stretch to say that it is my intention, when I “publish” this message, to send it shooting straight off into hell? I almost don’t want to do it. I feel as though my posting, my “blog,” will be as lonely out there as I myself would be. But I feel that I must do so anyway, if only to plumb the depths. I am taking a sounding, with this message, of the depths. Will I recieve a reply? That is not something I have control over. Very well. I await an answer…   

It was just by chance that in the later months of last year I happened to read a pair of books containing some of the more famous selected short stories of Doyle’s famous and infamous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. I actually picked up both of the books out of the free box at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to my local library. I wasn’t familiar with many of the specific stories of the celebrated detective, but found them entertaining, if somewhat derivative. My biggest critique would be that each case is incredibly formulaic, and also that it becomes more difficult to distinguish individual cases from one another because each new character, or set of characters, as they are introduced, serve only as set pieces in the individual case; in other words, there is little to make them memorable. Even Moriarty, Holmes’ most diabolical adversary, is presented as a kind of archetypal “master villain,” similar to Holmes in his methods of deductive reasoning, but his exact opposite, using his powers for crime rather than to detect and capture criminals. That being said, I can see why the series was as popular as it was and continues to be as enduring as it is. The two characters that you do get a feel for, of course, are Holmes and Watson, Watson being the willing accomplice who is only along for the ride, so to speak, and whose central purpose it is to narrate the events of every misadventure (it is his secondary purpose to act incredulous each time that Holmes’ genius methods prove successful, even if he has seen it done a few dozen times over). Holmes, while he has stood the test of time and become an iconic literary figure, actually is possessing of several personal qualities that you might at first think would make him anything but likable. He’s smug, he’s self serving (even though he would like Watson and the bumbling police he’s always helping to think otherwise; he always claims that it is “justice” that he serves, and is acting as an agent again crime and criminals. This seems unlikely. While on the one hand he never wants the credit when a criminal has been captured or a coronet returned to whatever duke or duchess it was stolen from, he still seems entirely too self satisfied by his own accomplishments). The more stories I read, though, the more I seemed to find myself liking Holmes. How was this to be explained? I was finding out, I think, what countless other readers had in the past. Holmes is likable precisely because he’s so smug, and because he’s so self assured. It is difficult not to like someone who is continually proven right, again and again and again, and who is always multiple steps ahead of Watson, the criminals and the clueless police. They doubt his methods, at which point the reader begins to smile, because they know what’s coming. Again, predictable, but satisfying. Why continue to go to your favorite restaurant, time in and time out, and get the same thing? Because you know what you’re getting, and you like it. Holmes is infallible, and how can you help but like someone who is always right when everyone around them is always wrong?
This year, I’ve been reading and rereading a few selections from a rather weighty tome, the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve read Poe in the past, both the obligatory short stories back in high school, and later in my adult life, and I always take something different from the experience each time I read. (That is the litmus test for great literature, I think, if you take something different away with each and every reading. The best books I’ve read have meant different things to me at different points in my life.) But I digress- I had wanted to get back to Poe for some time, and really dissect certain stories and passages. This time, when I leaped back into it, I was quickly struck by an observation that I had never made before. Certain of Poe’s stories have long been regarded as being precursors to the detective genre that was to come, and even to science fiction writing in some cases, in addition to the gothic horror for which he is best known. But in the reading of certain particular stories this time around, I noted a striking resemblance in form to that of the Conan Doyle detective yarns that I’d been amused by a few weeks back. Take, for instance, the trio of interconnected Poe stories involving the same protagonist, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, who first appears in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and then later in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Dupin is a man possessing of certain qualities and capable of making certain observations, through which he is able to reason out the chain of events in “Murders” to their satisfactory conclusion, something the police find themselves unable to do. He examines the minutia of the scene where the murders took place, and is at length able to ascertain, through process of elimination, who (or indeed what) the culprit must be. The method by which it is accomplished reads in some instances as remarkably similar to that which appears in Doyle’s detective stories, and all of the peripheral details are there too- we may substitute Dupin for Holmes, the unnamed narrator for Watson, and one inept police force for another.
It is when we look closer, though, and actually line some of these individual stories up against one another, that we begin to observe the most noticeable similarities in form and structure. There are, for instance, several Conan Doyle stories where Holmes is approached by those who have heard of his prowess and wish to entreat his help in the recovery of various items, including, in “The Naval Treaty,” a certain valuable document that has been stolen and could be used to gain political leverage or for the purpose of blackmail. So too we find in “The Purloined Letter,” where the events precipitating the case are practically identical. In should be noted that Dupin sometimes employs a tactic that Holmes also uses- that of hiring someone outside the building to create a distraction, so that the switch can be made of the actual article for a replica prepared in advance. Now we have passed beyond any possibility of mere coincidence in terms of how each story is structured and enacted, but there are still more notable examples to be found.
Look to the Poe story “The Gold Bug,” and what I deem its counterpart, Doyle’s “The Dancing Men.” In the Poe story, a man living in the Carolinas comes into possession, through an unusual set of circumstances, of a map leading to the treasure of the pirate Captain Kidd. Part of the story centers around the symbols on the map, forming a cipher, which must then be transcribed if the treasure is to be found. In “The Dancing Men,” a country home is menaced by a series of notes with a cipher on them that Holmes must decode in order to alleviate any danger to the house and its occupants. The individual sections in each story where the method by which the cipher is translated into English are almost interchangeable;Conan Doyle definitely had this story in mind when he wrote the complementary one. And the list goes on…

What then are we to make of these conclusions? That I cannot presume to say. Poe’s work has left an inarguable imprint on world fiction due to his impact on the Romantic period of literature, and Conan Doyle scarcely less so. Each of their individual bodies of work remain immensely popular today and are perennial best sellers. But because of the similarities that I describe, owed to the fact that one came first and the other followed, could it not be said that Conan Doyle stood on the shoulders of a genius to boost an essentially undistinguished career by ripping off his characters and method? If so, then he did not do so with any malicious intent, certainly…imitation is, after all, the most sincere form of flattery. Personally, though I find Poe’s works to be more masterfully crafted, I don’t mind reading about Sherlock Holmes; his capers are amusing, but only up to a point. Conan Doyle tried to make forays into the literary world beyond and apart from Holmes, but they invariably failed. Lack of originality of character and story concepts may well have been the culprit. So I will say this: I regard Conan Doyle’s work to Poe’s as hamburger to fillet mignon. Conan Doyle at least acknowledges that he is an avid admirer of Poe’s, and that’s as it should be. Conan Doyle owes him tribute for all of the success he ever experienced.