13 - Psychic sleuths and soul doctors

Summary

I opened Part III with a discussion to which I now wish to return: the dual impulse in detective fiction both to embrace and reject alternate ways of seeing and knowing, modes of perception and understanding that appear incompatible with rationalist protocols but that detective fiction itself prompts us to regard as rationalism's occulted supplements – or variants. Clairvoyance, telepathy, and intuition, I suggested, are not just uncannily reminiscent of the detective's mind-reading powers and miraculous feats of deductive reasoning, but are versions of these practices, and vice versa. My example was The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Holmes's levitating act and confession of spiritualist leanings problematize a number of related distinctions: between natural and supernatural, rational and irrational, science and spiritualism, detective and ghost fiction. Holmes's anxiety about the limitations of his method – “if … we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature,” he admits, “there is an end of our investigation” (HB, pp. 24–5) – is overshadowed by the greater fear that detective fiction was never ghostless to begin with, never spirit-free or immune to the supernatural. Dull as he usually is, Watson seems to understand this better than Holmes. “You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago” (“SB,” p. 210), he tells Holmes after the latter performs one of his off-the-cuff deductive feats. Holmes is “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (“SB,” p. 209). But this is precisely why he is uncannily like a magician. Wizardry and reasoning, Watson suggests, may very well be two names for the same thing.