Sherlock Holmes をめぐる冒険

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タイトル別名
  • Some Adventures around Sherlock Holmes
  • Sherlock Holmes オ メグル ボウケン

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Needless to say, Sherlock Holmes is one of the best-known detectives in fiction. He has long been a standard model for other detective fiction writers to copy in characterizing their heroes. His creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, famously declares in his autobiography about the birth of Holmes that although he had been interested in previous sensational novels of adventure, he tried to create a new type of detective, who could solve on his own merits rather than through the blunders of the criminal. In Doyle’s pronounced view the new method to be employed by the detective should be based on ‘an exact science’. Apparently Doyle’s design is effectively executed in stories by the protagonist’s somewhat odd behaviour and the narrator’s comments on it. But then it can be argued that the scientific knowledge Holmes exhibits does not directly contribute to the solution of the problems he deals with. In the late Victorian era, the word ‘scientific’ seems to apply to anything desirable and innovating, as is well illustrated in advertisement pages in various magazines in the period; Holmes’s indulgence in scientific experiments, therefore, together with his attachment to the Stradivarius or his cocaine addiction, seems to be a theatrical gesture for establishing himself as a social outsider deviated from the ‘respectable’ and restricting norms of Victorian society. It is this deviation that Holmes achieves tremendous popularity when he appears in The Strand Magazine, whose middle-class readers, because of their feeling of being restricted, adore and admire his freedom as a hero’s privilege which they are never awarded. In fact Dr Watson, as a puppet of Doyle’s, endeavours to present Holmes not as an ordinary, more or less fathomable person but rather as an ‘inhuman’ or superhuman existence that common readers cannot easily define or demarcate. This privilege enables Holmes to maintain a kind of dignified aloofness, which gives a good opportunity to peep at various interesting and/or criminal things which are going on among common people, and the reader of Holmes stories enjoyed the act of peeping when reading them, since it is justified by the hero. The act of peeping, which provides the basis for detection is not usually allowable by moral norms accepted in a healthy society, however: not unlike Victorians who entertained a growing idea of privacy and elaborated the art of disguise, we, putting on many masks, love peeping at others but do not like being peeping at. This implies that detection contains a kind of criminality in itself. Detectives in the stories, Holmes included, are, though the ‘cases’ are rare, seized by an uneasy sense of being peeped at or outwitted by the target they try to detect, giving irresponsible optimist readers a piece of useful and valuable advice: beware, you are not such a clever deceiver as you think.

収録刊行物

  • 大学院紀要

    大学院紀要 (35), 1-20, 2019-03-31

    立正大学大学院文学研究科

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