Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body

Abstract

The persistent appeal of the Sherlock Holmes stories owes much to his all invincible accuracy in recognizing which are clues and in forcing them to tell their tales. Many critics have followed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's biographer Pierre Nordon in viewing Holmes as a resonant symbol of the late Victorian faith in the power of logic and rationality to insure order, fewer have focused on the narrative manipulation necessary to guarantee his positivistic triumphs.2 Although Sherlock Holmes claims that is a shocking habit-destructive to the faculty (SIGN, 93), the familiar pattern whereby he identifies the traces of crime and evaluates their relationship in fact rests on the constant informed guessing of hypothesis formation and testing. The contributors to The Sign of Three amply demonstrate that Holmes's logic is patterned less on induction or deduction than on what Charles Peirce defined as abduction and Holmes calls analytic reasoning (STUD, 83): moving backwards from an effect to hypothesize about the situation(s) that could have caused it.3 Unlike Peirce, however, Holmes seldom tests the validity of his abductions; as Marcello Truzzi points out, Holmes's apparent wizardry rests largely on the fact that Doyle has simply arranged the plots so that the detective either guesses correctly the first time, or easily eliminates alternative hypotheses.4 The logical solution has been created in order to be discovered; the facts are allowed to tell only one tale. Holmes also differs from Peirce by stressing not the originality and creativity of abduction, its close conformity to recognized codes and laws. An important effect of Doyle's fictional project is to reassure readers of the reliability of such codes and to render the social order that they imply. Holmes's conclusions are elementary (CROO, 412) because his method is nothing but systematized common sense (BLAN, 1011). Doyle reinforces this view by having Watson repeatedly admit how ridiculously simple (SCAN, 162) is Holmes's reasoning once explained (e.g.,

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