Chapter 64 Years later, when we face Sherlock Holmes - "The Baker Street Murder"

Recently, a new sneaker commercial video appeared on TV.The players in the film are all ordinary little ghosts that no one recognizes, even transgender people including girls and trans-ethnic people including Asians, and the courts are also shabby, such as ordinary elementary school gymnasiums or street concrete bullrings, etc.; but solemnly, The background music and its rhythm that seem to decompose time and stop time are familiar. Looking at it further, even the movements, expressions and game status of these little devils are all too familiar to us, including holding their bodies behind their backs and straightening their right hands to grab The way the ball is prepared to be extraordinary, including the firm eyes and defense to prevent the opponent from overstepping the barrier, including the jump shot shot by leaning back in the first-line time difference and space gap of the blocker, including the right-handed dunk that finally entered the championship game against the Lakers. The classic shot of picking the basket with the left hand, including the sudden stop of the dribble to make Jazz Russell slip, and then a straight shot into the buzzer to win two points, including sticking out the tongue and holding the ball sideways with one arm This will happen every two games The registered moves, including across the court at the advice of Doctor J., rose from the free throw line and pulled the stick to score the 50-point game-winning shot that beat Dominic Wiggins-finally, after breaking the Blazers In the scene of six three-pointers in the halftime "how can I be so accurate" and the angry man shrugged, the instigator of all this stood on the sidelines, Michael Jordan. There are people in Jiangshan, who are more likely to come back to check whether what he created has light and light, and whether it is still being followed in the world in a fertile and spring-like way, and it will be endlessly praised and multiplied.

So, the late paleontologist Gould, a staunch believer in Darwin's theory of evolution, was right to tell us that all evolution has in general a so-called "right wall" against which nothing can happen. The limit of transcendence, the real meaning of transcendence is not to win, overwhelm, replace or necessarily be better, but to find another way, to open up, to explore other possibilities.Therefore, Gould, a versatile and top baseball fan, suggests that we might as well sit back and enjoy every kind of thrilling performance that has reached the limit of the right wall. Willie Mays doesn't need to say who is better than whom, of course it's okay to quarrel, but just busy arguing, you can easily miss every perfect, self-perfect art boutique, the magical pick-and-kill action content and its special, infinite Fungibility, what you lose is the best part.

In this "Murder on Baker Street", Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the instigator, did not stand by the side of the court like Jordan, who has aged kindly and kindly. "The short article made him come off the bench in the penultimate chapter as a bench player or something.This may also remind us that the mind is different from the body. Once the mind is created, it is always lighter and less worn out by time. Just put it in. It doesn’t look like there is a hundred years of time. There is no need to bother those who do computer image special effects to repair and synthesize. On the other hand, mental re-creation is probably more difficult to deceive and even more impossible to fake.Another notable difference here is that not just anyone can play in this book. At the end of the book, there is a brief introduction of each of them. It was also written by them one by one, and there is absolutely no computer-generated article, please rest assured.

Here, let's listen to a rumor first, a rumor that is believed to be true because of his imagination and rich metaphors. It is said that Chaplin ran to participate in the imitation Chaplin contest on a whim before his death, and won the third place. If you randomly picked an authentic short story by Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes, and everyone named it, guess what place Conan Doyle would rank? In this way, I don’t want to go back and compare who wrote it better, but I want to remind, in these later parody novels, what do they think of Sherlock Holmes?How did they arrange his presence?How to convince many readers who are also familiar with every detective case of Sherlock Holmes to believe that this is the same Sherlock Holmes?In addition to simply copying Holmes' appearance, body description, hunting cap, pipe and other constant outfits, and still allowing him to live in the famous 221B Baker Street, what do they think is the most authentic and most recognizable Sherlock Holmes? Are you sure it's his right trait?

According to the statistics of the eleven novels in front of us, we found that Holmes's not-unquestionable first-sighted observation/inference method won the victory, that is, his fortune-teller usually bluffed when he first met. As for your two or three intimate matters, none of us knows that the first customer or victim of Holmes' trick was Dr. Watson himself. "Are you from Afghanistan?" What's interesting is that after a hundred years of repeated doubts and provocations in the future (suspiciousness and finding troubles are inherently inalienable and inextricable vices of mystery novels), this set of Sherlock Holmes is no doubt more like an old trick of charlatans. It has already been dismantled, and the clothes, hats, shoes, rings and other accessories on a person's body, as well as various traces on the body, never have only one reason, one answer, and one possibility, allowing people to be so straightforward.In fact, this loophole is not only known to you and me, but even Conan Doyle himself knew it at the time, so he specially arranged for Sherlock Holmes to be embarrassed at the end of a certain detective case; there are also eleven rewritten Sherlock Holmes detective cases The veterans of mystery novels must know it well. We believe that they will never and dare not repeat this established "mistake" when they create their own detectives and actually write their own mystery novels. game moments (as the editor of this book, Daniel Stashall, put it), they feel they have this speech immunity.This should be right. One of the reasons is that Conan Doyle himself has fully assumed and paid off the responsibility for this part of the error; Received an amnesty, completely exempted from the debate of truth and falsehood, and become a pure myth full of aesthetic meaning, a sweet myth shared by all reasoning ethnic groups.Who is so bored today to care about the authenticity of myths?Isn't it true that it is called a myth just because it transcends the entanglement of truth and falsehood?

But having said that, the high proportion here is still surprising.We can see that more than half of the writers in these eleven novels "believe" that they still have to let Holmes show off in order to be like Sherlock Holmes, and this ratio has far exceeded Conan Doyle's original version.The original Sherlock Holmes, as Loy Rose pointed out in the article "Holmes's Centennial Birthday", this pretentious and bluffing trick only focused on the early Sherlock Holmes, who was still light and weightless, and began to meet Dr. Watson from Greetings from Afghanistan, to the one-word competition with his brother, who can see more and reach the peak; and when Holmes' face gradually becomes clear, "countless small habits of life give him amazing authenticity "After that, Holmes no longer needs to use this to prove that he is Holmes, er, or it should be said that Conan Doyle can let Holmes show his intelligence without using the author's tricks to decorate him.

Thus, there arises the question of Chaplin and the imitation Chaplin game.There is actually a difference between the two. The so-called "image" is a pre-existing "image", which focuses on the few special performances that impressed everyone the most. Therefore, it has nothing to do with the essence, but depends on collective cognition The common divisor does not need to be profound, but it must be clear; that is to say, although Chaplin is still right no matter what he does, it may not be the Chaplin that conforms to the collective cognition. You have to be like Chaplin Chaplin, in fact, it is enough to hold on to those few performances, but you have to exaggerate it properly, amplify it, and then you have a good chance of beating Chaplin himself in the imitation contest.

From this we can see that the eleven post-Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes writers actually did two things at the same time. Like Sherlock Holmes; we readers also have two perspectives, twofold pleasure, one is to read the Sherlock Holmes novels that I thought were impossible, and the other is to appreciate how realistic and seamless they are It is embedded in every possible gap of the original Sherlock Holmes case, like a mimetic inchworm or a chameleon subtly blending into or even disappearing in the real thing. In this way, unlike the writing and reading of "normal" mystery novels, a considerable part of the success or failure of writing depends on the writer's understanding of the original Sherlock Holmes novels; A lot depends on how familiar we are with the original Sherlock Holmes novels. There is another strange dialogue, another set of unrelated knowledge puzzles that have nothing to do with crime. The more you know, the more you can understand why the rational detective suspect Vampires will come out, for example, who is Professor Moratti, why he can not show his face from the beginning to the end and can not be arrested, even, you can also get the name of the original detective from the seemingly inadvertently quoted According to the past, Holmes guessed the period in which this new investigation took place.Also, among the eleven novels, the two most "unlike" at first glance, "The Carriage Called by Sherlock Holmes" and "Dark Gold", why did they write like this, dare to write like this, and why the writer mixed tribute and confrontation His subtle thoughts, and the effect he tried to achieve-the former used a similar "addendum" method, through a coachman's account, as if he had found a case of Sherlock Holmes' disappearance many years later, and we may also think of it The records of the original Sherlock Holmes' investigations were not all written by Dr. Watson. Conan Doyle himself took the lead in trying different perspectives to present the investigations, didn't he?Although the latter challenged the popular impression of Sherlock Holmes' contempt for women, and did not allow him to really show off his detective skills, there are many novels in the original Sherlock Holmes novels that are based on adventures rather than solving puzzles. Wasn't the only one who really beat him in the case to be that venerable lady, so clever and beautiful that Holmes would have given a jeweled ring for a photograph of her?Isn't this way of writing very reasonable and sensitive to reproduce a certain aspect of Sherlock Holmes?

We only remind this part so far, the more delicate and subtle part is the reader's inviolable rights and interests, All rights reserved.Reserved for those who read novels word for word. Okay, let’s ask again, will it be more difficult to rewrite the Sherlock Holmes case if we need to focus on writing mystery novels while taking into account the original Sherlock Holmes’ appearance?The logical answer is no.Here we will only talk about a very natural and common psychological state: all post-Conan Doyle novel writers (we can assume that each of them has read the compulsory textbook of Sherlock Holmes) have one or two stories in mind. The unformed Sherlock Holmes case is like some kind of reading experience report, the only difference is whether it is actually written or not.

Sherlock Holmes has become transparent and well known to everyone so that it has become a public property, and has become a character that every writer can own and use in his own writing. It is said that at a banquet after Columbus discovered the New World of America, someone was not convinced by Columbus's feats. Columbus picked up an egg (obviously a hard-boiled egg, the kind eaten for European breakfast) and asked him if he could Unable to stand the egg upright, after repeated attempts by this person (obviously it was not at noon of the Dragon Boat Festival), Columbus broke one end of the air chamber of the eggshell, and simply let the egg stand upright on the table. "If I said it earlier, I would do it too." "Yeah, the problem is that you are not the first one to do it."

Putting this story and Sherlock Holmes' novels together can tell us many things (the advantage of the story is that it always has rich meanings and does not only tell one thing, so Azaer, a female scholar who reads in Tehran, said that the novel is a democratic What we want to point out here is that even if the Sherlock Holmes novels are so famous that they have become an insurmountable wall, those who wander around the wall to admire and admire are still quite common. Also, especially after you are more familiar with the unsurprising life, thoughts, words and deeds of its creator, Conan Doyle, for example, it is easier to give birth to the sigh that it will be too late for the rest of his life, and he is lucky. I believe there is a certain part of history in it. Chance or even the mysterious role of fate ("The King of Han was bestowed by heaven, not human power.").Such unruly thoughts are not necessary to be regarded as gloomy and abnormal. They often coexist and are compatible with people’s sincere respect for Sherlock Holmes novels. With a certain degree of penetration and comprehension, your deeper thoughts have been activated, and you are not only familiar with it, but you can also start to see the various thoughts behind the tangible words, and the part of why it is.Here, you are no longer just a silent, pure recipient reader, you have taken a big step forward to become an interlocutor, and bickering and dissent is an inevitable and extremely necessary part of dialogue, isn't it? If we try to remove the emotional part of this "said I would do it earlier", if we try to remove the emotional part, like carefully washing away the impurities sticking to it, so as to get its pure core, then it will become "it could be This way"—a joyful and inexplicable discovery, a sudden clearness of the landscape in front of me, the most important and the best, a beginning, the beginning of immediate practice.This is of course meaningless to those idiots who don't think about it, but for those who are serious, those who are desperately trying to break through, and those who are full of will and strength but don't know where to start, what they really need That's it, and that's enough. They can and like to come by themselves in the following part of the Yangtze River.They will use every bit of its potential, squeeze every drop of juice, and even overuse and over-exploit it to the point where they are notorious and everyone is screaming, and they have to stop and wait anxiously for the next "it can be like this" Come". Sometimes you really want to find physical words such as "fire" to express the concept of intangible, soundless and odorless and its transmission. If you have seen people's eyes seem to be reflected in that scene Sparkling words lit up.It seems to make an entire generation (except some idiots, or only the wise and the stupid) instantly wise. Of course, there must be a necessary conversion process between the enlightenment of the concept and the specific practice like a flower blooming like a wind. Just keep your hands upright.But every time such historical experience tells us without exception, knowing that it can be done like this, things are more than half settled, and there are always enough people, so many people that you will be surprised, to emerge one by one Come.Like Raphael, who is known as the ultimate and comprehensive skill of some kind of painting, it is not so difficult to imitate and reproduce. Picasso said that he had a plenum when he was twelve years old; he could not hesitate to sway on rice paper, and he could not be modified. It is so strong and personal The Qi Baishi style, do you know how many fake and fake paintings are there in the market?Even more hard-hitting, Jordan, whose physical condition is useless if you have not practiced for a hundred years, commercial videos may be processed by computers in consideration of cost and efficiency, but every miracle that Jordan has ever done and repeatedly presented on the TV screen Trick movements are simulated and reproduced on street basketball courts and school gymnasiums every day and every hour, which is actually the same as the advertising film. So, is it difficult to write a Sherlock Holmes novel?We can only say that the meeting is not difficult, not difficult at all. In the world of novel writing and reading, there are still simple questions of justice—many times, we would look forward to returning to the finished novel itself cleanly, without being disturbed by all kinds of impurities in time, and being able to save them from the smog People's prejudices, misunderstandings, inexplicable chances (both good and bad) are saved, and even its short-term and temporary so-called "realistic meaning" can be removed, so that the work can be completely written in its own way. The content meets the person who reads it directly, and good or bad, great or rubbish, has no luck being determined by its content rather than anything outside it. To some extent this can be done, by what?For long enough.Use long enough time to clean all kinds of short-term pollution, and precipitate the true essence. Yet the perceptive and thoughtful Milan Kundera presses a question to the heart not far from the beginning of his book of quest fiction, The Curtain—indeed, he starts from the musical composition. It starts with things that directly appeal to people's senses.After telling an interesting story about his musician father, Kundera said: "We might as well imagine that there is such a contemporary composer who wrote a sonata, but its form, chords, and tune are all similar to Beethoven's." We can also imagine that this sonata is so wonderfully written that, had it been written by Beethoven, it would have been worthy of the title of his greatest composition. If it is written by a contemporary composer, it will still be ridiculed. If everyone still applauds him, it is at most admiring his chowder. What! We can feel the pleasure of aesthetics when listening to Beethoven’s sonatas, but Wouldn't we have a similar sense of pleasure if such works were by composers of our time? Isn't that the most hypocritical thing or what? So then our sense of beauty doesn't just happen naturally, it's at our beck and call Receptivity, instead, is subject to the cognition of the time when the work was completed?" It is conceivable that the trouble caused by this question is far-reaching, and even our direct, immediate sensory experience, which theoretically has no time for any thinking to penetrate, is suspicious and can be ridiculed.How did Kundera himself answer this nasty question?He first reassured us with this simple sentence, and then explored it with a whole book-"This is a helpless thing. In the process of our appreciation of art, historical awareness must accompany it. Therefore, this anachronism (what is written today is Beethovenian) 'naturally' (without an iota of hypocrisy) would be considered ridiculous, fake, out of place, even ugly. The sense of historical continuity in our minds So strong that it even enters into our perception of each work of art." To untie the bell and tie the bell, Kundera will take care of the problems caused by Kundera himself. Those who have the habit of getting to the bottom of the matter suggest that you go directly to buy the book "The Curtain". I brought the topic here because I wanted to entice some people to read "The Curtain", sorry).Here, what we want to point out through Kundera is that the so-called "historical consciousness" and "historical perception" and so on do not only exist in the hearts of our future generations of appreciators. They are originally hidden in the works, not entirely external. It is part of the "content" of the original work, and it is also part of the achievement of the original work, regardless of how much or even whether the original creator, writer himself is aware of it.Michael Jordan didn't realize much. Basically, this competitive guy only focused on winning every game or more focused on making this shot. The same is true for the old Conan Doyle who wrote mystery novels. As Kundera pointed out, "Rabelais didn't care whether he was a novelist or not, and Cervantes wanted to write a novel that made him look smarter than others. To satirize the text. Neither of them claimed the status of 'founder'. Only in later generations, when the novel became popular, did everyone add this title to them. The art of fiction does not regard them as ancestors because They were the first to write novels (in fact, there were many novelists before Cervantes), but because their works made people understand more clearly the reasons for the existence of this new and moving art; In their eyes, their works contain the most important value of novel art. Once everyone perceives a certain value, special value, and aesthetic value in a novel, then the novels completed by later generations can appear in the form of a piece of history.” This kind of value is not only presented by the lonely feelings of the readers and receivers (although this is its richest and most real source), but also by the works of future generations inspired by it. Therefore, it is by no means a collective deception of pure beauty, icing on the cake or what others say and what we believe.In fact, the more expert you are (basketball, reasoning, or the art of fiction), the more you will be able to perceive its goodness and vitality, its display and penetrating power to an era, and its insight into a certain core issue or novel in an era. The response and development of needs (not necessarily clearly revealed in front of everyone or in consciousness at the time), and the power of enlightenment and creative power poured out as a result.The effect that makes people feel "this is the way" and "it can be like this" is so concrete and concrete, so, does it find history or does history find it?I am afraid that this is not easy to explain clearly, and it probably cannot be too optimistic without a certain degree of luck and misfortune (as Kundera said, in the forgotten cemetery of a pile of worthless works, there are always undervalued, Misjudged, unfairly forgotten valuable works), but from the historical experience of the past, we at least dare to assert that a certain kind of pure concentration and earnestness buried in the head is far more important than chasing the wind and looking forward to the distant future.The most typical example is the writing style of the standard left wing. They are eager to change the times and rush into the future. As a result, they are neither interested in writing the work itself (this is common sense), nor can they really focus on the real present (this is very common sense). easily overlooked, including themselves), it is always quite reasonable to write only instrumental fake works in the end, and it is very reasonable to be thrown directly into the big cemetery of forgetting once used or not used. The real value and power, because they are acquired through concentration and seriousness, often will not and need not be presented in an exaggerated style and posture, like the opening sentences of García Márquez: "After many years, Aureliano Colonel Buendia, facing the firing squad, will remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to find ice." So simple, so natural, but since then, most novel writers in most of the world seem to have received a novel The latest time travel machine, an arbitrary door of time, makes the novel fly more freely in the past and future, prophecy and memory, doesn't it? The future, no matter what we see afterwards, is completed in a way of drastic diversion or slow formation, there is always a flow of time running through it and can be traced back. This is what Kundera said "appears in the form of a period of history" Roughly speaking, therefore, it is unexpected, but understandable, and can be connected with the sudden enlightenment of the present moment at this moment.Can we guess like this, if the future is so real and hidden in the present, then it can only be grasped and glimpsed with the real and real things at this moment, or more modestly, to hope for their chance encounter? Having said that, will such a collection of short stories imitating Sherlock Holmes be considered ridiculous, fake, out of place, or even ugly, as Kundera said?The answer is not at all, for they are humble imitations, or rather reenactments, with homage to them, rather than a veiled attempt to steal that irreversible "greatness."So it simply became a carnival, a high-spirited and high-level parade of makeup, which we all knew was "fake", so they came to life and only felt warm and even caring-years later, when we faced this The gleeful murder procession wearing Holmes' mask only takes us back to that historical moment we missed when Holmes took Dr. Watson to find the killer.