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They’ve created a monster
Emma Gilbert investigates canonicity, Conan-Doyle, and cephalopods.
Posted 3rd June 2009 | Author: Emma Gilbert
(Views: 177)
I’m fond of illustrative experiments, and decided to carry one out while at home last weekend. ‘All right,’ I said, having doled out paper and pencils to a reluctant sister and parental units. ‘Draw me Frankenstein. And then Dracula. And Sherlock Holmes. Just doodles.’
‘The three men I admire the most,’ my mother commented wryly, but my guinea pigs, who have come to expect this sort of behaviour from me, obeyed their orders with minimal fuss, Soon I was presented with the drawings I had demanded, each one conveying, as well as a frankly shocking lack of artistic merit, precisely what I had anticipated. A square, lurching ogre of a thing, with its stitch-scarred head bolted onto its body, labelled ‘Frankenstein’. A foppish-looking, black-cloaked young man with a widow’s peak of dark hair. A pipe-wielding, tweed-caped fellow in a deerstalker, clutching a pipe. My sister had even added a little speech bubble containing the words: ‘Elementary, my dear Watson!’
Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, never had his Holmes utter any such thing. He would have been horrified, too, at the prospect of his gentleman detective parading about town in country shooting gear, although he does once permit Holmes an ‘ear-flapped travelling cap’ for a rural excursion. Bram Stoker would, doubtless, be equally confused by the increasingly debonair aspect his withered, hairy-palmed vampire has developed since his first print appearance in 1898. Poor old Dr. Frankenstein has fared worst of all, for the vast majority of people have no mental image at all of Mary Shelley’s diffident medical student, equating his name with the horrific creation before its creator. And our image of the creation, whether or not we are conscious of it, is almost certainly an image of Boris Karloff.
It is hardly a new concept that cinema and television are capable of making great and indelible impressions upon our minds, but it is rather startling to recognise the depth to which cinematic images, particularly from very early films, have permeated society, often slipping unnoticed into what we believe to be our literary understanding. We know that ‘Frankenstein’ is a grunting, quasi-decapitated monster: cartoons, television and films repeatedly tell us so. He may be a far cry from Shelley’s Milton-reading, morally ambiguous grotesque, but he is arguably more culturally significant, more emotionally potent. It is difficult to know what to make of public ‘knowledge’ such as this: is there a word for things seen by thousands of people as integral to a character, although their origins do not lie with the original author?
Yes, if the internet is to be believed. In the parlance of Internet fans - or ‘fen’, as they call themselves - beliefs common to large numbers of fans, but which are unmentioned by the source material, be it a novel, a film or a television series, constitute ‘fanon’ - the word is a straightforward play on ‘canon’. We could do worse than to take Holmes’s devotees - or Sherlockians - as an example of the phenomenon since, as fans go, their level of collective insane dedication is difficult to outdo. Doyle’s stories, then, represent canon, as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is canon to its fans. Everything else – not only internet fanworks but also fiction by other authors – films, television adaptations – is fanon, and Holmes fanon contains some rather unexpected tenets, from equally surprising contributors.
Doyle was famously lax on the point of attention to detail, frequently forgetting whether Dr Watson’s Maiwand war-wound is in his shoulder or his leg, and on one occasion having his wife refer to him as ‘James’, although we all know that his name is John H. Watson, PhD (not MD). Fanon, however, was ready with solutions to these manifold irregularities, based upon the fannish belief that the stories are all, in fact, the products of Dr Watson, with Doyle acting solely as his literary executor. So, the ‘mistakes’ are not mistakes at all, but forms of evidence. Dorothy L. Sayers, who formed part of a very illustrious early gathering of Sherlockians which included Ronald Knox, Agatha Christie and GK Chesterton, suggested that the ‘James’ was no slip of the pen, but an Anglicisation of the Scottish name ‘Hamish’, for which the ‘H’ in Watson’s name must therefore stand. And thus minor tenets of fanon are formed.
On the internet, of course, fanon is able to grow as never before, contorting itself into all sorts of unexpected positions. It is commonly held as fanon among Harry Potter devotees, for example, that the werewolf Remus Lupin constitutes a metaphor for an HIV victim in modern society, which, like a lot of fanon, is a viable suggestion which illuminates, rather than contradicts, the canon. Yet it is also maintained by many, however, that the giant squid in Hogwarts’ lake has had its wicked tentacled way with as many underage students as you can possibly fit into one piece of fan-fiction. Squids seem to be universal in Internet fan circles, in fact, for rather inexplicable reasons. Biggles-based fanon is full of them. The graphic novelist Neil Gaiman himself decided that giant octopuses and Sherlock Holmes were obvious bedfellows, and created a Squid of the Baskervilles extravaganza entitled A Study in Emerald.
To those of us unfamiliar with this world of fen and fanon, it all seems a little odd, but the fact is that other people have altered our views of literary characters in particular since before even the dawn of cinema, and in earnest since then. Now, thanks to internet discussion forums, hives of human activity as it would be without the inhibitions imposed by a dependence upon snail-mail and Actual Conversation, squids, it seems, are the coming thing.
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