Solving the Mystery: A Schutzian Analysis of Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s serial adventures of Sherlock Holmes comprise the best representatives of the subgenre of mystery writing called the ‘detective story.’ The word, ‘mystery,’ invites an inherent ambiguity and tension as it refers to the profound, the inexplicable, or the secretive. ‘Mystery’ carries both secular and non-secular references. The finite Being of humankind in its existential situatedness is circumscribed by a funda-mental transcendence. The great mystery of life horizons all meanings that humankind creates and constitutes in its socio-cultural constructions. Hence a typology and characterization of the literature of mystery must take into consideration a subgenre’s relation to the ever-present horizonal opacity, or existential mystery, inherent to the human condition. The thesis presented here is that the treatment of mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the literature of the fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, can be understood from a more profound standpoint than usually recognized in “the standard interpretations” of detective stories. My contending thesis is that the socio-functional processes underlying the detective mystery reveal a fundamental interconnection with profound symbolic provinces of meaning. This thesis is exhibited through a Schutzian based analysis in social phenomenology.²This paper is organized into three major sections. The first section offers an ontological, epistemological, and socio-logical analysis of mystery, which situates the “detective story” within mystery literature and which explicates how mystery functions within the detective story. The views of David I. Grossvogel on the subject of mystery literature are presented as a foil in order to counter the standard thesis to which he subscribes – that the detective story treats mystery in an essentially shallow manner.³A deeper understanding of the sense of the detective story’s framing of mystery is gained through a sociological description of life-world transcendencies, knowledge intransparencies, nomic orderings and anomic disorderings, legitimations, symbolic uni-verses, and world-maintenance. This analysis employs a phenomenologi-cal description in the sociology of knowledge, the social construction of reality, and the sociology of religion. That the Sherlock Holmes adven-tures exhibit a serious treatment of the profound mystery of life is corrobo-rated by the Unitarian minister, Stephen Kendrick’s interpretation of the adventures as parables.⁴Furthermore, I establish that Kendrick develops the Holmesian corpus in the service of a theodicy. A theodicy provides religious explanation for marginal life experiences for the purpose of subjugating the intrusion of chaos to the nomizing function of human world-building. The second section of this paper consists of implementing Schutzian structures of ideal typification: personal and course-of-action, in an analysis of two adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The purpose is to establish that the figure of Holmes cannot be reduced to a cold logician by exhibiting a richer reading of Holmes as not only a sagacious practi-tioner of applied human science and social psychology, but as someone whose efforts are guided by the profound mystery of life. This allows for a deeper understanding of the significance of the stories, for logical puzzles are one thing, but the complexity of the human psyche in its existential situatedness involves a deeper perspicacity and reverence toward life. I argue that Holmes is attuned to the opaque boundaries concerning the deepest mysteries of human nature and thus displays profound forms of compassion in his interactions. The third section of the paper explores why Alfred Schutz, who was a great enthusiast of the detective story, read the ending of the mystery first, which essentially defeats the psycho-logical context for the mystery reader. Schutz engages in the didactic methodology of social science training and the mystery genre is excellent for this purpose because it offers a closed world based upon the delimited relevancy structure of solving a mystery. Explorations of the structures of Schutzian social sciences disclose the structure of mystery writing in a way that reveals its peculiar possibilities for profundity.