Monday, December 1, 2014

know your audience

This post has absolutely NOTHING to do with health and nutrition -- fair warning!  :-)  Whether that's a good or a bad thing, i'll leave moot.

As i was stringing tinsel-garland and colored lights up the front-staircase bannister yesterday, something popped into my mind....  This is actually one of the benefits of mindless manual labor -- your hands are busy and a very minute portion of your consciousness applied, and it seems that the BBB*-like borderline to the subconscious is made more porous.  From "nowhere" come ideas and solutions to questions which are possibly years old and essentially forgotten.

The subject of this train of thought was an after-hours conversation about literature, among history-buffs....

The recent plethora of depictions of Sherlock Holmes (my first love, at the age of twelve) have taken that character in directions which would have astonished Sir Arthur.  His mildly-autistic, borderline-manic-depressive, and decidedly obsessive-compulsive ICON of a character is actually nothing like some of the smirking James-Bond-wannabees that modern audiences love.  Hell, even the early Rathbone films show him to be questionably urbane.

But what modern person would know?  To understand period fiction, you need to have a sense of what ITS ERA is all about, and as i postulated the other day, the vast majority of living people have no clue on how their great-great-grandparents lived and THOUGHT.

You see, Doyle wasn't writing for US, he was writing for his contemporaries.  When he first penned "A Study in Scarlet" he never dreamed that his serialized magazine story would be the beginning of such a popular character.  Although the demand and income were nice, he soon became tired of his creation and wanted to kill him off, but his public -- and even his family -- kicked up such a fuss he backed off.  He would never have dreamed in 1887 that 127 years later, Holmes would still be "alive."

And BECAUSE Doyle was writing to his contemporaries, the things that get modernity all excited ... just never occurred to him.  Yes, they had homosexuality in Victorian England:  but it had a code of its own (read your Oscar Wilde -- i did).  Sir Arthur's characters were almost all straight.  But that's just one example of what today's audience gets wrong.

Period fiction (or non-fiction, when it comes to that) is decypherable only in the context of the environment of its creation.  In this case, the writer was himself an enthusiast of history as well as of science -- in his Holmes canon, he writes of the exciting forensic developments of his day but he also wrote books about the medieval period ... and he gives Holmes some of his own historical interests too.

The guy SIMPLY WOULD NOT have tried to speak to a future world, but that's exactly what a lot of "interpreters" of Holmesiana are trying to make him do.

As a reenactor, i try to get inside the heads of the people i portray -- that's how one's characters/personae LIVE for the audience.  Being an ordinary modern person "dressed up funny" does not give the school-kids an idea of what the historic world was like, when we have that day before the reenactment actually begins, and they bus in the local elementary-thru-highschool students to talk to us.  It's our job to depict typical people in their many roles in society, so they can get an idea of how the world has changed and what made it happen.  TELL them this stuff, and it just goes out the other ear;  let them carry the water with the yoke and canvas buckets, let them see and smell the period-correct recipe you're cooking for the next meal, let them feel the lye soap and try out the washboard ... they'll understand everyday life of 150 years ago MUCH better.

Any good living-historian does a LOT of reading, and knows better than to read ABOUT the past -- we have to read sources that CAME FROM the past, and even before the period of our greatest interest.  The ancient past feeds into the recent past which feeds into the world of our parents, which usually influences who we are today.  Though human nature hasn't changed much, the societies which influence our points of view HAVE.  And the society in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was trying to establish himself as an author of popular fiction is very, VERY different from ours.  HE came from the world described by Charles Dickens, who came from the world described by Jane Austen, who came from the world described by Samuel Richardson ... all the way back to the bible.  The average person was also more influenced by their families, personal friends and church-teachings than anything written in the wider world.  People were very circumscribed, in the days before the train, radio, movies, television, internet....

Point of view is a strong determiner in what we find significant.  Modern points of view are IRRELEVANT when looking at the past.
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*  for the friends i'll send here who aren't regulars, this is the Blood-Brain Barrier, not the Better Business Bureau.  ;-)

18 comments:

  1. I recently finished a book called "Modoc, the True Story of the Greatest Elephant that Ever Lived." It obviously wasn't true--it had errors of geography, people from rural Germany and Asia in the early 20th century speaking English, a German Jew of that time who had never even heard of prejudice, photos that obviously weren't of the elephant in the book (tusks v. no tusks) and on and on. Bad enough. What was more disturbing were Amazon reviews from people who had NO IDEA the book was concocted from whole cloth until they went online found other people saying it was fictional.

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    1. :-) i'm always a little suspicious of people who claim to know the TRUTH, the REAL story, or the absolute FACTS....

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    2. I expected some embellishment to make a good story, but good grief. It seems that the author briefly owned a former circus elephant named Modoc, and the rest is a fairy tale.

      Why does Google have the Sign Out button where I expect the Publish button to be? $(@&%!

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    3. lol -- i've done that too! what bothers me about blogger is how often i try to leave comments on blogs, and it just seems to say "no" to me a lot....

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  2. I love that this post has nothing to do with health and tradition. I also like the picture I have in my mind of you stringing tinsel garland on the bannister. I had visions of 'Victorian Houses' and the lovely look of Christmas cheer ........

    It's good to do something with your hands and let your mind run free - you never know where you may end up?

    I like Sherlock Holmes, to many he is a real person and the coaches of tourists that go visit 221b Baker Street. Of course the spin offs in films - TV series etc = he cannot be killed off. Benedict Cumberbatch is great in the present role.

    Living History is a good way for people to live and learn History, I can remember my children going to Victorian Houses and Schools......they came away enthused.

    We could and should learn more about our lives today from yester year and take it on board but regretfully we don't.

    I like the change in post Tess ....nice one, thanks.

    All the best Jan

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    1. thank YOU, Jan! :-) i guess i need to post some photos when i get more of the decorating done....

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    2. "i guess i need to post some photos when i get more of the decorating done...."

      Definitely - I look forward to seeing some please.

      All the best Jan

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  3. I have read all books by C.Doyle by the age of twelve too. Somehow at that age I was the most fascinated by his Lost World and stories about pirates, however stories about Sherlock Holmes stay aside. I hope I see London some day, even though I understand it is a different town now. It is also the town where The Forsyte Saga took place.

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    1. a very different city to the one described by some of my favorite writers, but fascinating nevertheless! :-) LOVE that place....

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    2. I initially read Doyle in Russian translation, later, in my 30-x, when I arrived in Canada, I re-read many books in English. Somehow more old-fashioned version of the language put me off a little bit. I enjoyed the most stories by Somerset Maugham. Some books were much better in translation, like Steven King - the translator removed all swearing and most of street language, but wonderful fantasies stayed.
      I thought that the space shuttle Challenger was named after the professor Challenger, the leading character of some of Doyle's novels.
      Sadly, stories about Sherlock Holmes are excluded from school problem. I guess because of mentioning of drugs.

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  4. I used to listen to Sherlock Holmes on Classic radio on my long drives...I'v never read the books. I may have to get to it now!

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    1. check your library for The Annotated Sherlock Holmes -- http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Sherlock-Holmes-Fifty-Six-Complete/dp/0517502917/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417537967&sr=1-3&keywords=annotated+sherlock+holmes -- so much research is in it, it enriches the experience!

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    2. http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Sherlock-Holmes-Fifty-Six-Complete/dp/0517502917/ is right -- link copied badly above....

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  5. Sorry to say I'm NOT a Holmes-aphiliac - although I have learned to like Johnny Lee Miller & Lucy Liu in "Elementary" since Hubs is a big fan... (Sci-fi geek weakly waving from back row)
    As far as period fiction goes, I admire Jane Austen much more for her repartee w/the language - and yes, loathed the Keira Knightley "modernized" adaptation. (also loved Jane Eyre as a teen)

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    1. there's room in this Geek Clubhouse for us all! ;-) I tried sci-fi, recommended by some good friends, and never could get into it. Fantasy was another matter....

      if you like Austen on film, the best thing we've found is the Colin Firth version of P&P -- my husband loves it as much as I do.

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    2. YES MA'AM (pant pant) - my MIL gave me a copy! Just like George C Scott as Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, there are NO substitutes!

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    3. for Jane Eyre, i'm torn between the Ciaran Hinds version and Orson Welles -- the first has the best Jane, and the second the best Rochester, in my opinion. ;-)

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    4. I liked every screen version of Jane Eyre.

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