[转帖] 福尔摩斯古代现代版联系考证

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[转帖] 福尔摩斯古代现代版联系考证

Post by Jun » 2005-11-21 8:50

下面是我在L&O Newsgroup上发的一篇长篇大论。我喜欢上福尔摩斯,Murder Rooms电视剧和小说,Law and Order: CI是分别不同时期的事,现在回头一看,原来根源是相同的,再次引证了自己的喜好非常predictable的理论。

关于L&O:CI的介绍我写过一篇。

http://www.fabvalley.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=1207

Goren, Holmes, Doyle; David Pirie, Rene Balcer

The connection between these 5 people, 3 real and 2 fictional will become clear after you contemplate these observations ---

1. Detective Bobby Goren. Created by Rene Balcer. Based on Sherlock Holmes. He carries psychological baggage from childhood difficulties with his parents. His mother was a tender and weak woman who developed schizophrenia and was later institutionalized. Despite his shame and fear growing up, Goren is affectionate with her and visits her frequently. His father was a gambler and indifferent to his children. He abandoned the family and died lonely and broke. Goren resents him, hates him, but also once longed for his approval and love (unsuccessfully), and pitied him when he died. Goren tries to keep his past at bay and carry on with his duty as a police detective, but his work and life are inevitably affected by this dark family history. He is a brilliant detective and uses the power of observation and deduction to solve cases. In addition, he empathizes with the criminals and understands their deepest motives and agonies, which he uses to draw their confession. He has a brother who apparently has inherited their father's addictive and self-destructive tendencies.

2. Sherlock Holmes. Created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Based on (supposedly) Dr. Joseph Bell. He is a brilliant private detective who uses his power of observation and deduction to solve cases. He sometimes empathizes with the criminals and let them off the hook of law enforcement out of his personal principles, especially when they are desparate women with a justifiable motive. But he has no past. His family history is NEVER mentioned anywhere, except for a brother who is a government official who is more brilliant than he. We know nothing about his parents or childhood.

3. Arthur Conan Doyle. I lump him in the first rather than the 2nd group, because here I'm talking about the Doyle interpreted (created?) by David Pirie, the creator of the BBC series "Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes" and a new semi-fictional historic drama "The Strange Case of Arthur Conan Doyle" (which I have not seen). He has also published 3 mystery novels using the fictionalized real characters Doyle and Dr. Joseph Bell, the real-life Edinburgh surgeon on which Holmes was based. Pirie spent years digging into Doyle's past and trying to understand the deepest and darkest secrets. In Pirie's portrayal of Doyle, the physician/author himself was also tormented by his family secrets.
Most significantly, Doyle's father had some kind of psychotic disease and died in an asylum. He probably had schizophrenia. And he was a gentle, creative, kind man. Living deep in his delusions, he drew haunting, beautiful pictures of fairies. His mother, on the other hand, was the source of shame for him in the Victorian era. After her husband was locked up in a mental institution, she had an affair with a lodger at her house who was 20 years her junior. They carried on the affair for years (she might have even moved in with him at some point).

Doyle resented his mother deeply for "betraying" his father. And he did his best to keep up a normal, conventional, stoic, and sane image of an upstanding gentleman throughout his life. His autobiography was more of a cover-up than a revelation about his own life and thoughts. Yet his psychology was revealed by himself unintentionally in his behavior later in life. Not a believer in Christianity all his life and insisting on scientific methods and observations in Holmes stories, he suddenly became obsessed with proving the existence of fairies ("captured" in some photographs doctored by a couple of kids) and with psychic communications with the dead. The latter was widely believed to be connected to Doyle's regret over his strained relationship with
his mother after her death.

4. David Pirie. His "Murder Rooms" is one of the best TV mysteries I've seen. They perfectly capture the slightly gothic atmosphere of the original Holmes stories, but are more bizarre, more complex, and more psychological. The same eeriness is also in his novels featuring Doyle and Dr. Bell. His mimicry of Doyle's own style of storytelling is shockingly authentic. The plotting is exceptional and imaginative. The evil in these stories have a psychological depth that is disturbing and slightly surreal. Most significant, he focuses on the main characters' own psychological baggage, family history, and their effects on their lives. Unfortunately, I know absolutely nothing about Mr. Pirie himself or why he is so obsessed with Doyle's dark secrets, except that he was a journalist before he became a TV screenwriter for BBC.

5. Rene Balcer. I know only slightly more about Mr. Balcer than Mr. Pirie. He was a photojournalist before he became a TV screenwriter. Schizophrenia has touched his family, apparently, but I don't know how or who, nor his relationship with his parents. Nevertheless, he seems to be at least a Sherlock Holmes fan. How much he is aware of Pirie's work on Doyle remains unknown. Still, his hero (alter ego?) Detective Goren is tormented by the same kind of demons as Pirie's Doyle -- insanity, betrayal, lack of love, shame, fear, hurt -- before adulthood.

Gosh, I'm exhausted from drawing this web of connections. I'm sure I've missed some things, but I cannot go on any more. Draw your own conclusions.

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