On the Relevance of Punk II

In my last post, I explored the concept of punk as it relates to certain genres of pulp literature.  In the dystopian futures depicted in Cyberpunk stories, it is the criminals and hackers who have learned to master technology and manipulate the system for their own ends who are made heroes.  In a world where the system is the engine of dehumanization, the rebels becomes the image and champion of the human.

To understand how these science fiction concepts are relevant to to a Victorian Gentleman like Sherlock Holmes, let’s take a look at his greatest nemesis – a man Holmes describes together with himself in the play as “two men who share a shadow”…I am speaking, of course, of the notorious Dr. Moriarty.

Doyle based Moriarty off of real-world criminal masterminds like Adam Worth and Jonathan Wild – men who in their respective times both recognized that the rapidly evolving complexity of their world presented unique opportunities for profit.  A contemporary of Doyle, Worth was a “bounty jumper,” collecting income by enlisting in military regiments under false names and deserting after receiving pay – a trick he likely learned after he was mistakenly listed as killed-in-action after the Second Battle of Bull Run.  Pursued by the Pinkertons, Worth moved to New York City and eventually Europe, founding criminal networks which thrived on large-scale robberies and forgery scams.

Jonathan Wilde, a career criminal in 17th Century London, managed to portray himself in the public eye as a master “thief taker,” or private detective.  He used this position to claim rewards on “recovered” stolen goods which his own gang had made off with in the first place – men and women he frequently betrayed and turned over to the law for his own profit.

In effect, both of these men learned to “hack the system” and manipulate it for their own ends.  They were able to look at the machine-like workings of society and exploit that knowledge for a desirable result.

As I’ve written before, the Victorian Age, like the modern Information Age, was a time of rapidly increasing complexity and innovation.  Even as technology revolutionized production and created prosperity for some, these advancements vastly outpaced social and political change.  The men, women and children who labored along side that same technology had almost no legal protection and were themselves reduced to little more than cogs in the giant machine of Victorian industry.

The Victorian Age is, in fact, the beginning of the same post-humanism that Cyberpunk literature explores: the fear that as our world becomes increasingly complex, we’re going lose the very things that make us who we are.  The prevalence of these ideas has even given rise to an offshoot of Cyberpunk literature that takes place during the Victorian Age and explores the same themes.

This is called Steampunk.

I want to be clear here that I don’t mean to say Idle Muse is presenting Sherlock Holmes as a Cyberpunk – or even a proper Steampunk – play.  But these concepts are fascinating to me.  If we focus only on the archetypical and surface-level details we’re familiar with from other portrayals of Holmes, like the deerstalker cap and the curved pipe, these ideas might slip by us entirely. Living in the shadow of the factories and the black smog of the coal mines, however, they are forces that would have been present and very immediate to Doyle’s audience. They are fears that would have permeated the Victorian subconscious as they watched Holmes navigate the seedy underbelly of London’s criminal underworld and aristocracy with equal aplomb.

In Moriarty, Doyle presents an adversary who is a perfect machine – like Holmes, he understands the system so well he works in perfect concert with it, predicting results and manipulating outcomes.  At the same time, he is hindered by none of Holmes’ human traits, like empathy or compassion.  What sort of man must Holmes become to match and defeat such an opponent?  What happens when that man meets a woman who offers an alternative to that battle and the prospect of the most fundamental of human experiences?

On the Relevance of Punk

I guess I’ve been partial to “pulp” plays for a long time now…ever since I first saw Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman’s Cyberpunk adaptation, William Gibson’s Burning Chrome, at The Next Theatre in Evanston.  I was still an undergraduate at the time, and in love with all things that seemed to challenge traditional ideas of what art should be.  As a card-carrying sci-fi geek, the prospect of presenting an icon of pop-culture as high art was just too great a temptation to pass up.

The Poor Players’ Guild, the campus predecessor of what would one day become Idle Muse Theatre Company, acquired the rights to and performed Burning Chrome in the Spring of 2000.  Three years later I would stage that same play again as my graduate thesis, using the production as a sort of personal barometer to gauge how much I had learned in the interim.

I like pulp literature, like Sherlock Holmes, because it serves as sort of modern mythology. To borrow a bit from my thesis, Cyberpunk stories, like Burning Chrome, Blade Runner (adapted from Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and The Matrix take place in a dystopian future—a sort of out-of-control information age, in which nations and economies have faded away in favor of the only true remaining currency: data. 

Generally, in Cyberpunk, these forces give rise to some sort of all-encompassing social and technological system that is in direct conflict with the human.

In any narrative, relationships are a kind of mirror in which various aspects of the protagonist are reflected.  But when those relationships become so numerous and complex as to be overwhelming, one cannot be distinguished from another. One’s sense of self is lost in the maelstrom of collective identity. There is no self distinct from the group, no unique identity, only a machine-like producer-consumer of the master system.

The fact that Cyberpunk characters are criminals makes them rebels against the rules of their society, which is the force of dehumanization. Humans in Cyberpunk are turning, metaphorically and literally, into machines. Against this setting, the punk becomes a symbol of the human struggle against the forces of dehumanization that we fear exist even in our own information-driven world today.

So, why all these words about Cyberpunk in a blog dedicated to a play about Sherlock Holmes? More on that in the next post…and a look at something called Steampunk…

The Old Order Changeth

Longtime Idle Muse fans who saw Bloody Poetry (2008) already know that we have an interest in the Romantic Poets. At the same time, I’ve also always been partial to Alfred Lord Tennyson. I’ve always seen him as something of a transition poet, straddling the divide between the Romantic and Victorian Era’s.

In the literary timeline I posted a few days ago, I dated Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in 1885, because that’s when the epic poem was completed. He actually began composing it in 1834, just prior to Victoria’s taking the throne. It was published over time in sections (idylls) and is considered by many to be something of an ongoing commentary on the era in which the poet lived.

The Victorians found in the myth of King Arthur an image of themselves. Throughout the period, there was a resurgence of Arthurian themes depicted in art and literature. The tale of the legendary British king’s emergence, rise and death provided a ready metaphor for the changing nature of their times – and they were indeed full of change.

Victoria’s reign oversaw the Industrial Revolution in England, and with it urbanization, overpopulation and widespread poverty. Simultaneously, this occurred at the height of the British Empire, a period called the Pax Britannica, during which British colonial interests and trade power were unmatched throughout the world. Meanwhile, science and technology were blossoming: gasworks and sanitation systems improved the quality of life in major cities, soap and antiseptics gained widespread use, and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species rocked the world.

Underscoring all of this, a strict moral code sought to suppress the expression of emotion and rampant libertinism of previous ages – in a society that was becoming more and more deeply influenced by “oriental” ideas from abroad, even as it was reshaped by new technologies.

A side note: I love Wikipedia.

You can’t use it for academic purposes and you can’t blindly trust it – but if you already know a bit about a given subject, it can make for great conversation starters – not to mention dramturgical summaries in actor packets. For those looking to learn more about Victorian England, a couple of Wikipedia articles which, if not comprehensive or academically rigorous, make for good primers on the subject are:

Victorian Morality – short, condensed historical context

Victorian Era – longer and broader in focus

As for Tennyson, named Poet Laureate during this period, he addressed the fast-turning Victorian world in his Idylls through Bedivere’s lament, spoken as his king lay dying:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole ROUND TABLE is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world;
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

Facing the harsh realities of the Industrial Revolution and looking back on the Romantic Era, it must have seemed to the Victorians that they might indeed be standing at the end of an ideal age. But Tennyson wanted to offer his readers one more thing…

Hope.

And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

During the Victorian Era, people began looking at society analytically and believing it could be improved. There was a kind of faith that the acquisition and application of knowledge could better the individual and the world. This is the same era that gave birth to John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle – and during which people were reading the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche. This is the era in England that gave birth to the idea of the self-made man, through which a burgeoning middle class won a place at the table among the aristocracy based on the strength of personal success.

This was the idea that an industrial, imperialist society, with all its inherent imperfections and injustices, could be better understood and was constantly evolving, on its way to something better:

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint,
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

Where Credit is Due

More posts on Sherlock soon to come, but first I need to do a quick plug for Paul Holmquist’s Neverwhat? blog.  Paul’s directing an adaptation of one of my favorite novels, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, over at Lifeline Theatre that opens April 30 – and it looks like it’s going to be fantastic.

I also need to give Paul credit, because his production blog is the conceptual model I based The Road to Baker Street off of (read: “stole shamelessly from”).  Check it out at:

Neverwhat?