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?