Transforming Audiences, 1-2 September 2011

Adler, Hound, Reichenbach: BBCs Sherlock Fans in Search of the Canon In this paper, I discuss the fan community of BBCs Sherlock (2010), a television series which stands out as a modernization of Doyles Sherlock Holmes. In their discussion and creative practices, fans refer to the canon of Sherlock as a common ground, meaning the official information provided within the series and by its authors. In practice though, fans understand Sherlock in relation to Doyles original stories, its earlier pastiches and adaptations, and derivative texts based on Sherlock. The canon is not a constellation of facts but a form of literary consensus that results from these multiple texts. By analyzing fan discussions about Sherlocks canon, I provide insights in the diverse cultural repertoires of audiences and expectations that result from this. Theoretically, I focus on two things. First, how fans construct knowledge and speculate about media content. Second, how a source-text with a long legacy can or should be mediated according to its audiences. Here, I add up to Jenkins theory of transmedia storytelling (2006) by showing how readers understand the narrative by naturalizing it in relation to other texts or experiences. In doing so, I shed light on individual ways of reading and understanding Sherlock that are negotiated in fan communities. The study is based on several in-depth interviews with Dutch fans of the series and ongoing virtual ethnography conducted since January 2011 at the online forum The Bakerstreet Supperclub. I upfront fans interpretations of Sherlocks characters and their speculation about the second season which has been spoiled to involve Irene Adler, The Final Problem and The Hound of The Baskervilles. Thus, I explore how audience members understand the series defining features in relation to other texts, and analyze their discussion of what information is deemed crucial to understand Sherlock. [290/300]

http://www.slideshare.net/setsuna_cutey/transforming-sherlock

This talk is partly derived from a publication in Transmedia Sherlock, edited by Kristina Busse and Louisa Stein. The relation with canon is something I only theorized in this talk for Transforming Audiences. To get a good idea about how Dutch fans interpreted Sherlock, I suggest you look at the chapter itself which offers an empirically-rich study on the matter. The book is available online and in stores from early 2012 onwards.

Notes of the talk at Transforming Audiences, 2 September 2011 My talk today will be about canon, a term you might come across in your research on audiences. I shall discuss the concept through the fan community of BBCs Sherlock (2010). This recent television series stands out as a modernization of Doyles Sherlock Holmes stories. This adaptation portrays the detective as a citizen of contemporary London who uses new media and modern science to solve his crimes. The series explicitly goes against the Victorian image of the stories that has been dominant in the previous adaptations. Foggy sidealleys, hansom cabs, deerstalker hats, Sherlock does away with them all. Like in Doyles original stories, Holmes is written once again as a pioneer of science. By doing so, the series revisits Doyles original canon. In their discussion and creative practices, fans refer to the canon of Sherlock as a common ground. I have always found canon a rather interesting term. To explain it briefly, it refers to the official information provided within the series and by its authors. In practice though, fans understand Sherlock in relation to Doyles original stories, earlier pastiches and adaptations, and derivative texts based on Sherlock. What I argue is that Sherlocks canon is not a constellation of facts based form of literary consensus that results from these multiple texts and that never reaches full closure. This will be my bridge to two theoretical points. First, fans critically reflect on how a source-text with a long legacy can or should be mediated. Your expectations of Sherlock are shaped by your experiences of Sherlock Holmes texts that you read or saw earlier. We can see this clearly now that the second season of the show is being shot and there is a lot of fan speculation going on. Second, though fans connect these multiple texts within communities their own individualized, personal views of the text are decisive. I shall describe this as naturalization later. This is also a point I make in a chapter I wrote for the book Transmedia Sherlock. In that chapter, I do not go into canon but study the reception of various Dutch fans. Empirically, that study was based on several in-depth interviews with Dutch fans of the series. Today I shall draw from that data and my ongoing virtual ethnography for the dissertation itself, which takes place at the small fan community Bakerstreet Supperclub. The idea of canon is more complicated than it seems. Fans refer to the canon of Sherlock as the official information provided within the series and by its authors. Fan texts always stands in contrast with this official information and are seen as fanon. Of course that does not dispute the fact that these derivative texts help create a certain image of the story and also draw from it. Still, the official text is what guides fans when they make their own products and in that understanding, it is a kind of benchmark. Not just for the stories, but also

for the characters, who are often evaluated as behaving more or less canonical, or true to the original. When we look at a complicated text like Sherlock, it becomes clear that many texts shape our reading or viewing of the series. This interplay, which can be captured as multiplicity, is what shapes the interpretation. Sherlock is a series that is explicitly influenced by earlier texts and in some ways opposes these or solidifies their characteristics. It can be seen as transmedial, a term we have heard before during this conference. With that concept we usually mean the dispersion, migration, of content across various media platforms. Transmediality complicates our ideas of the stories and characters that do not just draw from one source-text, but from many and change our interpretations. This interplay makes it difficult to determine the canon. Let me just show you what kind of texts may shape an audience understanding of the series. I have already addressed some texts that are of influence here, like the original stories by Doyle and derivative fiction, which has a long history in Sherlock Holmes fandom that includes pastiches and fake biographies or memoires. The original has been reworked in many professional media texts as well. On top of that, the modernization of Sherlock fits the corpus of the same directors-authors, Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis, that worked together on Doctor Who (2005-ongoing) and Jekyll (2007), a modernization of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In a broader sense, Sherlock is influenced by the history of detective novels at large. This is of course limited by local culture as well. In The Netherlands, we have a different detective culture that shaped the viewers understanding of Sherlock, and Holmes in general is not as widely read as here. He is, however, a popular icon of a British detective for many Dutch people. Fans built on these texts in their own discussions and creative products. In their own practices they make use of the long history of Sherlock Holmes reception and its particular readings of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, even Irene Adler. Certain tropes that have been around for a long time - like reading Watson and Holmes as lovers or Holmes as asexual - get new impulses in Sherlock. The characters are reinvented or maybe they go back to basic all together. This is also a point of concern in Sherlocks fan community because these texts are always balanced against each other. If Sherlock is in part a deconstruction of earlier texts, what remains of the canon? When we look at Sherlock we see a text that is not really a given but a node where the history of Sherlock Holmes comes together. Henry Jenkins assumes that when we read a transmedial narrative, we hunt down all the bits of a story and paste them together or discuss these within their respective fan communities. Though his theory on transmediality has

inspired me, I find that this is a very instrumental view of a text. It suggests that you can obtain the right meaning as long as you assemble it right. In my study, I found that rather than actively using Sherlocks extra-texts, fans naturalized the series. This is a term by Jonathan Culler that shows how readers make sense of a text through other texts and genres they are familiar with. Naturalizing is all about individual responses a text evokes; your reading is informed by similar experiences you had, cultural conventions, different texts and modes of identifying with what you see or read. Rather than explicitly relating the series to additional texts and instalments related to Sherlock, I argue that viewers explore the text through their associations with related genres, local and global popular texts and ideas of what constitutes plausible character behaviour. Especially in Sherlock Holmes fandom, it becomes clear that readers rely on very different repertoires concerning the characters. My interviewees showed a diversity of responses that were not clearly filtered through their similar national background or other Sherlock Holmes texts. They were more personal and drew from popular culture at large. Particularly the characters were understood in diverse way that were shaped by more recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations rather than the original stories, which some of them had not read. The original Moriarty, for instance, raised different responses informed by all kinds of media. To some, he is a rich guy, to others a mobster or a smart professor (Slide shows various versions of Moriarty). What makes a Moriarty a real Moriarty becomes a matter of debate. Now that the second season of Sherlock is approaching, there are many online discussions about how the writers will tackle the reworking of, for instance, hound of the Baskervilles or Adler. Online fans debate about these stories and their crucial motives that can and should be transferred to the modern setting. What is specific about Sherlocks near-death confrontation with Moriarty? Is the core of the story, like some users say, that Sherlock faces his shadow, Moriarty, or that he comes to terms with himself or that he symbolically falls from grace? And what about Adler? Does including her mean that Sherlock will get a love interest, as she is so often portrayed? What we expect from the text is shaped by these previous instalments and ideas fiction. Fans try to distil what is canon out of various texts and their endeavours show how complex this is: they never fully reach a consensus or closure. Though Jenkins shows a kind of path that audiences follow in his theory on transmediality, actual audiences function more haphazardly. They associate. We all do. My experiences and memories of Sherlock, my naturalization process, is not the same as yours. Rather than a constellation of facts,

Sherlocks canon is an ongoing discussion that combines individual responses and multiple texts. Whats official is a matter of interpretation.

Contacts Nicolle Lamerichs - PhD candidate Department of Literature and Art T work: +31 43 388 2604 T home: +31 43 311 3154 http://www.fdcw.unimaas.nl/staff/default.asp?id=390

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