10.11.06

Sherlock Holmes' Sadism

It is puzzling that three out of six Doyle´s favorite Holmes stories (in the list published in 1927) are stories where Holmes powers of deduction fail (The Speckled Band) or he is matched by a rival (A Scandal in Bohemia and The Final Problem). This coincides with many readers' favorites lists. These stories do not violate the laws of the detective genre as Hodgson (1994) holds. On the contrary, they derive their interest from the very peculiarities of the reader’s reaction to detective stories. They are interesting because the hero is flawed and they underline, more than perfect reasoning stories, the tragedy of the reader of detective fiction.

As Caprettini (1994) keenly sees Holmes/Watson relationship is based on the master/servant patron, and as such, "we always find in the servant/master topos a certain form of sadism". We can trace examples of this sadism towards Watson in many stories:

"You have not observed...since your are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this (A Scandal in Bohemia)"

"After all you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications (The Dying detective)"

This sadism by Holmes generates in Watson some resentment against Holmes aloofness. Watson, and the reader is identified with Watson in his role as a witness of Holmes adventures, wishes Holmes to be wrong from time to time. As we have seen, the reader likes the best the stories in which Holmes fails, because before one of Holmes masterful and commanding reasoning the reader can not help joining Watson in complaining about his own limitations:

"when I hear you give your reasons," I remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled, until you explain tour process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours (A Scandal in Bohemia)"

The reader of detective fiction is continuously trying to anticipate and outwit the detective in the solving of the crime, to beat him in his own game, as Watson sometimes fancies:

"Then I began to think of Holmes´ own method and to try to practice them in reading this tragedy. It was, alas! only to easy to do. (The final problem)"

Moreover, if the reader is to derive any pleasure from this form of fiction, his mental movements must be akin to that ascribed by Aristotle to the audience of a tragedy in the Poetics: the turning of events must, in a first movement, surprise; and then it must come to be recognized as necessary given the plot, in a second and wider awareness. Holmes, himself experiences this feeling when recalling his deductions:

"I confess that I have been as blind as a mole, but is better to learn wisdom late, than never to learn it at all. (The Man With The Twisted Lip)"

The reader likes to fail in anticipating the resolution, but to acknowledge its failure the very next moment:

"«There I was stretched when you, my dear Watson, and all your following were investigating in the most sympathetic and inefficient manner the circumstances of my death...At last, when you had all formed your inevitable and totally erroneous conclusions (The Empty Room)"

"All your following" are evidently the readers, who do not like a straightforward anticipation of the events, neither an insurmountable heap of reasoning that can not be given sense in a rear-view after the conclusion. If we admit a certain anagnoresis in the reader of detective fiction parallel to that described by Aristotle for the audience of tragedy, we must also establish that the hero must somehow be flawed if the reader is to contemplate its own limitations under a tragic eye when seeing an individual of superior powers failing miserably. This effect of achieving the tragedy of the reader, as done by Doyle in The Speckled Band, is what gives an enormous appeal to flawed Holmes stories as privileged instances for the study of the reader reactions to certain narrative effects.
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SentenceMe Tech News

Buddhism in India: Decay and Fall in Buddha's Homeland

While Buddhism expands in the West -in the USA it has increased a 170% in the last ten years according to American Religious Identity Survey ARIS- and reaches globally around 350 millions followers (the fourth religion in the world), his situation in India remains precarious. There are around 7 millions Buddhist in India representing merely a 2% of the world adherents and an infinitesimal percentage of the total Indian population. How has one of the world’s main religions fallen into such decay in its own birthplace? Has some large-scale instance of cultural obliteration taken place at some point in Indian history?

The Golden Age

The key council for the spreading of Buddhism was the Third, held under the auspices of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century B.C. The most important decision was the Emperor sending forth of monks to preach in nine different countries. Ashoka consolidated Buddhism as the hegemonic religion in India and initiated its expansion with the conversion of Sri Lanka. By the 7th century A.D. it had spread to East Asia and Southeast Asia (modern Thailand, Tibet, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan). Ashoka, despite his preference and active promotion of Buddhism advocated for religious tolerance, as stated in one of his stone edicts -some current leaders should mark his words:

"But it is better to honor other religions for this reason. By so doing, one's own religion benefits, and so do other religions, while doing otherwise harms one's own religion and the religions of others. Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought "Let me glorify my own religion," only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good.[24] One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all should be well-learned in the good doctrines of other religions."

Decay and fall

Buddhism enjoyed promotion from power until the end of the reign Harshavardhana (8th A.D.) when royal patronage ended. This marked the beginning of a decay that extended until the Muslim invasions in the 13th century. Although Hindu scholars attribute the progressive decay to the divergences between sects and the appearance of tantric deviated conducts in monasteries, Hinduism, and most particularly, Brahmanism (a strict social organization on the basis of some religious ideas) tried to dilute Buddhism by presenting it as a kind of Hinduism. Thus, from the 7th century Buddha was included in the list of Avataras of Vishnu. The Muslim invasions in the 13th century brought the destruction of Buddhist Universities and the killings of Buddhist monks. Again, it is common for Hindu scholars to put the full blame on Muslims, but it is also a fact that there was a certain connivance of the Brahmin class at the local levels of administration, where they retained their privileges, with the new Muslim rulers. Moreover, the formation of Buddhist monks was conducted through rigorous training and therefore, they were less easily replaced than Brahmin priests ready-made by birth. Many Buddhist lay worshipers were driven to Islam by persecution. Evidently, the tolerant spirit of the Ashoka reign had long passed away.

Rebirth

After the 2nd World War, Buddhism initiated a process of recovery in India. In Sri Lanka, 29 countries gathered in 1950 to discuss the preliminary works leading to the Sixth Council, held in Rangoon in 1954. One personality that went to this preliminary works was to become a milestone of Buddhist patronage in India: Babasaheb Ambedkar. He was one of the great activists for Indian independence , a process in which he held some sour discussions with Gandhi on account of his distrust in Hindus willingness to address the caste problem in India. He was a great supporter of the abolition of the caste system, having founded in 1942 The All-India Scheduled Castes Federation to unite all ‘untouchables’ in political party. After independence he became an architect of the Indian constitution passed in 1949. On the occasion he stated that: "I appeal to all Indians to be a nation by discarding castes, which have brought separation in social life and created jealousy and hatred." When he came back from the Sri Lanka conference in 1950 he made another historical statement: "In order to end their hardships, people should embrace Buddhism. I am going to devote the rest of my life to the revival and spread of Buddhism in India". This call was addressed mainly to the untouchables and the lower castes. He blamed Hinduism and its passive acceptance by the lower castes, as the cause of the perpetuation of the caste system. Buddhism could provide an egalitarian ground (one of the principles of Buddhism is the view that all beings have a Buddha nature and are equally equipped to attain enlightment), without completely discarding the traditional Indian religious devotion or introducing forced foreign ideas. In 1956 he wholly embraced Buddhism in a ceremony in which half a million untouchables proclaimed their conversion. Millions of untouchables followed his appeal and converted to Buddhism. In 1891 there were only 50.000 Buddhists in India, while in 1965 the figure raised to 4 million. Actually, the Wheel of Law at the center of the national flag refers to the Dharma-vinaya in Buddhas’ doctrine, and the official seal of the republic is the Lion Capital of Ashoka.

Despite this situation, Buddhism global health is solid and India can be credited for having provided the world with a religious philosophical system and practice that, while remaining deeply rooted into traditional Indian philosophy, has open ground for adaptation to radically different social and cultural realities. This adaptability has proven vital for Buddhism expansion and survival, a survival that in some phases of Indian history was strongly menaced by bigotry and religious persecution.
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SentenceMe Tech News

Vampires: The Romantic Invention

The French Revolution constituted for the conscience of the dominant aristocratic class a fall from innocence, and upturning of the natural chain of events that resounded all over Europe; the old regime became, in their imaginary, a paradise lost. This explains why some romantic poets born in the higher classes were keen on seeing themselves as faded aristocrats, expelled from their comfortable milieu by a reverse of fortune or a design of destiny. Byron and Shelley are the prime instances of this vital pose. In The Giaour he writes on a vampiric character: "The common crowd but see the gloom/ Of wayward deeds and fitting doom;/ The close observer can espy/A noble soul, and lineage high."

Byron departed from England leaving a trail of scandal over his marital conduct and since then saw himself as an exiled expatriate. Shelley was expelled from Oxford and he fell in disgrace by marrying an in-keeper’s daughter; he always struggled to reconcile his origin with his political ideas: "Shelley could find no way of resolving his own contradictory opinions" (Cronin, 2000).

This icon of the fallen aristocrat is rooted on another character revered by romantic poets: the fallen angel. As Mario Praz proves, miltonic Satan became the rebel figure of choice among romantic poets. Milton reversed the medieval idea of a hideous Satan and wrapped its figure with the epic grandeur of an angel fallen in disgrace. Many of the byronic heroes share with Milton’s Satan this fallen-from-grace condition, such as Lara: "There was in him a vital scorn of all:/
As if the worst had fall'n which could befall,/ stood a stranger in this breathing world,/An erring spirit from another hurl’d" ( Lara XVIII 315-16)

There is another social factor that is behind the formation of the romantic myth of the vampire. In the early nineteen century, the foundations of what would later become a mass society were laid; the expansion of the press and of the reading public produced an increased diffusion for literary works and fostered movements such as the Gothic and the sensation novel. Byron himself experienced the event of being turned into a proto-bestseller. The unification of literary taste and preferences that was a correlate to these social changes could not be more alien to the romantic notion of individual gusto and original sensibility. In order to combat these unifying forces, romantic poets revered the individual who stands outside society and is free from common concerns. Many of Byron’s heroes look down on the masses from above, even though they walk among them and do not lean towards wordsworthian escapades into nature; they achieve to remain untainted by the masses in a sort of exile within the world akin to that of a ghost or a dammed spirit. This self-definition of Manfred is revelatory:

"From my youth upwards
My spirit walk’d not with the souls of men,
Nor look’d upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh, (Manfred II, ii, 50-58)"

Not only Byron’s works contrived to produce the modern image of the vampire in relation to the Male Seducer archetype, but also some odd events in his life and the life of those surrounding him exercised a decisive influence. A critical study bundled with an anthology of vampire tales (Conde de Siruela, 2001) attributes to the short story The Vampire (1819) by John William Polidori the fixation of the "classical images of the literary vampire as a villanious, cold and enigmatic aristocrat; but, above all, perverse and fascinating for women". Mario Praz, in the same line, also states that Byron was "largely responsible for the vogue of vampirism". Polidori was the unfortunate doctor and personal assistant of Lord Byron who died half-crazy at 25. The idea for the tale published in 1819 came from the famous meetings at Villa Diodati on June 1816 between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Polidori, in what was probably the most influential gathering for fantastic fiction in the history of modern literature. In order to pass the stormy and ether-fuelled nights, they agreed to write each one a ghost story. Mary Shelley (who was then 17 years old) got during these nights the idea of what later became Frankenstein and Polidori wrote the tale The Vampire that he would publish three years later. The story appeared in the New Monthly Magazine falsely attributed by the editor to Lord Byron (taking advantages of the aura of Satanism that surrounded the poet in the popular view to promote the sales of the magazine). A misguided Goethe hailed the story as the best that Lord Byron had ever written. The tale was, actually, a covert portrait of Lord Byron disguised as the vampire Lord Ruthven, a cruel gambler and killer of innocent girls. Polidori had introduced in the story fragments from an autobiographical and revengeful novel called Glenarvon written by Caroline Lamb, an ex-lover of Byron. The Lord´s reaction was a threat to the editor and the denouncing of a commercial imposture with his name. Eventually Stoker´s Dracula (1897) blended, according to Siruela (2001), this tradition derived from Polidori´s Lord Ruthven with some old romano-hungarian tales of wandering dead and enchanted castles, fixating thus the modern images of the vampire.

The vampire is closely linked to another romantic archetype: the dissatisfied lover. Rafael Argullol summarizes its traits: "el enamorado romántico reconoce en la consumación amorosa el punto de inflexión a partir del cual la pasión muestra su faz desposedora y exterminadora.", i.e. the romantic lover begins to feel a sense of dissatisfaction and mortality at the very moment when his passion is fulfilled. This feeling prompts him to embark in a sentimental roller-coaster where each peak of satisfaction is followed by a valley of despair and the impulse to seek satisfaction in a new object of love in order to renew the faded passion (the extreme of this attitude is the character of Don Juan). The vampire goes one step further than the seducer: for him the loved one stands as an image of his own dissatisfaction and it must be destroyed at the very moment when the longing for her disappears; at the instant of consummation. Again Byron in Manfred expresses this transference, which Argullol opportunely labels as romantic self-mirroring: "I loved her, and destroy'd her! (211)". Keats conveys in his Ode on Melancholy the feeling of mortality that is hidden in the moment of pleasure for the romantic: "Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:/ Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,/ Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine". La belle dame sans merci is according to Argullol also a poem where "vida y muerte se vivifican y complementan mutuamente [...] se hallan en total simbiosis". But there is a crucial difference between Byron and Keats in their approach to the fatal lover: Byron’s characters are fatal males, epitomized in the vampire, while Keats’ characters are femmes fatales. This difference underlines a different attitude to gender issues: Byron liked to emanate a dominant masculinity which is imprinted in all his leading characters. Keats, however, had a passive approach to love, his poetic personas like to be seduced even if that means, as we have seen, to be killed. Byron is the male aristocrat who thinks all women are naturally his, they are his possessions and, as such, disposable at will. Keats, who disliked Byron’s Don Juan - in a letter to his brother, he referred to it as "Lord Byron's last flash poem", announces a more modern and non-patriarchal approach to love where the woman is free to be the seducer. Nevertheless, as we have seen, they both share the extreme notion of love as creation and destruction at the same time; and their characters, though of different gender, are vampire lovers. This different attitude is not only personal but it mirrors a wider and epochal distinction. Mario Praz has observed how the fatal and cruel lovers of the first half of the nineteenth century are chiefly males, while in the second half of the century the roles are gradually inverted until late century decadentism is dominated by femmes fatales. This literary process mirrors the advancement of social changes throughout the century, and the slow but continuous emancipation of love from patriarchal standards. Gender issues shift focus, but power and domination remain at the core of the portrayals of love even in the fully bourgeoisie society of the late nineteenth century. Goodland (2000) has explored the role of women as a redundant class subject to another classes and the gender/class dialectic found in the vampire.

Not only Byron and Keats were fascinated by the myth of the vampire, but we can find its presence in most romantic poets, even in the proto-romantic early Goethe. A list of authors who use such characters made by Twitchell (1981) comprises: Southey in Thalaba the destroyer, Coleridge in Christabel and Wordsworth in The Leech Gatherer.

As we have seen throughout this paper the figure of the vampire is shaped in the romantic period under the form of an ideological knot where many social forces converge: the French Revolution, an embryonic mass society, the decline of aristocracy and the gradual shifting apart of gender divisions from the patriarchal model. Therefore, it constitutes a myth that may be read as a battleground for the play of discourses of its era, shedding light on other romantic attitudes towards existence. As such it is subject to an analysis that, as new historicism maintain, is aware of the historicity of a text and the textuality of history.
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Technology News

Google Books in PDF


Wow this will blow some minds, especially over at the British Library. Google offers pdf download of out-of-copyright books.

Some concerns, though. The pdf format chosen is far from standard and it consists of a bunch of scanned images. This disallows format conversion or text extraction without advanced OCR.

One more effort, google.