Of Baudelaire and Holmes
29
from the deadly clutches of the nefarious Lord Blackwood. In other words,
Ritchie attempts to create the illusion that the viewer is seeing the real Holmes,
and perhaps he succeeds.
In truth, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes bears only a surface resemblance
to Doyle’s vision of the world’s greatest detective. What Ritchie has done is
obvious—the new Holmes is an action figure—and this deserves little further
comment. What is more pressing is this: what is it within the fabric of popular
culture that accounts for the phenomenal popularity of a work that grossly
misrepresents the world’s greatest detective? How do we explain the reduction
of Sherlock Holmes to the level of an action hero? What accounts for the film’s
reliance upon spectacle, from beginning to end?
I accidentally arrived at an answer several years ago. I was preparing lecture
notes for Madame Bovary when I came across French Symbolist Charles
Baudelaire’s comments about a mid-nineteenth century French society that had
apparently lost its ability to appreciate the aesthetic and spiritual truths offered
in great literature. (Recall that Flaubert and Baudelaire had been accused of
violating public decency, Flaubert for Madame Bovary and Baudelaire for
Flowers of Evil.) Praising the French legal system for not punishing Flaubert,
Baudelaire commented, “This striking concern for Beauty, coming from men
whose faculties are primarily called upon to serve the Rightful and True, is a
very moving symptom, especially if one compares it with the burning appetites
of a society that has entirely forsworn all spiritual love and, forgetting its ancient
entrails, now only cares for its visceral organs” (337). Apparently, someone in
the courts found merit in Madame Bovary, likely reducing it to a didactic novel
condemning promiscuous women. Baudelaire and his Flowers of Evil, of course,
did not fare so well: he and his publisher were charged with offending public
morals and subsequently fined.
Understandably, Baudelaire was outraged by the public’s reaction to his and
Flaubert’s masterpieces, attributing this popular response to the rise of
materialism in French society:
For many years, the interest which the public is willing to devote to matters
of the spirit has considerably diminished . . . The last years of Louis-Philippe’s
reign saw the final outburst of a spirit still willing to be stimulated by the display
of imaginative powers; the new novelist, however, is confronted with a
completely worn-out public or, worse even, a stupefied and greedy audience,
whose only hatred is for fiction, and only love for material possessions (338).
While he had the reception of Flaubert’s novel in mind, Baudelaire was also
targeting a specific cultural phenomenon known as ennui: a pathological
boredom that afflicts materialistic societies, dulls spiritual and aesthetic
sensibilities, and lowers the reading audience to a “stupefied and greedy” level.
Consider, for instance, his poem “To the Reader” which he wrote in hopes
of alerting his reader to a culturally-imposed boredom that assumed demonic
dimensions, which, within the larger scope of his works, he attributes to the rise