Sherlock Holmes and Art Bell
69
homes of the aristocracy. His wanderings outside this metropolitan space, as in the
ventures to Dartmoor {Silver Blaze, The Hound o f the Baskervilles) or his retirement
to Sussex, are posed as departures to the hinterlands; there is no question that
London serves as a kind of center of human activity. Even the fabl ed rooms on
Baker Street exist as a kind of microcosmic heterotopia, as we are told that they
are simultaneously the chemical lab, concert hall, and shooting range of the famous
sleuth, in addition to their more traditional functions. Similarly, the city is the
home of a broad array of social types, from the impoverished urchins who comprise
the “Baker Street Irregulars” to the royalty Holmes occasionally serves (as in The
Adventure o f the Noble Bachelor).
Bell, as mentioned, operates from a compound in the Nevada desert, complete
with a high-tech broadcast studio. The desert is a kind of anti-metropolis; as
postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard points out, the desert is the space of the
void, of a kind of transcendent nothingness. To say that the desert alone comprises
Bell’s milieu is deceptive, though, as his real space is a set of networks—virtual,
telephonic, and broadcast—that renders his concrete physical space largely
irrelevant. Indeed, the fact that Bell’s rural isolation does not inhibit his status as a
locus of knowledge is evidence of one of the significant distinctions between a
Holmesian sensibility and the world of Bell. Bell chronicles extensive personal
travels in his autobiography—evidence, perhaps, of a cultured and cosmopolitan
figure—^but these are largely tangential to his primary venture. Indeed, part of the
appeal of Bell is his status as a trailer-dwelhng desert recluse, acting as a kind of
symbolic nexus rather than a flesh individual. Unlike Holmes, who is constantly
boarding a train, haihng a cab, or striding energetically through a thriving metropolis.
Bell acts a kind of antenna, pulling the signals into his isolated trailer and processing
them and thus also acting as his own information technology.
Of course, the status of London as the center of an empire is an historically
specific one, so it is appropriate to examine the other half of a milieu, the temporal
situation of each figure. Bell and Holmes share a position as figures at the fin-desiecle (different “siecles,” obviously) and also reflect the dawn of respective eras.
Holmes, who concludes his career shortly after World War I, stands at the final
glory years of the British empire and the dawn of the horrific carnage of two great
wars; in this sense, he operates within the last moments of a kind of European
world domination and enlightenment enthusiasm, one that will be tested and
dialectically complemented with genocide, environmental destruction, and the
eventual dominance of the rogue colony referenced in A Study in Scarlet and The
Valley o f Fear. In this sense. Holmes is a figure reflective of a moral and
methodological sensibility which is increasingly threatened by a world which
reflects a more complex, indeed dialectical variant of modernity.
Bell, on the other hand, operates within the era of “millennial panic,” as Arthur