The vanishing point: Sherlock Holmes and the ends of perspective

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Michael G. Levine

Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Monmartre,

where the accident of our both being in search of the

same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into

closer communion. We saw each other again and again.

Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Webster's Dictionary defines a vanishing point as "a point at which receding parallel lines seem to meet when represented in linear perspective." As a secondary meaning, it offers a less technical and more literal definition: "a point at which something disappears or ceases to exist." In what follows I would like to extend the initial definition beyond the sphere of visual representation and use it to describe the point in Arthur Conan Doyle's detective fiction where the various plot lines appear to converge, the apocalyptic moment at the end of his tales where Holmes finally reveals whodunit. Like pictures drawn in one-point perspective, such tales are usually thought to be rationally ordered and rigidly determined by the sense of an ending. Indeed, the teleological orientation and highly plotted nature of detective fiction in general have become such defining traits of the genre that many works ranging from Doyle's "The Musgrave Ritual" to gorges's "Death and the Compass" ironically take the plotting of points on a line as the thematic focus of their plot lines.(1) Needless to say, the horizon of meaning towards which these narratives tend marks the point at which the interest of the reader also seems to vanish.(2)

There is, however, another way of thinking about vanishing points in the context of detective fiction, a way of viewing them not simply as rationally plotted points of convergence, revelation, and resolution, but as points of significant coincidence. One might recall in this regard Poe's second Dupin story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," which opens with a quote from Novalis cited both in German and in English:

There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the

real ones. They rarely coincide [Seltenfallen sie zusammen].

Men and circumstances [Zufalle] generally modify the ideal

train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences

are equally imperfect. . . .(3)

Were these parallel series of events ever to coincide-and according to Novalis it seems they can and on rare occasions do-, their vanishing point would mark the site of a seemingly accidental encounter or coincidence [Zufall]. Yet, as Poe remarks in the opening lines of "Marie Roget," there are coincidences and then again there are coincidences.

There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers,

who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet

thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of

so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences,

the intellect has been unable to receive them. Such

sentiments--for the half-credences of which I speak have

never the full force of thought--such sentiments are seldom

thoroughly stifled unless by reference to the doctrine of

chance, or, as it is technically termed, the Calculus of Probabilities.

Now this Calculus is, in its essence, purely mathematical;

and thus we have the anomaly of the most rigidly

exact in science applied to the shadow and spirituality of the

most intangible in speculation. [emphasis in original](4)

Ironically, what Poe describes as "the most intangible in speculation" is itself nothing other than a tangent--that rare point in time where two entities belonging to absolutely different ontological spheres seem to touch. Moreover, what seems to distinguish mere concidence from the kind that startles even the calmest thinkers "into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural" is the tenuous articulation in the latter of accident and necessity. What is at stake in this kind of coincidence is not merely the conjunction of ideal and real "series of events," as Novalis seems to suggest, but the way one thinks about the very seriality of a series, about the narrative joints and tropological links which articulate and define a series in the first place.

As Richard Klein and William Warner, have argued, there can be no strictly causal way of explaining the particular concatenation of events one calls a coincidence. The momentary "touching" of two seemingly unrelated realms or events nevertheless appears

to be motivated by some significant necessity, some deep affinity

of meaning. The word [coincidence] itself is normally

used to describe the accidental character of some conjuncture,

in the sense of mere coincidence, but one distinguishes

it from accident itself because of the appearance of some resemblance

between two heterogeneous events. Whenever

that resemblance appears to acquire the strength of some motivated

necessity, then one might further speak, as Jung does,

of `significant coincidence.'

Significant coincidence may be defined as a conjuncture of

events so unlikely or implausible that to call it accident

seems less reasonable than to assume some intentional, motivated

connection. One may think of significant coincidence as