I tend to distrust Watson's dates more than anything else, since that would be the first thing any author would change if they wanted to obfuscate the true facts of a case in order to preserve some level of confidentiality and anonymity. I'm sure Watson always changed names and dates -- I would think less of him and his gentlemanly discretion if he didn't! So I'm not inclined to read too much into the apparent change in living quarters between this one and Illustrious Client. I doubt they actually occurred three months apart. Or even if they did, Watson might simply have swapped them chronologically, so that the knighthood Holmes recently declined could have been in response to his service and sufferings on the Greuner case :)
In general I am angst-averse, so I am content either imagining them both happy with friendship or both happy as lovers, but I don't want to imagine one of them wanting more and being rejected. That's not for me!
Garrideb -- given that I've just argued that Watson must have changed the participants' real names in these publications, "Garrideb" becomes Watson's invention. It's his idea of an eccentric, unusual, somewhat silly name. Perhaps a chance to emulate Charles Dickens and name his characters in outlandish ways that, through their sound, give an idea of the personalities they are attached to. Watson says at the beginning of the story that to his mind it has elements of comedy. It's never seemed very funny to me, but perhaps this is an invitation to read the text for signs of Watson's dry sense of humor, quietly on display in the details he alters or invents. The Garrideb case probably bears similarities to the real case that Holmes solved, but perhaps Watson also writes it at least in part as a joke, noting the odd thinness of the plot and poking a bit of fun at it.
The one and only time -- I take this to mean that this was the most extreme display of emotion that Holmes ever made toward Watson. He looks back on it as the moment in which they were most unguarded with one another. They shared the quiet, everyday intimacies of working and living together for years and of course felt confident in each other's affection, but outbursts of this level of passionate emotion were, it seems, vanishingly rare. Clearly Watson values the memory highly.
"you would not have got out of this room alive" -- I'm afraid that I think Holmes means it literally, in that moment. The whole tenor of the scene suggests to me that he is imagining himself making a revenge killing, not a self-defense killing. But he is of course speaking in a moment of extreme emotion, and fortunately he was never actually put in a situation where he would have been tempted to follow through on that kind of threat. Everybody in that room dodged a bullet that night.
Who knows if he would really have done it? I suspect that were Watson truly dying Holmes would have no attention to spare for Evans and he would have had plenty of time to run away before Holmes recovered from the paralysis of his despair. And of course words spoken in a state of fury are no trustworthy guide to what real actions any person would take. I find it very telling that, even though Holmes is armed with a gun, he does not fire on Evans once the man starts shooting at him and Watson. Instead he chooses to risk getting shot himself by rushing the man and he uses his gun to hit Evans rather than shoot him, and uses non-lethal force to disarm and subdue him even in a life-or-death situation of self-defense where both his and Watson's safety are at stake. So I think he clearly has deeply rooted instincts against excessive or directly lethal violence. Do I think it possible that Watson's murder would have provoked him to do something terrible? Yes, I think it very possible. Perhaps that is one reason he is so afraid of his own capacity for powerful emotion -- he is afraid of what he might be capable of. But fortunately for all concerned his actual actions were not immoral in the least. They made it through the crisis and thankfully nothing so dire ever happened again. Plus Watson sees how profoundly he is loved, which is pretty amazing.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-02-07 08:45 pm (UTC)In general I am angst-averse, so I am content either imagining them both happy with friendship or both happy as lovers, but I don't want to imagine one of them wanting more and being rejected. That's not for me!
Garrideb -- given that I've just argued that Watson must have changed the participants' real names in these publications, "Garrideb" becomes Watson's invention. It's his idea of an eccentric, unusual, somewhat silly name. Perhaps a chance to emulate Charles Dickens and name his characters in outlandish ways that, through their sound, give an idea of the personalities they are attached to. Watson says at the beginning of the story that to his mind it has elements of comedy. It's never seemed very funny to me, but perhaps this is an invitation to read the text for signs of Watson's dry sense of humor, quietly on display in the details he alters or invents. The Garrideb case probably bears similarities to the real case that Holmes solved, but perhaps Watson also writes it at least in part as a joke, noting the odd thinness of the plot and poking a bit of fun at it.
The one and only time -- I take this to mean that this was the most extreme display of emotion that Holmes ever made toward Watson. He looks back on it as the moment in which they were most unguarded with one another. They shared the quiet, everyday intimacies of working and living together for years and of course felt confident in each other's affection, but outbursts of this level of passionate emotion were, it seems, vanishingly rare. Clearly Watson values the memory highly.
"you would not have got out of this room alive" -- I'm afraid that I think Holmes means it literally, in that moment. The whole tenor of the scene suggests to me that he is imagining himself making a revenge killing, not a self-defense killing. But he is of course speaking in a moment of extreme emotion, and fortunately he was never actually put in a situation where he would have been tempted to follow through on that kind of threat. Everybody in that room dodged a bullet that night.
Who knows if he would really have done it? I suspect that were Watson truly dying Holmes would have no attention to spare for Evans and he would have had plenty of time to run away before Holmes recovered from the paralysis of his despair. And of course words spoken in a state of fury are no trustworthy guide to what real actions any person would take. I find it very telling that, even though Holmes is armed with a gun, he does not fire on Evans once the man starts shooting at him and Watson. Instead he chooses to risk getting shot himself by rushing the man and he uses his gun to hit Evans rather than shoot him, and uses non-lethal force to disarm and subdue him even in a life-or-death situation of self-defense where both his and Watson's safety are at stake. So I think he clearly has deeply rooted instincts against excessive or directly lethal violence. Do I think it possible that Watson's murder would have provoked him to do something terrible? Yes, I think it very possible. Perhaps that is one reason he is so afraid of his own capacity for powerful emotion -- he is afraid of what he might be capable of. But fortunately for all concerned his actual actions were not immoral in the least. They made it through the crisis and thankfully nothing so dire ever happened again. Plus Watson sees how profoundly he is loved, which is pretty amazing.