Date of Meeting: 1st May 2023
Location of Meeting:
The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK
Attendees:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)
Apologies:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) confirmed he was present and refused to apologise.
Toast:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) provided the following toast to Watson's sexual prowess:
Some say Watson had one wife,
Some say he married six.
To be honest, we can't really tell:
Without clay there's no bricks.
However many wives he had,
We can all agree upon
The sexual prowess of our man -
Of good old Three-Con-John.
Presentation:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented the following paper on Unstuck Watson Theory:
Unstuck Watson Theory
LISTEN:
John H. Watson has come unstuck in time.
Watson has gone to sleep a multiple widower and woken up on his first wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1903 and come out another one in 1881. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1914. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the adventures in between...
Watson first came unstuck while the second Afghan war was in progress. Watson was an Assistant Surgeon in the war... There he was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery... This was when Watson first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light... then Watson swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light... then he swung into life again and stopped. He was a little boy taking a shower with his hairy father at the miners' camp in Ballarat...
The problems in Watson's testimony are myriad for those wish to establish a chronology of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. However, a recent rereading of Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut suggested to me a solution to many of these problems. Is it possible that, like Billy Pilgrim, Watson was "spastic in time" with "no control over where he is going next"?
In brief, for those unfamiliar with Billy Pilgrim - the central character of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 - he does not experience time the same way the rest of us do. Picture his life as the series of sounds taking place one after another on a vinyl record. Rather than passing through these events in order, Billy's consciousness jumps about from moment to moment, like a needle skipping about on the record at random. He replays snatches of his life over and over with no control over which part of his life he will experience next. [By no means does this explanation do justice to the work of Vonnegut. I urge you to stop reading this and go read his book if you haven't read it already.]
I once tried to create a Holmesian chronology which started from the premise that the facts Watson gave us in the Canon are all correct. The result was a book called "Watson Does Not Lie". It is a book which almost all Holmesian chronologists can agree is utter horse-shit. By taking Watson's word for everything, you end up with a chronology that involves many significant problems. But by reviewing these through the lens of Unstuck Watson Theory (hereafter U.W.T.) many of these problems may actually be resolved.
Before I proceed, I need to make one point very clear. In order for U.W.T. to be a viable explanation for Holmesian chronological issues, it is first necessary to establish that Billy Pilgrim was much better and keeping track of his life than Watson was. Despite finding the experience disorientating at times, Billy Pilgrim usually managed to keep the segments of his life coherent to more linear onlookers. Watson had a far more chaotic reaction to his Temporal Spasmodic Disorder. The confusion it caused him is what led to the confusion he created on the page.
Let us next examine some of the more famous chronological problems and how U.W.T. makes sense of them:
Multiple Marriages
The number of Watson's marriages is problematic for anyone who pays attention to the dates in the Canon. By my reckoning, Watson works out to have had at least six wives. Some of these marriages only lasted a few weeks. My explanations for this in Watson Does Not Lie were tenuous at best. However, it is difficult to make sense of the Canon if one tries to reduce the marriage count to just Mary Morstan and the mystery wife of 1903 ("January, 1903... The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife" - Sherlock Holmes, BLAN). If Mary was Watson's only pre-1903 wife, consider the following:
When Watson first shacks up with Holmes it seems clear that he has no wife. He describes himself as having "neither kith nor kin in England." (STUD)
John H. Watson and Mary Morstan become engaged at the end of SIGN. By my calculations, this is at the end of July 1888, and we are given every reason to believe that this is Watson's first marriage - no other wives are mentioned in the Canon.
However, in SCAN, which Watson states began on 20th March 1888, he says that he had drifted away from Holmes because of his marriage. This seems to suggest that Watson managed to marry Mary four months before he proposed to her.
But we know this can't be the case because in ENGR he refers to "the summer of ’89, not long after my marriage" suggesting that Watson actually married Mary in spring 1889.
U.W.T. immediately makes sense of this situation. When Watson states that he "had seen little of Holmes lately" because his "marriage had drifted us away from each other", this is because his consciousness had been passing through events sometime after spring 1889. Then, while "returning from a journey to a patient" he time-slipped to 20th March 1888 - a full year before he would get married and four months before he would meet his wife. From Watson's perspective this all made sense. It is only from our limited viewpoint that the dates seem confusing.
The Date of Wisteria Lodge
The Wisteria Lodge date is an infamous problem. FINA and EMPT make it clear that between 4th May 1891 and 1st April 1894 Holmes was on The Great Hiatus - that period of time when almost everyone believed Holmes was dead, but he was actually off having fun on a tour of Eurasia. However, Watson seems to explicitly state that Holmes travelled with him to Wisteria Lodge in 1892.
My previous explanation for this in "Watson Does Not Lie" is, frankly, ludicrous. But U.W.T. provides a much better answer. First, we need to consider where we get the date for this case from. What Watson actually states is:
"I find it recorded in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892. Holmes had received a telegram while we sat at our lunch, and he had scribbled a reply..."
Watson was relying on an entry he made in a diary when he wrote this story up in 1908. It seems obvious to me that the diary of a temporally unstuck individual might well be a chaotic book. Watson might well have been in March 1892 in his room, but as he travelled to the table to have lunch he could have time-slipped to any other date when Holmes was around. Watson sat down to lunch, and began idly writing in his diary. He could easily put the wrong date at the top of the page before realising he had time-slipped. He later returned to his diary to write up the day’s events, unaware he was jotting them down under the wrong date. Later, in 1908, Watson may well have found WIST recorded under that date, but it could have actually taken place any time during his life at 221b.
Knowledge of Moriarty in Valley of Fear
Most Holmesians are already aware of this chronological issue. In FINA, set in 1891, Watson is told for the first time about the existence and exploits of Professor James Moriarty. By the end of that tale, Moriarty is dead. However, in VALL Holmes, Watson and Inspector MacDonald discuss Moriarty in quite some detail. This would not be such a problem if VALL were not set in "the early days at the end of the '80's", several years before Watson had ever heard of the man.
U.W.T. makes sense of this. It is fair to assume that Holmes knew about Watson’s condition. Either Holmes would have been told by Watson or Holmes would have deduced it. In that light, Holmes’s opening gambit in this conversation is not at all remarkable. He says: "You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?" Rather than confirming a past conversation Holmes had had, Holmes was finding out from Watson whether his consciousness had passed through a later moment when he had revealed all. All of Watson's knowledge of Moriarty comes, not from a moment before FINA, but from his consciousness having already been through FINA before time-skipping its way back to VALL. Long before he arrived at Birlstone Manor, Watson had already experienced the later events which would lead to Moriarty’s death at the Reichenbach Falls. So it goes.
The Wrong Day
The start date of The Solitary Cyclist case is given in Watson’s introduction: “On referring to my note-book for the year 1895 I find that it was upon Saturday, the 23rd of April, that we first heard of Miss Violet Smith.” The problem is that 23rd April 1895 was a Tuesday, not a Saturday.
Again, U.W.T. makes sense of this. Watson may well have started off on a Saturday, 23rd of April. Perhaps in 1892 or 1898. It was there that he went on his adventure with Violet Smith. Then he time-slipped to some date in 1895. Picking up his notebook for that year, he wrote down the details of the story, failing to record the actual year it took place. Watson, then, is perfectly correct when he states that the details were found in his 1895 notebook under the date "Saturday, the 23rd of April". What he omits is that the events never took place in 1895 - that is just the year his consciousness happened to be when he wrote it down.
Dating REDH
The Red-Headed League can be dated to 27 June 1890 via the newspaper Jabez Wilson shows Holmes. However Watson says he called upon Holmes "one day in the autumn". Now we can see that Watson probably set off to visit Holmes in autumn but time-slipped on the way and arrived in summer.
The Wrong Day Again
In TWIS, Watson claims that 19th June 1889 was a Friday, when if fact it was Wednesday. He is talking to Isa Whitney at the time, who picks Watson up on the error. For a man who frequently time-slips, we can see how he could easily make this mistake.
I submit, then, that U.W.T. is not only a possible explanation of the chronological 'mistakes' we find in the Canon, it is the best available theory to explain them.
Watson licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: ‘Why me?’
‘That is a very Earthling question to ask, Dr Watson. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?’
‘Yes. There was one in the mouthpiece of Grant Munro’s pipe.’
Any other business:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) requested that people send him their Sherlockian Selfies for use in an upcoming Shingle of Southsea video. No one replied.
