Three Characters in Search of an Archetype: Aspects of the Trickster and the Flâneur in the Characterizations of Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House and Doctor Who

JPTV 1 (1) pp. 83–102 Intellect Limited 2013

Alec Charles University of Bedfordshire

Three characters in search of an archetype: Aspects of the trickster and the flâneur in the characterizations of Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House and Doctor Who

Abstract Keywords This article examines the relationship between C.G. Jung’s notion of the trickster and House M.D. the Baudelairean concept of the flâneur in the context of three iconic heroes of popular Sherlock Holmes culture – and in doing so explores the similarities between those three figures – Sherlock Doctor Who Holmes (from Conan Doyle’s original to Benedict Cumberbatch’s contemporary Jungian psychoanalysis interpretation of the role) and the heroes of the television series House M.D. and trickster Doctor Who. It suggests that by applying these models to these three characters – flâneur these eccentric and brilliant and apparently emotionally stunted outcasts – we may discover in these figures greater depths than had at first met the eye.

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Jung and easily freudened The work of C.G. Jung is generally rather less popular than that of his mentor, colleague and eventual rival Sigmund Freud in the analysis (and in the practice) of popular culture. Freudian theory has, often via the work of Jacques Lacan, informed such thinkers as Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Christian Metz and Slavoj Žižek in their reflections upon cultural interpellation, gendered discourse and cinematic pleasure and perversion; Freudian readings are, for example, common enough in analyses of such populist television dramas as Star Trek (1966–69) – see Greven (2009) – Battlestar Galactica (2004–09) – see Peirse (2008) – and Doctor Who (1963–) – see Charles (2011). It is, after all, from Freud rather than Jung that even the great Sherlock Holmes seeks help with his cocaine addiction in Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974); and in Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006) – a detective romp in early twentieth century New York – it is Freud (rather than the rather sinister Jung) from whom the Holmesian hero accepts advice. Jung’s work has, up until recently, offered little attraction to cultural critics. This may at first sight appear incongruous: Jung tends to focus on cultural issues rather more than Freud – as Hauke (2000: 5) points out, although Jung’s career began ‘immersed deeper in psychiatry than […] Freud’, he later ‘developed his thinking in the direction of cultural concerns’. There may be a number of reasons for Jung’s relative lack of popularity in contemporary cultural theory, not the least of which is that some of Jung’s more mystical notions are no longer entirely convincing; it may also be the case that Freud’s modes of analysis lend themselves better to the reduc- tive and deconstructive fashions of much contemporary cultural theory than do the often convoluted architectures of Jung’s symbological systems. Furthermore, the apparent resistance of Jungian structures and archetypes to the effects of cultural, social and economic history and their consequent divorce from their ideological contexts sits uneasily with a mode of cultural criticism which equates the ignorance of history with a sophistic syncretism. It seems clear that though the Jungian model may purport to refute history, historicity nevertheless informs the manifestations of Jung’s system of archetypes. In these terms, this article sees Jungian archetypes not as immu- tably universal but as icons generated by cultural traditions, and therefore as subject to cultural evolution: indeed, this article will conclude by suggest- ing that these icons have, in the context of developing gender roles within western societies, not only adjusted to that context but have discovered within that context possibilities for the reconciliation of their own defining contradictions – and may therefore eventually evolve to the point of their own perfection and extinction. Indeed the usefulness of such archetypes within critical argumentation may not reside in their intended psychological universality but in their cultural specificity, a specificity from which they originally emerged – and which may therefore be seen to underpin their alignment with popular cultural perspectives and tastes. This article would therefore hope to offer a contribution towards a grow- ing trend in the uses of Jung in cultural criticism, one which attempts to reconcile Jung’s work with contemporary theoretical concerns. In recent years, such writers as Hockley, Hauke, Bassil-Morozow and Rowland have spear- headed something of a renaissance in Jungian cultural analysis – or, rather, as their work will often emphasize, in specifically post-Jungian analysis. Gone are the often somewhat surreal and baroque indulgences of Jung’s meditations,

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replaced by a productively pragmatic deployment of the continuingly productive tools of interpretation devised by Carl Jung. Hauke (2000: 1) explicitly sites Jung’s work within its historical context as ‘a response to modernity’ (emphasis in the original) and stresses that contemporary Jungian cultural critics would therefore be rereading Jung ‘in a postmodern frame’ (Hauke 2000: 9). In transcending a literalist or funda- mentalist approach to Jung’s work, such perspectives allow that work to enjoy a renewed relevance to contemporary culture and cultural theory; and what seems significant is not only what Jung tells us about popular culture but also what the prevalence of intentional or unintended echoes and exemplars of Jungian archetypes in popular culture may tell us about the ongoing usefulness and pertinence of Jungian theory. Although Jungian perspectives have lately gained some increasing currency in, for example, the critical interpretations of anglophone screen science fiction and fantasy, these approaches have tended to focus on American productions. Rowland (2009), for instance, interestingly deploys Jung’s archetypes of senex and puer to analyse Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). It may be that US productions are particularly open to such readings – that the overt self- mythologizations of such series as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99) and Babylon 5 (1994–98) lend themselves closely to Jungian positions. Fans have suggested that both those series were directly influenced by Jung’s work and Babylon 5’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski, has said in online discussions with fans that he named its lead villains the Shadows ‘after the Jungian notion of the shadow’. In October 2012, Mike Rugnetta produced a short film for PBS Digital Studios in which he argued that American Doctor Who fandom is a form of religion. It may be the case that American fandoms generally assume devoutly mythologizing positions, positions which might foster Jungian approaches – when, as Goethals (1981: 125) put it, TV becomes ‘a substitute for sacraments’ and thus offers a secular alternative within a fundamentally religious culture. Whatever the reason, Jung’s work has clearly enjoyed a particular impact upon popular American science-fiction television – in terms of its industry, its fandom and its theorists. Jung’s relative impact on American culture is perhaps unsurprising: he, after all, had always seemed rather most positive about the United States than had Freud. There, however, of course remains some stateside resistance to Jungian approaches, not only among academics but also within fandoms. Fan cultures tend to embrace critical interpretations that offer academic validation to their amateurish interests, and to reject those that contradict their own strongly- held readings of their favoured texts. This may be, as Hills (2002: 3) puts it, ‘why fans don’t like academics’. Fredericksen (2011: 99), for example, notes one Star Wars fan’s particularly vociferous reaction to his reading of George Lucas’s films – describing the Jungian theorist as ‘full of crap’. The self-conscious mythology of the Star Wars saga (Lucas et al., 1977–) has nevertheless, like that of Star Trek, prompted extensive Jungian reflections. One might suppose that those forms of popular screen culture that have attracted the most fanatical devotion from some members of their audiences are those most ripe for a mode of analysis fascinated by ritual and myth. Singh (2011: 173), for example, employs Jung’s concept of the shadow in his exploration of the development of Han Solo’s character in Star Wars. Jones (1998: 307–09) meanwhile invokes Jung’s notions of the shadow to inform his analysis of Star Trek’s Mr Spock. Hockley (2001: 21) goes on to describe

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the exploration of Spock’s attempt to balance thinking and feeling in the first Star Trek film (Wise, 1979) as ‘a very Jungian message’. Hockley (2007: 92) later develops a parallel juxtaposition – and its deconstruction – when he writes of Star Trek’s blurring of ‘the distinction between what is human and what is machine’. As Hauke (2005: 75) argues, the issue of the oppositional relationship between thinking and feeling, or mechanical intellect and human emotion, has become, from a Jungian perspective, a key feature of postmodern culture; and this is an issue upon which this article will centrally reflect. But why try to impose Jungian archetypes on contemporary popular television at all? In a Jungian essay on television analysis, Polette (2004: 94) points out that, although ‘Jung did not write about TV’, he offers a method of analysis which may allow us to ‘see through our accepted notions of “what is” in order to discover the archetypal dynamics informing the underlying structures of appearances’. John Fiske (1989: 36), in his classic study of Television Culture, notes that television’s conventions of representation ‘have developed in order to disguise the “constructedness” of the reality it offers, and therefore the arbitrariness of the ideology that is mapped onto it’ – and argues that a critical analysis of such representations might usefully deconstruct these conventions. In these terms Jungian methods might be seen to offer one such mode of reinterpretation. These methods do not contradict but might usefully complement already prevalent modes of analysis which see notions of star- dom and of genre both in terms of their iconic status and in terms of the contradictions inherent within, and therefore the creatively dynamic instabil- ity of, that status. Jung’s notion of psychological archetypes might also, rather more prag- matically, allow television scholarship and industry a methodology by which to reconcile crucial tensions between those economic imperatives that seek to homogenize television’s products, meanings and audiences, and the aesthetic demand for the individuation of cultural and individual (and brand) identities within that homogeneity. Ang (1991: 61) suggests that the international discourse of television as a commercial and demographic commodity is under- pinned by the ‘notion that the television audience is a taxonomic collective’ but argues that this objectification of the TV audience is constantly subverted by the fact that this constructed audience in truth comprises ‘the subjective moment of actual people watching television’. We might therefore imagine that a mode of addressing television audiences which both is psychologically individuating (indeed which, in Jungian terms, is all about psychological individuation) and at the same time homogenizes those audiences into a global commodity (or, for Jung, a universal symbology) would appeal significantly to the international television industry. Such a synthesis of homogenization and individuation (or the possibility of individually nuanced identities being promoted through that homogenization) might address what Ang (1989: 2) once depicted as the perceived ‘threat posed by American-style commercial culture against “authentic” national cultures and identities’. This synthesis seems to have been evolving for some time through the transatlantic cross- fertilization of television formats and genres, and it should be noted that this is a dialogical rather than a one-way process – whether in the relationship between the work of Larry David and Ricky Gervais, or in the ocean-hopping hits produced by the likes of Chris Carter, Joss Whedon, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat. Thus McCabe (2000: 141) has been able to write of the way in which ‘nascent British identities’ are ‘discursively negotiated’ by imported American television; and one might suggest that the converse is also the

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case – that American identities may find space for their own development within imported British TV products. There seems something faintly mythical in this mode of global multiculturalism; and yet there is also something aspirationally postmodern in such pluralist possibilities. It is through such aspirations (at once commercially and culturally progressive) that, as Barker (1997: 226) suggests, ‘global television’ might be seen to ‘contribute to an increase in symbolic resources for identity formation and thus post-traditional multiple identities’. This article will examine how certain figures from popular television might sustain the inscription of such plural and contradictory identities and archetypes. These unlikely possibilities may perhaps be maintained by dynamic and generative tensions within popular television genres. John Fiske (1989: 90) wrote that

… the structure of a television text and its ideological role in a capital- ist society may well try hard to iron out and resolve the contradictions within it, but, paradoxically, its popularity within that society depends upon its failure to achieve this end successfully.

Tulloch (1990: 74) has similarly argued that ‘the complexity of discourses within genres allows the “excessive” to be exposed and contained at the same time’ – this excess is, like the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, at once licensed (it is reassuringly constrained) and always threatening to overflow the bounds imposed upon it. It very closely approximates, in these terms, the Jungian notion of the trickster, which this article will go on to explore. Tulloch (1990: 66) notes that ‘TV drama has shown a special concern with social roles (such as doctors and other “scientific” helpers) that tame and naturalize the supercultural’. But in the figures of those particular scientists and doctors whom this article will examine – Holmes, House and Who – we may discover, by contrast, the trickster-esque possibilities of the superses- sion of cultural normativity. This potential for subversion informs, for example, Tulloch’s depiction of Doctor Who as a ‘strangely experimenting outcast standing for the human spirit against the dull […] consensual state of social contingency’ (Tulloch 1990: 80) – a description which could apply as well to Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House or to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes. Tulloch (1990: 81) goes on to suggest that the success of TV genres based around such figures is founded upon the ‘tension between scientific cognition and romantic difference’. Cooke (2003: 63) sees the early incarna- tions of Doctor Who as decidedly ‘anti-establishment figures’ and House and Holmes clearly share this characteristic; though all are also, of course, figures of the scientific establishment. Such tricksters stand both within and outside the hegemony. As, for example, Bassil-Morozow (2012: 2) observes, Charlie Chaplin’s tramp is himself a product of the hierarchies of industrial modernity from which he is excluded and which he apparently inadvertently subverts. It is perhaps worth noting that Patrick Troughton’s interpretation of the role of Doctor Who was explicitly based on Chaplin’s tramp; and there might indeed even be hints of Chaplin in Gregory House’s cane-dependent gait. These trickster figures, at once inside and opposed to the establishment, simultaneously disrupt and mediate between hegemonic and rationalistic homogeneity and radical individuation. In doing so, they may, paradoxically, promote a globalism – a universalism – which they appear both to adore and to deplore.

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Points of convergence A man alienated from his family and home, unable to sustain romantic relationships, an eccentric who surrounds himself with bright, beautiful, young people, a charismatic genius undoubtedly, capable of great leaps of intuitive thought, an inspiration to others and yet also a dangerous role model, a rebel and a risk-taker, a nonconformist, a coldly logical scientist-hero, a figure of extraordinary wit and extraordinary loneliness, a liar and a cheat. This Victorian detective, this New Jersey medic and this Gallifreyan time-traveller appear to have an improbable number of features in common. This article examines the convergence of the characters of three of contemporary television’s most popular characters: Sherlock Holmes – most recently seen on British television in Sherlock (2010–); Dr Gregory House – from House M.D. (2005–12); and Doctor Who – from Doctor Who (1963–). Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who have featured in both British and American television and film productions; Gregory House is an iconic modern American character played by a well-known British actor. These three icons of different ages, genres and provenance appear to tran- scend any transatlantic differences and to embody a significant number of common characteristics; but perhaps the most significant characteristic that they share is their iconicity. This article explores that iconicity in relation to a number of apparently pertinent cultural models through an interdisciplinary approach that combines, and attempts to reconcile, the aesthetic and political philosophy of Baudelaire and Benjamin with the psychoanalytic theory of Jung and his followers within the context of a media analysis that moves towards issues of gender politics. It should be made clear from the start that these figures and the archetypes they appear to approximate are all primarily masculine; as a result, the male pronoun will, for the most part, be applied. For the most part: that is, until this argument concludes with the idea that this masculinity is not necessarily as clear-cut as it might at first appear. There are some clear points of convergence between these three characters. Much has, for example, been written of the fact that the characteri- zation of Dr Gregory House was based on Sherlock Holmes (see, for example, Rowland (2011)) – and the series House M.D. is itself peppered with Holmesian references – from echoes of the main characters’ names (Holmes/House, Watson/Wilson) to allusions to Moriarty in the 2006 episode ‘No Reason’ and Irene Adler in the 2008 episode ‘Joy to the World’. There are also clear links between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who; the latter’s debt to the former is at its most overt in the 1977 story ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ – a mystery set in Victorian London, in which Tom Baker’s Doctor goes as far as to don a deerstalker and a Holmesian cloak. There are other, less overwhelming references: such as the ‘Holmesian’ style of dress and behaviour which Jon Pertwee adopted in the role in the early 1970s (Tulloch and Alvarado 1983: 100). In ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’ (1970) Pertwee’s Doctor points out to his colleague Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, a character intended as a Watson to Pertwee’s Holmes, that he is not himself ‘exactly a little Sherlock Holmes’. The following year saw the introduction to the series of the arch-villain the Master, conceived as a ‘Moriarty figure’ to the Doctor’s Holmes (Tulloch and Alvarado 1983: 229). Indeed, in the Doctor Who spin-off novels All-Consuming Fire and Happy Endings Holmes and Watson join the Doctor on his adventures.

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Tom Baker himself went on to play Holmes in the BBC’s 1982 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (Duguid, 1982); and Peter Cushing (who had played Doctor Who on the cinema screen in 1965 and 1966) also played Sherlock Holmes on film in 1959 and on TV in 1968 and 1984. Since 2010 Doctor Who screenwriters Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have collaborated to create Sherlock, a modern-day reimagining of the adventures of Conan Dole’s detective; a series starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role – an actor who, according to the Daily Express (Catt 2012), was ‘being lined up to play Doctor Who’s deadly foe the Master’. In Moffat’s Doctor Who episode ‘The Snowmen’ (2012) Matt Smith’s Doctor impersonates Holmes, complete with deerstalker, cape and an accompanying musical allusion to Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. Other coincidences accumulate. House star Hugh Laurie’s former comedy partner Stephen Fry played Holmes’s brother Mycroft in Guy Ritchie’s 2011 film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and was reported by the BBC on 25 June 2005 to be in talks to write for Doctor Who, though his episode never materialized. One of the regulars in House, Dr Foreman, shares his name with that adopted by the Time Lord in his first TV appearance in 1963; furthermore, Foreman’s room-mate, Dr Taub, admits in the 2011 episode ‘Bombshells’ to staying up till three in the morning because ‘that’s when classic Doctor Who comes on the BBC’. Doctor Who and House M.D. have both developed elements from Conan Doyle’s original premise for Sherlock Holmes; but Holmes himself has also grown. Sherlock Holmes is no longer merely Conan Doyle’s original portrait – no more than Hamlet still resembles Richard Burbage or William Hartnell is still Doctor Who. He is Basil Rathbone, Christopher Plummer, Peter Cook, John Cleese, Jeremy Brett, Robert Downey Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, to name but a few. Indeed one might suppose that these versions of the character have interacted dynamically with other characters – such as Gregory House and Doctor Who – which have been inspired by Holmesian traits and which have gone on to inspire the ongoing development of that original character. Tom Baker’s Sherlock Holmes, for example, clearly owes much to his time as Doctor Who (Peter Cushing’s rather less so); Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s Sherlock develops directly out of their work on Doctor Who; Cumberbatch’s Holmes owes something to House’s misanthropy; Matt Smith’s Doctor shares something of House’s scepticism – ‘Everybody lies,’ says House – ‘The Doctor lies,’ says everybody. Rowland (2011: 133) has suggested that ‘unlike House, Holmes is not violently unhappy’ – although one might observe that violent unhappi- ness, a manic ennui, has often characterized portrayals of the latter character. Rowland (2011: 148) has argued for a differentiation between House and Holmes in the way they relate to their closest friends: ‘House […] drives away his Watson, Wilson. Holmes treats Watson as a friend.’ Yet Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’ coldly tricks his friend into believing that he (Holmes) is dying; in ‘Half-Wit’ House is similarly perfectly happy for his friends and colleagues to believe he has terminal cancer and in ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’ he tricks them into thinking he has syphilis. In ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ (2012) Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes uses Watson as an unwit- ting guinea pig in an experiment involving a dangerous hallucinogen in a way that recalls the numerous occasions on which House drugs Wilson – in, for example, ‘Resignation’ (2007), ‘Known Unknowns’ (2009), ‘Larger than Life’ (2011) and ‘Holding On’ (2012).

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The Gallifreyan Doctor treats his friends with similar levels of exploitative detachment. Indeed, at the end of the programme’s 2011 season the Doctor allows his companions to think he is dead. The Dream Lord – a shadow- aspect of the Doctor’s own personality in the 2010 episode ‘Amy’s Choice’ – suggests that the Doctor’s friendships with his companions are transitory and contingent: ‘Friends are people you stay in touch with. Your friends never see you again once they’ve grown up.’ As his arch-enemy Davros points out in ‘Journey’s End’ (2008), though he claims to abhor violence, the Doctor continues to ‘take ordinary people and […] fashion them into weapons’ – transforming his travelling companions ‘into murderers’. In a similar way Gregory House’s influence turns his younger colleagues into lesser versions of himself – emotionally distant, unable to accept author- ity except his own, incapable of sustaining personal relationships – and in one case becoming an actual murderer, when his protégé Robert Chase (played by Jesse Spencer) advertently causes the death of one of his patients, a genocidal dictator, in the 2009 episode ‘The Tyrant’.

No hard feelings These three figures share a number of very obvious traits: their nonconformity, their scientific logic and their resultant lack of demonstrable emotion. The detective, as Poirot puts it, ‘cares for no one’ (Christie 1957: 126) and Holmes appears to have purged his logical psyche of any extraneous senti- ment (Doyle 1992a: 117): ‘all emotions were abhorrent to his cold, precise […] mind. He was […] the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but, as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position.’ As Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes explains in ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ (2012): ‘I’ve always been able to […] divorce myself from feelings.’ The detective thus tends to shun sentimental, romantic, sexual and emotional attachments. In the 1975 Doctor Who story ‘The Pyramids of Mars’ Tom Baker’s Doctor announces: ‘I’m not a human being. I walk in eternity.’ This is a character who, as he explains in the 2005 episode ‘Rose’, can feel ‘the ground beneath our feet […] spinning at a thousand miles an hour […] the entire planet […] hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour’. This extraordinary ability to feel – this intuition – is precisely what divorces him from normal human feeling. As one character says in ‘Family of Blood’ (2007), ‘he’s like fire and ice […] He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe.’ Yet this is not merely a triumph of the intellect: his apparent inability to connect with others masks a superhuman degree of intuition and empathy which means that, far from him being unable to relate to others, others cannot relate to or connect with him. As Hodge (1988: 40) points out, ‘Even Doctor Who – that almost perfect example of intellect – is guided by his feelings for others.’ Indeed he seems much more guided by such feelings than most characters, fictive or real: and it is that which distances him from others and which he therefore attempts to conceal. Thus he remains a ‘wanderer […] in the fourth dimension’ – an ‘exile’ – as William Hartnell puts it in ‘An Unearthly Child’ (1963), or, as Tom Baker says in ‘City of Death’ (1979), a ‘perpetual outsider’ or, as he is dubbed in ‘New Earth’ (2006), a ‘lonely god’. In the pilot episode of House M.D. (2004), Hugh Laurie’s eponymous medic announces that ‘treating illnesses is why we became doctors. Treating patients is what makes most doctors miserable.’ Yet, although House may

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claim that he is interested only in treating diseases – and not in treating patients – his methods (including searches of his patients’ homes) suggests an almost Freudian obsession with their personal back stories. Indeed, as one character observes in the 2012 episode ‘Nobody’s Fault’, ‘his complete lack of concern is evidence of his deep concern’. Indeed, despite their protestations of emotional detachment, each of these characters demonstrates extraordinary personal commitment to indi- viduals. Doctor Who so often endangers the universe in order to save a single friend’s life, and even Gregory House and Sherlock Holmes repeatedly take risks for the sake of their friends: House risks his own life in an attempt to save Wilson’s girlfriend in ‘Wilson’s Heart’ (2008); Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes proceeds to his apparent death at the end of ‘The Reichenbach Fall’ (2012) explicitly in order to save his friend Dr Watson. This is perhaps precisely why they constantly have to deny or denigrate any such sentimental attachment. Essentially, these characters announce that they will sacrifice anything but their individual integrity: and this sets them apart from all others. In a 2005 episode of House M.D. entitled ‘Kids’, Hugh Laurie’s protagonist is interview- ing an applicant to join his medical team. The candidate in question consid- ers himself something of a nonconformist and is shocked to discover that, as he sees it, House has ‘a problem with nonconformity’. House responds in his typically abrasive style: ‘I can’t remember the last time I saw a twenty- something kid with a tattoo of an Asian letter on his wrist. You are one wicked free thinker. You want to be a rebel? Stop being cool.’ Wynhausen et al. (2011: 269–86) argue that House only accepts nonconformity when it reflects knowledge and intelligence. One might go further and suggest that he does not value nonconformity per se but only values the cleverness that sometimes accompanies it. House, Holmes and Doctor Who are not nonconformist because it is ‘cool’. We may note that the less success- ful interpretations of Doctor Who involved a self-conscious, studied attempt at nonconformity. By contrast, when Matt Smith’s Doctor justifies his desire to wear a bow tie or a fez on the grounds that such accoutrements are ‘cool’ he is not trying to be ‘cool’ but is simply trying to rationalize his naturally nonconformist sartorial taste. These characters therefore may happen for the most part to be nonconformist only because they would never have thought of the imperative to conform – because their existential integrity is all they have. Yet certain readings might suggest that these icons of nonconformity are conforming not only to their own iconicity but to a shared typology – even to an ancient archetypal model, one which might be claimed to pre-date their own individuality by some centuries or even millennia.

Ancient and yet Jung Storr (1991: 53) has suggested that the Jungian notion of the shadow offers a personification that arises from an ‘infantile tendency […] to divide persons into black and white categories’ – just as populist fiction does in the rendition of such characters (here specifically cited by Storr) as Holmes and Moriarty. We might therefore usefully look to the work of C.G. Jung – and in particular to his theory of archetypes – in attempting, at first, to match these fictive figures to broader iconic models (without ignoring the caveat that these mappings can only ever be approximate, provisional and incomplete – but nevertheless possibly fruitful).

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Anderson (1989: 136) has pointed out that Sherlock Holmes ‘is an archetype’ that ‘had been slowly evolving for a long time’ before Conan Doyle ever first put pen to paper. Anderson (1989: 136, 140) therefore argues that the ‘Holmes figure has appeared in a number of reincarnations already, and seems likely to go on indefinitely’ and specifically observes that ‘science fiction […] is positively loaded with Holmes types’. Anderson (1989: 137–38) goes on to draw direct comparison between Holmes and two mythological figures that correspond closely to Jung’s concept of the senex – ‘the wise old man, the superior master and teacher, the archetype of the spirit’ (Jung 1991: 35) – Merlin and Odin:

Is Merlin […] not Holmesian in several ways? […] Still more Holmesian is the Northern god of Odin […] he fights the powers of evil with cunning rather than with spear […] he presides over the otherwise riot- ous feasting in Valhalla but does not otherwise join in […] he is the brooding foreknower of the inevitable future.

These characteristics might just as easily fit Gregory House – or for that matter Doctor Who – those otherworldly geniuses, those champions of the cerebral over the physical, those seers, those strangers in crowds. At the end of Michael Moorcock’s Doctor Who novel The Coming of the Terraphiles (2011: 341), the eleventh incarnation of the eponymous protagonist observes that ‘everywhere, throughout the multiverse there are people like us trying to put things right or sometimes just trying to stop things getting any worse – echoes of echoes, shadows of shadows. Call some archetypes. Jung did. But maybe we’re all archetypes.’ There is clearly a temptation – or at least a tendency – to view these characters in such archetypal terms. Although Rafer (2007: 125), invoking Jung, has written of the ‘mythic character of the Doctor’, an explicit interest in the works of C.G. Jung appears somewhat limited in the Doctor Who canon. As Tulloch and Jenkins (1995: 140) have pointed out, the writer Christopher Bailey offers perhaps the programme’s most overt references to Jung. Bailey’s interest in Jungian archetypes appears related to his background in Buddhism, a subject which also, of course, fascinated Jung – see, for example, his section on mandala symbolism in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Jung 1991: 355–84). A stal- wart writer, producer and executive producer of the series, Barry Letts also extended his keen interest in Buddhism (as evidenced most clearly in his 1974 story ‘Planet of the Spiders’, an adventure set partly in a Buddhist monastery) into a Jungian dimension: his 1996 Doctor Who radio series ‘The Ghosts of N-Space’ calls upon Jung’s notion of synchronicity; Jung is also invoked in his 2005 Doctor Who novel The Island of Death. Cited by Tulloch and Alvarado (1983: 273), Christopher Bailey has observed that ‘in Jungian psychology […] the highest level of the hero is the wise old man, who has wisdom and insight into things’ and has argued that the character of the series’ protagonist is at its most interesting when it approximates this archetype – in Jungian terms, the senex. Hodge (1988: 40) has similarly described the character of the Doctor as ‘the best possible example of the shaman, the wizard-king, the wise magician’. Echoing Anderson on Holmes, Hodge has added that ‘such phrases may elicit thoughts of Merlin […] but the most potent wizard, king of the gods, master-by-force-of-knowledge-and- intellect is […] Odin […] He rules more by the power of what he knows […] than by his physical power’ [emphasis in original]. We may note that Odin

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was not just a wise old man but also an eccentric and a wanderer – and that he and Loki, the shape-shifting trickster-god of Norse mythology, are thought to have evolved out of the same figure. Odin is then both senex and trickster (and his representation in, for example, Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (2001) very clearly fits this dual model); and in this sense he perhaps approximates the character of the Doctor, or of Gregory House for that matter, rather more closely than James Hodge might have imagined. But other archetypes also apply to these characters. Charles (2007: 119) has described the sexless and ageless figure of the Doctor as a ‘boy who never grows up’ – and this character seems at once perpetually young and immeas- urably old, or, as he is described in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ (2012), ‘an ageless god who insists on the face of a twelve-year-old’. As the Doctor is asked in the 2007 episode ‘The Shakespeare Code’: ‘How can a man so young have eyes so old?’ The ‘boy’s own’ adventures of the sulky and sexually immature Sherlock Holmes also seem to put that character into that category. Porterfield (2011: 117) similarly sees Gregory House as ‘a typical Puer Aeternus, Jung’s archetype of the eternal child, the adult who refuses to grow up’. Beebe (2011: 171), meanwhile, notes how Dr Gregory House fulfils Jung’s puer, senex and trickster models all at the same time. It seems, in particular, that the trickster may be the most apposite aspect of this mix.

Same old tricks It may be that the senex and puer, while dependent upon each other for balance, can only be reconciled into the possibility of coexistence by the paradoxical figure of the trickster – a figure that inscribes both aspects in a dynamic and dialectic suspension. The Jungian figure of the trickster clearly has significant currency in the representation and interpretation of the characteristics shared at least by Doctors House and Who. Waddell (2011: 59), for example, describes Dr Gregory House as demonstrating ‘the embodiment of trickster energy; a boundary transgressor compelled to inflict suffering in order to heal and provoke self-reflection in others’. Although the Doctor Who screenwriter Christopher Bailey (cited above) noted his preference for the portrayal of the Doctor as a senex figure, his two stories for the series – ‘Kinda’ (1982) and ‘Snakedance’ (1983) – both feature trickster figures; the first involving a tribal jester specifically referred to as the Trickster in the screenplay, the second including an extraterrestrial Punch and Judy show. In both stories the senex role is taken by characters other than the Doctor, by wise and ancient figures, part shaman, part outcast. The Doctor’s role – though inwardly wise – is outwardly foolish: in the former story, when asked if he is an idiot, he responds that he supposes he must be. The same story glosses the trickster role: ‘the clown/jester’s a familiar figure, anthropologically speaking. He diffuses a potential source of conflict through mockery and ridicule.’ Thus the trickster, though a fool, serves a key sociocultural function. This is, in part at least, exactly what the Doctor does. Patrick Troughton and Sylvester McCoy’s interpretations of the Doctor have perhaps most clearly fitted the trickster model – as perhaps did Tom Baker’s portrait of the Time Lord at those times when his nerv- ous energy eclipsed his studied insouciance. More recently, Matt Smith’s Doctor has assumed the mantle of the trickster: he is, as he puts it in

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‘The Big Bang’ (2010), a ‘daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away’ – not a wise old man, but a foolish one, an erstwhile senex who now seems little more than, as he says in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ (2010), ‘a mad man with a box’. In Moffat’s ‘The Pandorica Opens’ (2010) the Doctor speaks of a mythical box called the Pandorica in which is said to be imprisoned ‘a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing’. This über- trickster was, he says, itself ‘tricked’ into getting trapped in the Pandorica by a ‘good wizard’ – to which statement one of his companions retorts that ‘good wizards in fairy tales […] always turn out to be him’. When our heroes discover the Pandorica and it eventually opens, they find it is empty – ready to imprison its destined captive, the Doctor himself. In this sense the Doctor is both the trickster (the victim of the Pandorica) and the wizard (by pursuing the legend he has ostensibly tricked himself into this fate). When Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor posed as the great wizard Merlin in ‘Battlefield’ (1989) he seemed rather more trickster-like than wizardly – closer to Colin Morgan’s mercurial Merlin in the BBC series of the same name (2008–) than to Nicol Williamson’s shamanic figure from the film Excalibur (Boorman, 1981) – the latter incidentally also played Holmes in 1976. The Doctor may pose as a divine miracle-worker but in the end he seems little more than a mischievous conjurer. When in ‘The Dæmons’ (1971) he briefly assumes the mantle of ‘the great wizard Qui-Quae-Quod’ he is swiftly exposed as a charlatan. Jung (1991: 255) notes the trickster’s ability to shift its shape, a power not unlike the Doctor’s capacity to regenerate his physical body. Jung (1991: 256) adds that ‘there is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man’ – and we can see this element in the Doctors, medical or otherwise, from both Gallifrey and New Jersey. Jung (1991: 256) supposes that this ‘wounded wounder is the agent of healing’ – just as both House and ‘Who’ are sufferers (the former physi- cally dispossessed, the latter dispossessed of his people and his planet) who both destroy and redeem at the same time. This figure is ‘both subhuman and superhuman’ – a ‘cosmic’ being (Jung 1991: 263–64). The alignments continue convincingly to accrue. Jung (1991: 256) also notes the trickster’s ‘approximation to the saviour’. Both Doctors are clearly saviour figures and indeed there are moments in which their series offer visual jokes as to their Christlikeness. In ‘Voyage of the Damned’ (2007) David Tennant’s Doctor is, for example, borne aloft by angels; while in ‘Small Sacrifices’ (2010) Hugh Laurie appears as a cruciform figure – till the camera pulls out and we find a tailor is measuring him for a suit. Jung (1991: 256) emphasizes that the redemptive power of the trickster lies in that figure’s ability to transform ‘the meaningless into the mean- ingful’. This is a crucial feature exhibited by House and the Doctor (for an analysis of this uncanny ability see Charles (2011: 7–19)) – and by Sherlock Holmes. Though Holmes’s tendency towards gravitas (except in Robert Downey’s interpretation) ill befits the image of this puckish prankster, he regularly assumes the trickster’s shape-shifting facility in his penchant for disguise. Indeed one might suggest that Holmes’s feats of deduction are hardly any more, in the end, than the conjuring tricks of an intellectual exhibitionist. The trickster then has areas of correspondence with these three characters; but to look beyond the trickster towards a rather more modern and metro- politan figure may also assist us in our enquiries.

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Using one’s loaf If none of the Jungian archetypes – not trickster nor senex nor puer – perfectly fit this character then perhaps this character itself stands as a new archetype. It is not just that any persona is, as Whitman might have said, large enough to contain multitudes of archetypes; it is that there may be a new model, forged by and for modernity – a figure which Tester (1994: 1) sees featuring ‘regularly in the attempts of social and cultural commentators to get some grip on the nature […] of modernity and post-modernity’. These three characters are all loungers and loafers – men who put their feet up (often on other people’s desks) – idle wanderers motivated only by the libido of listless curiosity. In short, they are flâneurs. Indeed, Tom Baker, in the most iconic portrayal of Doctor Who, seems self-consciously to fit this model, in his Bohemian costume based on a Toulouse Lautrec poster of Parisian cabaret artist Aristide Bruant – see Tulloch and Alvarado (1983: 100). They are also all specifically scientific flâneurs. White (2008: 41) has written that ‘the scientific flâneur’ is ‘a contradiction in terms, since flânerie is supposed to be purposeless’. White (2008: 39–40) adds that ‘a specific goal or a close rationing of time is antithetical to the true spirit of the flâneur. An excess of work ethic inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition.’ Their work is therefore a false and unfocused labour, their science a pseudo-science; they use the name of science as an excuse for their eclectic pursuits. As Rowland (2001: 137) points out, Holmes’s creator was an enthusiast of the occult who posed as a scientific rationalist; and Said (1994: 152) described Holmes’s own ‘unorthodox style of operation’ as rationalized into ‘quasi-academic special- ties’ that allowed detection to ‘gain the respectability […] of […] chemis- try’. Doctor Who similarly solves problems by ‘reversing the polarity of the neutron flow’ as he investigates the effects of ‘wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey’ conundrums. House avoids the life in pure scientific research that might best suit his misanthropy in order to pursue ephemeral puzzles whose life-and- death implications seem trivial to him; like Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes, he moves from diversion to diversion in his episodic adventures without any sense of ongoing commitment. Benjamin traced the activities of flânerie back to Poe’s detective stories, and sees the flâneur in such fiction as a figure repeatedly transformed into ‘an unwilling detective’ – a transformation which, for Benjamin (1983: 40–42), ‘accredits his idleness’. Thus Sherlock Holmes comments that ‘malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph’ (Doyle 1981b: 129–30) – as if the composition of a scientific monograph, or his acts of detection themselves, might somehow atone for, or justify, the malingering. Dorothy Sayers’s Peter Wimsey is described as a man who ‘would be one of the finest detectives in England if he wasn’t lazy’ (Sayers 2003: 35). Yet it is his laziness – like House’s and Holmes’s – coupled with his innate restless- ness, which makes his genius possible. (The conjunction of laziness and rest- lessness might at first seem paradoxical: until of course one observes that they come from the same source, a profound existential absence – the absence, that is, of any sense of essence.) Huskinson (2011: 82) observes that ‘when House is […] loafing about […] he continues to think unconsciously through his previous deductions […] he is not doing nothing’. Except that, if the detective work is merely a justification for the loafing, then – despite the positive side-effects of that loafing – nothing is precisely what he is doing, insofar as the desire for the puzzle is merely symptomatic of his restless idleness.

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Tester (1994: 2–3) notes that in the classic model of the Parisian flâneur, as imagined by Baudelaire, ‘to be a poet is the real truth of the idler […] the poetry is the reason and justification of the idling; the poet is possibly at his busiest when he seems to be at his laziest’. Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur was, as Benjamin (1983: 42) noted, a direct elaboration of Poe’s detective-flâneur, and, like all these detective figures, consulting, consultant and extraterrestrial, he is, writes Tester (1994: 4), ‘a man apart […] in sovereign control of a world of his own definition […] proud of the mystery of himself’. These characteristics apply closely to our three characters, these enig- matic monarchs of their realms. Why then, asks White (2008: 51) ‘is the flâneur so lonely? So sad?’ Tester (1994: 5–6) notes that the flâneur’s inter- minable ‘search for selfhood through the diagnosis of dissatisfaction […] just leads to more dissatisfaction’. However many crimes he might solve, diseases he might diagnose and lives he might save, the redemption of others (insofar as it remains a cold intellectual puzzle) cannot redeem the flâneu- rial self. The flâneur, writes Tester (1994: 7), needs ‘to be filled because […] he is utterly empty’. Yet the more he experiences, the emptier he becomes. Benjamin (1983: 58) sees the flâneur ‘filling the hollow space […] in him […] with the borrowed […] isolation of strangers’. There is something irretriev- ably Sisyphean in this struggle: the more that this figure pursues meaning and plenitude, the more these phenomena elude him. As Holmes laments:

What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever. (Doyle 1981a: 61)

When Holmes goes to his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls Doyle frames his last message to Watson as a suicide note: ‘… my career had in any case reached its crisis, and […] no possible conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this’ (Doyle 1992b: 446). It is the failure of his intellectual and existential journey that has led him to this. The flâneur is at once within and outside the crowd, an outcast, an alien – ‘something of a deviant in […] bourgeois society’ (Ferguson 1994: 25). Benjamin observes that ‘to Poe the flâneur was, above all, someone who does not feel comfortable in his own company. That is why he seeks out the crowd’ (Benjamin 1983: 48). But the crowd does not relieve his loneliness; the contrast between the teeming masses and his solitary self exacerbates it. In his depiction of The Painter of Modern Life Baudelaire described the artist-flâneur as ‘a singular man, whose originality is so powerful […] that it […] does not bother to look for approval’ (Baudelaire 2010: 7). He is one for whom, while ‘curiosity may be considered the starting point of his genius […] curiosity had become a compelling irresistible passion’ (Baudelaire 2010: 10). He is ‘an eternal convalescent […] a man-child’ – ‘at the very centre of the world, and yet […] unseen of the world’ (Baudelaire 2010: 11–13). Once more we see our three characters quite clearly delineated. This flâneur is, in short, for Baudelaire (2010: 9) ‘the spiritual citizen of the universe’. He is, as William Hartnell’s Doctor Who described himself in ‘The Feast of Steven’ (1965), ‘a citizen of the universe and a gentleman to boot’. Baudelaire’s portrait of the lonely, broken, obsessively curious, purposeless, wandering artist is echoed in his great verse sequence ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’.

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Here the poet is described as ‘semblable au prince des nuées […] Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher’ (‘like the prince of the clouds […] Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowds, his giant’s wings keep him from walking’) (Baudelaire 1995: 7). He is ‘comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux […] jeune et pourtant très vieux, Qui […] S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres bêtes’ (‘like the king of a rainy country […] young and yet very old, who […] bores himself in the company of his dogs, as of other creatures’) (Baudelaire 1995: 76). Baudelaire’s artist is – to quote the 2010 Doctor Who episode ‘The Big Bang’ – ‘brand-new and ancient’ at the same time – like the young-old Doctor, like the perennial and timeless Holmes, like Gregory House. Like Hugh Laurie’s scientist, Baudelaire’s artist suffers a pathological ennui; he is uninter- ested by life or death; he is a compulsive wanderer despite the fact that he cannot walk (consider House’s obsessive pacing through the corridors of his hospital). Walter Benjamin (1983: 56–57) notes in passing that ‘Baudelaire was a connoisseur of narcotics’ – and of prostitution for that matter. He also had that much in common with Gregory House. Benjamin (1983: 47) argues that, even as early as Baudelaire’s time, the flâneur’s city had been lost to the logic of industrial capital: Baudelaire ‘roved about in the city which had long since ceased to be the home of the flâneur’. The modern flâneur is only at home everywhere because he is in fact at home nowhere; because his home has long since ceased to exist. The wanderer- by-choice turned wanderer-by-compulsion has now become a wanderer-by- necessity. Like Doctor Who he no longer has any place he can call home.

Once more – with feeling This is not to suggest that the figure of the flâneur – or the trickster, puer or senex – can in itself satisfactorily and exclusively flesh out these three related characters. Perhaps what makes these characters interesting (what makes them real, what makes them triumphantly human in all their overt inhumanity) is not just how they fit these models, or any such models, but how eventually they also become independent of these destinies, and thus how their trag- edies are transformed into comedies. Beebe (2011: 171) suggests that ‘no one archetype […] can circumscribe House. His lined face, even if aged by pain, is as impishly boyish as it is avun- cular, and the trickster is at least as important to his character as the senex.’ Like all compulsively fascinating fictive characters he comprises a multifac- etedness that makes him so much more than the sum of those parts. He is a montage or indeed a bricolage – the construct of creative flânerie – not a character engineered through logic but assembled through the acts of a bricoleur the artistic counterpart to the flâneur, one who fiddles, tinkers, improvises and potters around without an explicit purpose and with the semblance of idleness. House M.D. is replete with characters whose identities are diagnosed as displaying incongruous dualities – one patient, for example, embodying two sets of DNA in the episode ‘Cane and Able’ (2006); another a bi-gendered child in ‘The Softer Side’ (2009); yet another in ‘Skin Deep’ (2006) suffering from pseudohermaphroditism – a female supermodel who is in fact a boy: ‘The perfect woman’, House contentedly observes (because this discovery has proven him right – has validated him – in so many ways), ‘is a man.’ In the episode ‘Both Sides Now’ (2009) a patient appears to be suffering from an

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irreconcilable split between his left and right brain functions – a metaphor, perhaps, for House’s own poorly repressed duality. Cotter (2011: 101) has described House as ‘an intuitive, right-brain character’ who thinks he is a left-brainer – just as Atkinson (1992: 335) has empha- sized that Sherlock Holmes uses ‘intuition to a larger degree than he would admit’. Despite his Holmesian emphasis on logic and scientificism, Gregory House is, like Holmes himself and like Doctor Who, at heart ‘an intuitive feeler’ (Izod 2011: 35) – an individual whose genius is determined by what Beebe (2011: 175) has described as ‘his anima-led intuition’ – adding that ‘the anima is the energy in House that delivers his intuitions to him in an unconscious but creative way’ (Beebe 2011: 178). Despite his explicit and extrovert (but hardly macho) masculinity, this figure remains enthralled to his anima, that feminine aspect of the male psyche, in Jung’s terms, which fosters what is commonly stereotyped as ‘female intuition’ and which, Jung (1991: 70) notes, makes her subject ‘touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted’. Waddell (2011: 69–70) has argued that Gregory House differs from other ‘trickster figures’ in that he lacks their capacity to morph ‘from male to female in their capacity as shape-shifters’. Yet perhaps House, in a way, does precisely that, perhaps he shares with the trickster what Jung (1991: 255) depicted as that figure’s ‘powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature’. Indeed, Jung (1991: 263) went on to point out that for the trickster ‘even his sex is optional […] he can turn himself into a woman’. And perhaps even Gregory House, when his anima asserts herself as his intuitive genius, his raison d’être – as a dominant characteristic he simultaneously celebrates and represses – does precisely that. House claims to be all about the objective scientific logic of his patients’ symptoms and yet he spends most of his time delving into their private and inner lives: as Huskinson (2011: 78) points out, ‘… far from relating ineffec- tively to people by distancing himself from them, House engages with them to profound implication.’ The man who cares for no one in fact, then, cares and feels for everyone; House and Holmes and Who are in this sense Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reunited, their gender-related or gender-like contraries held in an uncomfortable but productive suspension. And this is why they fail at romantic relationships: because they are already bi-gendered, which is to be post-gendered or post-sexual; this is why Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who appear to be asexual and why House fails at romantic sexuality – because they already inscribe and balance both aspects of gender identity within themselves, and therefore do not require conjunction with another in order to become complete. Although the Baudelairean flâneur appears, as Tester (1994: 2) has commented, to be virtually exclusively male, there is no machismo in this male- ness; and a more modern flâneur may, as White (2008: 47) emphasizes, be a ‘he (or she)’. Or, we might add, both. As Janet Woolf (1994: 125) has suggested, although ‘in the early twentieth century […] flânerie was still very much a gendered activity’ the scandalously Bohemian Paris of the turn of that century had afforded the beginning of the development of the possibility of ‘gender ambiguity’ out of such flânerie (Woolf 1994: 128). The metrosexual subtexts (at once so late postmodern and so timelessly trickster-esque) that underlie the reinvention of Doctor Who in the twenty-first century – and the reimagining of Conan Doyle’s Holmes as the contemporary Sherlock – may have had similar effects. These characters’ apparent deficits of feeling, of gendering and of sexuality are in fact the opposites of these: these characters encompass and

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simultaneously repress an overdetermination of these characteristics. The thing that distances them from other people is paradoxically and ironically, and therefore both tragically and comically, the overflowing of their humanity. It is in the realms of such excess – such overdetermination – such ambiguation – that senex and puer may meet, that animus and anima may be reconciled, and that trickster and flâneur may joke and stroll and canoodle together as one. In this way these archetypes should not be seen to constrain these characters: rather they should offer one approach to understanding their shared iconicity, and thereby to understanding their potential and their need to develop beyond the original constraints of those archetypes. This does not only offer us a reason to look at Jung or Benjamin’s work again and anew; the development of such models in the form of these popular icons might contribute to the propagation of productively contemporary post-Jungian and post-Benjaminian perspectives – perspectives that might allow us to start to reconcile the former arch-universalist with the latter arch-historicist. Benjamin (2000: 299) cites Jung’s notion that the sin of modern civilization is to be ‘unhistorical’ and, though Jung and Benjamin might have enjoyed very different views of what history is and how (or whether) it evolves, it is perhaps by exploring such models of Jungian and Benjaminian thought in contemporary popular culture that such a rehistoricizing reconciliation might tentatively be broached – even if it remains, in these terms, the merest act of pragmatic and trickster-esque bricolage or flânerie.

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Television programmes Babylon 5 (1994–98, United States: Warner Brothers) Battlestar Galactica (2004–09, United States: Sci Fi Channel) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, United States: Warner Brothers) Doctor Who (1963–, United Kingdom: BBC) House M.D. (2005–12, United States: Fox) Merlin (2008–, United Kingdom: BBC) Sherlock (2010–, United Kingdom: BBC)

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Star Trek (1966–69, United States: Desilu Productions) The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, United Kingdom: BBC)

Suggested citation Charles, A. (2013), ‘Three characters in search of an archetype: Aspects of the trickster and the flâneur in the characterizations of Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House and Doctor Who’, Journal of Popular Television, 1: 1, pp. 83–102, doi: 10.1386/jptv.1.1.83_1

Contributor details Alec Charles is Principal Lecturer in Media at the University of Bedfordshire. He has previously worked as a documentary programme-maker for BBC Radio, and has taught at universities in Cornwall, Japan and Estonia, where he also worked as a newspaper journalist. He is the editor of Media in the Enlarged Europe (2009), co-editor of The End of Journalism (2011) and author of Interactivity: New Media, Politics and Society (2012). His recent publications include articles in Science Fiction Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, Utopian Studies and Journalism Education. Contact: University of Bedfordshire (C101), Park Square, Luton, LU1 3JU, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Alec Charles has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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