Palimpsestuous Holmes

The malleability of Sherlock Holmes is immense and undeniably impressive. He adjusts perfectly to the changing times, media, and readerly expectations, and such transposability, combined with the transtextuality of the figure, allows for his rewritings to be believable in almost any story arc. Disinterested in or obsessed with Jack the Ripper, regardless of whether he succeeds or fails in solving the case, Sherlock Holmes remains himself—the Great Detective created by Doyle. Drawing on the vast array of his contradictory characteristics, such as being logical and bohemian, or helping the law enforcement while supporting social justice, this chapter discusses the palimpsestuous and dual nature of the versus Holmes, with narratives depicting him as the Ripper being of particular interest. Instead of exploring the versus representations of the detective through cultural expectations, generic conventions, temporal shifts, or spatial relocations of the hybrid storyworld and asking why this version and this form at that particular time, I pose a different question: how do the versus narratives and the presence of Jack the Ripper (re)shape Holmes the serial figure?