On Language as a closed system and its relevance in “The Bascombe Valley Mystery”

Given my native proficiency in English, the language in which Arthur Conan Doyle originally scribed his short story, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” it would appear that this supposed mastery of English would lend to me, as Saussure may have argued, an automatic and irrevocable access to the closed system of English. Thus, many of the sound-images—or, images-acoustiques—would be immediately transmitted, without hesitancy, from the paper to my own thinking. And yet, that same hybris ultimately betrays a reading of the story, lending false cues toward nonexistent images and turning away from ones that may, from another perspective, seem obvious. It is clear here that—much to Saussure’s dismay, in his own focus on words with single definitions—lingual ambiguity plays such a critical role.



For example, as I read the phrase, “I ejaculated,” which followed a speedily uttered line (80), my awareness of the concrete, tangible act of ejaculation led me momentarily astray. However, with a pause and a re-look at its context, the meaning was reasonably easily constructible. (For reference, Google now includes a “dated” definition, alongside the more contemporary one: “say something quickly and suddenly.”) Because it was such a clear misfit into the English language I have come to enjoy as 21st century American college student, who often avoids at all costs words such as “ejaculation,” I could notice the shift of meaning throughout the phrase. However, it is ultimately a caution sign for the contemporary reader, informing us that, perhaps, Doyle and may operate in an aligned but nonetheless different sphere of the English language from the reader, such as myself.

Later on, when James McCarthy tells of his father’s utterings of “some allusion to a rat,” his contention that his father had grown delirious is reasonably clear (82). This is because “a rat” really only amounts to a single thing: a rodent, and a potentially dangerous one, at that. However, Holmes makes clear after more consideration that “a rat” must be in reference to the town “Ballarat” (95). There is reasonable confusion in this mix-up, because oral language is linear. As demonstrated by Doyle, Saussure, and Mahoney, the end of a word or phrase, without the context of its beginning, can mean something wholly different, and the audience would be clueless to recognize that—unless, they’re actually a detective. However, Holmes arrives at a conclusion nearly entirely out of the bounds of my own comprehension, as a modern English speaker: He rightly infers that the mention of Ballarat alludes to a person, “So-and-so of Ballarat” (95). Inevitably, the existence of Black Jack of Ballarat justifies this further. Regarding my own experience as a modern reader, I simply had no idea that someone could be named as such, with their last name simply being the town. This lingual distance only serves to hinder understanding of the text and the mystery at hand. Unlike his scatterings of French words and phrases, such as outré (83), détour (91) and nous verrons (93), which are actually words of a different language, these differences might be unrecognizable, since they still function in context for an average reader of the language. Indeed, what may be Doyle’s greatest strength in the story is in leveraging the critical ambiguity in language, where one word may refer to a few different concepts or things—and clearly, that’s what made the mystery so much harder to solve.