Author Interview with Professor Joel Jensen on our Doyle Anthology, A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural Volume 2
Release day! Yes, today marks the release of A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Revolutionary Stories of fear and the Supernatural, Volume 2. Now, everyone can read the complete Study in Terror anthology, enjoy Doyle's weird side, and learn about his importance in the horror, supernatural, and thriller genres. To commemorate, I interviewed Volume 2 contributor, Professor Joel Jensen who wrote about the horror aspect of Doyle's (sort of) first mystery novel, The Mystery of Cloomber.
1. How did you get involved in The Study in Terror anthology?
Well, the simple answer is that I became involved because I was asked! And this was a fun opportunity to think carefully about a neglected Doyle story, so I took the opportunity.
2. Well, that was a straightforward answer. How about this? Your focus for The Mystery of Cloomber in your essay is on its horror aspects. Why didn't you want to focus on the mystery side of the story?
I think the Mystery in the mystery of Cloomber is very thinly veiled, despite the title. Doyle could hardly have imagined that readers would be remain in the dark until the apotheosis unfolds in the final pages. What's more interesting is the unusual source of fright in the story. Doyle is using the frightening foes - the Buddhist monks - as a way of teasing our moral suppositions. The tale is frightening because it supposes that the moral truths we hold dear rely upon dark underpinnings; they're built in, as it were. This should frighten us. The story isn't built around a whodunit at all - we know from the very beginning that the General has committed some terrible deed in the past which is coming back to haunt him. The force of the story is in the dreadful moral weight with which he receives his comeuppance.
3. The novel mainly deals with Buddhists seeking revenge. In your studies of Buddhism, have you encountered any history of revenge or, at the very least, karmic retribution?
Well, yes and no. One can look at current events in Myanmar, in which the majority Buddhist population is seeking to remove by force a Muslim minority. This is a dreadful set of circumstances, and to observers in the West, we look on somewhat baffled. Buddhists are supposed to be peaceniks, right? Of course, we're colored by our encounters with American Buddhists - maybe the gentle hippie you see at the coffee shop, or perhaps by familiarity with the Dali Lama, who has been a visible voice for nonviolence for half a century. And strictly speaking, insofar as Buddhism can be said to have a doctrine, its a pacifistic religion. So, what's happening in Myanmar? Well, this is a case of humans just being humans. People want an excuse to act violently toward people they fear, and they do so regardless of religious principles. There was a long period of time in Japan in which Mt. Hiei's Buddhist monks dominated the political scene because any time something happened that the didn't like, the headed down the mountain and burned Kyoto, under the pretense of teaching their political opponents impermanence. But this should hardly seem surprising - Christianity is explicitly pacifistic too, but we're all familiar with the long history of violence sanctioned by religious authorities. But also because we're familiar with Buddhism primarily as that peacenik religion, Doyle's Cloomber is surprising. What's up with these Buddhists bent on violent revenge? Of course, this has nothing to do with "Buddhism" proper, merely a Doyle-ization of the religion for literary purposes. Doyle was actually pretty familiar with Buddhism, or at least with Indian Buddhist practices. I don't know if he really believed that he was accurately portraying Buddhist doctrine - we probably couldn't know such a thing - but we can probably chalk it up to artistic license.
4. You've written a book There is an X, X is a Sandwich, on the Philosophy of the sandwich. What led to you writing about such an odd yet fun topic?
This is a bit of a long story, but I'll try to keep it brief. I was asked to write a short essay on the history of the sandwich for an artist friend of mine, Scott Nedrelow, whose art studio doubled as the Sandwich Bar For Peace. He had this idea of making a coffee table type book featuring works in the permanent collection, and wanted a short essay on sandwiches. Actually, the original idea was that the book would look and feel like on of those catalogs that corporations put together, like annual reports, that they print 600 of to give out after the Christmas party, but they end up piled in the corner and no one looks at them. So, the idea was that I would write an essay that would actually be unreadable - it would be so boring, you know "the history of the sandwich" that it would just be unread catalog filler taking up space. Then he would print out all these catalogs and have them piled in the corner of the studio. It was a very weird idea, but I said sure, it sounds like my kind of project. So, initially I never intended the essay to be read, it was just something funny to do. But as I began writing the essay, I found myself getting deeper and deeper into the problem of how a sandwich should be defined, that I couldn't finish the essay. It kept getting longer and longer, and I kept realizing that there were more angles I hadn't considered yet, so I kept writing. Finally a year later I told Scott, well I'm done And he basically said, oh that? That was a weird idea; I gave up on that ages ago. But lets try to publish your book on its own. So we did. It still strikes me as strange that such an odd philosophical problem - how should we define this ordinary mundane thing - should end up being interesting, and really its basically unresolvable. In about 100 pages or so, I feel like I only scratched the surface. But it's been great fun, both the writing and the response.
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule for the interview. Have a great end to the semester.
To purchase <1>A Study in Terror...Volume 2 via Amazon, follow this link for the Kindle edition http://www.amazon.com/Study-Terror-Re...), and this link for the paperback edition (http://www.amazon.com/Study-Terror-Re...).
Joel K Jensen is the author of There Exists an X, X is a Sandwich, available from Sandwich Bar Press. He is interested in applying the methodologies of deductive logic to everyday life with both humor and intellectual rigor. Jensen studied philosophy and architecture at the University of Colorado, and teaches philosophy at North Hennepin Community College. He lives in Minneapolis.
Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.
1. How did you get involved in The Study in Terror anthology?
Well, the simple answer is that I became involved because I was asked! And this was a fun opportunity to think carefully about a neglected Doyle story, so I took the opportunity.
2. Well, that was a straightforward answer. How about this? Your focus for The Mystery of Cloomber in your essay is on its horror aspects. Why didn't you want to focus on the mystery side of the story?
I think the Mystery in the mystery of Cloomber is very thinly veiled, despite the title. Doyle could hardly have imagined that readers would be remain in the dark until the apotheosis unfolds in the final pages. What's more interesting is the unusual source of fright in the story. Doyle is using the frightening foes - the Buddhist monks - as a way of teasing our moral suppositions. The tale is frightening because it supposes that the moral truths we hold dear rely upon dark underpinnings; they're built in, as it were. This should frighten us. The story isn't built around a whodunit at all - we know from the very beginning that the General has committed some terrible deed in the past which is coming back to haunt him. The force of the story is in the dreadful moral weight with which he receives his comeuppance.
3. The novel mainly deals with Buddhists seeking revenge. In your studies of Buddhism, have you encountered any history of revenge or, at the very least, karmic retribution?
Well, yes and no. One can look at current events in Myanmar, in which the majority Buddhist population is seeking to remove by force a Muslim minority. This is a dreadful set of circumstances, and to observers in the West, we look on somewhat baffled. Buddhists are supposed to be peaceniks, right? Of course, we're colored by our encounters with American Buddhists - maybe the gentle hippie you see at the coffee shop, or perhaps by familiarity with the Dali Lama, who has been a visible voice for nonviolence for half a century. And strictly speaking, insofar as Buddhism can be said to have a doctrine, its a pacifistic religion. So, what's happening in Myanmar? Well, this is a case of humans just being humans. People want an excuse to act violently toward people they fear, and they do so regardless of religious principles. There was a long period of time in Japan in which Mt. Hiei's Buddhist monks dominated the political scene because any time something happened that the didn't like, the headed down the mountain and burned Kyoto, under the pretense of teaching their political opponents impermanence. But this should hardly seem surprising - Christianity is explicitly pacifistic too, but we're all familiar with the long history of violence sanctioned by religious authorities. But also because we're familiar with Buddhism primarily as that peacenik religion, Doyle's Cloomber is surprising. What's up with these Buddhists bent on violent revenge? Of course, this has nothing to do with "Buddhism" proper, merely a Doyle-ization of the religion for literary purposes. Doyle was actually pretty familiar with Buddhism, or at least with Indian Buddhist practices. I don't know if he really believed that he was accurately portraying Buddhist doctrine - we probably couldn't know such a thing - but we can probably chalk it up to artistic license.
4. You've written a book There is an X, X is a Sandwich, on the Philosophy of the sandwich. What led to you writing about such an odd yet fun topic?
This is a bit of a long story, but I'll try to keep it brief. I was asked to write a short essay on the history of the sandwich for an artist friend of mine, Scott Nedrelow, whose art studio doubled as the Sandwich Bar For Peace. He had this idea of making a coffee table type book featuring works in the permanent collection, and wanted a short essay on sandwiches. Actually, the original idea was that the book would look and feel like on of those catalogs that corporations put together, like annual reports, that they print 600 of to give out after the Christmas party, but they end up piled in the corner and no one looks at them. So, the idea was that I would write an essay that would actually be unreadable - it would be so boring, you know "the history of the sandwich" that it would just be unread catalog filler taking up space. Then he would print out all these catalogs and have them piled in the corner of the studio. It was a very weird idea, but I said sure, it sounds like my kind of project. So, initially I never intended the essay to be read, it was just something funny to do. But as I began writing the essay, I found myself getting deeper and deeper into the problem of how a sandwich should be defined, that I couldn't finish the essay. It kept getting longer and longer, and I kept realizing that there were more angles I hadn't considered yet, so I kept writing. Finally a year later I told Scott, well I'm done And he basically said, oh that? That was a weird idea; I gave up on that ages ago. But lets try to publish your book on its own. So we did. It still strikes me as strange that such an odd philosophical problem - how should we define this ordinary mundane thing - should end up being interesting, and really its basically unresolvable. In about 100 pages or so, I feel like I only scratched the surface. But it's been great fun, both the writing and the response.
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule for the interview. Have a great end to the semester.
To purchase <1>A Study in Terror...Volume 2 via Amazon, follow this link for the Kindle edition http://www.amazon.com/Study-Terror-Re...), and this link for the paperback edition (http://www.amazon.com/Study-Terror-Re...).
Joel K Jensen is the author of There Exists an X, X is a Sandwich, available from Sandwich Bar Press. He is interested in applying the methodologies of deductive logic to everyday life with both humor and intellectual rigor. Jensen studied philosophy and architecture at the University of Colorado, and teaches philosophy at North Hennepin Community College. He lives in Minneapolis.
Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.
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