Explorations 189 because they play by ear. And all time is now in oral societies. This auditory space is a physical field and its spherical character really explains the bias and expectations of oral, pre-literate societies. Likewise the visual lineality of scribal and print cultures really includes the anal-oral axis, with strong anal stress, of course. The psychodynamics of sight, sound and language take easy precedence over social biology as concepts and instruments of explanation of these phenomena. SHERLOCK HOLMES VS THE BUREAUCRAT 10 The popular idea of Holmes, the many-sided man, and of his many triumphs over Scotland Yard is a vivid image of the basic clash of attitudes in Western culture. Sherlock Holmes is so much the type of the intuitive genius that it is unnecessary to dwell at length on the characteristics of the intuitive mind. It is a mind for which situations are total and inclusive unities. Every facet, every item of a situation, for Holmes, has total relevance. There are no irrelevant details for him. In an organic complex all parts have total relevance, not just some relevance to the whole. In the nineteenth century the power of biological metaphor such as obsessed the Holmesian mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his scrutiny of artistic creation, gradually was extended to every phase of human speculation and inquiry. The concentration on biological analogy with its assumption of total relevance of the least details begins to appear in the joy taken in the new realism, in documenting the most ordinary scenes from daily life in the press, in the novel, in painting. Flaubert worked in exactly the opposite way from his notion of le mot juste. For Flaubert, every word in a long novel had total relevance to the whole novel not just to the local episode. He was the first to return to contrapuntal composition in which all levels of action and implication are simultaneous and in which character becomes theme or motif. Flaubert like Holmes is an instance of the new artist for whom every art situation is total and inclusive of many of the simultaneous levels which occur in actual experience. THE ARTIST AND THE BUREAUCRAT For the artist with his organic, vivisectional (or living section) point of view of man and society, the natural enemy is the bureaucrat, the man with the tidy desk, the big file, the orderly mind devoid of simultaneous modes of awareness or observation. It needs no documentation to sustain the view that the admirable administrations of Scotland Yard are hostile to the inclusive and instantaneous grasping of situations. The Yard technology is serial, segmented and circumstantial. They conclude effect from immediately preceding cause in lineal and chronological order. They do not dream of totalities or of the major relevance of details.