Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  Language is full of what are called “mixed sentences,”67 statements that cross between worlds by combining fiction with reality. These statements allow imaginary entities to wander through our world—as in a sentence like “Freud psychoanalyzed Gradiva”—or, conversely, grant beings and objects from the real world the right to inhabit fiction, as in “Sherlock Holmes walks down Baker Street.”

  In other words, even if some beings are native, and are born and live in one of the worlds without traveling, there exist many immigrants who pass from one world to the other, to stay there for a brief time or to settle there for a longer period.* Whatever the borders and their fortifications may be, it is hopeless to forbid these passages between worlds, which, as we will see, occur in both directions.

  It is more or less impossible, in fact, to avoid these mixed sentences; even the segregationists’ demonstrations are thick with them (even if they are there to be dismissed). To say that “Sherlock Holmes does not belong to our world” is already a mixed sentence in itself, since it juxtaposes the real world and a fictional character, uniting the two for a brief while.

  By speaking in the same way about what exists and what does not exist—by conferring an identical degree of reality on the two—language is an agent forever sneaking across the border between worlds. To be in a position to establish a clear distinction between the worlds, as the segregationists dream of doing, we would have to imagine a being or a state of affairs about which it would not be necessary to speak.

  The second argument in favor of the integrationist theory is a psychological one. It amounts to noting that although fictional characters might not possess a material reality, they certainly have a psychological reality, which leads undeniably to a form of existence.

  Our relationship to literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche.

  Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject’s life can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people, especially if we are in a relationship marked by transference; “real” people reach us only through the prism of a kind of novel in which they are the heroes or monsters.

  What’s more, many of us are deeply marked by literary characters, to the point where we are no longer able to tell the difference between reality and fiction. This phenomenon is richly illustrated by works like Don Quixote or Madame Bo-vary. (In fact, it could be described as “bovaryism.”) In this state, the subconscious fails to recognize the fictive quality of literary characters and comes to see them as just as real as the inhabitants of our world, and perhaps even more so.

  For this reason, it is impossible to agree with the segregationist theory that literary characters have no existence. To do so would neglect what we have learned from the life of the mind, which, in its depths, is located at the intersection of different worlds and could even perhaps be defined as the meeting place between reality and fiction.

  As you will have guessed, the author of these lines places himself without the slightest hesitation in the camp of integrationists, and, within this camp, in the part that’s most tolerant of that original form of existence embodied by literary characters.

  My tolerance toward fictional creations can be explained by two chief notions. The first is the certainty of a great permeability between fiction and reality. There is no point in trying to patrol the borders between these worlds, for passages between them occur constantly, in both directions. Not only, as we will see, can we inhabit one fictional world or another, but the inhabitants of this world also at times come to live in ours.

  The second notion—which I’m afraid would not be shared by even the most open-minded of integrationists—is my profound conviction that literary characters enjoy a certain autonomy, both within the world in which they live and in the travels they make between that world and our own. We do not completely control their actions and movements. Neither the author nor the reader can do so.

  If you do not accept this twofold hypothesis of the permeability of borders and the autonomy of literary characters, it is impossible in my opinion to hope to solve the case of the Hound of the Baskervilles any better than Sherlock Holmes did.

  * See also the summary of this question by Bertrand Westphal, in La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace, Paris: Minuit, 2007, pp. 126–182.

  * These categories of “native” and “immigrant” were coined by Terence Parsons, who also uses the term “surrogate,” for when a fictional account mentions a real object, substantially modifying its properties (Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

  II

  The Immigrants to the Text

  THIS QUESTION of the relative degree of existence of literary characters, especially of Sherlock Holmes, is posed with special acuity in the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The reason may be found in the historical situation of this book, published at a very special moment in the life of its author.

  Having put his detective to death a few years earlier, in 1893—in circumstances to which we will return—by 1901 Arthur Conan Doyle is forced by his clamoring public to bring him back to life. This he does with a heavy heart, and it is this reluctant resurrection that gives rise to The Hound of the Baskervilles. We can see now how this book is located at the very meeting-place between reality and fiction, and why it is necessary to take into account the conditions in which it was written in order to understand what occurs in it—and thus to identify the criminal.

  Curiously, no one to my knowledge has ever tried to establish a connection between Sherlock Holmes’s death, his reappearance, and the case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, although these events are concomitant. Yet there is every indication that the novel bears the traces of this—and, what’s more, that these are the very facts we must analyze if we wish to get beyond the official version of truth and reconstruct what actually happened on the Devon moor.

  The vanishing of Sherlock Holmes is recounted in a story entitled “The Final Problem.” It is so difficult a scene that Conan Doyle ponders it for several years ahead of time; it is on a journey to Switzerland, in the company of his ailing wife, that he spots the precise location where it will take place. The plot requires Conan Doyle to invent from whole cloth an adversary equal to Sherlock Holmes, who will make possible a confrontation sufficiently terrifying to make the detective’s death plausible.

  In the very first lines of “The Final Problem,” Watson warns us that the outcome will be tragic:

  It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished. It was my intention to have stopped there, and to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill. My hand has been forced, however, by the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother, and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly as they occurred. I alone know the absolute truth of the matter, and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose is to be served by its suppression.68

  Watson then tells how, one spring night in 1891, Holmes walks into his consulting room and, after closing the shutters, tells him he is threatened with death by the criminal mastermind of London, Professor Moriarty:

  He is the Napoleon of crime,Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this gr
eat city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized.69

  Many times Holmes has discovered Moriarty’s trail and foiled his plans. At last, Moriarty himself has come to the detective’s home to advise him to leave him in peace. Failing that, he threatens him with death:

  “ ‘You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.’

  ‘You have paid me several compliments, Mr. Moriarty,’ said I. ‘Let me pay you one in return when I say that if I were assured of the former eventuality I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept the latter.’

  ‘I can promise you the one, but not the other,’ he snarled, and so turned his rounded back upon me, and went peering and blinking out of the room.”70

  That is the first and nearly the last meeting between Holmes and Moriarty. Our villain is a particularly mysterious character; he has not appeared till now in the chronicle of Holmes’s adventures, and we know little about him, except that he is the head of a giant network that allows him to control the country. He will not reappear in the continued adventures of Holmes, after Holmes has been revived.

  His creation fulfills an obvious logical necessity: only a man of extraordinary gifts—a gift for murder, in this case—can ensnare the brilliant Holmes. In this sense, Moriarty is a kind of anti-Holmes, or even the detective’s twin, a mirror in which he is reflected.

  But there is also another, more secret reason for the creation of Moriarty. Conan Doyle is experiencing the greatest psychological difficulties in getting rid of his hero, and, in order to manage to conquer his own internal resistance, he must create this abstract murderous creature, verging on the fantastical—the villain that foreshadows the monstrous hound of the Devonshire moor.

  Following Moriarty’s threats, Holmes decides to go to Europe and asks Watson to accompany him there. The two men find it extremely difficult to avoid being shadowed by Moriarty and his henchmen, who go so far as to charter a private train to pursue them. Undeterred, he and Watson reach Switzerland, the village of Meiringen, where they take a hotel room and decide to walk out and admire the Reichenbach Falls:

  It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss.71

  The site plainly calls to mind the drenched landscape that serves as a setting for The Hound of the Baskervilles, a story whose characters constantly risk sinking into an abyss with uncertain borders, into which the main suspect will himself disappear.

  Holmes and his friend are contemplating the abyss when they see a local boy running toward them with a letter in his hand. It has been written by the innkeeper, who asks for Dr. Watson’s help in caring for one of the guests. Watson goes back to the hotel and leaves Holmes alone by the falls:

  My friend would stay some little time at the fall, he said, and would then walk slowly over the hill to Rosenlaui, where I was to rejoin him in the evening. As I turned away I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last that I was ever destined to see of him in this world.72

  Having arrived at the hotel, Watson finds out that he has been duped: no one is waiting for him there. He returns to the Reichenbach Falls, but the detective has disappeared. Nothing remains of Holmes but his alpenstock and a letter addressed to his friend, in which he says that he realized it was a trap prepared by Moriarty, but that he had made up his mind to confront him. He implies that the fight will be fatal for both of them (“I am pleased to think that I shall be able to free society from any further effects of his presence, though I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you”73). Everything leads us to suppose, then, that there has been a struggle between the two men, and that they fell, locked together, into the chasm.

  Thus disappears Sherlock Holmes, in tragic but ambiguous circumstances. Since the detective’s body is never found, we may wonder how much Conan Doyle was reserving the right, at least subconsciously, to snatch his hero from death someday and make him live again through other adventures.

  It is difficult today to imagine the violence of the reactions that greeted the death of Sherlock Holmes, in England and abroad. This outcry became the very symbol, in literary history, of the power of imaginary worlds, and of the difficulty we have in separating them from the real world.

  Holmes’s death became known even before the publication of “The Final Problem” in December 1893. As early as November, some newspapers announced the event, spurring an immense anxiety among the detective’s admirers throughout the globe—an anxiety that was attenuated only by the hope that the author would not insist on doing what could not be undone.

  When the news was made official, when it seemed as if Conan Doyle had indeed carried out his threats, furious readers swamped the newspapers with letters of protest, and the Strand, which published the writer’s stories, was submerged in the flood of insult-laden missives from angry readers.74 Some Holmes enthusiasts wrote to members of Parliament in the hope of making them intervene with Conan Doyle; some even wrote to the Prince of Wales.75

  Conan Doyle himself received threatening letters from furious readers76 and was subjected to intense pressure from those close to him, including his mother, who begged him not to put his hero to death.77 His mother’s long-standing fear that he would kill off Holmes was so pressing that she had taken it upon herself to provide her son with plots for stories in order to prolong the detective’s life.

  The announcement of the death of Sherlock Holmes also gave rise to scenes of collective hysteria in the streets, with some readers unable to control their emotions, bursting out in tears in public. It is said that many young people in London, especially in the City, wore black armbands to display their mourning publicly.78

  There is something else at play here besides the understandable regret at no longer being able to look forward to the detective’s new adventures: a phenomenon that, in many respects, is like a kind of collective madness. How can we explain that the death of a fictional creation could have such effects, unless we suppose that he is not entirely fictional?

  Psychoanalysis can provide a few rough explanations for such phenomena of mourning. One explanation can be found in the concept of identification: to say that we identify with a literary character is to say that, on a subconscious level, we become that character for a time; the character offers an idealized image of ourselves and thus provides a plausible incarnation of what we would like to be, or of what others would like us to be.

  The reactions to Sherlock Holmes’s death also bring to mind, though on a different scale, those processes (described by Freud with regard to fanatical crowds) that we find at work in outbursts of passion for actors or singers. Of course here it’s a question not of a single crowd, but of one single psychological behavior that gathers together the members of this literary cult: an intense identification with a shared model.

  This shared identification presents another likeness wit
h the case of fanatical crowds. It has the effect of dissolving the borders of the Ego—by making it more permeable to others—and freeing it from the prohibitions of the Superego. In this somewhat altered state, the subject is capable of actions that he would not allow himself to carry out normally, because they go against his conscious principles.

  But we have to go farther than recognizing the phenomenon of identification between readers and characters. What happened in this case makes it seem as if some readers had taken up residence in the world of fiction and could not be torn from it without unbearable suffering.

  For some readers of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the world Holmes inhabits along with Dr. Watson is not a completely imaginary universe, but rather possesses a form of reality. Naturally, in the great majority of cases, this belief is subconscious; the reader knows perfectly well that Sherlock Holmes has never existed and will readily testify to this if he is questioned. But things happen quite differently on the level of the subconscious, populated as it is with incredible beliefs, where some imaginary characters acquire such vividness that they become real.

  This confirms the hypothesis mentioned earlier, by which there exists between the world of fiction and the “real” world an intermediate world unique to each person; for some subjects, the investment in this world is profound. Performing a function of transition between illusion and reality, this world is neither completely imaginary nor completely real, since inhabitants from both worlds meet there and intermingle.