Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  This intermediate world that everyone constructs in his reading can become pathological if the subject is no longer capable of making the distinction between reality and illusion. But it also performs a beneficial function by offering the subject, at little expense, the possibility of identity-shifting that allows him to improve his self-image.

  This intermediate world does not have the precision of the world of fantasy, which remains rooted in an elementary, repetitive scenario built to satisfy precise conditions. The subject does not necessarily occupy a precise, limited place in this transitional space; in the present case, he does not have to choose to be either Holmes or Moriarty. His identity there is often fluid and mobile, and his relationships to literary characters can remain indistinct. But he is indeed an inhabitant of this world, and he undergoes the psychological effects of events that occur in it.

  This explains why for many admirers of Sherlock Holmes, his disappearance did not only deny them the pleasure of reading. It constituted a violent intrusion into their own intermediate world, and hence into a space that they inhabit inwardly and that is part of themselves. Thus, what they experience is authentic psychic suffering, all the greater because it is shared by other readers. Just as emotions are reinforced in fanatical crowds, so the readers’ suffering is increased by being shared.

  This intermediate space allows the inhabitants of the “real” world to come and live, if not in the world of the book, at least in a world that they give rise to as its continuation, a world where they can meet the characters they admire. In the present case, the readers of Conan Doyle leave reality for a time to come inhabit this other world, from which they feel expelled by the death of the detective.

  But it is not out of the question that this border might be crossed in the other direction—that this passageway can, at times, help fictional characters leave the world where they are usually enclosed and join us in our world.

  III

  The Emigrants from the Text

  READERS’ REACTIONS to the death of Sherlock Holmes offered a striking illustration of the bonds that can link us to fictional creations. They left such a mark on literary history that they have overshadowed another phenomenon closely linked to that death: the reasons Conan Doyle decided to execute his detective in the first place.

  This was to all appearances a completely incomprehensible decision; after all, Sherlock Holmes had brought fame and wealth to his creator. This enigma is an important one to solve. It has, as we shall see, close ties with what takes place in The Hound of the Baskervilles and with the detective’s failure to find the correct solution.

  Conan Doyle commented a number of times on his motives in killing off Sherlock Holmes: he wanted to devote himself to the rest of his work, which seemed to him to be more worthy of his attention.

  Many readers familiar with the detective’s cases are unaware that they comprise only a small part of Conan Doyle’s considerable body of fiction. His other writings are primarily adventure stories, often grouped into cycles, that take place in different epochs. There are medieval novels around the figure of Sir Nigel; stories that occur under the First Empire, around the figure of Brigadier Gerard; an epic devoted to the first immigrants to America, The Refugees; and science fiction novels.

  To this abundant literary work must be added a large number of essays that Conan Doyle devoted to international problems with which he was concerned, such as the Boer War, and to what would increasingly become his exclusive passion, spiritualism—a passion to which he would eventually sacrifice both his time and his reputation.*

  The paradox, for those who live in our era and are familiar only with the cycle of Sherlock Holmes adventures, is that Conan Doyle was much more concerned with the rest of his body of work; he thought the Holmes stories held a much more limited interest than the adventures of his other heroes, and with an eye toward posterity, it was those stories to which he wanted to devote himself.

  But the desire for more time to devote to the remainder of his work, or the fear that his other work might be overshadowed by the success of the Holmes adventures, cannot by themselves explain the antagonistic feelings Conan Doyle developed toward his detective.

  The idea of getting rid of Holmes came quite early to Conan Doyle. He had originally agreed to a series of six stories, then had consented to add six others. But even before he finished this second series he wrote to his mother, “I’m thinking of killing Holmes in the sixth. He’s keeping me from thinking about better things.”79 His mother, concerned, suggested the plot of one of the most famous of the detective’s stories,“The Copper Beeches,” thus sparing Holmes’s life for a time.80 But Conan Doyle continues to think about whether to remove him and how: “A man like that cannot die of a trifle or a bad flu, his end must be violent and tragic.”81

  When Conan Doyle writes that Holmes is keeping him from thinking about better things, we imagine that he is alluding to his wish to pursue what is closest to his heart: his cycles of adventure tales. But we can also intuit that there is something more serious at play, and that the question is not really about whether Holmes is keeping his creator from writing other books.

  In fact, it seems as if the creator were reproaching his creation for keeping him from living. About his relations with Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote this sentence, which says much about the anguish into which his psychic cohabitation with the detective plunged him: “If I don’t kill Holmes, he will kill me.”82 The sentence makes Holmes not just someone who prevents him from writing, but a sort of evil twin, who, like Maupassant’s Horla, is taking over his mind.

  The feeling that gradually comes to dominate the relationship between the two men is hatred. Conan Doyle can no longer bear the existence of a character who has taken on such importance in his social and inner life, with whom he is constantly linked by the public. His very identity is now threatened by his creation, and he must try to preserve his identity, no matter what the price.

  How can one come so to detest someone who is the source of one’s success? What at first sight seems a paradox is not necessarily so for the subconscious, and we can speculate that it was precisely because he owed his success to him that Conan Doyle detested Sherlock Holmes so much.

  Some psychoanalysts, especially Gabrielle Rubin in Pourquoi on en veut aux gens qui nous font du bien,83 have stressed the profound ambivalence that links us to those who come to our aid—an ambivalence that, against rational expectations, sometimes goes so far as to make us hate them. This phenomenon comes as no surprise to those familiar with the subconscious.

  Even as he seems to be doing us good, the one who tries to help us confronts us violently with our own weakness, and that is difficult for us to forgive. No doubt Conan Doyle felt this; after all, the rest of his body of work brought him only a fraction of the publishing success the Sherlock Holmes adventures did—as the detective, by his very success, keeps cruelly reminding him.

  What’s more, contracting excessive debts to someone creates infantile situations of dependence and reminds us of the fundamental impotence of childhood, which we energetically strive to forget in our adult life. Old subconscious debts are reactivated, bringing with them the strong ambivalence that is attached to parental figures.

  These debts are all the more burdensome when we are insolvent, when they rest on such inequality that it is impossible for us to imagine ever getting rid of them. How could Conan Doyle hope to restore everything another had brought him—even conferring a new identity on him—especially when this other, so overwhelmingly beneficial, was a literary character?

  The question of how we can come to hate someone who wants to help us is paired with this other, even more singular, question: how can one hold so much hatred for someone who doesn’t exist?

  The simplest answer to this question can be found in the idea we began studying above: this literary character does in fact exist, or in any case he has taken on, for the person he affects, a form of existence that can interfere with his own li
fe.

  So we are led to imagine that for a time in his life Conan Doyle felt persecuted by a character that he himself had created, but who had contrived to invade him psychically, making existence impossible for him, destroying him from within, and obstinately refusing to let himself be put to death.

  The first, most obvious response to this notion is that Conan Doyle was simply a victim of his imagination, that he forgot the borders that theoretically separate reality from fiction and began to behave as if the fictional Holmes were an inhabitant of the real world.

  But another hypothesis cannot be entirely ignored. It stems from the most extreme conclusion of the “integrationist” theoretical position: that literary characters live their lives autonomously, and that they can sometimes leave the world they inhabit and sojourn temporarily in our own.

  In short, this hypothesis states that the avenues between the worlds of reality and fiction can be traveled in both directions and that, if we sometimes “pass” into the world of fiction (as did all those who couldn’t accept Sherlock Holmes’s death), the inhabitants of that world sometimes make the opposite journey, and emigrate into our own.

  If this is so, then we must admit that the inhabitants of a literary world possess not only a sort of reality, but also a sort of autonomy. And thus is is hopeless to claim that we can control their actions completely, just as it would be to claim to control beings in the real world.

  To recognize this autonomy is to think about literature, and the relationship writers and readers have with literary characters, using the model of the golem.

  The golem is that character of fantastic literature into whom its creator could breathe such life that it ends up escaping him, and is able to decide its own fate and to commit actions its creator never intended, even crimes.* It is a figure that crosses the ages and mythologies; we can find examples as early as the Greek myth of Pygmalion.

  There is indeed something fantastic in the way the admirers of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle think of the detective as a living person, whose resurrection (or death) they desire. In this intermediate world they share with fictional creations, there is scarcely any difference between the modalities of existence of the character and the “real person.”

  Thus we are led to suppose that, after a certain number of cases, the character of Sherlock Holmes, like the golem, has stopped obeying the injunctions of his creator and has begun to lead his own life, in those intermediate places between books and readers where reality and fiction collide. This autonomy of the character reaches its height when he refuses to let himself be executed. In the battle between Conan Doyle and Holmes, the latter emerges victorious. The writer first has to accept making him live again—probably under pressure from Holmes, his victim—then (after The Hound of the Baskervilles, where he revives him) must once and for all renounce putting him to death; he is forced to let him live out other adventures where he will continue to play the hero.

  The notion that literary characters are confined inside the books they inhabit is a dangerous illusion. Holmes’s persecution of his own creator demonstrates that their autonomy allows them at certain times to pass into our world, free to remain harmoniously in our company or to profoundly disturb our existence.

  In this sense, it is the relationship of writer and reader with the literary character, more than the terrifying dog that supposedly haunts the Devon moors, that provides the truly fantastic dimension of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It would be wrong to say that this book’s magnetism comes from its text alone; the text is only the center of a complex of mysterious phenomena in which all those who dare approach will find themselves caught.

  * On this little-known second life of Conan Doyle’s, read Patrick Avrane, Sherlock Holmes & Cie.: Détectives freudiens, Paris: Audibert, 2005.

  * See the novel The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

  IV

  The Holmes Complex

  WE SHOULD TAKE seriously, then—much more seriously than have previous literary theorists—the bonds that are created between writers and readers and the characters they bring to life. Everything leads us to think that these characters, drawing strength from the passionate feelings we bring to them, are at times able to free themselves from our control and pursue their own initiatives, traveling between worlds and carrying out unpredictable actions within the world in which they have chosen to take up residence.

  The intensity of readers’ reactions to Holmes’s death, like the intensity of the conflict between the writer and his detective, begs for explanation. How shall we account for the pathological relationship that can develop between these inhabitants of the real world and the inhabitant of a fictional world, that collision within the intermediate space each reader constructs between himself and the work?

  I propose to call this a “Holmes complex”: the passionate relationship leading some creators or some readers to give life to fictional characters and then to form bonds of love or destruction with them. The thousands of readers who felt abandoned by their hero in 1893 suffered from this complex to varying degrees; Conan Doyle himself suffered from it, and was eventually rendered incapable as he was of maintaining peaceful relations with the detective he had created.

  Based on the inability to separate reality from fiction, the Holmes complex has the effect of inciting fictional creations toward autonomy, by breathing an energy into them that they may use to travel between worlds or pursue their own agendas.

  The fact that the Holmes complex presents a pathological dimension and can lead to forms of madness should not make us forget that it also constitutes a remarkable force for creating and comprehending literary works. As a victim of that complex, Conan Doyle could fuel his plots with the hatred he felt for his detective, inspiring any number of inventive dangers for his hero to face.

  And it is because the author of these lines is not himself immune to such a complex that he is able, perhaps better than other readers, to reconstruct the murderer’s secret thoughts—thoughts that he would be less able to reveal if this murderer didn’t happen to exercise an obscure form of fascination over him, within the intermediate world where they may meet.

  The Hound of the Baskervilles is thick with symptoms of the Holmes complex; page after page bears the traces of the conflict that set Conan Doyle against his character and of the hatred that grew in him till he reached the point of deciding to put Holmes to death. This murder fails at first in “The Final Problem,” since the writer is forced to revive him. But it is followed by new attempts, this time symbolic, in the case in which Holmes is resurrected.

  The conditions of the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles help illustrate the intensity of the conflict between Conan Doyle and his creation. The writer hesitated to bring his detective back to life until the very last minute, and finally assented to place him in the novel—from which he had considered excluding Holmes—only if the publisher agreed to double his royalties.84

  But he doesn’t welcome the detective’s return with a glad heart, and his reluctance transforms the novel into a vast compromise formation, in the Freudian sense of the term. Compromise in that the text expresses at once, in a self-contradictory way, Conan Doyle’s deadly hatred for Holmes and, under the pressure of guilt, the fear of giving in to murder.

  It is difficult not to be struck by Holmes’s absence throughout most of the book. After receiving Dr. Mortimer at his flat, in the company of the faithful Dr. Watson, and then meeting Henry Baskerville, Holmes disappears completely from the story and lets his friend conduct the investigation in his place. This delegation of power is unequalled in all the other sixty cases, and it is hard not to see this erasure of the hero as the equivalent of a second execution. And even though Sherlock Holmes does reappear at the end of the story, his presence only multiplies the mistakes and inaccuracies until the reader is led to wonder if this succession of blunders shouldn’t be chalked up to a creator’s ambivalence toward a character that utterly exasperated him.

  It
seems as if Conan Doyle never really accepted the resurrection* of his hero; forced by his publisher and his public to bring Holmes back to life, he did so only reluctantly, taking care to restrict him to the most limited and least glorious place possible.

  But it’s not enough for Conan Doyle to try to bar Sherlock Holmes from the book and then to withdraw him from the investigation; he also lets his hatred for him show through in the very way he portrays him, by continually (and curiously) associating him with the forces of evil.

  This accusation runs throughout the book, working on two levels. The first association of Holmes with evil forces occurs when the confused Watson glimpses the mysterious silhouette on the moor, describing it in unsettling terms:

  And it was at this moment that there occurred a most strange and unexpected thing. We had risen from our rocks and were turning to go home, having abandoned the hopeless chase. The moon was low upon the right, and the jagged pinnacle of a granite tor stood up against the lower curve of its silver disc. There, outlined as black as an ebony statue on that shining background, I saw the figure of a man upon the tor. Do not think that it was a delusion, Holmes. I assure you that I have never in my life seen anything more clearly. As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place.85