Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (10 page)

Stapleton’s entire behavior is odd from the beginning of the book. But the best is still to come. At the very end, Watson
asks Holmes about the reasons that led Stapleton to commit two murders:

“There only remains one difficulty. If Stapleton came into the succession, how could he explain the fact that he, the heir,
had been living unannounced under another name so close to the property? How could he claim it without causing suspicion and
inquiry?”
⁵⁰

Faced with this sensible remark, Holmes keeps his composure:

“It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you expect me to solve it. The past and the present
are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”
⁵¹

This is an astonishing answer. It amounts to acknowledging, at the very moment the case is wrapped up and the story is ending,
that in the absence of a clearly thought-out motive, it is hard to understand why Stapleton would have tried to kill both
Baskervilles.

Understanding that it is problematic to pin murders on someone who has no motive for them, Sherlock Holmes then discusses
three hypotheses, although the multiplicity of solutions provide no reassurance from a logical point of view. First, he says,
Stapleton could have claimed his inheritance from South America and enjoyed his fortune without appearing again in England.
Second, he could have ed “an elaborate disguise” during the time he needed to appear in England. Finally, he could have sent
an accomplice to claim the inheritance and had this accomplice send him an income.

It is hard not to be surprised by these solutions, each one more far-fetched than the last. Unless we doubt the intelligence
of the English police, none of those schemes has the slightest chance of working. How is it possible that after two suspicious
deaths in close proximity the person who claims an immense fortune would not immediately become the object of an intense investigation?
Or that a disguise would keep the claimant safe from suspicion?

Seeming scarcely to believe in his own hypotheses, Holmes immediately brings the debate to a close by suggesting, in the last
lines of the book, that he and Watson go see a performance of
Les Huguenots
:

“We cannot doubt, from what we know of him, that he would have found some way out of the difficulty. And now, my dear Watson,
we have had some weeks of severe work, and for one evening, I think, we may turn our thoughts into more pleasant channels.
I have a box for
Les Huguenots
. Have you heard the De Reszkes? Might I trouble you then to be ready in half an hour, and we can stop at Marcini’s for a
little dinner on the way?”
⁵²

Unlike Holmes, I find it difficult to imagine how after the second death of a Baskerville—the second occurring in circumstances
that cast suspicion on the first—the police wouldn’t have said to themselves that people seem to die frequently in this family,
and wouldn’t have found it curious that the inheritance was subsequently claimed by a neighbor of Baskerville Hall.

To be fair, none of this proves Stapleton definitely innocent, and he wouldn’t be the first murderer to make a number of mistakes
while unconsciously trying to get himself hanged. But such a succession of blunders poses some unresolved questions—questions
that remain unresolved when Holmes, carried away by his own intelligence, utterly ignores them in his final explanation.

Above all, it leads us to wonder: Is Stapleton, this clumsy figure of a murderer who occupies our attention from his first
appearance, shouldering a crime too great for him? Is he hiding, without knowing it himself, one of the most diabolical murderers
in the history of literature, the one lurking in the text for more than a century?

* “It is possible that Stapleton did not know of the existence of an heir in Canada.” (
The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit.,
p. 895.)

Fantasy

I
Does Sherlock Holmes Exist?

THERE IS A TWOFOLD mystery in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, then. The first concerns the identity of the murderer; the second has to do with the circumstances around the book’s creation
and the reasons why Conan Doyle allowed so many improbabilities to exist within it. In my opinion, we have to clear up this
second mystery before we have any chance of solving the first.

In order to grasp what is at play deep down in this book, that which has escaped the all-too-rational critics, we must try
to understand the tormented relationships Conan Doyle shared with his characters—especially his greatest character, Sherlock
Holmes. These relationships were tinged with madness, and, in the case of this novel, ended up influencing the plot to the
point of making it indecipherable to the writer himself. It is as if, having lost control of his own work, Conan Doyle hid
his own confusion behind that of his characters.

We should not underestimate the bonds that can form between a creator and his characters, bonds whose fierceness makes us
wonder to what extent these characters might possess a form of existence like our own. This question about the independent
lives of literary characters is all the more acute for Sherlock Holmes; in fact, the celebrated Holmes is the best example
we can point to of the difficulties, and at times dramatic consequences, inherent in separating real people from fictional
beings.

This tricky distinction is not the product of current criticism; rather, it is an idea readers have struggled with since ancient
times. In his book
Fictional Worlds
,
⁵³
Thomas Pavel retraced the history of the schools of thought that, since antiquity, have reflected on the separations between
the world of reality from the world of fiction, and on the intersections that might exist between them.
^*

Commenting on an excerpt from
The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens, Pavel notes that although the reader knows perfectly well that Mr. Pickwick does not exist, he is still
caught, while reading the passages devoted to him, with an irrepressible feeling of reality:

The reader [ . . . ] experiences two contradictory intuitions: on the one hand he knows well that unlike the sun, whose actual
existence is beyond doubt, Mr. Pick-wick and most of the human beings and states of affairs described in the novel do not
and never did exist outside its pages. On the other hand, once Mr. Pickwick’s fictionality is acknowledged, happenings inside
the novel are vividly felt as possessing some sort of reality of their own, and the reader can fully sympathize with the adventures
and reflections of the characters.
⁵⁴

All of us who try to define the status of fictional characters are confronted with this feeling of reality—which is also,
in many respects, a feeling of unsettling strangeness. But the attempt to define a character’s status is indeed the heart
of the problem. These characters do not precisely inhabit our world, but they unquestionably occupy a certain place in it,
which is not so easy to define.

In a book devoted to listing a full range of the possible theoretical stances, it is interesting that the character of Sherlock
Holmes plays a large role; Pavel cites various authors who use the example of Holmes to question the degree of validity of
statements concerning fictional beings. Thus Pavel quotes Saul Kripke stating that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, but noting
that “in other states of affairs he would have existed.”
⁵⁵
Less hospitable, Robert Howell notes that if the character of Sherlock Holmes is made to achieve the geometric impossibility
of drawing a square circle, his world stops being a possible world.
⁵⁶
And Pavel postulates that “there are worlds where Sherlock Holmes, while behaving as he does in Conan Doyle’s stories, is
a secret but compulsive admirer of women.”
⁵⁷

Other characters might occupy the same symbolic function: the names Hamlet and Anna Karenina turn up many times in Pavel’s
work. But Holmes has become so famous that he takes on a special form of existence, one that blurs the boundaries between
literature and fact. Sherlock Holmes seemed such a part of reality that when Conan Doyle tried to make his creation disappear,
there arose among his readers a collective sense of trauma. Conan Doyle did not realize that for some readers the character
was decidedly not a matter of fiction—that his elimination amounted to an actual murder.

On this question of the boundaries between the real world and the fictional world there are essentially two contradictory
positions, with a number of intermediate positions between them. At one pole are those Thomas Pavel describes as “segregationists”:

Some theoreticians promote a segregationist view of these relations, characterizing the content of fictional texts as pure
imagination without truth value.
⁵⁸

In the opinion of the segregationists, a watertight barrier exists between these two worlds, thereby limiting the freedoms
of fictional characters. For hard-line segregationists, statements concerning fictional characters must necessarily be void;
they can carry no inkling of truth, since the things that they speak of do not exist.

Pavel shows how segregationism has evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century and has become progressively more
fluid, even though it remains fundamentally intolerant toward the creations of the writerly imagination. According to classic
segregationists like Bertrand Russell, “there is no universe of discourse outside the real world. Existence [. . .] can be
ascribed only to objects of the actual world.”
⁵⁹
But Russell is not content merely to question their right to existence; he also means to deny the possibility of truth in
any statement made about them.
⁶⁰

Some more broad-minded segregationists take each sort of potential argument into separate consideration. For example, a sentence
like “The present king of France is wise” may either be subjected to true/false evaluation or simply rejected outright as
absurd, depending on the circumstances under which it is uttered—particularly given the current political system in France.
⁶¹
But segregationists are much more prudent in determining the truth of statements about beings like Sherlock Holmes, who exist
only in the realm of fiction.

By agreeing, however, that it is not possible to evaluate the truth of a statement without inquiring into the conditions in
which it was made, segregationists open a breach. And through that breach scurries a brigade of theoreticians who are both
more relativist in their view of the truth and more hospitable to alternate worlds and the creatures who inhabit them.

Other critics are less closed to fictional worlds; for them, Pavel offers the term “integrationist”:

[T]heir opponents adopt a tolerant, integrationist outlook, claiming that no genuine ontological difference can be found between
fictional and nonfictional descriptions of the actual world.
⁶²

The “integrationists,” who likewise form a group made up of varied sensibilities, are ready to recognize a certain form of
existence both in fictional characters (they “assume that Mr. Pickwick enjoys an existence barely less substantial than the
sun or England in 1827”
⁶³
) and in the potential truth of statements made about them; they do not regard such things as inherently absurd speculations.

On the other hand, for the same reason that integrationists grant fictional texts a status comparable to nonfiction, they
tend to deny the latter its privileged place with regard to truth. Believing every statement obeys conventions, they are inclined
to undercut the distinction between fiction and the other types of discourse.
⁶⁴

Pavel seems to have placed himself in this more tolerant group when he notes (following the example of John R. Searle especially)
that the fictional quality of a text can be changed according to the circumstances, and that “fictional texts enjoy a certain
discursive unity: for their readers, the worlds they describe are not necessarily fractured along a fictive/actual line,.
⁶⁵
He means that fiction is only one particular form of the play of language, and a given text may seem fictional or actual
depending on the context in which we encounter it. The same is true for oral performances. Pavel takes the example of a theatrical
scene wherein an actor mimics the gestures of a priest and pretends to bless the audience. There is nothing effective about
this blessing in most contexts, but it can become effective in certain circumstance: imagine, for example, a dictatorship
in which religion is banned and in which a theater audience, having kept the old faith, experiences the actor’s gesture as
authentic, transforming this fictional scene into a scene of real life.
⁶⁶

For partisans of integration of fictional characters, there’s no point in fortifying the borders between worlds, and denying
these characters their existence. On the contrary: in a society that is increasingly inclusive of formerly sidelined groups,
it seems preferable to also recognize fictional persons’ innate legitimacy, and to admit that they form part of our world,
which implies, as it does for all its inhabitants, a certain number of duties, but also of rights.

The difficulty in taking a stance on these debates, which can reach a high degree of philosophical or linguistic complexity,
stems from the fact that the various authors, resorting to ideas as vague as “reality” or “truth,” do not always sound as
if they’re talking about the same thing.

In my opinion, however, there are two major arguments in favor of the theory of the integrationists and their tolerance toward
fictional characters. The first is of a linguistic order. It comes down to noting that language does not allow us to make
a separation between real beings and imaginary characters, and so the integration of characters is inevitable, whether one
has an open mind or not.