Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (7 page)

What can we say about these declarations I’ve just made, that Oedipus, Dr. Sheppard, and Claudius are innocent of the crimes
of which they are accused? On the face of it these assertions are wrong, since they’re not in keeping with what the books
seem to say. But things are not so simple. That apparent barrier against delirium,
textual closure
—the notion that a text includes only a limited number of readings
^*
—is a
material closure
, but not necessarily a
subjective closure
. How shall we understand this?

It is important first of all to stress that separating a true statement (“Hamlet is the nephew of Claudius”) from a false
statement (“Hamlet is the brother of Ophelia”) is easy to practice but tends to produce unoriginal readings, content to repeat
what the text says in more or less similar terms. Without even going as far as interpretative criticism, even the least ambitious
psychological analysis quickly goes beyond strict written statements, surmising things that the text might possibly encourage
but does not strictly speaking authorize. In short, to keep exclusively to what the text
says
risks leading to readings that are unarguable but also uninteresting.

Above all,
the world that the literary text produces is an incomplete world
, even if some works offer more complete worlds than others. It would be more correct to speak of heterogeneous fragments
of worlds, made up of parts of characters and dialogues that are never joined together into a coherent whole. And—an essential
point—these weaknesses in the world of the work do not stem from a lack of information, one that studious research, as in
the field of history, might hope one day to fill, but from a lack of structure: in other words, this world does not suffer
from a lost completeness; it was never complete. What we are dealing with in literature is a
gapped universe
.

This incompleteness is especially striking when it comes to descriptions, which enclose some possibilities but leave many
others open to the imagination. The remark was made long ago that written descriptions, compared to figurative painting or
cinema, leave much more room for the inventiveness of the reader—often regarded as an advantage for literature.

Every story, furthermore, leaves to the reader’s imagination vast spaces of narrative, in the form of direct or indirect ellipses.
In principle the reader does not have to worry about what is going on in these virgin spaces of the story. But just as with
descriptions, it is hardly likely that he won’t be tempted to fill them, especially when the text mysteriously alludes to
absent events.

To these descriptive and narrative incompletenesses a third gap should be added, which concerns character. A great number
of elements in the characters’ lives, both psychic and factual, are not communicated to us. This uncertainty is closely linked
to an essential point that will be discussed later on regarding the special mode of existence of literary characters. These
characters, I believe, enjoy a much greater autonomy than we usually think, and are able to take initiatives unknown both
to the writer and the reader. When characters have their own will, their own autonomy, it gives the literary universe a greater
internal mobility; it also makes the texts through which we view this world all the more open and incomplete.

This incompleteness of the written world is not absolute, however. It is restricted by the intervention of the reader. The
reader in effect comes to fill in, at least partially, the rifts in the text. This work of completion—or, if you prefer, of
subjective closure
—functions just as well for descriptions as for the ellipses in the thoughts or actions of the characters. It is more or less
precise and conscious, depending on the reader, but it always takes place. And once a reader has found his own subjective
closure of a work, he will find it impossible, past the level of superficial agreement, to truly communicate with other readers
of the same book—precisely because they
are
talking about the same book.

Because of this work of completion, it is in fact utopian to think that any objective, or even shared, text exists, onto which
different readers could project themselves. Even if this text existed it would unfortunately be impossible to reach it without
passing through the prism of subjectivity. It is the reader who comes to complete the work and to close, albeit temporarily,
the world that it opens, and the reader does this in a different way every time.

This subjective incompleteness of the world in the work encourages us to suppose that there exists around each work, produced
by the limited nature of statements and the impossibility of increasing the quantity of available information, a whole
intermediate world
—part of which is conscious and another part unconscious—that the reader develops by inferences so that the work, completed,
can attain autonomy: a different world, a space with its own laws, more fluid and more personal than the text itself, but
indispensable if the text is to achieve, in the limitless series of its encounters with the reader, a minimal coherence.

To admit the existence of these many intermediate worlds orbiting literary works has obvious risks: that we may be misled
into keeping the expansion going ad infinitum, giving unknown lovers to the Princesse de Clèves or making her die of poisoning.
But it is difficult to do otherwise. Beyond the good faith of protagonist or narrator (who can, as in Agatha Christie’s novel
or Shakespeare’s play, be caught in the act), the hypothesis of detective criticism is that the writer himself is often misled.
His work, in fact, necessarily escapes him, since, incomplete, it closes itself at every reading in ever different ways.

If we accept this hypothesis, then there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible
worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of
some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we
cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its own priorities and those of the era in which it was
written.

Since this work of completion is inevitable, one might as well do it with as much rigor as possible. For the virtual intermediate
worlds in a given work, as numerous as they are, are not strictly equivalent to each other; it is possible to classify them
according to their credibility, both on an individual and a collective level. To start with the individual, it is obvious
that the operation of completing a literary text will be carried out differently according to the sensibility of each reader,
and, in the field of the detective novel, according to the reader’s conception of criminals and crime.

But the possible worlds vary also in accordance with the times, their conception of criticism, and the evolution of scientific
research. As the years go by, our reading of a given work changes; today, we have grown sensitive to certain details of the
text that strike our modernity and can lead us, according to the type of completion we bring to bear, to renewed access to
the text.

Thus we could say that the question of the guilt of Oedipus, Sheppard, and Claudius is not intrinsic, but is posed anew for
each reader, in the framework of what I have called in my book on Hamlet an
inner paradigm
—that is, the unique way in which each of us portrays the world and confronts reality, based on the questions posed by our
own time.

Within these personal paradigms, one’s rigorous investigations may unfold with some chance of success. And through them, a
fragile form of truth, profoundly anchored in one of those intermediate worlds that extend and complete the text, can hope
to come to light for a while.

* See Shoshana Felman, “De Sophocle à Japrisot (via Freud), ou pourquoi le policier?” [From Sophocles to Japrisot (via Freud),
or Why the Mystery Story?],
Littérature
, Larousse, 1983,No. 49.

* See Pierre Bayard,
Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?
, translated by Carol Cosman, New York: The New Press, 2000.

* To limit myself to just one more example, Sheppard is supposed to have killed Ackroyd because the latter was preparing to
reveal that Sheppard had been for years blackmailing Ackroyd’s companion, who had gotten rid of her husband so that she could
live with Ackroyd. This blackmail is revealed in a letter received by Ackroyd on the morning of his death, a letter that the
police do not find in the room where the corpse is found; the murderer, presumably, has made off with it. But it’s Sheppard
himself, when all the proofs have disappeared, who tells the police about the existence of this blackmail! Strange compulsion,
really, on the part of a murderer, who seems at times to be doing all he can to help the police and get himself arrested.

* See Pierre Bayard,
Enquête sur Hamlet: Le Dialogue de sourds
, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002.

* An assertion that should be tempered, taking into account variations and rough drafts. On this separation between material
closure and subjective closure, see also
Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, op. cit.,
pp. 103–110.

II
The Plural Story

DETECTIVE CRITICISM is suspicious by nature. While other readers, whose critical sense is less developed, quickly accept what
is told them without asking questions, the practitioner of detective criticism pays close attention to the
way
the facts are presented, accepting no testimony without reservation and systematically calling into question everything that
is reported to him.

Attentive to the fact that he is always reading someone’s narration, and doubting in principle everything he is told, the
detective critic sifts each bit of testimony, questioning the author, the circumstances in which he formulated the story,
and the motives that led him to express himself. To put it another way: detective criticism draws the fullest consequences
from the fact that many elements presented to us in a text as established truths are actually, when looked at carefully, only
eyewitness accounts.

The Sherlock Holmes adventures, particularly
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, offer one surprising characteristic reinforcing this point: the facts are communicated to us not by the author himself or
by an omniscient narrator to whom a certain credibility is naturally due, but by a companion of the detective’s, Dr. Watson.

There is nothing original about this narrative device; it is common for a character in a novel to take it upon himself to
tell the story. It takes on a special interest, however, when one looks at one’s reading as a detective investigation, in
which everything should be open to suspicion. From this perspective,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
does not relate the actions that occurred on the Devonshire moor or the investigation of Sherlock Holmes; it relates only
these actions or this investigation
as Dr. Watson perceived them
.

When a character can intervene in this way, we readers are never dealing with bare facts, but only with stories about facts,
subjected to the prism of a subject—of a particular intelligence, sensibility, and memory—and therefore eminently problematic.
Everything contained in this story, including Holmes’s conclusions, stems from an eyewitness account. True, the source of
this account is peculiarly well informed and probably sincere, but he is nonetheless intimately involved in the affair, and
therefore cannot claim to determine the truth of the reported events.

Things become even more complicated when this narrator-character, already made questionable by his subjective involvement,
is presented as a complete fool. The book in fact takes a malicious pleasure in displaying how little Watson understands of
what is happening around him.

The low opinion Holmes has of his friend’s intellectual capacities is no secret; it is demonstrated repeatedly throughout
the accounts of his adventures. And it is stressed again at the very beginning of this book, in the conversation between the
two friends before Dr. Mortimer’s first visit. Having asked Watson what reflections their client’s cane inspired, and having
listened to Watson’s conclusions, Holmes replies:

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself. [ . . . ] I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to
give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous,
but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess,
my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”
³⁰

For a moment Watson delights in these compliments, which he was hardly expecting, given the way he is usually treated by the
detective:

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his
indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to
think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval.
³¹

But Watson’s joy is short-lived; he soon understands where Holmes is leading him:

He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest
he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

  “Interesting, though elementary,” said he, as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one
or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”

  “Has anything escaped me?” I asked, with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have
overlooked?”

  “I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to
be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.”
³²

To praise a friend for his help because he has led you to the truth through the accumulation of his mistakes is a dubious
compliment. But that is the only way we can read Holmes’s definition of Watson as a “conductor of light.” His ability to stimulate
Holmes’s thinking is proportional to his fundamental miscomprehension of reality.

It is difficult to fault Holmes, though, when we watch Watson conduct his investigations throughout the novel. It is not just
Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick that Watson fails to properly analyze; he misunderstands
everything
that occurs (at least from Holmes’s point of view).

It is true that Watson, with Sir Henry’s help, shows himself capable of clearing up the mystery surrounding the curious behavior
of the Barrymores, and manages to connect them with the convict Selden. But this is one of only a few successes Watson records
in the entire book, and it is actually due to Mrs. Barrymore’s confession. Most of the time he misses the truth.

For example, he proves incapable of guessing the identity of the mysterious person glimpsed on the moor—Holmes himself. And
even with Frankland’s help in spotting and trailing him, he still allows himself to be identified by Holmes from his telltale
cigarette stub before he can recognize Holmes.

Watson shows himself equally inept at unraveling the relationships that link the characters living on the moor. He does not
realize that the Stapletons are actually married, that there is a love affair between Laura Lyons and the naturalist, or that
the latter is in fact a Baskerville.

But Watson is not content merely to misunderstand everything that is happening around him; he also displays reprehensible
negligence, which almost costs Sir Henry Baskerville his life. It is because Watson failed to keep watch over him that Sir
Henry runs the risk—at least in Holmes’s reconstruction of the event—of being attacked by the hound, which, led astray by
the scent on the clothing, finally pursues Selden.

Watson’s constant errors of interpretation have the effect of continually confronting readers with passages they will later
discover are based entirely on misperceptions.
^*
So long as Watson continues to be wrong, so long as he feeds the reader fallacies, it is difficult to believe the final account
in which he implicitly affirms his friend’s conclusions.

The question of the reliability of the narrator is all the more important in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
since Watson often entrusts the narration to other characters, allowing their voices to tell the story. But their statements
are often not directly verifiable, even if their credibility can be supported in other ways.

A characteristic example of this delegation of narration is the one offered at the beginning of the book to Dr. Mortimer.
He is of course not the only person to have seen the corpse of Sir Charles Baskerville, but he is the only one to have discovered
a dog’s footprints nearby, which he curiously deemed it wise not to mention to the police investigators:

There was a thrill in the doctor’s voice which showed that he was himself deeply moved by that which he told us. Holmes leaned
forward in his excitement, and his eyes had the hard, dry glitter which shot from them when he was keenly interested.

“You saw this?”

  “As clearly as I see you.”

  “And you said nothing?”

  “What was the use?”

  “How was it that no one else saw it?”

  “The marks were some twenty yards from the body and no one gave them a thought. I don’t suppose I should have done so had
I not known this legend.”
³³

Mortimer then loses the narrator’s role, which he has occupied only for a few pages. But his story is decisive for the whole
case, since it is he who introduces the hypothesis of the dog and, at the same time, of murder. Holmes’s entire investigation
and the results he arrives at depend on the veracity of this initial testimony. If Mortimer, for whatever reason, has given
an inexact version—for instance by mistaking the prints of some other animal for a dog’s—then the detective’s whole solution
collapses. Here again, the fact that we’re dealing with eyewitness accounts has considerable consequences.