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.”57Other 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.60Some 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.66For 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.
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).
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong
Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles
Pierre Bayard
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