* “I heard the creak of a door and the crisp sound of boots upon gravel. The steps passed along the path on the other side of the wall under which I crouched. Looking over, I saw the naturalist pause at the door of an out-house in the corner of the orchard. A key turned in a lock, and as he passed in there was a curious scuffling noise from within. He was only a minute or so inside, and then I heard the key turn once more and he passed me and reentered the house. I saw him rejoin his guest, and I crept quietly back to where my companions were waiting to tell them what I had seen.” (The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 886)
* In “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” another Sherlock Holmes adventure, the heroine has herself tied up by her lover—who has killed her violent husband—so as to make people think there had been a burglary.
* Holmes does have additional independent evidence about the school and the Stapletons’ past, however—cf. Pages 831, 870, and 893.—Trans.
* The scene where Stapleton rushes at Sir Henry as he is kissing Beryl does not imply that the naturalist is jealous, and can be interpreted differently from the way Watson reads it, who is standing at a distance and doesn’t hear the words exchanged between them. Here again, it’s Beryl who is leading the game. All she has to do, when Henry tries to kiss her, is let out a cry and call for help to make her husband run up and offer that eternally duped spectator,Watson, a melodramatic scene of a jealous husband.
* The word “beryl” is associated, in another Sherlock Holmes adventure, with feminine guilt. In a story entitled “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” a banker’s niece steals from her uncle, to give to her lover, a luxurious jewel that one of the most exalted names in England had entrusted to him.
The Hound of the
Baskervilles
ASIDE FROM ALL the evidence we can gather against Beryl, on an intuitive level everything indicates that a woman’s crime is at stake in this book. It is the crime of a wife who no doubt was in love for a time, but who, disappointed in a person she finds mediocre, little by little transformed her passion into hatred.
In this sense, it is Beryl who is the true Hound of the Baskervilles, not the innocent watchdog raised by her husband. The way she is described at the end of the book (“Her eyes and teeth gleamed with fierce merriment”114) suggests there is indeed a monster in the story, but it’s not where Conan Doyle, led astray by his hatred for the detective, persists in imagining it.
But is there only one single monster in this book? It is tempting to wonder, seeing Beryl’s behavior, to what extent she also plays her part in a more ancient story: that of the woman Hugo Baskerville had locked up, then pursued and hunted to her death.
The final scene in fact works to close the cycle begun by Hugo’s initial crime. First, by murdering her husband Beryl avenges the girl who was killed. But she also opens up an entrance into the Baskerville family, since there is every reason to think that, after a decent period of mourning is over, she will end up marrying Sir Henry and becoming the new mistress of the Hall.
We can readily imagine that after a few years Sir Henry Baskerville will himself die in an accident—by going to look for a horse, for example, who has ill-advisedly wandered into the mire—leaving all his wealth, his property, his manor, and his name to his tearful young widow. Thus Beryl, welcomed as a happy owner to Baskerville Hall, will symbolically reverse the path that the imprisoned woman traveled between her captivity in the Hall and her death at the bottom of the goyal. Beryl answers the call for vengeance uttered by the girl as she breathed her last.
In this sense, Beryl avenges Hugo Baskerville’s prisoner by executing her murderer’s heir and by taking possession of his home. But can’t we go one step farther and wonder if Beryl was actually manipulated without knowing it by the murdered woman, as if possessed by her spirit?
If we accept the hypothesis that literary characters travel easily between the world of reality and that of fiction, can’t we also imagine that they can travel, inside fiction, between different eras, and that the literary world, like our own, is haunted by ghosts?
The girl pursued by Hugo Baskerville, who died in the goyal of the Devon moor, haunts Conan Doyle’s book like a specter in search of a sepulchre of words—such a notion will surprise only those who do not believe in the reality of literary characters and in the demands they, like we, try to have satisfied.
Thus the novel might tell of two revenges separated by eras and worlds: the revenge of the disappointed woman, Beryl, twinned with a revenge from farther away but just as active in the book, that of a murdered woman who, unable to sleep in peace, has been calling for justice for more than two centuries.
Beryl, probably without realizing it, actually performs a simple action that shows how she is acting out the role of the girl persecuted by Hugo Baskerville, and is unconsciously avenging her death.
By locking herself upstairs in the house of one of the heirs of the Baskervilles, by tying herself up and exhibiting her bruises, by wrapping herself up in strips of cloth like a mummy, she displays herself to everyone as the phantom of the woman Hugo had locked upstairs in the Hall to assault sexually.
And Stapleton’s death on the moor also reproduces, like a mirror image, Hugo’s death. Whereas Hugo had died in the mire while pursuing a woman and while himself being pursued by a hound, his descendant perishes by a woman’s hand as he is trying to save his hound.
Thus the final scene of the novel is like a full ceremony of expiation in which, without the participants even realizing it, the inaugural scene of the crime is played out all over again, as if the Devonshire moor were still inhabited by ghosts who, in search of peace, were begging for someone to come to their aid.
It is as if, behind the criminal hand that is running the plot by inventing a literary fiction, another, more formidable figure lets itself at times be glimpsed: that of a ghostly revenant who has taken over the heroine and will not desist until Beryl has allowed her, in the intermediate world she has been inhabiting for centuries, to find rest.
For it is not true that the dead are dead. In fiction as in reality, they possess a singular form of existence and continue to mingle with the living, shaping their decisions, dictating their statements and even their thoughts, imperiously demanding, with as much force and steadfastness as the living, finally to be recognized and heard.
Notes
1. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1930, p. 790.
2. Ibid., p. 791.
3. Ibid., p. 800.
4. Ibid., p. 796.
5. Ibid., p. 801.
6. Ibid., p. 811.
7. Ibid., p. 807.
8. Ibid., p. 816.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 812.
11. Ibid., p. 854.
12. Ibid., p. 850.
13. Ibid., p. 867.
14. Ibid., p. 871.
15. Ibid., p. 893.
16. Ibid., p. 895.
17. A Study in Scarlet, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, op. cit., p. 6.
18. Ibid., p. 14.
19. Ibid., p. 13.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 12.
22. The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 876.
23. Ibid., p. 803.
24. A Study in Scarlet, op. cit., p. 85.
25. Ibid., p. 14.
26. The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 786.
27. Ibid., p. 872.
28. The Hound of the Baskervilles, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, op. cit.., p. 794.
29. Ibid., p. 800.
30. Ibid., p. 784.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 794.
34. Ibid., pp. 876–7.
35. Ibid., p. 876.
36. Ibid, p. 888.
37. Ibid., pp. 887–8.
38. Ibid., p. 887.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., p. 796.
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42. Ibid., p. 871.
43. Ibid., p. 799.
44. Ibid., p. 800.
45. Ibid., pp. 833–4.
46. Ibid., p. 851.
47. Ibid., p. 894.
48. Ibid., p. 899.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
54. Ibid, p. 11.
55. Ibid., p. 45.
56. Ibid., p. 48.
57. Ibid., p. 93.
58. Ibid., p. 11.
59. Ibid., p. 13.
60. Ibid., p. 14.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., p. 11.
63. Ibid., p. 12.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., p. 16.
66. Ibid., pp. 23–4.
67. John Woods, cited by Pavel, ibid., p. 29.
68. “The Final Problem,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, op. cit., p. 542.
69. Ibid., p. 544.
70. Ibid., pp. 546–7.
71. Ibid., p. 552.
72. Ibid., p. 553.
73. Ibid., p. 554.
74. James McCearney, Arthur Conan Doyle, Paris: La Table Ronde, 1988, p. 175.
75. Michael Coren, Conan Doyle, London: Bloomsbury, 1995, p. 83.
76. Ibid., p. 83.
77. James McCearney, op. cit., p. 165.
78. Ibid., p. 175.
79. Ibid., p. 165.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., p. 166.
82. Ibid., p. 129.
83. Gabrielle Rubin, Pourquoi on en veut aux gens qui nous font du bien [Why we’re mad at people who do us good], Paris: Payot, 2006.
84. James McCearney, op. cit., p. 240.
85. The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 850.
86. Ibid., p. 852.
87. Ibid., p. 866.
88. Ibid.
89. A Study in Scarlet, op. cit., p. 22.
90. “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, op. cit., p. 1082.
91. “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, op. cit., p. 1126.
92. Ibid., p. 1134.
93. The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 887.
94. Ibid, p. 887.
95. Ibid., pp. 791–2.
96. Ibid., p. 887.
97. Ibid., p. 888.
98. Ibid., p. 876.
99. Agatha Christie, Towards Zero, London: Macmillan, 2001, p. 255.
100. The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 890.
101. Ibid., p. 891.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid., p. 890.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid., p. 899.
106. Ibid., p. 816.
107. Ibid., p. 826.
108. Ibid., p. 830.
109. Ibid., p. 807.
110. Ibid., p. 890.
111. Ibid., p. 893.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid., p. 890.
Note on the Author
PIERRE BAYARD is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of many books, including Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? and How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong Page 14
