Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard Page B

age behind you, and if you were to see
     a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel
     that his presence there was more natural than your own. 45
    Not only in his reports to Holmes but in the notes he keeps for himself, Watson lets himself be mastered by Holmes’s anxiety,
     as this extract from his diary reveals:
    October 16th. A dull and foggy day, with a drizzle of rain. The house is banked in with rolling clouds, which rise now and
     then to show the dreary curves of the moor, with thin, silver veins upon the sides of the hills, and the distant boulders
     gleaming where the light strikes upon their wet faces. It is melancholy outside and in. The baronet is in a black reaction
     after the excitements of the night. I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling of impending danger—ever-present
     danger, which is the more terrible because I am unable to define it. 46
    When our heroic investigators have allowed themselves to be so caught up in this supernatural atmosphere that they are terrified
     themselves, it is not that the truth is difficult to grasp. To find the truth would involve liberating words themselves from
     the burden of the conventional ideas that keep them from coming close to recreating what’s real.

    Thus the representations of the evil hound and the fantasies it gives birth to in this book are only the first sign of a more
     general distortion in the narrative. Even as they try to defend themselves against it, our investigators are caught in the
     teeth of the genre of fantasy, forced to abandon common sense—even though it is their business to unravel lies and illusions.
    It is in fact impossible to disprove Holmes’s theory of a triple attack by the hound. We have no choice, however, but to think
     that the three scenes in which the dog appears—whether they have no surviving witness, as in the first two, or are observed
     by several people, as in the third—are so infiltrated by a stereotyped imagination that it becomes extremely difficult for
     the rational investigator to know what actually occurred out on the Devonshire moor.
    * At the end of the famous dream, Athalie sees her mother’s corpse torn apart by dogs: “But I could find nothing but a horrible
     mixture/ Of bones and bruised flesh dragged in the mud,/ Bloody strips of flesh and frightful limbs/ That starving dogs squabbled
     over” (Racine, Athalie , v. 503–506).
    * In the story by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, the cuckolded duke gives his wife’s lover’s heart to the dogs to eat, in front
     of his adulterous wife: “But the sight of such a love made the duke fiercely implacable. His dogs devoured Esteban’s heart
     in front of me. I fought over it with them; I struggled with those dogs. I could not tear it from them. They covered me with
     terrible bites, and dragged and wiped their bloody muzzles on my clothes” (Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques , Paris: Robert Laffont, coll. “Bouquins,” 1981, p. 1037).

IV
Stapleton’s Defense
    ONCE THE GUILT of the hound of the Baskervilles has been called into question, we are free to ask ourselves what remains of
     the accusations made by Holmes against the prime suspect, Stapleton. Apart from all the improbabilities that make the animal’s
     participation in the murders scarcely credible, the culpability of the naturalist seems obvious at first—especially when he
     is regarded from Holmes’s point of view. But it grows drastically less so when we rigorously examine all the evidence in the
     case, when we try at all costs not to bend reality to fit the fixed idea that Stapleton is a murderer.

    Even if psychoanalysis allows us to justify the strangest behavior by finding its hidden motives, it is rather difficult for
     the reader to make what he knows of Stapleton’s personality coincide with that of a serial killer whose entire life is determined
     by the lust for money.
    The