Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard Read Free Book Online Page A

close to him. It is an imagined world that, although the detective fights against it—Holmes does
     not believe in the legend of the hound responsible for carrying out the curse—nonetheless remains closely linked to a fantastic
     vision of reality; from a hound alone, there is a simple transposition to a murderer with a hound.
    Not only is there an imagined world at work behind Holmes’s hypothesis, then, but there is reason to think that the hypothesis
     is truly active only because it is animated by a private fantasy world—determined both by the sex and the social standing of the detective—which shapes,
     and thus perturbs, his way of seeing the world.

    Far from being a closed system, the Holmes method thus allows alternative solutions to subsist, both at the point-by-point
     level of clues and at the level of the overall construction. *
    * Holmes is beaten by a woman, Irene Adler, who is always a step ahead of him and guesses everything he will do.
    * “Watson,” said he, “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains
     to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.” (“The Yellow Face,”
     in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1930, p. 415.) James McCearney notes that “out of the twenty-four stories published
     between July 1891 and December 1893, a good half dozen of them result in partial or total failure” ( Arthur Conan Doyle , Paris: La Table ronde, 1988, p. 152).
    † Aside from mistakes, major elements sometimes elude Holmes. These range from a key plot point—such as an important link
     of kinship, in “The Adventure of the Priory School”—to a secret, as in “The Gloria Scott .”
    * A list of Holmes’s failures in stories not narrated by Watson figures at the beginning of “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”
    * See also on this point Umberto Eco’s analyses in The Limits of Interpretation , Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

I
What is Detective Criticism?
    TO HIGHLIGHT THE SORT of problem that the Sherlock Holmes method exemplifies, I created a dozen or so years ago my own method
     of investigation, to which I gave the name detective criticism . The aim of this method is to be more rigorous than even the detectives in literature and the writers who create them, and
     thus to work out solutions that are more satisfying to the soul. Before applying this method to the most famous of Conan Doyle’s
     novels, I would like to give a brief presentation of it, recalling the circumstances of its creation and explaining its principles.

    The first inspiration for detective criticism was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex , or more precisely my reading of texts by American critics—such as Sandor Goodhart and Shoshana Felman—who cast doubt on
     the traditional version of the murder of Laius by Oedipus. Studying the contradictions in Sophocles’ text, the two authors,
     who drew inspiration from Voltaire’s ironic remarks on the plausibility of the plot, came to the conclusion that it was never
     actually proven that Oedipus was guilty of the crime of which he finally accuses himself. *
    One of the problematic details is the number of Laius’s attackers. The only witness to the murder, a servant of the king’s,
     declared that his master had been killed by several people; he never changed his testimony. Yet once Oedipus has convinced
     himself of his own guilt, the witness is not brought back for questioning, although his testimony flagrantly contradicts the
     results of Oedipus’s investigation. A strange oversight, and one that encourages all sorts of suppositions—including that
     the accused Oedipus is innocent.
    We can imagine all the consequences that an innocent Oedipus might entail. To take just one example, one of the most important
     theories of our era, psychoanalysis, is largely based on this ancient myth, and upon the