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Sherlock Holmes, un nouveau limier pour le XXIe siècle

 | 
Hélène Machinal
, 
Gilles Menegaldo
, 
Jean-Pierre Naugrette

Première partie. Genèse, origines et contexte

The ending as addiction in the Sherlock Holmes stories: the last ending as always the last ending but one

Nathalie Jaëck

Texte intégral

  • 1 In his liminal and authoritative article on endings, “Clausules”, Philippe Hamon makes it clear tha (...)
  • 2 Mellier Denis, «L’aventure de la faille apocryphe ou Reichenbach et la Sherlock-fiction», in Mellie (...)
  • 3 Hamon Philippe, «Clausules», Poétique, vol. 24, Paris, Le Seuil, 1975, p. 499.
  • 4 Armstrong, Paul B., How Literature Plays with the Brain: the Neuroscience of Reading and Art, Balti (...)
  • 5 Ricœur Paul, Temps et Récit, t. 1, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983, p. 189.

1Endings in the Sherlock Holmes stories are troubling cases of narrative ambivalence. The Canon is typically characterized by an absolute craving for endings, by a compulsion to persistently bolt the text with triumphant all-encompassing final conclusions—a compulsion that is of course a sign of their generic belonging1. It is now a well-documented fact Sherlock Holmes is what Denis Mellier called “une fiction continue”, a text that keeps proliferating, and being rewritten: “Une telle insistance de la fiction s’exprime incontestablement dans les jeux de miroir et de réécriture en perpétuelle élaboration que Conan Doyle a peut-être involontairement ouverts lui-même2.” Such “insistence” is even more striking as far as endings are concerned: there is indeed in the Canon an explicit yearning for endings, sixty all in all, plus all the spectacular endings that are merely mentioned, stirring the text with frustration and desire: terminating the text amounts indeed to a ritual obsession, celebrating the contemporary positivist belief that reality can be ordered and reduced by reason. The ending is thus the strategic “finality3” of the text, its ideological “protentional horizon4”; it is also the very profession of Sherlock Holmes, an indefatigable serial-ender while the official police are typically at a loss, stuck in the middle of cases that are invariably labyrinthine to them. The ending is cheered by collective euphoria: it is the high of the story, saturated with information, replete and sated, and it fulfils the comforting function of what Ricœur called “le secours du monde5”—the detective fixes the world, all is well that ends well, and the excipit amounts to a self-satisfied authoritative explicit.

  • 6 The Sign of Four, in Conan Doyle Arthur, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, London, Penguin, 200 (...)

2But the text is also (de) structured by contrary forces, by a conflicting urge to destabilize the ending as soon as it is masterfully achieved: the climax triggers an acute reactive anti-climax, an unsettling state of withdrawal that demands repetition and craves for the next ending. The fix is highly transient and invariably insufficient, and Holmes goes back to cocaine the minute the case is solved in The Sign of Four: “‘For me,’ said Sherlock Holmes, ‘there still remains the cocaine-bottle.’ And he stretched his long white hand up for it6.”—a sentence that makes the link explicit: cocaine is only a product of substitution when the discharge of energy provided by endings is not available.

  • 7 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 508.

3Doyle thus wrote endings that prove both extremely final and necessarily temporary; that these endings are characterized both by an exhilarating exhibition of closure, and by what Philippe Hamon called “une force de continuation, anti-clausulaire par excellence7”. Such ambivalence shapes what I called the addictive structure of these endings—a structure that is closely linked with the process of serialisation itself and with Doyle’s ambivalent relationship with his cumbersome character: both necessary and insufficient, much desired and much dreaded, the endings build the formal conditions for their own perfect closure, as well as they develop contrary textual strategies of escape and open-endedness. Doyle thus seems to have perfected a double-binding protocol that demands the ending to be a sort of multi-reached ever-receding limit, potentially the final one—and exhibiting that delicious threat is part of the hooking writing method—but advertising and ensuring its never-ending repetition: the addiction went on obviously, and Michael Dibdin’s very successful parody, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, takes up Doyle’s paradoxical titling tradition—“The Final Problem”, “His Last Bow”—advertising closure as an obvious decoy, the more so since His Last Bow is actually the title of the collection of eight stories containing “This Last Bow”: it is thus a new way to pluralise the unique ending, to insist that the last bow is invariably embedded.

  • 8 Deleuze develops the idea in his Abécédaire, letter B, «B comme boisson», a documentary series crea (...)

4Such tension within the strategic space of the ending will lead us to propose that the ideal “last ending” in the Sherlock Holmes story is thus built as “the last ending but one”: Gilles Deleuze explains that for the alcoholic, drinking always tends to “the final glass” (“boire, c’est tout faire pour accéder au dernier verre8”), but that the final glass is always the final glass but one, the glass that makes it possible to start over again the next day; similarly, the Doylian text is all targeted towards the ending, but the perfect ending is always the last ending but one, the ending that allows a new start. The ending is thus not so much a fixed product as an on-going addictive process.

  • 9 A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 86.
  • 10 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 500.
  • 11 A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 86.
  • 12 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 516.
  • 13 A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 86.
  • 14 Ibid., p. 86.

5Doyle’s involvement with Holmes was ironically initially meant to be a one-shot—he wrote A Study in Scarlet as mere distraction from his more serious work, and published it in 1886 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual after receiving several rejections. Yet the novella already presents the reader with a prototypical ambivalent ending: on the one hand, it is highly bolted—by entitling the final chapter “The Conclusion”, Doyle insists that ending is the very object of the text and indeed it consists in the methodical retrospective unknotting of all entangled threads, while a final maxim in Latin and in eternal present affords classical stabilisation. Yet, Watson cannot help leaving it there, and mentions a text-to-come: “I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them9”. Just as the targeted “protensional horizon” is reached, it is displaced forward, it becomes imminent again, and the modal “shall” inscribes the unsettling irruption of a necessary future text. The Sign of Four, the second novella, written four years later and achieving no greater success, builds the same tension: on the one hand, Watson sums up the text with a final formula, that has the signalling function of what Hamon calls “un indicatif, un leitmotiv signalétique10”: “Well, and there is the end of our little drama11”. Doyle also seems to have taken all the precautions for the text to be the last one: by getting Watson married and moving out of Baker Street, he efficiently terminates the collaboration, and thus fortifies the ending by justifying it with thematic backing, as Hamon explains: “Le texte peut mettre en relief sa clausule en laissant à l’énoncé proprement dit le soin de l’assumer par une thématique particulière, celle précisément de la fin, et de toutes ses variantes12.” Nevertheless, Watson again, the narrator, the text-monger, cannot quite resolve to a full stop: “I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods13”. As in A Study in Scarlet, “the last”, though much established, is also much deconstructed, introduced by a precautionary clause that dissolves its object, and works nearly as an antiphrasis: “the last” is heavily unsettled by modalization, grammatically pushed back, made subjective and merely probable, and preceded by “I fear”, echoed by Holmes: “I feared as much14”—the ending is thus from these liminal texts a receding certainty.

6This is all the more surprising as the typical Sherlock Holmes ending needs to be fully bolted, and even doubly bolted—following Hamon’s distinctions, in order to be finished, in order to provide the accustomed reader with what Kermode famously called the full “Sense of an Ending”, the end must be not only “finalized” as far as the story is concerned, but “finite”, i. e. “polished”, as far as the text itself is concerned. The ending is thus a double performance: the story of the case must be completed, and the self-celebrating text must fall back beautifully on its typical narrative positions.

  • 15 “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1044.
  • 16 “The Red-Headed League”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 190.
  • 17 “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 538.
  • 18 “The Adventure of the Three Students”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 607.
  • 19 “The Musgrave Ritual”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 397.
  • 20 “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 332.
  • 21 “The Red-Headed League”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 190.

7As for the story itself, no remainder is allowed, no thread can remain unravelled, and reality needs to fully surrender to the detective’s final logocentric ordering, resettling the world after it was disrupted by the criminal event. The text meticulously builds such stabilisation through globalising retrospection, clearing what Armstrong called “the retentional horizon”: static present perfect—“The matter has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion15”—resolute post-positions to comfort full clearance—“You reasoned it out beautifully16”, “to round off my narratives17” or “I think we have cleared your little problem up18”—and hackneyed formulas that mark a return to motionlessness and mechanically signal the end: “And that’s the story of the Musgrave Ritual Watson19”, “And thus was solved the mystery of the sinister house with the Copper Beeches in front of the door20”. “Out”, “off” and “up”: the story is superlatively ended, as the detective fulfilled his fixing mission: the rational positivist thinker took the measure of frightening, opaque and chaotic reality into a verbal coherent, chronological and causal chain of event, with a beginning, and an ending: “It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true21.” “Secours du monde” indeed, Holmes gets rid of crime, but above all finalizes his ideological positivist function.

  • 22 “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 244.
  • 23 Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 490.

8Beyond individual original finalization, each story also needs to achieve collective finish, i.e. to satisfy to the common criteria of congruence to the codified model: to be validated as such, each conclusion must thus reach the contractual stable positions of THE end, and abide by the textual programme as it has been progressively and implicitly defined. The end is thus literally portended by contents that have gradually been legitimized into compulsory forms: Holmes must deprive Watson of the narration and engage in a long explanatory monologue only to be interrupted by interjections of admiration from the bemused audience, he must boast about how undemanding the resolution was in front of utterly mystified members of the official police (typically “I reached this one by sitting upon five pillows and consuming an ounce of shag22”), he must humiliate both Gregson and Watson, who must look half-offended, half-gratified (and this is except when Watson decides to underestimate himself and to cast himself in the role of the village idiot to save the detective trouble, another very enjoyable leitmotiv of the text: “‘Oh, what an ass I have been!’ I exclaimed23.”), he should find an eccentric way out, like going to a concert of abscond music or injecting himself with cocaine, and for good measure he may absolve the culprit. As Hamon puts it:

  • 24 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 499; 501.

Le sentiment d’achèvement vient en général de la saturation d’un modèle ou d’un code implicite au message lui-même. […] La clausule est donc un élément fondamental de la lisibilité du texte puisqu’elle l’intègre à un corpus de textes déjà lus, qu’il ne s’agit pas tant de la comprendre, que de la reconnaître; elle joue donc un rôle phatique appréciable, le rôle d’une véritable citation, d’un opérateur d’intertextualité, d’un appel à la compétence textuelle du lecteur, point d’insertion dans le texte du savoir de la communauté culturelle, effet par conséquent autant de l’extratexte que du texte même24.

  • 25 Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix, op. cit., p. 121.
  • 26 Eco Umberto, De Superman au surhomme, Paris, Grasset, 1982, p. 29.
  • 27 “The Adventure of the Second Stain”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 666.
  • 28 “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 999.
  • 29 “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1120.
  • 30 “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 372.
  • 31 “The Reigate Puzzle”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 411.
  • 32 “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 931.
  • 33 “The Resident Patient”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 433.
  • 34 “A Study in Scarlet”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 83.

9The ending is signalled indeed by the irruption of intratextual recognition, the text is suddenly turned into a palimpsest and folds on its previous versions: it is the end simply when you recognize it, and it becomes all the more intense as it reactivates all the previous endings; repetition is thus not a static return to the same, but an intensifying process, a kind of ending, giving the text what Deleuze called “une puissance de variation continue25”. As Eco analyses it: “Le style usera de solutions préconstituées, offrant au lecteur les joies de la reconnaissance du déjà-connu. Puis il jouera d’itérations continuelles afin de procurer au public le plaisir régressif du retour à l’attendu26.” Euphoria is catching indeed, and endings in the Sherlock Holmes stories are collective highs: “wonderfuls” and “excellents” by the dozen punctuate the final narrations of the detective, “thank yous” and blessings pour from ecstatic clients (“Thank you! Thank you! […] Mr. Holmes, you are a wizard, a sorcerer27.”), as well as superlative praise: “you have done wonders—wonders28”; “‘It is masterly’, said the inspector in an awed voice29”). But these outbursts are nothing to the exhilaration of the detective himself, and the uninterrupted flow of his own narration acts like a discharge of intense pleasure: “‘The paper! Of course!’ yelled Holmes in a paroxysm of excitement. […] He flattened it out upon the table, and a cry of triumph burst from his lips30.” Each ending acts like a sort of invigorating substance to him, and makes him feel “much invigorated31”, or “refreshed32”, a psychotropic self-celebration that often results in a kind of delusion of grandeur and leads him to dispense with the police altogether and to free the culprit—it is spectacularly the case in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”, or “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”. As for the doctor, he does participate in the outburst of collective pleasure, in his usual clumsy way: “‘My dear Holmes!’ I ejaculated33”, one of the numerous similar echoes from the first story: “‘Simple!’ I ejaculated. […] ‘It is wonderful!’ I cried34.”

  • 35 “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1044.
  • 36 “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 538.

10So endings in the Sherlock Holmes stories create both the static self-contained satisfaction of finalization, and the intense ecstasy of finite extratextual self-enjoyment; while the first ideological motivation is satisfied with a return to the beginning, the second aesthetic jubilation craves for the next “beautiful”, polished ending. The idea that endings are aesthetic achievements is indeed reinforced by their rephrasing as artistic performances: one of the stories is titled “His Last Bow”, while Holmes himself resorts to the vocabulary of the stage: “‘This, I fancy, is the time for our exit, Watson’35”. In this respect, each ending becomes a kind of rehearsal of the next one, and we could say that while the first satisfaction is part of a strategy of conservation, a settling return to the status quo before chaos, a sort of end-pleasure, the second type of pleasure is linked with an unsettling strategy of expenditure—what Bataille called “la dépense”, which is quite close to what Freud called the “bonus pleasure”, “la prime de plaisir”, a sort of fore-pleasure. Not only is pleasure found in the full satisfaction of a need (in this case the cure of society from crime), but also, additionally, as a bonus, in the auto-erotic anticipation of that satisfaction; this powerful side-effect becomes the very principle of addiction in the Sherlock Holmes stories, since in Watson’s words: “Each case has been the prelude to another36.” The fore-pleasure thus competes with the end-pleasure, and repeatedly disconcerts the ending, by creating an acute sense of withdrawal.

  • 37 In A Study in Scarlet, Watson suspects some drug use: “Nothing could exceed his energy when the wor (...)

11It is well-known that Holmes indulges in the occasional shoot of cocaine, and is not adverse either to morphine or opium—though less than modern adaptations have exploited, since cocaine is mentioned only four times in the whole Canon37. Yet, addiction is much more than a decadent idiosyncrasy of the dandy detective—it is a textual structure, and the crucial addiction concerns endings. Weaning the text from the next compulsory ending, from its upcoming textual dose, proves much more difficult than weaning the detective from cocaine—no matter how hard Doyle tries to make the ending the last one, it always remains the last but one.

  • 38 The Sign of Four, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 157.
  • 39 A Study in Scarlet, in Doyle, Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 89-90.
  • 40 “The Red-Headed League”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 190.
  • 41 “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 913.

12The first element to notice is that the satisfaction procured by endings is really short-lived and creates instantaneous acute frustration that amounts to a state of withdrawal—actual drugs are in fact only resorted to as products of substitution when the real thing—cases—is missing. References are numerous in the text: “The reaction is already upon me. I shall be as limp as a rag for a week38”, says Sherlock in The Sign of Four as he craves for a new puzzle to solve: “‘My mind,’ he said, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation39.’” Or again, in “The Red-Headed League”, “Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me40.”, while physical symptoms are most acute in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”: “He paced restlessly about our sitting-room in a fever of suppressed energy, biting his nails, tapping the furniture, and chafing against inaction41.” Such a bad need for cases reflects upon the structure of the text, and both Holmes and Watson build the textual conditions for a never-ending flow—Sherlock even dealing cases from his personal stock to Watson when narration is running short.

  • 42 “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 257.
  • 43 “Silver Blaze”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 350.
  • 44 “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1022.
  • 45 “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1122.

13The most efficient textual strategy is to frame the ending in a double process of anticipation and frustration, either by mentioning more, or by not yielding quite enough. Anticipation is created by giving the reader a taste of the next case—a free sample so to speak. The artificiality of the process is signalled in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”: “‘If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief feature42.’” This final sentence is all written in the future, it deterritorializes the ending, creates anticipation and fuels desire by starting a line of escape. The process is reinforced by the creation of artificial lack, through manipulation of ellipsis—not providing the reader with quite the full dose of text: “‘If you care for a cigar in our rooms, I shall be happy to give you any other details which might interest you43’”, or in a still more flippant way: “The case is but half-finished; the details can wait44.” Here again, the ending is deterritorialized, but another way: the sense of abundance is inverted in a sense of deprivation, since the ending does take place, but it takes place off the text, and the reader is tricked of the better end. Interestingly enough, the very final story, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman” written in 1927, three years before Doyle’s death, reads as a textual concentrate, combining both processes, both anticipation and ellipsis, both abundance and withdrawal. The final sentence of the text, after Holmes has successfully solved the case is as such: “‘You can file it in your archives, Watson. Some day the true story may be told45.’” Doyle is here at the purest of the textual formula: he creates a sense of abundance and possible never-ending supply by mentioning Watson’s archives, the grail for all the future parodists who will plunder this textual reservoir for merely mentioned textual ferments and develop them in full-length stories; he creates a sense of lack by referring to “the true story”, as if what the reader had only been given some passable ersatz, and he creates a sense of anticipation, projecting the text on to an undefined future, making it possible. “May” is thus the textual space of that “last but one”, it is the perfect linguistic marker of the ending, that invariably allows the next one—it may also read as an authorial invite.

  • 46 The story is well-known well-documented in Doylian criticism: the public’s reaction to “The Final P (...)

14As for any addiction, the yearning to go on in the Sherlock Holmes stories is deeply ambivalent, and is repeatedly opposed by a contrary desire to quit. Doyle did quit, quite valiantly and despite the fact that he was unanimously unsupported46. But there were a couple of textual bad trips along the way: though Watson surreptitiously mentions them between square brackets, squeezing the information in at the beginning of “The Yellow Face”, endings were not always so successful as the official Canon records:

  • 47 “The Yellow Face”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 350-351.

[In publishing these short sketches based upon the numerous cases in which my companion’s singular gifts have made us the listeners to, […] it is only natural that I should dwell rather upon his successes than upon his failures. And this not so much for the sake of his reputation—for, indeed, it was when he was at his wits’ end that his energy and his versatility were most admirable—but because where he failed it happened too often that no one else succeeded, and that the tale was left forever without a conclusion. Now and again, however, it chanced that even when he erred, the truth was still discovered. I have noted of some half-dozen cases of the kind47.]

  • 48 Ibid., p. 359.
  • 49 Ibid., p. 359.
  • 50 “The Yellow Face”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 362.

15The quote is interesting for several reasons: first it highlights the fact that those tales “left forever without a conclusion” are simply not canonical, they are off-record bad textual material, and thus censored, barred by the brackets. That the ending should be inconclusive is simply not a textual option for Doyle, as we saw. But it also means that quite a few times, the double exhilaration of repeated bolted resolution is not achieved. This is never more acute than in “The Yellow Face”, the short-story introduced by this textual warning. Faithful to his maxim that his theory “covers all the facts48”, Holmes characteristically embarks on his self-satisfied monologue and wraps up the complex case of his client into a common trivial story of domestic infidelity. Not only do the audience’s doubtful comments fall short of the expected typical bravos and temper his enthusiasm (“It is all surmise49”, doubts Watson), but the wife in person deprives Holmes of his triumph, as she comes up with a highly sobering alternative version: an illegitimate black child she is hiding, and she can produce as damning evidence, stands in for Holmes’s fantasized lover, which leaves the detective utterly reactionless: “It was a long ten minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence50.” In “The Yellow Face”, the ending is unsettled because one of the two necessary conditions is missing: the text is duly finalized, as it provides the reader with a full solution; but the sense of completion is thwarted, because the text falls short of the model, it cannot glorify in his own protocol. As a product of substitution, “The Yellow Face” is highly unsettling: it morbidly certifies that repetition has turned into addiction, that there is no way out of the textual matrix.

  • 51 Cf. Jaëck Nathalie, “Le Saut manqué: aventure et imminence de Sherlock Holmes à Lord Jim”, in Fourt (...)
  • 52 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 480.

16Doyle obviously felt the strain of such repetition, explicitly describing his relation to the detective in terms of addiction, as having had an “overdose” of him: “‘I couldn’ t revive him if I would, at least not for years,’ he wrote to a friend who urged Holmes’s resurrection, ‘for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day51.’” He did quit indeed as he proudly asserts in this letter, making a radical move in “The Final Problem” in 1893, as he pushed Sherlock Holmes along with Moriarty down the Reichenbach Falls, “locked in each other’s arms52”. He did kill the detective, and then managed a ten-year period of abstinence, with only one flamboyant relapse, The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1901 but supposed to have taken place before the death of the detective. Doyle then yielded to temptation and, fiction being just like drugs a perfect place for illusion, he had no trouble resuscitating the detective in “The Adventure of the Empty House” in 1903—and going on for another 23 years.

17Despite the obvious resolution of Doyle to settle the ending once and for all, “The Final Problem” does not fully escape normative textual protocol: despite all the textual precautions to fully circumscribe the space of the ending, it seems that Doyle cannot help leaving room for perhaps just one more.

  • 53 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 469.
  • 54 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 516.
  • 55 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 516.
  • 56 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 469.

18The title makes the intention explicit, though it also acknowledges that ending is a difficult task, a problem indeed. The story is thus about tackling the problem of the end, just as much as it is the final story. Doyle certainly makes a case for the end, and the first sentence is a deterritorialising short-cut: in a highly unorthodox prolepsis, it immediately confuses the two thresholds and juxtaposes the beginning with the ending: “It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these, the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished53.” The end is to some extent cornered in the beginning, it is given no space to expand, it is denied any kind of development as it has already happened: it is thus made totally static by its safe territorialisation in the beginning of the story. All the grammatical forms further inscribe resolution and closure: “last” is reinforced by “ever”, “shall” makes closure compulsory, and Holmes is dealt with in the past—“was”. No hesitation there, the ending is indeed final, the more so since Doyle took the decisive precaution to back his textual purpose by actually killing the detective, doing away with temptation by making another story materially impossible. Hamon insists that the death of the principal character is a nearly automatic way to end a story, “un procédé stéréotypé très général de clausule54” that works as metatextual reinforcement by the central theme itself: “un mimétisme textuel, un commentaire métalinguistique du texte sur lui-même55”. The rest of the introduction reads as retrospective assessment by Watson of his function as a chronicler—“I have endeavoured to give some account […]56”—all in the present perfect, the time of narration thus being the temporal limit of the text, that is recapitulated from the beginning up to the present of narration, excluding any kind of future. Still more conclusive, Holmes himself, post-mortem, validates Watson’s analysis and confirms his own death—the typical show-off to the end, he claims the final word, and thus grants the text, on top of its finalization, its necessary aesthetic finish. But Holmes’s legacy letter is only the last but one paragraph, and Watson cannot leave it there—he needs write one paragraph more, and to unsettle the ending all over.

  • 57 Ibid., p. 480.
  • 58 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 480.
  • 59 Where “The Final Problem” failed to give a complete sense of an ending, later attempts, much less m (...)

19As both friend and narrator, he cannot help extending the ending just a little bit more, to insert a tiny remainder, the shadow of a possibility: “A few words may suffice to tell the little that remains57.” The fiend-form was not dead but sleeping indeed, and Watson stages the return of the prepressed modal “may”, invalidating the original “shall”. Similarly “ever” is un-written by “the little that remains”, the static past tense is once more inverted by a dynamic future. Watson’s words are then full of a minor, understated mode that completely contradicts his major meaning, and a euphoric tonality starts undermining the major dysphoric one. In the following sentence—“An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other’s arms58”—there is an unmistakable space for hesitation, a decisive stretching of the ending: not only are experts invariably wrong in the Sherlock Holmes stories as every mildly accustomed reader knows, but Watson returns the text to the possibility of a future. “Little doubt” and “could hardly fail” are proleptic clues that this final problem might well become “The final problem… but a few59”.

  • 60 Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix, op. cit., p. 16.
  • 61 Naugrette Jean-Pierre, Détections sur Sherlock Holmes, Cadillon, Le Visage Vert, 2015, p. 202.

20What is thus most remarkable in this set of sixty stories as far as endings are concerned is that the ending is paradoxically both crucial, and “a-significant”, as Deleuze and Guattari put it. They are definitely the strategic knots of the text, their targeted aims, their most coded and necessary configurations. But all these spectacular breaks can never endanger the whole structure of the text, as they obey, like the rhizome, the principle of a-significant break: “Principe de rupture asignifiante: contre les coupures trop signifiantes qui séparent les structures. Un rhizome peut être rompu, brisé en un endroit quelconque, il reprend suivant telle ou telle de ses lignes et suivant d’autres lignes60.” Indeed, owing to their multiple endings that unsettle linearity, the stories are like plateaux, they can be read in a random order: on top of being intensive moments of textual celebration, the endings thus allow multiple arrangements, and turn the text into a multi-ending never-ending surface, where finishing is always too stable to be honest, as Jean-Pierre Naugrette develops: “S’extraire du sens littéral, gage d’ouverture par la fermeture herméneutique qu’il institue, pour investir les possibles de la fiction, revient souvent à combler les manques et les lacunes du texte d’origine, à le «finir», en actualisant ses bifurcations virtuelles61.” As the text is an obsessively adaptable textual matrix, the ending is always a last but one spectacular trompe l’œil.

Bibliographie

Armstrong Paul B., How Literature Plays with the Brain: the Neuroscience of Reading and Art, Baltimore, The John Hopkins UP, 2013.

Bataille Georges, La Part maudite. précédé de La Notion de Dépense, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2011.

Conan Doyle Arthur, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, London, Penguin, 2009.

Dibdin Michael, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, London, Jonathan Cape, 1978.

Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix, Mille Plateaux, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

Eco Umberto, De Superman au surhomme, Paris, Grasset, 1982.

Hamon Philippe, «Clausules», Poétique vol. 24, Paris, Le Seuil, 1975.

Ingersoll Earl G., Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel, Danvers, Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp., 2007.

Jaëck Nathalie, “Le Saut manqué: aventure et imminence de Sherlock Holmes à Lord Jim”, in Fourtina Hervé, Jaëck Nathalie, Richard Joël (éd.), Aventure (s), Pessac, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2008, p. 131-142.

Mellier Denis, « L’aventure de la faille apocryphe ou Reichenbach et la Sherlock-fiction », Mellier Denis (dir.), Sherlock Holmes et le signe de la fiction, Fontenay/Saint-Cloud, ENS Éditions, 1999, p. 9-18.

Naugrette Jean-Pierre, Détections sur Sherlock Holmes, Cadillon, Le Visage Vert, 2015.

Ricœur Paul, Temps et Récit, t. 1, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983.

Notes

1 In his liminal and authoritative article on endings, “Clausules”, Philippe Hamon makes it clear that the finality of a text is closely linked to the genre it belongs to: “La ritualisation des procédures de clausule se fait principalement à l’intérieur du genre, le genre pouvant être défini comme un horizon d’attente thématique et formel institutionnalisé.” (Hamon p. 500) He insists that detective stories in particular are characterized by what he calls “clausules fermantes” (Hamon p. 509), and indeed the idea has been developed from early attempts at characterizing the genre. In his famous “Twenty rules for writing Detective Stories”, S. S. Van Dine repeatedly insists on the necessity to settle on a successful ending: “the criminal problem must be solved” [http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/vandine.htm]; in a recent study, Earl G. Ingersoll insists that “the pursuit of an ending” is the rule of detective stories, and that “the ending promises a sense of meaning not earlier attained” (Ingersoll Earl G., Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel, Danvers, Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp., 2007, p. 39).

2 Mellier Denis, «L’aventure de la faille apocryphe ou Reichenbach et la Sherlock-fiction», in Mellier Denis (dir.), Sherlock Holmes et le signe de la fiction, Fontenay/Saint-Cloud, ENS Éditions, 1999, p. 9.

3 Hamon Philippe, «Clausules», Poétique, vol. 24, Paris, Le Seuil, 1975, p. 499.

4 Armstrong, Paul B., How Literature Plays with the Brain: the Neuroscience of Reading and Art, Baltimore, The John Hopkins UP, 2013, p. 93.

5 Ricœur Paul, Temps et Récit, t. 1, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983, p. 189.

6 The Sign of Four, in Conan Doyle Arthur, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, London, Penguin, 2009, p. 158.

7 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 508.

8 Deleuze develops the idea in his Abécédaire, letter B, «B comme boisson», a documentary series created by Pierre-André Boutang and directed by Michel Pamart. It was broadcast on French television, in the Metropolis programme, on Arte en 1996, Paris, Montparnasse, 2004.

9 A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 86.

10 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 500.

11 A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 86.

12 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 516.

13 A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 86.

14 Ibid., p. 86.

15 “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1044.

16 “The Red-Headed League”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 190.

17 “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 538.

18 “The Adventure of the Three Students”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 607.

19 “The Musgrave Ritual”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 397.

20 “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 332.

21 “The Red-Headed League”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 190.

22 “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 244.

23 Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 490.

24 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 499; 501.

25 Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix, op. cit., p. 121.

26 Eco Umberto, De Superman au surhomme, Paris, Grasset, 1982, p. 29.

27 “The Adventure of the Second Stain”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 666.

28 “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 999.

29 “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1120.

30 “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 372.

31 “The Reigate Puzzle”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 411.

32 “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 931.

33 “The Resident Patient”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 433.

34 “A Study in Scarlet”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 83.

35 “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1044.

36 “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 538.

37 In A Study in Scarlet, Watson suspects some drug use: “Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him: but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.” (A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 20). The Sign of Four is the story where Holmes is actually seen injecting himself, at the beginning and at the end of the story, and Watson insists that this has been going on “three times a day for many months”: “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.” (Doyle, p. 89) In “The Yellow Face”, Watson mentions an occasional use of cocaine and once more makes it dependent on a shortage of cases: “Save for the occasional use of cocaine, he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting” (Doyle, p. 351). Finally, in “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter”, Watson mentions Holmes’tentative weaning, and defines him as an addict: “For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping.” (Doyle, p. 622).

38 The Sign of Four, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 157.

39 A Study in Scarlet, in Doyle, Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 89-90.

40 “The Red-Headed League”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 190.

41 “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 913.

42 “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 257.

43 “Silver Blaze”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 350.

44 “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1022.

45 “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 1122.

46 The story is well-known well-documented in Doylian criticism: the public’s reaction to “The Final Problem”, in which Holmes dies in the Reichenbach Falls locked arms in arms with his arch-enemy Moriarty was extremely vehement: it amounted to a national shock and people would wear black armbands in sign of mourning, while Doyle received thousands of pleading and threatening letters, and over 20000 readers cancelled their subscription with The Strand.

47 “The Yellow Face”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 350-351.

48 Ibid., p. 359.

49 Ibid., p. 359.

50 “The Yellow Face”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 362.

51 Cf. Jaëck Nathalie, “Le Saut manqué: aventure et imminence de Sherlock Holmes à Lord Jim”, in Fourtina Hervé, Jaëck Nathalie, Richard Joël (éd.), Aventure (s), Pessac, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2008, p. 131-142.

52 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 480.

53 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 469.

54 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 516.

55 Hamon Philippe, art. cité, p. 516.

56 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 469.

57 Ibid., p. 480.

58 “The Final Problem”, in Conan Doyle Arthur, op. cit., p. 480.

59 Where “The Final Problem” failed to give a complete sense of an ending, later attempts, much less motivated, prove even less efficient, a mere matter of form, as if to highlight that the end-wish remains, as some sort of textual wishful thinking: “His Last Bow” is subtitled “An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes”, and in this story, it is the upcoming war that acts as thematic backing, but apart from this paratextual clue and resort to real life, nothing in the text of the story prepares the conditions for the end. Similarly, at the beginning of “The Adventure of the Second Stain”, Watson surprises the reader by telling him that he had intended the previous adventure to be the last—without any such notion appearing in the mentioned story: “I had intended “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” to be the last of those exploits of my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, which I should ever communicate to the public.” (“The Adventure of the Second Stain”, p. 650) No only is his process not very efficient, since the ending is now made to belong to a kind of fictive past, not even considered for the case at hand, but the very next sentence of Watson cannot resist claiming how much text there is still left: “This resolution of mine was not due to any lack of material, since I have notes of many hundreds od cases to which I have never alluded.” (“The Adventure of the Second Stain”, p. 650) The mention of an ending becomes completely engulfed in a proliferation of possible new beginnings.

60 Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix, op. cit., p. 16.

61 Naugrette Jean-Pierre, Détections sur Sherlock Holmes, Cadillon, Le Visage Vert, 2015, p. 202.

Auteur

Professeure de littérature britannique du XIXe siècle, spécialiste en particulier du roman d’aventure victorien et de ses mutations formelles et idéologiques au tournant du siècle. Elle a écrit deux monographies, Charles Dickens : l’écriture comme pouvoir, l’écriture comme résistance, Paris, Ophrys, 2008 et Les Aventures de Sherlock Holmes, une affaire d’identité, Bordeaux, PUB, 2008, ainsi que divers articles sur Stevenson, Conrad, Stoker, Dickens, Doyle. Depuis 2011, elle dirige l’EA CLIMAS, où elle a notamment créé un séminaire de recherche pluridisciplinaire, « Puissance du mode Mineur ».

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