Collection et mémoire : le portrait des Baskerville

Abstract

The highly dramatic revelation, in Chapter XIII of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, that the naturalist Stapleton is in fact a Baskerville in disguise, is a means for Sherlock Holmes of finding, as he puts it, the «missing link» of his investigation. The examination of the «line» of family portraits on the wall makes Stapleton’s face «spring out of the canvas» (as Dr Watson puts it), in a potentially fantastic frame-breaking. The aim of this paper is to show to what extent Holmes’s use of this epistemological metaphor, far from bringing the novel to a conclusive ending, brings about an open one, where the criminal’s traces merge into the bogs and morasses of Dartmoor. The memory of an atavistic resemblance between the naturalist and the Baskervilles, triggered and revived as it is by the «time-stained portrait on the wall», raises the issue of the perception of past times as «stained», as crushing the individual — a key Victorian motif also treated by Stevenson in «Olalla», and Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. As Holmes turns out to be a connoisseur — which Dr Watson, in the novel, tends to deny —, the notion of collection is also problematic, here as in many stories where Doyle tends to associate it with madness: Holmes’s use of the «net» metaphor, by which Stapleton is viewed as a «pike» about to be caught, suggests, on his part, an identification with the very butterfly-collector he tries to catch. In «The Musgrave Ritual», Watson already described Holmes’s collection of cases as «curious». In her essay «Forging the Missing Link», Gillian Beer shows that the very notion of «missing link» is all the more ambiguous since the Victorians (and not Darwin or Spencer), who forged it in order to tame the fear of insecure origins, usually failed to do so: the «missing link» is not only a «negative», frightening creature, but by definition, missing. Thus does the end of the novel fail to secure the very origins which the detective himself had tried to revive by, and thanks to his own anamnesic work