Pierre Bayard Discusses Hitchcock s’est trompé at The Seminary Co-op

This event marks the conclusion of the Conference: Creative Reading — Rethinking Our Relationship to Art & Literature through Pierre Bayard, organized by Professors Loriane Lafont-Grave and Jacqueline Victor on October 14-16 at the University of Chicago with Pierre Bayard in attendance.

About the Book: It is impossible to seriously believe, like the two heroes of Hitchcock’s famous movie Rear Window, that their neighbor killed his wife and then cut her in pieces before the open windows of thirty apartments. But their interpretative delirium has not for sole consequence to condemn an innocent. It diverts our attention from another murder — this one being way more real— which takes place before the audience who does not realize yet what’s going one which demands the opening of a fresh investigation.

About the Author: Bayard’s best-known work in English prior to How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read is a work of literary detection entitled Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, published in 2000. In this book, Bayard dares to suggest that Hercule Poirot’s solution to one of Agatha Christie’s best-loved mysteries, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is incorrect and that Christie has deliberately deceived the casual reader. On his way to fingering the real murderer, Bayard conducts a sustained investigation into the nature of detective stories and the blind spots they exploit in hiding their solutions in plain sight, which he extends to other literary genres as well. He writes, “Many readers of fictional texts have at times experienced the disagreeable impression that they are being kept in the dark.” As in How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, this book concerns itself with literature that “disturbs the transparency of reading.” Reading, for Bayard, is never the simple transaction between author and reader that it would seem.

Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and other books, many of which have not been translated into English.