Doyle’s Diogenes Club: a Delightful Oddity Screening a Metatextual Clue
In this paper I propose to study Mycroft Holmes’s club in the Sherlock Holmes stories: the Diogenes Club is rather close to an oxymoron as the golden rule is that the members are not allowed to speak to one another. I will show how this textual detail, that eminently Doylian delicious paradox, can r...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2015-06-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/1984 |
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| Summary: | In this paper I propose to study Mycroft Holmes’s club in the Sherlock Holmes stories: the Diogenes Club is rather close to an oxymoron as the golden rule is that the members are not allowed to speak to one another. I will show how this textual detail, that eminently Doylian delicious paradox, can read as a rather elaborate parody of the ambivalence of Victorian clubs, where the ideal of sociability cohabits with a more dissident taste for secrecy and seclusion. It can also read as a metatextual clue to the strategic importance of silence in Conan Doyle’s text. That famous inquisitive text, a positivist celebration of the powers of logos, also makes room for a crucial vindication of silence, and creates the paradoxical possibility for the text to escape the very paradigms it powerfully establishes. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |