Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE OPENING THE CONVERSATION
- PART TWO HOLMES IN THE CONVERSATION OF HIS CULTURE
- PART THREE THE TWO POLES OF CONVERSATION
- 8 THE BIPOLAR DYNAMICS OF HOLMES' HOUSEHOLD DIALOGUES: levity and gravity
- 9 HOLMES' HOUSE DIVIDED: house-keeping and house-breaking
- 10 “CUTTING OFF THE COMMUNICATION”: fixations and falls for the walled-in self – Holmes in dialogue with Sterne, Dickens, and Melville
- 11 BREAKING THE HOUSE OF ROMANCE: Holmes in dialogue with Hawthorne
- PART FOUR CLOSING THE CONVERSATION
- Notes
- Index
8 - THE BIPOLAR DYNAMICS OF HOLMES' HOUSEHOLD DIALOGUES: levity and gravity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE OPENING THE CONVERSATION
- PART TWO HOLMES IN THE CONVERSATION OF HIS CULTURE
- PART THREE THE TWO POLES OF CONVERSATION
- 8 THE BIPOLAR DYNAMICS OF HOLMES' HOUSEHOLD DIALOGUES: levity and gravity
- 9 HOLMES' HOUSE DIVIDED: house-keeping and house-breaking
- 10 “CUTTING OFF THE COMMUNICATION”: fixations and falls for the walled-in self – Holmes in dialogue with Sterne, Dickens, and Melville
- 11 BREAKING THE HOUSE OF ROMANCE: Holmes in dialogue with Hawthorne
- PART FOUR CLOSING THE CONVERSATION
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Just as the eye seeks to refresh itself by resting on neutral tints after looking at brilliant colors, the mind turns from the glare of intellectual brilliancy to the solace of gentle dulness; the tranquillizing green of the sweet human qualities, which do not make us shade our eyes like the spangles of conversational gymnasts and figurantes.
Holmes, Mechanism in Thought and MoralsWhat is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity?
Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast-TableIn an early review of what he rightly sensed would be Holmes' major literary work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, James Russell Lowell celebrated the dizzying effects of the many turns, shifts, and clashes basic to the Doctor's strange new verbal form as a “universal Catherine-wheeling of fun and fancy.” And indeed initially Holmes' table-talk does often seem to spin wildly out of control, sending out sparks and speeches in all directions, spiralling far from any central point or voice with an irrepressible centrifugal force, dispersing any attempt at sober signification into a carnival of jabberwocky mush, so that even more private moments of calm internal discussion develop along the lines of a three-ring circus – or of the unending, disorderly proceedings of a multivoiced committee in debate. It may be, Lowell continues, that with his conversational free-play Holmes has invented a “new kind of rocket” that can “stay up against all laws of gravity.”
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- Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation , pp. 215 - 234Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001