some more notes on Florizel/Holmes (mainly literary)
more notes redrafted:
Livanov as Holmes in disguise Oleg Dal sans costume sans disguise
And so, some questioning thoughts; regarding the comparisons of Florizel and Holmes...
Philosophers and moralists both - as I have mentioned, there is a direct comparison between the Prince letting the villain Rolles go free and Holmes doing the same with Dr Sterndale. It would seem they are agents of their own power - a higher power perhaps... Holmes is, after all, resurrected, and though Florizel waves the comparison aside, Rolles nevertheless asks if Florizel will permit him to 'touch his hand’ (the hem of his garment?).
Florizel's advice, sending the man to Australia (as Holmes allows Sterndale to return to the African bush) is almost biblical in its wording.
(There is a linked issue here about disguise/recognition which i shall return to...and leads ultimately to Gandalf in LOTR).
(I cannot help but wonder if Father Brown sprang into the mind of Chesterton after this...)
.....
But the question for today is a simple one.
To quote the opening of The Suicide Club; (an astonishing correlative to given notions of Victoriana, and prescient indeed)
"Listen," said the young man, "this is the age of conveniences, and I have to tell you of the last perfection of the sort. We have affairs in different places; and hence railways were invented. Railways separated us infallibly from our friends; and so telegraphs were invented that we might communicate speedily at great distances. Even in hotels we have lifts to spare us the climb of some hundred steps. Now, we that know that life is only a stage to play the fool upon..."
Indeed such an echo of Shakespeare is redolent of existential crises - the void behind the glittering humour of Stevenson's Florizel tales, but a void that demands the birth of just such a proto-existential agent as the Prince (and indeed Holmes too).
Victorian literature is often an intriguing mix of the rational and the religious* the friction between these two oppositions was a mighty source of inspiration.
But my wonderings are primarily these; do readers/viewers consider these views to be also those of the Prince? It would be easy to dismiss - but Stevenson's retreat to a 'primitive' island begs the question.
And as for Holmes... of course the man would be lost without the telegraph!! It would be very easy to make the case that were he alive today then Baker Street would be a web-site and help would be summoned by an e-mail etc. Holmes was all for scientific advancement and a being of his age..
(Note: albeit a chivalric age; as Stevenson points out at the very beginning of The Suicide Club.
Interestingly both Florizel and Holmes are allowed to lie through their teeth, a serious sin in Victorian times, but they can do so only when in disguise.)
... or was he? At some indefinable point, it seems to me that Holmes came to represent a nostalgic mourning for a lost time, the youth of the author and his readers? The lost Victorian Empire? Was this backwards looking a natural part of Holmes resurrection, or simply the aging of the author, perhaps the loss of his wife? Did it take place after Reichenbach or after WW1... I am curious. Certainly those stories that immediately followed the canon, those stories by Doyle's son and Dickinson-Carr have this as their core.
And finally - are any of these issues seen on the screen when the adventures of Florizel and Holmes are recreated
*Rational and Religious - I use these words in the loose sense of their dictionary meaning - I am not making a personal judgement on either CONCEPT.
previous notes here:.
Livanov as Holmes in disguise Oleg Dal sans costume sans disguise
And so, some questioning thoughts; regarding the comparisons of Florizel and Holmes...
Philosophers and moralists both - as I have mentioned, there is a direct comparison between the Prince letting the villain Rolles go free and Holmes doing the same with Dr Sterndale. It would seem they are agents of their own power - a higher power perhaps... Holmes is, after all, resurrected, and though Florizel waves the comparison aside, Rolles nevertheless asks if Florizel will permit him to 'touch his hand’ (the hem of his garment?).
Florizel's advice, sending the man to Australia (as Holmes allows Sterndale to return to the African bush) is almost biblical in its wording.
(There is a linked issue here about disguise/recognition which i shall return to...and leads ultimately to Gandalf in LOTR).
(I cannot help but wonder if Father Brown sprang into the mind of Chesterton after this...)
.....
But the question for today is a simple one.
To quote the opening of The Suicide Club; (an astonishing correlative to given notions of Victoriana, and prescient indeed)
"Listen," said the young man, "this is the age of conveniences, and I have to tell you of the last perfection of the sort. We have affairs in different places; and hence railways were invented. Railways separated us infallibly from our friends; and so telegraphs were invented that we might communicate speedily at great distances. Even in hotels we have lifts to spare us the climb of some hundred steps. Now, we that know that life is only a stage to play the fool upon..."
Indeed such an echo of Shakespeare is redolent of existential crises - the void behind the glittering humour of Stevenson's Florizel tales, but a void that demands the birth of just such a proto-existential agent as the Prince (and indeed Holmes too).
Victorian literature is often an intriguing mix of the rational and the religious* the friction between these two oppositions was a mighty source of inspiration.
But my wonderings are primarily these; do readers/viewers consider these views to be also those of the Prince? It would be easy to dismiss - but Stevenson's retreat to a 'primitive' island begs the question.
And as for Holmes... of course the man would be lost without the telegraph!! It would be very easy to make the case that were he alive today then Baker Street would be a web-site and help would be summoned by an e-mail etc. Holmes was all for scientific advancement and a being of his age..
(Note: albeit a chivalric age; as Stevenson points out at the very beginning of The Suicide Club.
Interestingly both Florizel and Holmes are allowed to lie through their teeth, a serious sin in Victorian times, but they can do so only when in disguise.)
... or was he? At some indefinable point, it seems to me that Holmes came to represent a nostalgic mourning for a lost time, the youth of the author and his readers? The lost Victorian Empire? Was this backwards looking a natural part of Holmes resurrection, or simply the aging of the author, perhaps the loss of his wife? Did it take place after Reichenbach or after WW1... I am curious. Certainly those stories that immediately followed the canon, those stories by Doyle's son and Dickinson-Carr have this as their core.
And finally - are any of these issues seen on the screen when the adventures of Florizel and Holmes are recreated
*Rational and Religious - I use these words in the loose sense of their dictionary meaning - I am not making a personal judgement on either CONCEPT.
previous notes here:.