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Chapter One
Carlyle, a Victorian Sage?
In English departments in particular…it has been unthinkable entirely to ignore the prose writings of figures such as Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, and company. But at the same time, it has been hard to know quite what to do with them. (Collini 14)
[It is] language which speaks, not the author. (Barthes 168)
[A] text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody,
contestation. (Barthes 171)
I. Introduction
Walter Whitman highly praised Thomas Carlyle as “a representative author, a literary figure” (par. 2) of the nineteenth century in an elegiac prose. For Whitman, it was not merely Carlyle’s “literary merit” but his “touch of the old Hebraic anger and prophecy” (par. 5) that made him a great poet of his age. Whitman then added further that it was not appropriate to use the term, “prophecy,” to describe Carlyle’s value;
rather, “prophet” would be proper since “it mean[t] one whose mind bubble[d] up and pour[d] forth as a fountain, from inner, divine spontaneities revealing God” (par. 5).
Three decades later, in Robert Huntington Fletcher’s A History of English Literature (1918), Carlyle again was praised as “a social and religious prophet, lay-preacher, and prose-poet, one of the most eccentric but one of the most stimulating of all English writers” (Par. 1). Since then “prophet-poet” was almost synonymous with Carlyle from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth.
Due to Whitman’s appreciation and the early twentieth-century scholarly appraisal, “Thomas Carlyle” the name almost equates the term, sage-prophet, during
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the years from 1860s to 1980s.5 Sartor Resartus, reflecting its author’s sagacity, hence stood for a modern spiritual-bible to moral- and life-philosophy. To ally Carlyle to a sage and Sartor Resartus to the Bible, generally, the traditional twentieth-century scholars all agreed that, firstly, Carlyle was a conscious “Author-God” purposefully creating a unique philosophy, elevating Carlyle as the founder of nineteenth-century transcendentalism. Secondly, Sartor Resartus was an aesthetic unity structurally organized and rhetorically coherent to center Carlyle’s theme of moral philosophy of man and man’s life.
The “sage-prophet” discourse was problematic because, to take the author as an ultimate creator and the text as a complete unity, scholars mistook the author as the origin to produce meanings, and the work as an artistically-arranged structure of an aesthetic unity. They opined that, first, the author was able to create a never-said discourse, able to dominate the meaning, to work for the author’s own intent, and able to combine all contested meanings congenially to each other. Second, they supposed that there was necessarily an aesthetic unity to the work to combine the rhetoric, imagery, structure, and theme in the work via the author’s intention, forming compatible interrelations between author and work. A critic, consequently, was responsible for revealing the center of the work and to discover the aesthetic
interrelations hidden within the labyrinthine meanings. Based on these assumptions, the twentieth-century traditional studies of Carlyle and Sartor thus mainly focused on the aesthetic unity of the work and the moral purposes of the author.
To regard Carlyle as a prophet-sage and Sartor as a moral-philosophical instruction, the traditional scholars in fact sanctified both the author and the book. To be hallowed, the author was supposed to precede the book to “nourish the book”
5 Around 1930s and 1940s, however, due to the rise of Nazism and the eruption of the Second World War, Carlyle lost his reputation of a prophet-poet for his early affiliation with Goethe and Schiller as well as his enthusiasms about German Romanticism and transcendentalism (Tennyson 1984: xiv).
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(Barthes 170). The author and the book hence “[stood] automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after” (170). For instance, the author, Carlyle, stood for the father of the book, Sartor, which represented the child to deliver faithfully the father’s idea and for posterity. Carlyle, the transcendentalist, then spontaneously left his noble spirit to his child, Sartor. “Carlyle,” as the name of the father, thus typified the center of thoughts, and Sartor, as a pious child, signified an aesthetic unity to convey the central idea of the author-father, Carlyle. The author-father was sacred and noble, since he was the fountainhead originating thoughts and wisdom, and the
book-child was stable and dependable, because the lessons pouring from the book were true to the author’s intention. There seemed to be clear boundaries between the author-father and the book-child. The father-author stationed himself high in heaven to leave his message in his book-child in the mundane world. The responsible and trustworthy book-child never betrayed the father’s command and never diverged from its duty of advice, instruction, and moralization. According to such an interpretation, there were necessarily the stable and reliable interrelations between Carlyle the author-father and Sartor the book-child.
The hallowed author-child assumption of modern studies, however, overvalues the author. Due to the characteristics of the meanings—neither transparent nor steadfast—the author is by no means the ultimate origin and the sole creator of the work and the work itself is on no account an aesthetic unity able to combine the conflicting opinions and to work for morality only. The position of Carlyle, instead, should not be as high aloft as heaven but an indexical node to point a convergence of multiple discursive practices among the complex web of meanings. More than a transcendental figure to “create” meanings, the author should be regarded as an agent to transmit “already-said” meanings.
Furthermore, the hallowed author-child assumption also misinterprets the
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book-child as a closed territory. Meanings, however, due to their characteristic referring and deferring, are never stable within an assumed intact-border of the work.
Meanings thus exceed the supposed boundaries of the book form, flowing across the imaginary boundaries of the work. Without any limits, the completion of the work and its aesthetic unity hence never exists but turns out to be merely the New Critic’s romantic imagination. Instead of taking the work as an accomplished art, late
twentieth-century scholars then replace “work” by “text,” to highlight the attributes of borderlessness and intertextuality. Since they are borderless, meanings of a text can no longer be self sufficient but will be interrelated to the contexts of the text itself. The text is never independent but always relying on other texts.
To regard a work as a text, then, neither the author is the origin of meanings nor is the text the end of meanings. The “author can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” and the “the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (Barthes 170). Namely, neither is the author a
sanctified “Author-God” nor is the work an artistic unity and of biblical-like guidance.
Meanings, whether the “already-said” or the “never-said” (Foucault Knowledge 25) stream through the book, flowing over the bound of the book itself, even, over the author’s intentional control.
Provided that “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’
meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes 170), then, does
“Carlyle” still represent, as in George P. Landow’s Elegant Jeremiahs, one of the
“far-off Hebraic utterers, a new Micah or Habbukak” to “bubble forth [his words]
with abysmic inspiration” (21)? On condition that the “oeuvre can be regarded neither as an immediate unity, nor as a certain unity, nor as a homogeneous unity” (Foucault Knowledge 24), then, does Sartor still represent, in John Holloway’s prominent The
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Victorian Sage, an aesthetic unity “to express notions about the world, man’s situation in it, and how he should live” (1)?
Simply put, what is Carlyle? Is Carlyle indeed a sagacious Author-God, not only generating new meanings of Victorian prophecy but also creating a new form of the sage-prose writing? And what is Sartor Resartus? Is Sartor indeed an aesthetic unity, not only faithfully conveying the Author-God’s meanings and independently standing for other meanings?
The purpose of this chapter hence is to reexamine “Carlyle” the author and to review “Sartor Resartus” the text from the concepts of the author and the text. Instead of honoring Carlyle the sage-philosopher and lauding the aesthetics and the morals in Sartor in the manner of the New Critics of traditional studies, I shall, first, reconsider Carlyle the author from the concepts based on Barthes’s death of the author and Foucault’s author function, and second, to review Sartor the text from Foucault’s archaeological viewpoint. With the interrogation of the author’s status and the work’s unity, I will argue that, first, more than a stereotype of a Victorian prophetic sage,
“Carlyle” functions as a proper name to indicate the adaptation, transformation, and modification of certain ideas such as science, religion, matter, spirit, nature, the supernatural, scientists, and philosophers. Second, more than an aesthetic unity about the spiritual elevation of a lost philosopher, Sartor the text stands for a discursive site of the confrontation, conflict, and contradiction of multiple voices, resembling a museum that exhibits the ideas such as the visible, the invisible, the wise, the foolish, the Baconian scientist, and the Newtonian scientist of early nineteenth century Britain.
Before freeing the author and the work from the traditional myths of an
all-powerful “Author-Father” and an obedient “book-child,” this study will start with a review of the past studies in reference to Carlyle and Sartor. This review is of two
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purposes: on one hand to discover the confinements of previous studies and on the other to delve into the blind points for further breakthrough. After an epistemological review of the Carlyle studies in the past centuries, then, there will be the
interrogations of the author and the work to succeed.
II. The Modern Interpretations of Carlyle and Sartor Resartus