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the “how,” as in previous studies, the new study should endeavor to discover the
“what” in Carlyle’s text, Sartor, focusing not simply on the literariness but, more importantly, on the textual significances with regard to Sartor’s textual and contextual meanings. On the other, rather than emphasizing any specific intellectual history, the new study should try to be more objective and eclectic to exhibit the confrontations and interrelations of diverse ideological systems, implicitly or explicitly, mingled together within the Sartor the text. In other words, instead of falling into the fallacy of underlining aesthetic techniques in New Criticism and intellectual struggles in
Williams’ interpretation, the goal of a new study of Sartor should try to disclose
“what” is “said,” “unsaid,” and “yet-to say” in Sartor by centering on the intertextual significances of the text itself within the socio-cultural context of early nineteenth century English intellectual history.
In order to open up a new perspective in Carlylean study, this study follows Collini’s suggestion to concentrate on the study of the textual and intertextual significances of Sartor. The textual considerations of Carlyle and Sartor then will release Carlyle from the godlike author and sage position and the Sartor as a spiritual bible and from an aesthetic unity. To free Carlyle the author, I argue, the notion of Barthes’s “death of the author” and Foucault’s “author function” will be beneficial, and to free Sartor from the aesthetic yoke, Foucault’s concept of “archaeological study” will be profitable
III. Problems of Carlyle the Author-God And Theories about the Author
To begin with, what does the word, “author,” mean? What is the purpose of the author’s name? What are the relationships between the author and the society he dwells in? And what is the relationship between the author and his work? In “The
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Death of the Author”(1968), Roland Barthes declares a new age to review the subject of the author; on one hand, he downgrades the author from the transcendental
Author-God position, and on the other, he elevates the text’s position from merely a passive carrier of the Author to an active participator in meaning production.
To analyze this from the linguistic perspective, Barthes revolts against the traditional assumption that the author is the ultimate origin of meanings in traditional literary studies. He argues, “Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I” (Barthes 169).
Resembling all of the Is whose sayings are never beyond the linguistic system, all the writings of the author are by no means above the complex network of the language, but are within it. As long as what the author says is never beyond the linguistic system, the author’s meanings in the work are in no way original. The meanings that the
reader receives from a work are the meanings read and chewed by the author, who in fact is a meaning borrower of the linguistic network who hands over already existing meanings to his reader. It is hence “language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality …, to reach that point where only language acts,
‘performs,’ and not ‘me’” (168). In Barthes’ analysis, the author never represents a theological simile, but a transfer, or an agent, whose “hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and of no expression)” (170). Simply put, what the author performs in a work is not originality but the repetition of already-said meanings. It is thus language in the author that speaks, not the author who personally speaks.
Since the author is not an “Author-God,” the ultimate creator of meanings, the spoken words in the work are freed from the author as well, becoming “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (Barthes 170). Instead of representing an aesthetic unity, the work is an open text, interwoven amid the
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complex web of socio-cultural meanings. According to the attributes of language, always referring to other meanings and always deferring its own meaning, not only is the author by no means the origin of meanings, but also the meanings of the text are never finished. The text is a site “to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others”
(170). The text never presents a monologue from a theological Author; rather, it explicitly or implicitly contains the interwoven socio-cultural complexities of various subjects and meanings. The cost of an absent author then brings forth the significance the intertextual relationship between the text itself and the context. Since meanings are always beyond the author’s control, exceeding and flowing with other (implicit) meanings in the language system, one key to literary research then would be the intertextual exploration of textual meanings.
In 1969, Foucault published “What is an Author?” to modify Barthes’s “The Death of the Author.” Opposing Barthes’s idea to take the author as merely an absent site in which to convey already-existing meanings, Foucault argues that “the author”
functions as well to impart specific meanings. More than simply a physical individual,
“the author” symbolizes the “characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society” (Foucault, 1991: 202). To put it simply, rather than eradicating the author as Barthes does, Foucault revives the author to take it as a site of plural selves and a node of multiple meanings.
Resembling Barthes, Foucault rejects the traditional assumption regarding the author as a transcendental figure, that is, the center as well as the origin of discourse.
However, different from Barthes who radically uproots the existence of the author in
“The Death of the Author,” Foucault argues that the empty space left by the eradicated author should be replaced with new interpretations. Rather than taking the author as a real physical individual, Foucault assumes the author to be a “proper name” with which convey the socio-cultural meanings at the node that the author is situated. In
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other words, the proper name of the author does not “refer purely and simply to a real individual,” but “gives rise to several selves, to several subjects” (Foucault 1991: 205).
To study the author hence means to study the context of the author; the proper name of the author indicates more than the physical individual but the socio-cultural meanings of the author’s location.9
Foucault retraces the rise of sanctifying the author in the modern age. From the eighteenth century onward, the fashion of “author-construction” (Foucault 1991: 203) started to rise. Inheriting the Christian tradition to take the author directly signify the work, modern literary criticism “uses methods similar to those of Christian exegesis employed when trying to prove the value of a text by its author’s saintliness” (204).
The author precedes the meaning and stands aloft beyond the text, representing a genius creator of transcendental spirit. The author is sainted to indicate “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meanings” (209).Consequently, the author is defined as
“a constant level of value,” “a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence,” “a stylistic unity,” and “historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events”
(204). In short, the author is constructed to become a transcendental figure—a prototype of a certain discursive style, a model of specific value and moral, and a founder of particular theory.
The problem of the twentieth-century “sage theory” in the Carlyle study arises from what Foucault indicates the modern custom of “author-construction.” The New
9 In fact, Foucault concludes four functions of the author in “What is an Author?” Though in the age that “what difference does it make who is speaking?” (Foucault “Author” 210), Foucault analyzes the status of “the author” and concludes that “the author” is functional in four ways. First, the author functions to indicate the “juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourse” (205). To put it simply, the proper name of the author marks the boundaries of the profane and the sacred, beyond both, either punished or sainted. Second, the criteria to judge how the author differs socially and culturally. Once sacred in an age, the author may become illicit in discourse in another. Third, our concept of the author is not generated from the discourse of the producer spontaneously but “the result of the complex operations which constructs a certain rational being we call ‘author’” (203). Namely, how the author is interpreted is related to how the discourse is operated. Forth, the proper name of the author does not “refer purely and simply to a real individual,”
rather, it “gives rise to several selves, to several subjects” (205). Namely, the author in reality is different from the author as the proper name to indicate a series of works.
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Critics hence have mistakenly assumed that the author is a transcendental figure to guide a literary fashion and to usher in a new morality. During the 1960s-1980s wave of “sage theory,” Carlyle is identical with a wise philosopher inheriting the Jeremiah of the Christian tradition. The keyword “sage” sublimes the author and elevates the author to the position similar to “God.” The author, resembling God the Creator, becomes an intelligent genius that creates ideas, originates principles, and generates meanings. For modern critics such as Neff, Holloway, and Landow, Carlyle is an original writer for he invents the transcendental “Life-Philosophy” that shows the people how to be immune from the early nineteenth-century materialism,
mechanization, and utilitarianism. Except creating the transcendental life philosophy, Carlyle the Author-God represents the synonym of a new literary genre—non-fiction prose writing—as well. Of its own principles, rhetoric, and aesthetics, Carlyle’s
“non-fiction prose” form is very different from the traditional literary forms of poetry, drama, and fiction prose. Carlyle the Author-God hence turns out to be not only the originator of “Life-Philosophy,” a moralist in an industrial world, but also a founder of a new literary form, “non-fiction prose,” in the modern critics’ interpretations.10
10 The modern interpretation of Carlyle as an Author God, I suuggest, excludes the modern anxiety of study in the field of literary criticism. According to one of Foucault’s “author functions,” how an author is interpreted is related to how the discourse operates at a certain age. The “sage theory” in the modern age to transcend the author and the genre suggests the “characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning” of the discourses in the mid-twentieth century. That is to say, the wave of the “sage theory” concerning Carlyle and other non-fiction prose writers indicates an anxiety of study in the field of literary criticism.
Hidden under the enthusiasm of modern critics like Holloway and Landow who intend to revive the study of non-fiction prose, there dwells the modern anxiety to explore the purpose and the value of the non-fiction prose writings. In order to legitimate the “sage theory,” some critics take Carlyle as the main subject to elaborate the sage theory in monographs and others connect the non-fiction prose writers with the already legitimated fiction prose writers to prove the equivalent values of the two. Not only does the sage theory indicate the modern anxiety in studying non-fiction prose writings, but also the results of the “sage theory”—moralism and aesthetics—demonstrate the modern anxiety about literary principle and effect. In principle, any literary work should be of aesthetic values; in effect, any literary work should be moralistic. The discourse of “sage theory” concerning Carlyle the Author-God, in other words, indicates a mode of existence, purpose, and functioning of modern criticism. As a discourse, the “sage theory” implicitly shows the modern anxiety for discovering the ultimate “center”
and the absolute “truth” in literature. Rather than interpreting the historical reality of Carlyle the real individual in the early nineteenth century, modern criticism in fact reflects the reality of its own philosophy and values.
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To avoid the fallacious assumption of regarding Carlyle as an Author-God—as a pure originator of meanings, a genuine educator of morals, and a sacred prophet to speak merely God’s word, truth—this study intends to take Carlyle as a discursive site of multiple voices converging, conflicting, and compromising. “Carlyle,” the proper name attached to Sartor the text, will represent a discursive node of “several selves”
and “several subjects,” revealing not merely his personal experiences and ideas but also collective ideologies and circumstances while Carlyle the individual was writing.
This study then will not praise Carlyle as a genius and the originator of
transcendentalism, the founder of Clothes Philosophy, and the pioneer of the genre of non-fiction prose. Instead, this study will take what Carlyle said as the “already existing or yet-to-appear” discourses—the discourses neither independent nor
distinguished but inter-relational to other discourses and texts—to characterize Sartor the text as a certain mode of discourse.
Even if there are discourses confronting and conflicting, this study does not mean to prove that Carlyle is of a split character and Sartor is segmented. Foucault elaborates that even if there is never general congeniality among all discourses, the proper name of the author “serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be—at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconscious—a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are last toed together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction” (Foucault 1991: 204). The author, as the “point where contradictions are resolved” does not signify a center to organize all the
inconsistencies technically. Rather, the author, amid various discourses, consciously or unconsciously, perceives the contradictions, feels anxious about the discord, and then looks to discover possible concurrences among the incompatibilities.
So to be interpreted, “Carlyle” the author thus indicates a site of an utterance.
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The speaker of this utterance, Sartor, consciously or unconsciously perceives the crises caused by the incongruities of his age and expects to seek the possibility of reconciling the disharmony, such as the impending breaks of science form religion, of matter from spirit, or of the scientist from the philosopher. In other words, explicitly or implicitly, Sartor the text exudes the convergences, confronts, as well as
compromises the conflicting discourses, such as those surrounding science and religion in Carlyle’s age. Different from the previous studies that consider Carlyle as an intelligent transcendentalist who advocates simply the significances of religion, spirit, as well as the transcendentalist, this study will demonstrate that “Carlyle,” the author’s proper name, signifies multiple voices and various contradictions, and Sartor the text is Carlyle’s discursive museum to exhibit the diverse thoughts conflicting and compromising during the early nineteenth century. In other words, instead of stressing simply one pole of the conflicts—science vs. religion, matter vs. spirit, and scientist vs. transcendentalist—this study suggests that “Carlyle” represents a discursive site to show the possibility of harmonizing and integrating the two aspects of ideas, that is, the amalgamation of science and religion, matter and spirit, as well as the scientist and the transcendental philosopher.
Obviously, Carlyle’s intention to reconcile the two poles is distinctive in Sartor because a true philosopher, for him, is the “Philosopher” who “station[s] himself in the middle…. The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest has descended, and the Lowest has mounted up” (Sartor 50). Simply put, the “in-between” is the goal of Carlyle’s Clothes Philosophy.
IV. Problems of the Aesthetic Unity