Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  Carlyle had begun to think about historical subject-matter as the outlet for his literary talents as early as 1822 when he had read Milton and histories of the English Civil War in the hope of finding a subject to write upon. But it was not until 1833, after almost a decade of attempting to write fiction, that he became fully convinced that the (mainly biographical) subject-matter of the French Revolution could furnish material for a historical work that might become a masterpiece, perhaps even ‘the grand Poem of our Time’.9 The ‘Biography’ essay, however, itself suggests that it was not so easy for Carlyle to escape contamination by fiction as he seemed to think. For in the middle of his essay Carlyle had introduced a fictional device, a book by a non-existent German professor—Doctor Gottfried Sauerteig’s Aesthetische Springwurzeln—and inserted into a long quotation from the Professor’s work his argument concerning the mendacious character of all fiction. This was the very same fictional device that Carlyle had used two years previously in Sartor Resartus, which opens as a review article of a learned book on clothes—Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken—by a non-existent German professor named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. It was in Sartor Resartus, which is simultaneously his one full-length work of imaginative fiction and his farewell to fiction, that Carlyle finally found a way to record the story of his earlier life, including its Wertherian anxieties, to express the social and religious vision he had been forging during the preceding decade, and pre-emptively to dramatize his affrighted premonition of ‘the aspect of the Public’.

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  The first reference to what became Sartor Resartus appears in Carlyle’s journal for September 1830: ‘I am going to write—Nonsense. It is on “Clothes.” Heaven be my comforter!’ A month later he wrote to his brother John: ‘For myself here [in Craigenputtock] I am leading the stillest life…. What I am writing at is the strangest of all things: begun as an Article for Fraser; then found to be too long (except it were divided into two); now sometimes looking almost, as if it would swell into a Book. A very singular piece, I assure you! It glances from Heaven to Earth & back again in a strange satirical frenzy whether fine or not remains to be seen.’ The piece was called Teufelsdreck (Devil’s Shit) after its principal character. Early in November this ‘singular piece’ was sent to Fraser’s Magazine. To its author’s great disappointment his bizarre submission was rejected. When the manuscript was back in his hands Carlyle determined to expand it into a book. He outlined his plans in a letter to John of January 1831: ‘I have taken a notion that I can make rather a good Book of it, and one above all likely to produce some desirable impression on the world even now … I can devise some more Biography for Teufelsdreck; give a second deeper part, in the same vein, leading thro’ Religion and the nature of Society, and Lord knows what.’ Carlyle worked on his book from January to late July 1831, when it was finished. The original two-part article had become Book I of the completed work; the biography of Teufelsdröckh formed Book II; and the ‘deeper part, in the same vein’, concerning ‘Religion and the nature of Society’, became Book III. At long last, more than a decade after determining that the vocation of writer was the means of realizing his powers to the full, Carlyle had succeeded in writing a book. But he now had to endure the frustration of being unable to find a publisher. Eventually, he had to return to Fraser’s Magazine, and offer to ‘slit’ his manuscript ‘up into stripes, and send it forth in the Periodical way’. The work was accepted for serial publication and finally appeared in print under the title Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored) between November 1833 and August 1834.10

  Between its original conception as Teufelsdreck and its eventual publication as Sartor Resartus, Carlyle considered a third title for his work, ‘Thoughts on Clothes; or Life and Opinions of Herr. D. Teufelsdröckh D.U.J.’,11 and in the ‘Editorial Difficulties’ chapter of Book I the Editor characterizes his book as ‘properly a “Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh”’. The allusion is to an eighteenth-century precursor of Sartor Resartus, Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760—7), one of Carlyle’s favourite fictional works. A more direct reference follows in the ‘Adamitism’ chapter of Book I, which concludes with a quotation from ‘Yorick Sterne’s’ novel. Both Tristram Shandy and Sartor are fictions concerned with the making of biographies; both are steeped in the tradition of learned wit, deriving from Rabelais and Cervantes; and both provide dazzling displays of linguistic inventiveness, making frequent use of neologisms and borrowings from a variety of languages. Both are, at least in part, playful works, like Carlyle’s earlier, abandoned fiction ‘Illudo Chartis’ (‘I play on paper’). C. F. Harrold rightly noted over fifty years ago that while Carlyle’s ideas are profoundly indebted to those of German thinkers, his formal debts are primarily to English experimentalists such as Sterne, whom Carlyle termed our ‘best, our finest, if not our strongest’ humorist.12

  A still more important influence on Carlyle was Swift, whose A Tale of a Tub (1704) provides the seminal idea for Carlyle’s book about clothes and their symbolic and religious meanings. Central to Teufelsdröckh’s theories is the idea expressed in the ‘Prospective’ chapter concluding Book I that ‘the whole external Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES’, just as the editor had enquired in the second section of A Tale of a Tub, ‘what is Man himself but a Micro-Coat, or rather a compleat Suit of Cloaths with all its Trimmings?’ In the ‘Tailors’ chapter of Book III, Carlyle acknowledges his debt when Teufelsdröckh expounds ‘the doctrine, which Swift, with the keen forecast of genius, dimly anticipated … that the Tailor is not only a Man, but something of a Creator or Divinity’. As Teufelsdröckh’s ‘dimly anticipated’ suggests, however, Carlyle makes profounder use of the clothes metaphor than had his predecessor. In A Tale of a Tub, the fit suit of clothes is that worn by moderate Anglicans, in contrast to the excessive gaudiness of Catholics and the fanatical plainness of Dissenters. But in Sartor Resartus, the clothing fashioned by society and by religious institutions must be removed and replaced entirely; Carlyle thus resembles Jack, the persona for dissent in A Tale of a Tub, more closely than Martin, Swift’s Anglican representative.

  Despite this obvious contrast between the descendentalist Swift and the transcendentalist Carlyle, Sartor Resartus is imbued with the spirit of various Swiftian writings. Teufelsdröckh’s observation in the ‘Pedagogy’ chapter of Book II on man’s ‘omnipotent or rather omni-patient Talent of being Gulled’ clearly derives from Swift’s famous definition of ‘Felicity’ in the ninth section of A Tale of a Tub as ‘the Possession of being well deceived’. Gulliver’s Travels (1726), another favourite of Carlyle’s, is also a recurring presence in Sartor Resartus; the Laputians’ ‘Bladders with dried Peas’ appear in the ‘Pure Reason’ chapter of Book I, while Teufelsdröckh’s acerbic reflections on warfare in the ‘Centre of Indifference’, Book II, are surely influenced by Gulliver’s grimly ironic account to the King of Brobdingnag of human beings killing one another. More Swiftian overtones are heard in the project for shooting, salting, and barrelling paupers described in the ‘Helotage’ chapter of Book III, a savage piece of irony deriving from the scheme to kill, dress, and export children of the Irish poor in Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). And in the earlier definition of man as ‘a forked straddling animal with bandy legs’, in ‘The World Out of Clothes’ chapter of Book I, Carlyle is quoting directly from the eleventh chapter of The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a collaborative production of Swift and his fellow Scriblerians. Allusions such as this, as well as ones to Pope and Gay’s Memoirs of P. P. Clerk of this Parish in the ‘Prospective’ chapter of Book I and to The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) by ‘English Smollett’, in the ‘Centre of Indifference’ chapter of Book II, demonstrate Carlyle’s immersion in the satirical, non-realistic fiction of the eighteenth century that prepared the way for the constantly shifting ironies and mordant satire of Sartor Resartus.

  Other important
influences on Sartor are found in Carlyle’s own writings of the previous decade. A number of passages from Wotton Reinfred, for example, were worked into the story of Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual development in Book II. Of much greater importance is the influence of the periodical essays that Carlyle had been writing. Generically speaking, Sartor Resartus is a distinctly mixed work; but it is before anything else a fictitious review essay in which Carlyle makes brilliant imaginative use of the conventions of the form that he had himself helped to develop during the previous decade. In 1823 he had written the first of a series of essays and review articles that were to play a significant role in introducing German literature and thought to a wide British audience. The basic method of these pieces was to combine biographical accounts of the lives of their subjects with descriptions and appreciations of their work. At the same time, the review essay format more and more became a vehicle for the expression of Carlyle’s own emerging ideas and sense of the times. In fact, by the end of the decade his review essays were being superseded by pieces such as ‘Signs of the Times’ and ‘Characteristics’ that show Carlyle emerging in propria persona as a social critic and cultural prophet.

  One of Carlyle’s review essays, his first for the Edinburgh Review, was on Jean Paul Richter, the German humorist whose ‘fantastic, many-coloured, far-grasping, everyway perplexed and extraordinary’ mode of writing was an appreciable influence on Sartor Resartus—a point indirectly acknowledged in the fourth chapter of Book I when the Editor/narrator recalls that the only time he ever saw Teufelsdröckh laugh was during a conversation with Jean Paul, the one writer of all those mentioned in the text who appears in person. Jean Paul’s works, Carlyle wrote in this 1827 review essay, were ‘no less multifarious than extensive’, and while his chief productions were novels, ‘the name Novelist, as we in England must understand it, would ill describe so vast and discursive a genius.’ The most striking feature of Jean Paul’s method was his sporting with the text, the two principal manifestations of which were his disruptive editorial and narratorial commentary and his style. Concerning the former, Carlyle noted that ‘every work, be it fiction or serious treatise, is embaled in some fantastic wrappage, some mad narrative accounting for its appearance, and connecting it with the author, who generally becomes a person in the drama himself, before all is over’. As for the style, it was deliberately outlandish: Jean Paul

  deals with astonishing liberality in parentheses, dashes, and subsidiary clauses; invents hundreds of new words, alters old ones, or by hyphen chains and pairs and packs them together into most jarring combination; in short, produces sentences of the most heterogeneous, lumbering, interminable kind. Figures without limit; indeed the whole is one tissue of metaphors, and similes, and allusions to all the provinces of Earth, Sea and Air; interlaced with epigrammatic breaks, vehement bursts, or sardonic turns, interjections, quips, puns, and even oaths! A perfect Indian jungle it seems; a boundless, unparalleled imbroglio.13

  Given its generic miscellaneousness, and the variety of literary influences upon it, it is hardly surprising that Sartor Resartus has very little in common with the dominant mode of nineteenth-century prose fiction—the realistic novel. Sartor lacks a narrative skeleton, and while it is full of vivid concrete details, this solidity of specification is not used to give a sense of verisimilitude or create a representational illusion. Nor is such a sense given by its hyperbolic, metaphorical and densely allusive style, which is essentially an expressive and rhetorical medium unsuited to narrative or representational effects. But the most significant way in which Carlyle’s fiction differs from the tradition of the realistic novel is found in its attitude to character and to ordinary human experience. The author of Sartor is uninterested in either, and gives no evidence of the human sympathy that seems an essential feature of the realistic novel.

  In Book I, the narrator suggests that a key reason for the ‘short-comings, over-shootings, and multiform perversities’ of Teufelsdröckh’s book on clothes has to do with the ‘strange impartiality [and] strange scientific freedom’ with which he looks ‘in men’s faces’: he seems ‘like a man dropped thither from the Moon’. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing may be said about Carlyle’s attitude to his characters. Even in Book II, the story of Teufelsdröckh’s development from childhood to the threshold of adult life, which is in essence modelled on Carlyle’s own early years, there is a cordon sanitaire between the implied author and the central character; no suggestion of intimacy is permitted. In the ‘Romance’ chapter, for example, the narrator remarks that ‘psychological readers’ will naturally be interested in knowing the details of Teufelsdröckh’s first love affair. But Blumine’s station in life, her ‘parentage, fortune, aspect’, her behaviour when she met her lover, and even her real name—in fact, all the details with which readers of realistic novels expect to be supplied—are withheld. Even the emotions of Teufelsdröckh himself are described in a hyperbolic and distanced way that suggests an implicitly dismissive, even anti-humanist authorial attitude to an important phase in the development of the personality.

  While Sartor Resartus has little in common with the realistic tradition of verisimilar representation of human situations in their social and moral contexts, it does have affinities with another fictional tradition, one that has been well described by Robert Alter. This tradition includes the kind of prose fiction that ‘expresses its seriousness through playfulness, that is acutely aware of itself as a mere structure of words even as it tries to discover ways of going beyond words to the experiences words seek to indicate’. A fully self-conscious novel is ‘one in which from beginning to end, through the style, the handling of narrative viewpoint, the names and words imposed on the characters, the patterning of the narration, the nature of the characters and what befalls them, there is a consistent effort to convey to us a sense of the fictional world as an authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and convention’.14 For Alter, prime examples of fully achieved self-conscious novels include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire; and others would want to add works like Melville’s Moby-Dick to the list.

  Associating Sartor Resartus with the tradition of self-conscious fiction helps bring into focus its reflexive features, as well as the way in which the text is continually challenging the reader’s expectations and competence. The key feature of Carlyle’s modus operandi is that the text is about both itself and the experience of reading it. Sartor contains its own commentary and has within itself a fully developed model of a reader grappling with a difficult text. The description of Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh’s strange book on clothes given by the Editor in the ‘Characteristics’ chapter of Book I is at the same time a pointed description of the very book that the reader of Sartor Resartus holds in his hands. Throughout the text the Editor continues to be the reader’s surrogate as he struggles to make sense of Teufelsdröckh’s book and the six bags of miscellaneous and randomly arranged autobiographical documents. On behalf of the reader, the Editor attempts to find useful meanings in materials that fascinate him and compel his attention even while he suspects their authenticity, doubts the intentions and sincerity of their author, and comes to realize that none of his doubts can ever be settled with certainty.

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  In Book I of Sartor Resartus, the narrator, an English reviewer whom we come to know as the Editor, describes a new German book by Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo that he has undertaken to introduce to the British public. Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence) is divided into a Descriptive-Historical portion and a Speculative-Philosophical portion; while the Editor is clearly more comfortable with the former, he senses that there is something in the latter that may prove useful to ‘us English’, whose ‘mercantile greatness, and invaluable Constitution’ are examples of the ‘practical tendency’ of English culture and endeavour, which has perhaps cra
mped ‘the free flight of Thought’ and impeded the growth of ‘pure Science, especially pure moral Science’. It is ‘direct value’ and ‘inference of a practical nature’ that the Editor wants to draw from Teufelsdröckh’s book. In doing so, however, he is repeatedly hindered by his own literal-mindedness and inexperience with the free flight of thought, by genuine difficulties in the text, and by its gratuitously rebarbative features, chief among them ‘an almost total want of arrangement’, that makes Die Kleider seem ‘like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, were hurled into one huge tureen or trough’. From this ‘German printed and written Chaos’—Die Kleider and the supplementary autobiographical documents in six paper bags—the English Editor endeavours to ‘evolve printed Creation’.