Thomas Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus"
was a "new kind of book", in the 19th Century and maybe still today
In the spring of 1962 I
started over in college at The George Washington University (while 'living at
home') after the catastrophe at William and Mary (discussed often elsewhere on
these blogs). As a freshman, I somehow
placed out of English 1, basic composition. At GWU, you took a year of
literature before taking the second composition course (English 4) where you
'learned how' to write a term paper. You
could write about anything you wanted, and I think I rehashed a high school
paper on Mahler's influence on modern composers. We read Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain aka
Samuel Clemens) in that class, and I recall an odd passage in Chapter 8 where
Jim Tells Huck (in modern English), 'If you've got hairy arms and a hairy
chest, it's a sign you're going to be rich'.�
Nobody dared to say anything when the passage was read aloud in class
(in spring 1963, probably in the original text), but I thought then that the
passage was a euphemism for racism in pre
Civil War American History. Spark Notes offers the passage here.
But back in 1962, I had to start out with 'English
52B', which comprised the second half of English Literature, starting in the
late 18th Century. We had a gray
anthology textbook called 'British Poetry and Prose', and typically were
assigned about 50 pages to read, a lot of it poetry,
for each 75-minute class, taught by a Mr. Rutledge, in a dusky first-floor
classroom in Monroe Hall, with a good view of G Street in Washington�s Foggy
Bottom, with the old dive 'Quigley's' barely in sight. (Wordsworth appeared early in the course,
with discussions of why poetry gives 'pleasure', and suitable recognition of
the film 'Splendor in the Grass', which had played into my lost fall semester
at William and Mary).
Mr. Rutledge liked to give 'card quizzes'.' They counted one fourth of your grade (so you
came to class, but he would drop the lowest two); there would be a midterm and
a final.' And sometime around March 20 or
so, he gave us a card quiz on an excerpt from Thomas Carlyle's odd (and
blatantly self-indulgent) novel 'Sartor Resartus: The
Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh'. The Latin
lead means 'the tailor re-tailored' and the protagonist's name means 'god-born
devil dung'.
Every student
failed this pop quiz, including me. The
professor had to throw it out. No one
understood the point of the writing from just reading at home. The book is an example of a poioumenon, which
is a work of 'metafiction' where the author layers the inner story inside a
'presentation' layer where the author can address the reader.Among writers' groups, it's considered taboo
in modern 'writing to sell' as stuck up, but movie narratives do this kind of
thing all the time. Many modern books
and films consider the relationship between the narrative story and the
presenter or reader itself a subject to be written about. Think about 'Inception', 'Cloud Atlas', and
the gay sci-fi hit 'Judas Kiss'.
In the inner
story, the protagonist wanders rural England or Europe and is spurned in
heterosexual love life, and is taken back when he sees
his beloved with another nobleman. He
turns to nihilism, wanting to pretend that he doesn't exist (hide inside that
museum clam) until he finds a new purpose for living in his own head. It sounds dangerous. And he does find a different woman. But do people feel disappointed when they
have to take 'someone else', and think, 'I should have done better than
this'? That was how people thought about
relationships, especially in the gay male community, back in the late 1970�s in
the days before AIDS.
The outer
layer of the book has an 'Editor' account for his own experience with dealing
with the book, getting around to telling the inner existential (or
transcendental) story when he feels like it.
The professor
asked an essay question about the concept of the book (asking for comparisons
to other authors' works or even films) on the final exam. He thought that students should understand
this approach to writing,
The book is
available on Gutenberg in various formats here.And �it�s free�.� I tried to
download it 'free' onto Kindle (like many classics, it's also a free download
for Amazon Prime subcribers) and found that the
touchpad for typing on my little device didn't work, don't know why. Battery problems? But the html version works fine, and
downloads OK even on a smart phone, and is perfectly readable. In fact, Chapter II in Book I caught my eye
with its title, 'Editorial Difficulties', and says that man is a 'proselytizing
creature' (even if not a Mormon missionary) and speaks of the Philosophy of
Clothes. The latter would be called
'sartorial taste' and was very much a matter in the office in the 1970s and
1980s, as companies (other than IBM and EDS) gradually relaxed their dress
codes, making the choices of flared pants, colored shirts and wide ties very
much a modem of pre-Internet self-expression.
I don't see any evidence that Carlyle's novel has ever
become a film. It would make an
interesting indie experiment, at least in Britain. Let the BBC, Film 4 and the UK Lottery have
a stab at it.
Update:
I got the Kindle download from Amazon to go. It just needed to be fully charged back up
before it would work. The Kindle version
doesn;t show the three inner
"books", somewhat corresponding to vaious layers of narration by the
Editor.
Mencius Moldbug writes
about Thomas Carlye and "reactionaries"
here in 2009. Suddenly this matters, when considering authoritarianism and Donald
Trump.