Fearful Symmetry: Hypocrisy and Bigotry in Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse[s] on the Negro Question”

Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

—Bob Dylan

Most if not all of Thomas Carlyle’s peregrinations have exasperated readers in various registers and contexts, but none of them has given as much offense as his 1849 “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” and its 1853 pamphlet-incarnation “An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.”¹ Early responses immediately gravitated toward hostility or praise. In the United States, horrified abolitionists who felt that the great Carlyle had defended the institution of slavery as a divinely mandated condition of humanity dueled intellectually with the forces who viewed Carlyle as great because he had recognized the universal value of Anglo-Saxon destiny as the foundation of the southern way of life, that is a justification for slaveholding. In Britain, the responses were equally bifurcated, albeit on slightly different grounds. Those sympathetic with the abolitionists were duly outraged, while others contended that Carlyle’s true rhetorical mission in the piece was to reveal the tragic brand of “Telescopic Philanthropy” instilled by the misplaced interests of hypercritical liberalism.² During the intervening 160 years, various critics have struggled along yet another bifurcated track. They have explained Carlyle’s vicious language and apparent support of slavery in various contexts and as a result have alternately apologized for him as a man of his times and/or vilified him on the grounds of universal moral outrage, all in the exasperating interest of understanding exactly what it was that Carlyle was trying to say in the “Discourse[s].” To illustrate, whereas Carol Collins interprets Carlyle’s rhetoric as a “demandingly esoteric use of metaphor,” Catherine Hall views the work as a product of Carlyle’s “disturbed and enraged psyche” (24; 12). Whereas Chris Vanden Bossche claims that Carlyle’s shocking rhetoric stems logically from his “despair at being unable to effect any meaningful change,” Jude V. Nixon calls it an ineffectively “crude concoction of sincerity, ignorance, contradiction, semi-misanthropism, exaggeration, and conceit, all blended with a Dickensian eye towards caricature” (129; 101). The one apparent point of consensus in any review of the literature surrounding the essay/pamphlet leads to an overwhelming question: Why return to such a noxious declaration of Victorian racialism? Even in the context of “Carlyle and the Totalitarian Temptation,” there seems precious little grounds for temptation here.

And yet here we are, dear reader, faced with yet another slog through the “Discourse[s]” justified by an assumption that no matter how distasteful and inhumane the text is interpreted to be, it exudes a set of meanings that require periodic revisiting, that is until the social construct becomes so utopian that it is no longer necessary to understand issues such as race. Further, in the context of Carlyle, it is altogether appropriate to view this connection between past and present, as David R. Sorensen so astutely points out, remembering that “Carlyle had no interest in the past for its own sake” (49). The undeniable truth is that humanity continues to suffer from racial and socioeconomic inequalities, although some prognosticators have claimed recently to see evidence to the contrary. After all, the United States is led by a black president. Racism is dead (see Bowden). How inconveniently tragic that on 26 June 2011 a black man in Jackson, Mississippi, was beaten by a group of white teens chanting “white power” and then murdered, all because he was the first black man they could find.³ He is dead, and racism is, alas, very much alive. Yet another question remains. After 160 years of critics expressing their horror at violent, imperialistic, racist rhetoric such as Carlyle’s in the “Discourse[s],” what has the allegedly progressive trajectory of liberal modernity accomplished in the end? Not enough, certainly. And not that long ago, in April 1980, on the eve of a reading at the Folger Library in Washington, DC, the Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, author of the epic Gunslinger, asked his friend and dinner companion, David Southern, “would...