Communities in Mourning: Making Capital Out of Loss in Carlyle's Past and Present and Heroes

Thomas Carlyle is perhaps most famous for his consistent commitment to hero worship. Heroes, Carlyle hopes, will resolve the problems of democratic and industrial modernity exemplified by the Chartist rebellion and acute economic exploitation. ¹ Despite his strident insistence on the necessity of heroes, Carlyle represents leaders perpetually marked by social failure. Notoriously inarticulate and resistant to public exposure, Carlyle's heroes preserve their manly integrity by apparently forfeiting their social effectiveness. With so many expectations resting on a hero who refuses to make himself available to the public, Carlyle, it would seem, chooses to represent not leadership but a remarkably consistent failure of responsibility. This essay explores how the failure to become visible to the public actually constitutes a powerful form of charismatic seduction that relies on invisibility, absence, and mourning.

Carlyle, in Past and Present (1843) and On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), creates an erotics of death, which allows the hero to be both irretrievably absent from the social and eerily present. Carlyle's dead leaders eroticize relations among men, presumably replacing relations of monetary exchange with relations of love. This love of death becomes particularly clear in the second book of Past and Present in the narrative of the monk Samson, in which Carlyle elaborates the coordinates of a fantasy of dead heroes and male communities. This narrative of a medieval monk functions, for Carlyle, not as a hopelessly anachronistic narrative of a lost world but as a model for how the dead matter of capitalism can become vitalized by the dead matter of the hero's body.

Male Heroism and Feminine Modernity:
Carlyle's Phallic Agon

Before turning to books 2 and 3 of Past and Present and to Heroes, in which Carlyle elaborates his cult of death, I want to consider how the first book of Past and Present sets up certain false expectations about the nature of the hero and his relation to the modern world. By positing the hero as engaged in the conquest of a baffling and inchoate industrial modernity, Carlyle claims that the hero is an agent of visibility whose purpose is to shed light on mystery and to reestablish transparent relations among men.

In Carlyle and the Search for Authority, Chris R. Vanden Bossche writes that "Carlyle's works represent an attempt to resolve dilemmas raised by what he and his contemporaries perceived as a revolutionary shift of authority in virtually all realms of discourse and institutions of power in western Europe. From his vantage point, it appeared not only that authority had shifted but that the transcendental grounds for it had been undermined" (1). One reason for this problem of authority stemmed from the fact that "democratic and individualistic institutions had replaced hierarchical ones." The economy underwent a similar shift in authority to the political realm: "In the eighteenth century, Parliament, as representative of individual property owners, took control of governmental finance, effecting a shift from an economy regulated by royal authority to a laissez-faire economy that favored the interests of the individual" (5).

As a critic of modern individualism, Carlyle claims that replacing hierarchy with individual freedom actually creates more strenuous forms of oppression. Alluding to Sir Walter Scott's fictional serf in Ivanhoe, Carlyle claims that, in modern times, "Gurth is now 'emancipated' long since; has what we call 'Liberty.'" ² But he is more oppressed than ever in a world in which no one claims responsibility for that oppression because everyone is presumably free. In this world "Our enemies are we know not who or what; our friends are we know not where! How shall we attack anyone, shoot or be shot by any one?" (21). Because social relations are no longer transparent, the agents of oppression have become invisible: "O, if the accursed invisible Nightmare, that is...