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Criticism of Civilization in the Structure of Sartor Resartus
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 37, Number 3, April 1968
- pp. 268-280
- Article
- Additional Information
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CRITICISM OF CIVILIZATION IN THE STRUCTURE OF SARTOR RESARTUS R. D. Me MASTER "Nothing in Sartor Resartus is fact," says Carlyle; "symbolical myth all....'" That seems sufficient justification for examining the structure and meaning of the work in terms of mythical design as well as in terms of philosophy or biography? Carlyle himself gives the reader a characteristic nudge: "Apart from its multifarious sections and subdivisions," he says, "the Work naturally falls into two Parts; a Historical-Descriptive, and a Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps, and indents, and indeed runs quite through the other" (34)8 Taine takes a less charitable view; his Gallic love of order outraged by such a spectacle , he protests as many another reader has protested, that "the symmetrical constructions of human art and thought, dispersed and upset, are piled under his hands into a vast mass of shapeless ruins, from the top of which he gesticulates and fights, like a conquering savage.'" Carlyle, of course, has ironically built such criticisms of his "one scarcely pardonable fault ... an almost total want of arrangement" (34) into his own book. "Our Professor," says his earnest English editor, "like other Mystics, whether delirious or inspired, gives an Editor enough to do" C70. The apparently confused structure and chaotic jumble of ideas and experiences in Sartor, however, are a true symbolic reRection of the world, an objectification of the problems Teufelsdrockh, or mankind, faces and which he must understand in order to feel that he bears any significant relationship to it. As Carlyle sees them, the symmetrical constructions of human art and thought are indeed falling into shapeless ruins: "In our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief," he says, "the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil" (164). The tortuous narrative structure of Sartor Resartus is deliberate. By means of its complicated technique Ca Scottish author creating an English editor to arrange the chaotic papers and biography of a mystical, pedantic, infinitely-muddled German "Professor of Things in General") Volume: XXXVII, Number 3, April, 1968 THE STRUCTURE OF Sartor Resartus 269 Carlyle produces a compound of biography, philosophy, satirical fiction, and prophecy, which forces us to see Teufelsdrockh, and through him his times, in a number of differing perspectives. The outcome must be difficult, but as a later artist was to say: "Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.'" Sartor Resartus was the Finnegans Wake of its day, but as in Finnegans Wake its crenelations, Mngs, subterranean passages, Hying buttresses, fan vaults and rose Mndows rest on a solid, coherent foundation of mythical design. First, the world Teufelsdrockh inhabits is the labyrinth in its various forms as prison and as wilderness where the straight way is lost. Second, considered in the guise imposed on him by successive images and allusions, Teufelsdrockh is a protean figure whose archetype is Prometheus. These two archetypes and the others, such as the phoenix, that surround them gain a peculiar ironic power from the ways in which Carlyle introduces them. Brought on by a world "all puking and sprawling in Werterism, Byronism, and other Sentimentalism,'" a world of mechanical science, materialistic philosophy, dismal political economy, blustering Toryism, sham religion, utilitarian self-interest, Jacobin revolt, a world in which "men's souls were blinded, hebetated; and sunk under the inHuence of Atheism and Materialism, and Hume and Voltaire.'" Teufelsdrockh's sickness is a baRling imprisonment: "Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living" (163). The nature of Carlyle's labyrinth is, of course, conditioned by his inheritance of German romantic thought, his knowledge of contemporary philosophy and science, and his Calvinistic background. Though Carlyle knows his Newton well enough to appreciate Wordsworth's heroic view of him,' he still deplores the power of science and philosophy to destroy wonder, which "is the basis of Worship" (67), and leave the world a...