Sartor Resartus

At another point in my life, this would have gotten a full boat. Alas, ensconced within books as I am, ever enveloped with the urge to move on to something new, I'm afraid I became a touch impatient with Carlyle towards the end—but the fault is entirely mine. The age in which he composed this beautifully, lushly written work of great and subtle meta-sartorial humour—satirical, metaphysical, biographical, Goethean, liberally populated with phrases of a poetic entanglement whose surface appeal captivates you sufficient to pry and/or puzzle through unto the thoughts encased within—was one less hurried when it came to the written page: though folk back then do not appear to have overly cared for <i>this</i> particular iteration of Carlyle's prolix, demi-feudalist beard-stroking either. It is what Moldbug vainly aspires towards to this day, without promise—but, then again, precious few could wield a pen with Carlyle's degree of lustrous ribbons and exaggerated flourishes in the era of Twitter.

<b><br><br>فى البداية علىّ أن أشيد بالترجمة<br>فالأستاذ طه السباعى جعل الكتاب يبدو<br>وكأنه مكتوب بلغته الأصلية<br>حتى أننى تصورت أن النسخة الإنجليزية ماكانت لتكون بهذه الروعة<br><br>فلسفة الملابس<br>توماس كارليل<br><br><a href="http://imgur.com/uR2VFzW" rel="nofollow noopener"><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1428318370i/14404985.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"></a><br><br><br>ولدتنا أمهاتنا عراة<br>ولولا الملاءات والشراشف القطنية التى تدثرنا بها<br>لما بقينا على قيد الحياة<br><br>تحدث عن فلسلفة الملابس لأول مرة<br>الفيلسوف الألمانى: تيوفلسدروخ<br><br>ونظرًا للسباق العلمى وقتها فقد لفتت تلك الفلسفة نظر توماس كارليل<br>الذى أسمى تيوفلسدروخ بالأستاذ<br>ونظرًا للأمانة العلمية كذلك،<br>فإن كاريل أودع ترجمة الأستاذ وأفردها فى باب كامل<br>وإن كتابه لمكون من ثلاثة أيواب<br>والباب الخاص بترجمة الأستاذ هو الأوسط<br><br>الكتاب عبارة عن موجز لطيف لفلسفة الملابس للأستاذ<br>وتختلف أصناف الملابس:<br>فمنها الملابس القطنية وملابس الأوراق المالية وملابس المناصب الحكومية<br><br>فلا عجب أن يقال<br>فلان عليه ثوب من الهيبة والوقار<br>أوفلان عليه ثوب من غضب الله ومقته<br><br>ففلسفة الملابس بحر شاسع<br>فلا نكاد نخرج من باب حتى ندخل فى آخر<br><br><br>وإن القارئ ليلاحظ ان كل جملة لا تخلو<br>من دعوة صريحة لإعمال العقل<br>وترك العنان له<br><br>ولو تجاوز القارئ العنوان<br>وقرأ الكتاب بدون تخصيص<br>لوجد فيه فلسفة كبيرة<br>ولخرج منه بأفضل نتيجة<br><br>ومما لفت نظرى وأثار إعجابى..<br>الأستاذ إذ يطلق على عاصمة بلاد الإنجليز،مركز الحياة المتحضرة<br>وكارليل يصف الألمان بأهل الرأى والعرفان والمثابرة لا يعرفون الونى والكلال<br><br>فتأثرت بكيفية احترامهم لبعضهم البعض<br>حتى عندما ينتقد كارليل أفكار الأستاذ<br>فإنه ينقده نقدًا لطيفًا كأنما يداعبه<br>فلا تملك إلا أن تبتسم<br>:)<br></b>

In an attempt to rescue this one from the doldrums of hated student reads, I picked up the illustrated Canongate edition with an introduction from Alasdair Gray. Alas, a sudden conversion to the genius of this novel never came. I was more open to the humorous passages of ludicrous atiloquence on the apparel of dandies and churchmen, less open to the remainder of the novel, a rambling Greatest Hits package from the fictitious German screed, written in pore-clogging prose that wavers between hyperreferential and erudite and incomprehensible, interrupted every paragraph or so by a Kimbote-esque narrator who fogs the flow. Alas, the very definition of a syllabus chore whose charms still elude with age.

They simply don't make 'em like they used to...<br /><br /><i>Sartor Resartus</i> is one of Carlyle's supreme creations, to be sat alongside the towering achievement of his <i>French Revolution</i>. It's a sort of novel-cum-philosophical-treatise-cum-satire, a lumbering behemoth full of ideas and overheated prose. Did I mention that it's also rather funny. This is a great book to read drunk as, presumably, many in the 19th century did. <br /> <br />From out of a cloud of pipe smoke comes Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, a professor of "Allerley-Wissenschaft" (Things in General) at the University of Weissnichtwo (Who Knows Where) who has affected to form a "Philosophy of Clothes" (Kleider). The narrator has discovered this work, and presents key passages with digressions, as well the story of Professor Teufelsdroekh himself. <br /><br />As the work progresses, the elements constituting a Philosophy of Clothes are only gradually revealed until nearly the end of the book, when, in high satire, we encounter the <i>dandiacal body</i>: <br /><br /><i>What Teufelsdroekh would call a 'Divine Idea of Cloth' is born with him; and this, like other such Ideas, will express itself outwardly, or wring his heart asunder with unutterable throes. But, like a generous, creative enthusiast, he fearlessly makes his Idea an Action; shows himself in peculiar guise to mankind; walks forth, a witness and living Martyr to the eternal worth of Clothes. We called him a Poet; is not his body the (stuffed) parchment-skin whereupon he writes, with cunning Huddersfield dyes, a Sonnet to his mistress' eyebrow? Say, rather, an Epos, and </i>Clotha Virumque cano [ha! -ed]<i>, to the whole world, in Macaronic verses, which he that runs may read...</i><br /><br />Is it a skewering of a sort of materialism? I am not very well-read in philosophy, and therefore am perhaps unqualified to evaluate this work as it pertains to that discipline. It would be a pleasure to enroll in a seminar on Carlyle and German idealism and truly tease out all the references in this dense work. <br /><br />My opinions of this work, and undoubtedly those of other readers as well, are perhaps best summed up by Carlyle himself. <br /><br /><i>It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like the very Sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid its effulgence,--a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dulness, double-vision, and even utter blindness.</i>

<i>Introduction<br />Acknowledgements<br />Note on the Text<br />Select Bibliography<br />A Chronology of Thomas Carlyle</i><br /><br />--Sartor Resartus<br /><br /><i>Appendix I: Carlyle to James Fraser, May 1833<br />Appendix II: Maginn's Portrait of Carlyle, June 1833<br />Appendix III: Carlyle to Emerson, August 1834<br />Appendix IV: Carlyle to John Sterling, June 1835<br />Appendix V: Carlyle's Supplementary Material to the 1869 Edition<br />Explanatory Notes<br />Glossary</i>

Alright, so he's an old bastard. I know. He was generally wrong-headed and entirely conceited. He's also hilarious and witty. I would that all those who disagree with me could do so in such a pleasing fashion.

What does the Latin title of this novel mean? <em>The Tailor Retailored</em>. Who is the tailor? Humanity, or, in the old style, Man. Why is he not only a tailor, but a retailored tailor? Because Man is a spiritual being that can recreate himself through use of spiritual signs, such as words, pictures, and material artifacts, thus bringing himself into line with concepts of perfection and godliness—all of which means that God is an idea whose time has not yet come because we have not yet realized or actualized Him through our world-creating abilities to re-tailor ourselves in His ideal image. Why are metaphors drawn from clothing and fashion so helpful in understanding this philosophy of Man-as-God-Recreator? Because we use clothes to cover and thus to transfigure the naked state we share with the brutes; clothes are a special case of all human acts of perception and creation, because the universe itself is clothed (tailored) in divine signs that Man needs to interpret and manipulate (retailor) in order to materialize his potential perfection. And that, in answer to a question I have not yet asked, is why life can only be comprehended through metaphor: metaphor, the linking of concepts across their apparent differences, is the foundation of all thought, because to think at all we must apprehend the universal idea in which all things participate.<br /><br />The above paragraph is the summed-up philosophy of the fictional German thinker—Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor of Things in General—who is the protagonist of this 1833-4 novel by Thomas Carlyle, a man better known not as creative writer but for his later career as Victorian Sage, secular prophet, historian and pamphleteer, public intellectual.<br /><br />That Diogenes was a famous cynic, that "Diogense Teufelsdröckh" means "God-born devil's excrement" in English, that Teufelsdröckh's ideas reprise those of the German Romantic and Idealist philosophers (Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, etc.), and that metaphors drawn from fashion are an unusually low and homely way to exemplify such philosophies should all alert us that this is a work of satire and irony, as much a play of language as an earnest novel. The back cover copy of my edition draws appropriate comparisons to Swift, Sterne, Melville, and Joyce; it also calls the novel "enigmatic." Given that I was able to provide a synopsis of the protagonist's philosophy pretty easily (albeit with the help of hindsight and of having read some of the German philosophers alluded to), what makes the novel so mysterious?<br /><br />The answer is its metafictional form. Carlyle presents his narrative as a long summary work for the British magazine-reader of Teufelsdröckh's masterpiece, <em>Clothes: Their Origin and Influence</em>. Our British narrator portrays himself as a long-suffering annotator to an endless book of philosophy, written in a sometimes impenetrable style; to compound his challenges, he has also been sent, for the purposes of writing Teufelsdröckh's biography, bags of seemingly haphazard scraps from the philosopher's writings and wanderings. Thus, the text we read is, within the novel's fiction, a necessarily arbitrary assemblage of the philosopher's writings by a sometimes hostile or mocking editor. (Perhaps a modern analogue would be less <em>Ulysses</em> than <em>Pale Fire</em>.) Moreover, one of the editor's most characteristic comments is a statement of uncertainty, before or after quoting Teufelsdröckh, as to whether the German thinker is being ironic or straightforward.<br /><br />Note, then, at least four layers of irony (defined simply as double-meaning) in Carlyle's novel: 1. we encounter serious philosophy presented as a joke (its author is named Devil's Shit and is obsessed with clothes); 2. we read this supposedly coherent and total philosophy in a bewilderingly fragmented form; 3. said form is arranged by an uncomprehending and resentful editor; 4. finally, the text of the philosophy itself may or may not be self-undermining through an ironical tone. This makes for a dizzying and dazzling readerly experience, and should remind us that so-called postmodernism was just a further, and often less sophisticated, pursuit of <a href="http://www.english.uga.edu/~eberle/English4500_Spring2012/4500_romantic_irony_2012.htm" rel="nofollow noopener">Romantic irony</a>.<br /><br />Given all this abyssal irony, can the reader find any stable ground in this novel? I think so, at least in part. Here is my theory: I suspect the novel overall is sympathetic to Teufelsdröckh's ideas—his passionate wanderings, described so lyrically in the central section of the three-part narrative; his furious sarcasm, often completely misunderstood by the editor, at the world's injustices of war and poverty; his awe before the beauty of nature and the capacity of man to participate in its becoming. While I am not one for biographical interpretations, neither am I dogmatic on the subject, and there is no point ignoring Carlyle's well-known apprenticeship to German Romanticism and attempt to popularize it in England. The editor, then, stands for the crudity of the English imagination, its inability to think beyond the merely existent because of its thrall to nihilistic anti-metaphysics such as utilitarianism, empiricism, and capitalism. (The English type the Scot Carlyle sends up here remains very much with us: think of Richard Dawkins, John Carey, Ian McEwan, and that whole ilk of aging intellectuals who scorn so much that is beyond their own insular tradition; and have George Steiner and Gabriel Josipovici not operated as latter-day Carlyles, if only as the Continental opponents of such island-thinking?)<br /><br />Teufelsdröckh's writing, as relayed by the editor's selections, is so copiously generative—tenderly imagistic in descriptions of nature, full of eloquent and sarcastic invective when assaulting injustice, almost epic in its range when describing the nature and purpose of man's place in the universe. And the editor's comments on it, if occasionally refreshing in their common sense, seem mean-minded and cheap. It is no wonder that Emerson loved this book, for Teufelsdröckh writes not a little like Emerson in full visionary flow, whereas our editor sounds, does he not, like some <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/where-s-waldo_823370.html?nopager=1#" rel="nofollow noopener">carping critic</a> biting at the great man's ankles.<br /><br />"Great man." A worrying phrase. Also worrying is Teufelsdröckh's endorsement of "hero-worship," which Carlyle too will later praise in a book described by no less than Borges as a forerunner of Nazism. And let us not neglect that Teufelsdröckh's ideology is consistently described as <em>sansculottism</em>*, thus associated with the terroristic phase of the beautiful revolution idealist philosophy prophesies. At one point in the novel, Teufelsdröckh writes a Swiftian proposition that the poor should simply be gunned down to thin their numbers in line with Malthus's fears of overpopulation; now I read his tone as unambiguously ironic, a satire on what the rich think of the poor, but the editor takes the proposal literally and is shocked. Another joke at the expense of the stupid English bourgeois? Well, maybe, but the novel also clearly shows Teufelsdröckh's German disciple, Hofrath Heuschreke, taking it very seriously, even to the point of writing a dead-serious <em>Institute for the Suppression of Population</em>. Is it really so easy to separate idealism from contempt for the material? Are we sure we can tell the difference between revolution and reaction, between Jacobinism and fascism?<br /><br />If we do take Teufelsdröckh's beautiful idealism as having dangerous implications, as potentially tailoring not a new man but a straitjacket for man-as-he-is, then the novel's irony becomes its most redemptive aspect, not a quality to be read around in hopes of finding Carlyle's "real argument," not even if it allows us the facile fun of mocking some of today small-minded Englishmen. For the empirical English imagination in this book may function as a corrective, something like Sancho Panza in relation to Don Quixote, a real ground-level view of things as opposed to the intellectual's assumed stance of revolutionism. Teufelsdröckh, we are told, lives in building from which he can survey his whole city; but this godly perspective neglects the view from the street. The purpose of irony, it seems to me, is to allow us both perspectives at once—the tower and the ground, Sancho and Quixote—so that we have as much knowledge as possible in our attempts to fashion the future. Such irony is the essence of <em>literature</em>, of the novel, of the essay, and I suspect this is why Carlyle mocks the philosophical treatise, which aims at an intellectual closure that irony forbids and fiction—with its multiple perspectives—formally disallows. This is no doubt also why the older Carlyle threw over fiction for more closed forms; I would be lying if I denied that I too sometimes tire of these defenses of literature as that which allows us no conclusions. It all seems so weak, so foolish, the self-congratulation of the naïf, especially now, when we are surrounded by neo-Carlyles left and right urging that we worship new heroes in the hour of crisis. Nobody wants to hear that devil's shit is what we are, and I have no counsel of romanticized weakness, à la <a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/reading-like-a-loser/" rel="nofollow noopener">Malcolm Bull</a>, to offer, because that too is an arrogant philosopher's pose (vanguardism in assumed rags is still vanguardism). The proper conclusion, if we can come to one, is that whatever else we are or may be, including God-born, we are <em>also</em> devil's shit—and don't you forget it. <em>That</em> is the pedagogy of the essay, of the novel, of irony, of <em>literature</em>.<br /><br />I have committed a great sin here, a lapse I hypocritically would not tolerate in undergraduate writing, by not quoting from the novel! But it is so complex I thought it best approached at first with a telescope rather than a microscope. In any case, the whole thing can be read at <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm" rel="nofollow noopener">Project Gutenberg</a>, and I recommend dipping in to see if its intensities—which move in very long rhythms and so do not lend themselves to brief quotation—suit you. See especially the grand trinity of chapters at the heart of the novel: "The Everlasting No," "Centre of Indifference," and "The Everlasting Yea." Speaking personally, I loved this novel, but I allow that it is not for everyone. I spent my time in graduate school trying to understand the Marxist theory of the novel, which entailed a lot of mostly unsuccessful attempts to grasp the German Romantic philosophy that underlies Western Marxism and also a lot of worry over the potentially totalitarian nature of this intellectual tradition. For this reason, I very much appreciated Carlyle's intentional burlesque of this philosophy's more rarefied aspects, and his perhaps unintentional warning—a warning that seems to be embodied in his later career—of where it all may lead, of what trouble you may find yourself in, and not only intellectually, if you do not use the shears of irony to tailor your idealism to the human figure's so-far intransigent actual shape.<br /><br /><em>*A joke from Kafka, quoted from memory because I don't remember where I read it and Google doesn't bring it up, which means I have possibly invented it or am misattributing it to Kafka: "It is said that the members of the sans-cullotes met secretly in the night for the purpose of wearing cullotes." There is a whole theory of politics in that sentence, whoever wrote it.</em><br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/833943-john-pistelli" rel="nofollow noopener">View all my reviews</a>

<i>”No sé de un libro más árdido y volcánico, más trabajado por la desolación que Sartor Resartus.” Jorge Luis Borges</i><br /><br />Este es unos de los libros que Borges más admiraba y leía. Lo hacía constantemente, producto de su admiración por Thomas Carlyle, unos de sus escritores predilectos y uno de los más influyentes de la literatura inglesa.<br />Este volumen es en parte un extenso ensayo filosófico y por otra parte la biografía de un personaje ficticio, el intelectual Diógenes Teufelsdröckch, cuyo nombre es un juego de palabras, ya que Diógenes significa 'de origen divino', mientras que Teufelsdröckh se traduce como 'excremento de demonio', oriundo de la ficticia ciudad de Weissnichtwo (la traducción del nombre de este lugar sería algo así algo así como "No se sabe dónde").<br />En la biografía llevada a cabo por el mismo autor con un seudónimo conoceremos historia, vida y obra de Teufelsdröckch quien nos hará conocer su "Filosofía del Traje" desde las primeras páginas y por todo el resto del libro.<br />Puede notarse la influencia que Goethe ha ejercido en Carlyle, ya que por momentos el libro parece ser un sentido homenaje al excelso autor alemán.<br />El contenido altamente filosófico del "Sartor Resartus", que significa "El sastre remendado" o "El sastre zurcido" escapa a mi pobre entendimiento intelectual y casi inexistente desarrollo de la Filosofía, aunque me ha dado una grata satisfacción su lectura.

Read some of this as a freshman at Amherst College, back when it was a great college with my Humanities section prof Rolfe Humphries, the great translator. Read more Carlyle, Past and Present, in grad school, so that when we first went to Europe (bought a VW for $1300 and drove to Edinburgh and down the Rhine to Bern) we visited Carlyle's London house in Chelsea, played a note on the piano Chopin had played. Revisited the house in the 1990's.

That sure was a book. It made me laugh occasionally, which is good, but it overall just confused me.