Sartor Resartus

Having read much Kant and too much Hegel, I discovered Carlyle's very humorous take on the German philosophers with pleasure. Carlyle's prose is always clever and often hilariously overwrought (at one point, he likens his protagonist's philosophy to a hundred fiery Minerva's springing from the forehead of Jupiter!), and his taste in philosophy is sensible (Hegel and Voltaire each merit a lampoon). That said, Carlyle sometimes buries his thoughts under so many layers of irony that I doubt whether he himself had yet decided what he meant to say. This makes much of the third part of Sartor slow reading and probably less rewarding than his later works.

A heady tangle of Masonic esotericism couched in intentionally and mockingly stilted prose. The first subtext is satire, the second subtext is occult; much like the subtext of clothes is the aletheic vision of Platonic forms, or shells, while the second subtext is their usurpation of the latter, in an inversion of a typical relation where the symbol refers to divinity. It confirms some of the obscure connections with Rousseau's esotericism and the ever-present thematic of shells that places this works squarely to the realm of the Qliphotic, in line with the Lurianic goal of restoring a limited world to infinity(it's hard to see how this could be done without destroying the world) by working with the qliphoth. It also codifies the show more magical formula elsewhere described which inverts the sigil magic of Spare, amounting to mantric exercises in Tantra.

I don't know why this is not five: I might change it in regret after time passes. The main value of the book is mostly in these stray references that supply ever-so rare signposts in an increasingly confusing network of thought.

More than anything, I don't know what destruction of the world or development of society concerns me in contrast with my own death. Is it yet another death lurking arbitrarily necessarily as a background structure? Mostly it seems that the intricate labyrinths of works and plots crumble into miniscule in the face of that event which recombines all of you into other types of things during the 8 minutes of brain activity after cessation of bodily functions. In this context the puppet masters and the dunces don't seem all that dissimilar, except as something to be avoided so that they don't produce bad karma.

"If a rock falls on your head, that is bad; but shame, infamy, opprobrium, and curses hurt only so far as they are felt" - Erasmus of Rotterdam. show less

I read this book approximately 18 times in college. Each time for a class, and each time less painful than the last. Sartor Resartus grew on me. I hope to never read it again. I keep it out of spite.

Even now that I've read it I'm not entirely sure what prompted me to pick this up at the library book sale this spring. Probably it was the back-cover text noting that the book was inspired in part by Tristram Shandy, which is one of my favorites. I do know that this one doesn't hold up nearly as well, isn't nearly as funny, and certainly won't be a book I am likely to read again.

I read this novel in a Victorian prose class in graduate school more than ten years ago. Although I enjoyed it then, I felt I was missing something because of time pressures, and I wanted to read it at a more leisurely pace. I also reread the introduction. I had forgotten how influential this book was. Its ancestors include Laurence Sterne and his imaginative novel, Tristram Shandy. Sartor’s descendents include Melville’s Moby Dick, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The appendices, which I did not read then, proved helpful in understanding Carlyle’s thoughts during and after the writing of the novel.

As the short biography included in my edition tells us, Carlyle was the son of a dour, strict Calvinist, who viewed fiction as some form show more of deceit. This was a fairly wide-held view in the 19th century, hence the number of novels based on “found manuscripts,” which the author was careful to warn the reader that the author could not attest to the veracity of the facts related. Carlyle abandoned fiction for this dubious line of reasoning after completing Sartor.

This imaginative novel is really an essay about a made up philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, who has written an extensive treatise on clothes. Now, I can imagine this might sound boring to some, but it is full of humor – the extremely dry British variety, and this novel contains much of the philosophy current in the early years of the Victorian Age. Again, as the Introduction says, Sartor is key to understanding that influential period.

In fact, the Introduction also claims that Sartor did for the Victorian age what Lyrical Ballads did for the Augustan Age – turn it on its head before destroying it.

So. Am I glad I reread this novel? Yes. At just over 200 pages it only took a few hours, and I really do think I have a better understanding of Carlyle’s great novel now than I did back then. Four stars.

--Jim, 3/20/08 show less

Didn't finish. It's hard to enjoy a satire when you haven't experienced the satirised subject matter. Often you can't even tell whether the author is at the moment being satirical or in earnest.

"These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some hand breadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore".