Abstract
This essay reads Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present as a call for the reader to resist the reified language of cant by coming to understand signification as an act of human will. Though it is often read as a lament for lost meaning, I claim that the text offers a way through the nostalgia that structures its longing for the past into a future meaning made possible by the employment of metaphor and figure. Considering the layered tales of Midas, with which the text begins, and that of the Abbot Samson's near-revelation of the sanctified body of St Edmund, which structures its second section, I claim that these tales offer models of the acts of signification with which Carlyle tasks his reader. In insisting that the “Tongue of Man is a sacred organ,” Carlyle seeks to teach his reader both the capacity and the responsibility for the production of meaning in the world.
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