Thomas Carlyle’s “Real-phantasmagory”: The Historical Sublime and Humanist Politics in Past and Present

Abstract

... dead continue live on, survive beyond life, in afterlife we call reading. --Julian Wolfreys (185) In a 1964 article appearing in PMLA, David DeLaura mapped out intricate influence Thomas Carlyle had over Matthew Arnold, demonstrating Arnold's tenacious and ambivalent attitude towards Sage of Chelsea. The ambivalence Arnold harbored towards Carlyle, according DeLaura, led Arnold misrepresen[t] larger shape and effect of Carlyle's writings (129). In 1971, D. R. M. Wilkinson responds what he understands as DeLaura's and overall academic community's propensity just past, or in other words, being just Carlyle (225). For Wilkinson, scholars have been too forgiving of Carlyle's all-but-unforgivable style and rhetoric, mention questionable ideologies. The main problem with Carlyle, Wilkinson claims, is a certain naivete as he invites a True/False attitude in readers is difficult sustain for a lifetime (226). Wilkinson posits Carlyle's weakness is not simply divinity is vague and sometimes merely a rhetorical phantasm, but in blending unblendable--Jehovah, Odin, Destiny, and even 'Nature'--he was unwittingly damaging cause of morality and faith by blurring (227-28). Carlyle is only deluding readers with a phantasmal rhetoric bordering on irreligious and of questionable morality, but also, Wilkinson suggests, with his technique designed to win assent less by argument than by an attack on heart, adding that in most cases effect is enhanced in direct proportion solemn naivete of heart in question (226). The Sage has been handled roughly by many a literary critic, but Wilkinson's evaluation of Carlyle underscores critical atmosphere surrounds Carlyle well into twenty-first century. Perhaps my heart exhibits a solemn naivete, but like phantasms haunt pages of works, Thomas Carlyle haunts me. The Carlyle who haunts me is Carlyle who looked humankind in face in Past and Present, pleading: Human faces should grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! (153). As one of work's first reviewers, Friedrich Engels noted a strikingly chord. Staging Carlyle as a reluctant socialist, Engels nevertheless sympatheticaIly judged book as only one worth reading in English language and one strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view. Later critics have been less enthusiastic about work. Raymond Williams, for example, argued Past and Present demonstrates Carlyle's steady withdrawal from genuinely social thinking into preoccupations with personal power (83). Tom Toremans has aptly pointed out throughout body of Carlyle criticism, Past and Present and its year of publication--1843--have been persistently identified as the decisive locus of transition from promise decline (204). Past and Present, then, figures a Carlyle representing at once fading of humanist ideas and emergence of ultraconservative or allegedly proto-fascist ideology. (1) But primordially ideological criticism of Past and Present tended iron out complex wrinkles in formal and rhetorical structures of work. Ralph Waldo Emerson's review of Past and Present should invite us read Carlyle more closely: whatever thought or motto has once appeared him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen him henceforward, and is sure return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as promise, now as threat, now as confirmation (224-25). Past and Present is a promise and a threat. Carlyle perhaps best summed up estimation of work in a letter Emerson: it is a somewhat fiery and questionable 'Tract of Times' (CLO 16: 76-77). Formally, text is divided into four sections, which subtly threaten binary structure promised in title. …