Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

simply a series of symbols and images that cannot possibly be akin to it. Hence, Kant spoke of the thing in itself that is beyond our perceptions. Carlyle understood all of this perfectly. Carlyle said that just as we see a green tree, we could see it as blue if our visual organs were different, and in the same way, when we touch it we feel it as convex, we could feel it as concave if our hands were made differently. (This is fine, but our eyes and our hands belong to the external world, the world of appearances.) Carlyle takes the basic idea that this world is merely apparent, and gives it a moral meaning and a political meaning. Swift also said that everything in this world is apparent, that we call, let us say, a miter and a garment with a particular drape a bishop, that we call a wig and a robe a judge, that we call a certain uniform, with a helmet, and epaulettes, a general. Carlyle takes this idea and writes
Sartor Resartus
, or “The Mended Tailor.”
    This book is one of the greatest mystifications in the entire history of literature. Carlyle imagines a German philosopher who teaches at the University of Weissnichtwo—at that time, very few people spoke German in England, so he could use these names with impunity. 18 He gave his imaginary philosopher the name Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, that is Diogenes Devil’s Dung—the word “dung” is a euphemism, the word here is stronger—and attributes to him the penning of a huge tome titled
Clothes: Their Origin and Influence
. The subtitle of this work suggests it is a philosophy of clothes. Carlyle then imagines that what we call the universe is really a series of garments, of appearances. And he praises theFrench Revolution because he sees in it the beginning of an awareness that the world is mere appearances and that one must destroy it. For him, royalty, the Pope, the republic, are all appearances, or used clothing that should be burned, and the French Revolution had started by burning them. So
SartorResartus
ends up being the biography of this imaginary German philosopher, and this philosopher is a kind of transfiguration of Carlyle himself. Situating it in Germany, he recounts a mystical experience. He tells the story of an ill-fated love, of a young woman who seems to love him then leaves him, leaving him alone with the night. Then he describes conversations with this imaginary philosopher, and gives long excerpts from a book that never existed called
Sartor, the Tailor
. And, as he is the one giving excerpts from that imaginary book, he calls the work “The Mended Tailor.”
    The book is written in a rather obscure style, full of compound words and with a lot of eloquence. If we had to compare Carlyle with a writer in the Spanish language, we would start close to home with the most impressive pages ofAlmafuerte. 19 We might also think ofUnamuno, who translated
The French Revolution
by Carlyle into Spanish and over whom Carlyle had a strong influence. 20 In France, we could think of LéonBloy.
    Now, let us look at Carlyle’s concept of history. According to Carlyle, there is sacred scripture, which is only partially the Bible. That scripture is universal history; and that history, says Carlyle, is what we are forced to read constantly, for our fates are part of it. That history is what we are forced to read incessantly and to write, and in which—he adds—we are also inscribed. That is, we are readers of this sacred scripture of letters, words, and verses. Thus, he sees the universe as a book. Now, this book is written by God, but God for Carlyle is not a character. God is in each of us, God writes himself and realizes himself through us. That is, Carlyle turns out to be a pantheist: the only being that exists is God, though God does not exist as an individual being but rather through rocks, through plants, through animals, and through man. And above all, through heroes. Carlyle gave a series of lectures in London titled,
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
. 21 Carlyle says that mankind has always recognized the existence of heroes, that is, of human beings who are superior to them, but that in primitive eras the hero is conceived of as a god; and so his first lecture is titled “The Hero As Divinity,” and characteristically he uses the Norse god Odin as an example. He says that Odin was a very brave, a very loyal man, a king who ruled over other kings, and that his contemporaries and immediate successors deified him, considered him