In the ‘Romance’ chapter, for example, the narrator remarks that ‘psychological readers’ will naturally be interested in knowing the details of Teufelsdröckh’s first love affair. But Blumine’s station in life, her ‘parentage, fortune, aspect’, her behaviour when she met her lover, and even her real name—in fact, all the details with which readers of realistic novels expect to be supplied—are withheld. Even the emotions of Teufelsdröckh himself are described in a hyperbolic and distanced way that suggests an implicitly dismissive, even anti-humanist authorial attitude to an important phase in the development of the personality.

While Sartor Resartus has little in common with the realistic tradition of verisimilar representation of human situations in their social and moral contexts, it does have affinities with another fictional tradition, one that has been well described by Robert Alter. This tradition includes the kind of prose fiction that ‘expresses its seriousness through playfulness, that is acutely aware of itself as a mere structure of words even as it tries to discover ways of going beyond words to the experiences words seek to indicate’. A fully self-conscious novel is ‘one in which from beginning to end, through the style, the handling of narrative viewpoint, the names and words imposed on the characters, the patterning of the narration, the nature of the characters and what befalls them, there is a consistent effort to convey to us a sense of the fictional world as an authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and convention’.14 For Alter, prime examples of fully achieved self-conscious novels include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire; and others would want to add works like Melville’s Moby-Dick to the list.

Associating Sartor Resartus with the tradition of self-conscious fiction helps bring into focus its reflexive features, as well as the way in which the text is continually challenging the reader’s expectations and competence. The key feature of Carlyle’s modus operandi is that the text is about both itself and the experience of reading it. Sartor contains its own commentary and has within itself a fully developed model of a reader grappling with a difficult text. The description of Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh’s strange book on clothes given by the Editor in the ‘Characteristics’ chapter of Book I is at the same time a pointed description of the very book that the reader of Sartor Resartus holds in his hands. Throughout the text the Editor continues to be the reader’s surrogate as he struggles to make sense of Teufelsdröckh’s book and the six bags of miscellaneous and randomly arranged autobiographical documents. On behalf of the reader, the Editor attempts to find useful meanings in materials that fascinate him and compel his attention even while he suspects their authenticity, doubts the intentions and sincerity of their author, and comes to realize that none of his doubts can ever be settled with certainty.

[4]

In Book I of Sartor Resartus, the narrator, an English reviewer whom we come to know as the Editor, describes a new German book by Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo that he has undertaken to introduce to the British public. Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence) is divided into a Descriptive-Historical portion and a Speculative-Philosophical portion; while the Editor is clearly more comfortable with the former, he senses that there is something in the latter that may prove useful to ‘us English’, whose ‘mercantile greatness, and invaluable Constitution’ are examples of the ‘practical tendency’ of English culture and endeavour, which has perhaps cramped ‘the free flight of Thought’ and impeded the growth of ‘pure Science, especially pure moral Science’. It is ‘direct value’ and ‘inference of a practical nature’ that the Editor wants to draw from Teufelsdröckh’s book. In doing so, however, he is repeatedly hindered by his own literal-mindedness and inexperience with the free flight of thought, by genuine difficulties in the text, and by its gratuitously rebarbative features, chief among them ‘an almost total want of arrangement’, that makes Die Kleider seem ‘like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, were hurled into one huge tureen or trough’. From this ‘German printed and written Chaos’—Die Kleider and the supplementary autobiographical documents in six paper bags—the English Editor endeavours to ‘evolve printed Creation’.

In understanding Teufelsdröckh’s thought, and in building a bridge between it and the British public, the Editor is keenly aware of the value of biography. The professor’s radically original thought and peculiar mode of expression must reflect his life-experience, and to know his ideas ‘without something of his personality’ is likely to ensure ‘entire misapprehension’. Since the Editor has visited Weissnichtwo he is able to supply some vivid descriptive details of Teufelsdröckh in later life: his standing up in a crowded coffee-house to propose a toast to the Cause of the Poor; his physical appearance (‘loose, ill-brushed, threadbare habiliments’, thick locks overlapping a grave face; eyes ‘deep under their shaggy brows’, in which are seen ‘gleams of an ethereal or else a diabolic fire’); and his watch-tower, an attic room in the tallest house in the Wahngasse, from which he looks out on the living flood of humanity below while sitting in Byronic isolation ‘alone with the Stars’.

These brief outside glimpses of the older Teufelsdröckh are supplemented in Book II by the much more extended inside views of his earlier years, which make up a spiritual biography charting his inner development from childhood to when his ‘spiritual majority … commences’; that is, to the threshold of adult life, the point at which Bildungsromane normally conclude. Essentially, Book II offers a highly stylized and schematic account of the development of a certain kind of Romantic hero. Most of its stages will come as no surprise to readers familiar with Wertherian and Byronic heroes, and with Wilhelm Meister. The ‘Idyllic’ chapter of Book II describes the ‘happy season of Childhood’ before the shades of the prison house begin to close. During this season the perceptual given is all-sufficient and existence is ‘a bright, soft element of Joy’. A sense of reverence and obedience is instilled in the child through his parents and their ‘simple version of the Christian Faith’. The limitation of this stage of development, however, is that the child remains in a state of passivity with his ‘Active Power’ still dormant. The birth pangs of this power come around the time of puberty when the ‘happy season of Childhood’ gives way to the ‘fervid season of youth’. The death of Teufelsdröckh’s father and the revelation that his father and mother were only foster parents bring the realization that ‘I was like no other’; this self-conscious awareness dissolves the childhood sense of oneness with what surrounds him.

During the course of his higher education, Teufelsdröckh lays the foundation of a literary life; but his intellectual development at a ‘Rational University’ leaves him susceptible to the infection of religious doubt which soon develops into ‘the nightmare, Unbelief and causes a bifurcation between head and heart, between the doubting intelligence and emotional values and needs deeply rooted in the religious culture of childhood. The problem of vocation, of realizing one’s ‘maximum of Capability’, is closely related to this incapacitating split; to find one’s vocation means to find work that fosters an harmonious and mutually supportive development of all one’s faculties.

First love is a dangerous time in late adolescence because it seems to offer a way to transcend psychic divisions and recover the transporting joy of childhood. The beloved other seems to hold in her hand ‘the invisible Jacob’s-ladder, whereby man might mount into very Heaven’. During Teufelsdröckh’s romance with Blumine, ‘Pale Doubt fled away to the distance; Life bloomed up with happiness and hope.’ But when ‘the gay silk Montgolfier’ balloon loses its air, Teufelsdröckh is plunged into the depths of an extravagantly exaggerated world-sorrow. Like Byron (in Arnold’s phrase), he carries across Europe the pageant of his bleeding heart. At one point during the ‘Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh’ chapter, he is found in the mountains gazing at silent and solitary peaks bathed in the evening sunlight. In their presence he begins to experience one of those moments of expanded consciousness and sense of oneness with the visible world that are the raison d’être of Romantic reverie.