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“A Wondrous Contiguity”: Anachronism in Carlyle's Prophecy and Art
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Thomas Carlyle's writing has been deplored by some critics, Northrop Frye among them, as anachronistic; to the extent, however, that Carlyle considered time a “liar” and a “universal wonder-hider,” he deliberately employed anachronism both structurally and thematically in his work to express his most characteristic insights. The material of Past and Present, for example, is put together so as not merely to emphasize the relevance of past events to present conditions but also to insist upon their identity and even, curiously enough, their simultaneity. The structures of his works thus resemble those of the Eddas, described by him as tales of “successive generations” which are nevertheless “flung out for us in one level of distance… like a picture painted on the same canvas.” This phenomenological view of history, in which contiguity replaces continuity as the key relationship between the elements of experience, also informs Carlyle's politics and economics, giving to them their familiar intensity and antirational bias, without, however, rendering them entirely impractical. Insofar as Carlyle's anachronism represents the writer's stubborn resistance to change, it may properly be deplored. But insofar as it means rejection of the tyranny of mechanical chronology, it is a phenomenon in the author's work worthy of study.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972
References
1 New York: Random, 1968, p. 40.
2 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (Boston: Houghton, 1965), p. xvii.
3 A Study of English Romanticism, p. 88.
4 Marjorie Grene, “Portmann's Thought,” Commentary, 40 (Nov. 1965), 33.
5 “Portmann's Thought,” p. 33.
6 The professor was one Martin Horky, an assistant of Galileo's old rival Magini. For details of the controversy see Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans., introd., and notes by Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 74 ff.
7 “Portmann's Thought,” p. 33.
8 Or, as he puts it in Sartor Resartus, “The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of Tomorrow roll up; but Yesterday and Tomorrow both are.”
9 In our own century, the development of mechanical means for reproducing music has had the same anachronistic effect. As McLuhan writes in Counter-Blast (New York: Harcourt, 1969), p. 109: “Our music now includes the music of many periods and cultures in a vital and living relationship. And this had never occurred before in the world since there were no means of making a present which included so much and excluded so little.”
10 C. F. Harrold, paraphrasing Carlyle's own advice (contained in a letter to James Fraser dated 23 May 1833) on how to get the most out of Sartor Resartus, speaks of the book as “requiring a reflective and discontinuous [italics mine] reading rather than a persistent effort to discover mechanical pattern.” See Harrold's edition of Sartor Resartus (New York: Odyssey, 1937), p. 302. Carlyle's literary technique almost demands such a method of read ing. A chapter like “Phenomena” in Past and Present, e.g., may more correctly be said to have been orchestrated than written, the author employing a series of Wagnerian leitmotifs—the stuffed Pope, the gigantic hat, the woman with typhus—in a notably musical way throughout the episode. That is, the chapter, its elements repeated, with slight variations, until all their possible relationships with one another have been fully exploited, relies, for communication with the reader, not on any logical structure of premises but rather on a kind of intuitive harmony of metaphors.
11 I am indebted to Miss Donna Hudelson for this information.
12 Just as the past becomes contemporary by this method, the present becomes perennial, existing out of time, the Captains of Industry, therefore, quickly achieving the same order of mythic status as the Sphinx. Carlyle discusses this process, by which specific historical facts are absorbed into certain preestablished mythical structures, in “The Hero as Divinity,” writing: “The number twelve, divisiblest of all, which could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most remarkable number,—this was enough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac, the number of Odin's Sons, and innumerable other twelves. Any vague rumour of number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So with regard to every other matter. And quite unconsciously too, —with no notion of building up ‘Allegories.‘ ”
13 Altick, p. xvi.
14 But universal, generalized guilt, e.g., constitutes one very powerful noncausal connection between the two events, one which would certainly account for the perception of a relationship.