
In the spring of 1962 I started over in college at The
George Washington University (while “living at home”) after the catastrophe at
William and Mary (discussed often elsewhere on these blogs). As a freshman, I somehow placed out of
English 1, basic composition. At GWU, you took a year of literature before
taking the second composition course (English 4) where you “learned how” to
write a term paper. You could write
about anything you wanted, and I think I rehashed a high school paper on Mahler’s
influence on modern composers. We read
Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens) in that class, and I recall an
odd passage in Chapter 8 where Jim Tells Huck (in modern English), “If you’ve got
hairy arms and a hairy chest, it’s a sign you’re going to be rich”. Nobody dared to say anything when the passage
was read aloud in class (in spring 1963, probably in the original text), but I
thought then that the passage was a euphemism for racism in pre Civil War
American History. Spark Notes offers the passage
here.
But back in 1962, I had to start out with “English 52B”,
which comprised the second half of English Literature, starting in the late 18th
Century. We had a gray anthology
textbook called “British Poetry and Prose”, and typically were assigned about
50 pages to read, a lot of it poetry, for each 75-minute class, taught by a Mr.
Rutledge, in a dusky first-floor classroom in Monroe Hall, with a good view of
G Street in Washington’s Foggy Bottom, with the old dive “Quigley’s” barely in
sight. (Wordsworth appeared early in the
course, with discussions of why poetry gives “pleasure”, and suitable
recognition of the film “Splendor in the Grass”, which had played into my lost
fall semester at William and Mary).
Mr. Rutledge liked to give “card quizzes”. They counted one fourth of your grade (so you
came to class, but he would drop the lowest two); there would be a midterm and
a final. And sometime around March 20 or
so, he gave us a card quiz on an excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s odd (and
blatantly self-indulgent) novel “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr
Teufelsdrockh”. The Latin lead means “the tailor re-tailored” and the
protagonist’s name means “god-born devil dung”.

Every student failed this pop quiz, including me. The professor had to throw it out. No one understood the point of the writing
from just reading at home. The book is
an example of a poioumenon, which is a work of “metafiction” where the author
layers the inner story inside a “presentation” layer where the author can
address the reader. Among writers’
groups, it’s considered taboo in modern “writing to sell” as stuck up, but
movie narratives do this kind of thing all the time. Many modern books and films consider the
relationship between the narrative story and the presenter or reader itself a
subject to be written about. Think about
“Inception”, “Cloud Atlas”, and the gay sci-fi hit “Judas Kiss”.
In the inner story, the protagonist wanders rural England or
Europe and is spurned in heterosexual love life, and is taken back when he sees
his beloved with another nobleman. He
turns to nihilism, wanting to pretend that he doesn’t exist (hide inside that
museum clam) until he finds a new purpose for living in his own head. It sounds dangerous. And he does find a different woman. But do people feel disappointed when they
have to take “someone else”, and think, “I should have done better than this”? That was how people thought about
relationships, especially in the gay male community, back in the late 1970’s in
the days before AIDS.
The outer layer of the book has an “Editor” account for his
own experience with dealing with the book, getting around to telling the inner
existential (or transcendental) story when he feels like it.
The professor asked an essay question about the concept of
the book (asking for comparisons to other authors’ works or even films) on the
final exam. He thought that students
should understand this approach to writing,
The book is available on Gutenberg in various formats
here. And “it’s free”. I tried to download it “free” onto Kindle
(like many classics, it’s also a free download for Amazon Prime subcribers) and
found that the touchpad for typing on my little device didn’t work, don’t know
why. Battery problems? But the html version works fine, and
downloads OK even on a smart phone, and is perfectly readable. In fact, “Chapter II” in Book I caught my eye
with its title, “Editorial Difficulties”, and says that man is a “proselytizing
creature” (even if not a Mormon missionary) and speaks of the Philosophy of
Clothes. The latter would be called “sartorial
taste” and was very much a matter in the office in the 1970s and ‘80s, as
companies (other than IBM and EDS) gradually relaxed their dress codes, making
the choices of flared pants, colored shirts and wide ties very much a modem of
pre-Internet self-expression.
I don't see any evidence that Carlyle's novel has ever become a film. It would make an interesting indie experiment, at least in Britain. Let the BBC, Film 4 and the UK Lottery have a stab at it.
Update:
I got the Kindle download from Amazon to go. It just needed to be fully charged back up before it would work. The Kindle version doesn;t show the three inner "books", somewhat corresponding to various layers of narration by the Editor.
Update: Feb. 11. 2017
Mencius Goldbug
writes about Thomas Carlye and "reactionaries" here in 2009. Suddenly this matters, when considering authoritarianism and Donald Trump.
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