Sartor Resartus - Themes and Critical Reception

Themes and Critical Reception

Sartor Resartus was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. It ironically commented on its own formal structure, while forcing the reader to confront the problem of where "truth" is to be found. In this respect it develops techniques used much earlier in Tristram Shandy, to which it refers. The imaginary "Philosophy of Clothes" holds that meaning is to be derived from phenomena, continually shifting over history, as cultures reconstruct themselves in changing fashions, power-structures, and faith-systems. The book contains a very Fichtean conception of religious conversion: based not on the acceptance of God but on the absolute freedom of the will to reject evil, and to construct meaning. This has led some writers to see Sartor Resartus as an early existentialist text.

One of the recurring jokes is Carlyle giving humorously appropriate German names to places and people in the novel, such as the Teufelsdröckh's publisher being named Stillscweigen and co. (meaning Silence and Company) and lodingings being in Weissnichtwo (meaning Know-not-where). Teufelsdröckh's father is introduced as an earnest believer in Walter Shandy's doctrine that "there is much, nay almost all in Names."

Harold Bloom suggested that Sartor Resartus and James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake are so thematically similar, Sartor Resartus seems to be influenced by Joyce's much later novel.

According to Rodger L. Tarr, "The influence of Sartor Resartus upon American Literature is so vast, so pervasive, that it is difficult to overstate." Upon learning of Carlyle's death in 1881 Walt Whitman remarked: 'The way to test how much he has left us all were to consider, or try to consider, for the moment the array of British thought, the resultant and ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery.'" Tarr suggests the influence of Sartor Resartus on American writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain. Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, however, read and objected to the book.

Borges greatly admired the book, recounting that in 1916 at age 17 " discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart." Many of Borges' first characteristic and most admired works employ the same technique of intentional pseudepigraphy as Carlyle, such as "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".