Chopping Down the Bourgeoisie – Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters

I am not, on the whole, a fan of what I would call “closed-box novels”. Those torturous first-person narratives which Beckett and Murnane and so many others like to write, where our main character is generally floating in space, very rarely lucky enough to be trapped in a small box. From within this cramped environment they ramble, complain, whatever. But given how far detached from our own world theirs is, I get very little from them. Such narratives neither bring us closer to our fellows, nor do they ever appear to have any positive message to impart at all. Just pessimism and cynicism. If I wanted that, I’d go outside.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters is in some sense one of these closed-box mysteries. The main character spends most of the narrative sitting in a chair at a party, reminiscing or else thinking ill of those around him. A little later he has a bite to eat, sits and listens to an actor discourse, and finally goes home. What action there is lies within his mind until very late in the story. Though it is unparagraphed, and though it has a certain peculiar disconnection from human life that reminds me of Beckett, I ended up enjoying the novel. There was some light within its caverns, and the writing is also (trans. David McLintock) far funnier than I had expected.

I suppose I would like to open the box, and explain briefly what value to us in the real world this novel might have.

Plot Introduction

Woodcutters is set in Bernhard’s native Austria, in the Vienna of the 1980s. Our narrator is a writer, temporarily back in his homeland from England, where he appears to be in self-imposed exile. While in Vienna he accidentally encounters the Auersbergers – a married couple and old friends from the 50s, whom our narrator now despises, and they give him an invitation to “an artistic dinner” that he somehow fails to decline. He also hears of the suicide, by hanging, of their mutual friend, a woman called Joana. The action of Woodcutters takes place during this dinner, the same day as Joana’s funeral – first as our narrator sits alone on his chair, then during the dinner itself. The guest of honour is an actor from the Burgtheater, the most important Viennese theatre, but he is running late. Among the various guests is also Jeannie Billroth, another writer who the narrator despises.

Joana

The narrator’s treatment of his old friend’s suicide is rather ambiguous. As with most of the people in Woodcutters, Joana had once had a great impact on the narrator’s life, but since been abandoned by him. She had had a hard life, coming from the countryside to Vienna to be an artist but then ending up simply doing movement classes with actors. She married, but then Fritz, her famous fabric-making husband, ran off to Mexico without her. And so she drank, and drank, and the narrator is more surprised to hear that she had recently still been alive than that she had died. Why exactly she ended her life is unclear – what final thing brought her to go to the countryside and hang herself. But the narrator says he had always known she would hang herself, because she had dreams and dreams are not fit for this world.

Joana had been the narrator’s friend, and he had taken no interest in her these past ten or twenty years. Whether or not there is any guilt there is hard to say, but the cynicism of the narrator shouldn’t be confused with authority. At the funeral, which takes place in the village where Joana grew up and died, the narrator encounters John, Joana’s companion. At first he hates him, considering him an ill-educated peasant, but as he recollects the funeral his opinion changes, and he realises that in comparison with the bourgeois trash that were also there, John was actually a good man. He had organised the funeral, he had done his duty and looked death in the face in the way that the endlessly posing Viennese never had. And that, of course, is better than nothing.

Auersberger

Just now looking through the German Wikipedia page for Woodcutters I discovered to my surprise and, I think, horror, that these characters all have quite clear analogues in the real world. In many cases Bernhard did not even bother changing first names. That is a surprise because Woodcutters is full of characters with changed names. Joana was originally Elfriede, for example, and Auersberger’s name has also been pruned by him to make it sound more aristocratic. Everyone here is trying to be someone other than themselves.

The Auersbergers, “Auersberger” and “his wife”, are the hosts of the party. They have not changed in the thirty or so years that the narrator has had the misfortune of knowing them. The man is a composer, from the school of Anton Webern; his wife is a singer. Auersberger had promise, had genius perhaps, but now he is simply considered one of Webern’s many successors. He has a drinking problem, and occasionally goes for drying-out cures.

Their marriage is not happy – none in the book is. They are sustained by her money and these social events. They are, to quote our narrator, “perfidious society masturbators”. They have destroyed an entire village – the source of her wealth – by their indolence. As they do no work, they are forced to gradually sell parcels of land from her inheritance, which leads to land development. And no doubt by not working they are also doing a lot of damage to their souls. Everything about the Auersbergers is fake, dishonest. I particularly enjoyed the several pages where the actor talks about The Wild Duck, the play by Ibsen that he had been in, and not one person save Jeannie and the narrator has actually seen it. But in addition to the fake names there are fake books, fake libraries, fake relationships. Their whole world is false.

Auersberger, though, is terribly funny. He has drunk far more than he should and his wife keeps trying to force him to go to bed, whereupon he kicks her. But the best line in the book, I thought, comes when the discussion turns to suicide’s prevalence among the Austrians at that time.

“The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him.”

This gives a good idea of the humour in Woodcutters. It is cruel, but it is also shockingly funny. Yet I cannot leave Auersberger like this, because his particular character goes too far. The narrator is cynical, is brutal. But Auersberger – at least to me, reads as someone far more sinister, considering the context of politically unrepentant Austria in postwar period. When he starts talking about how “the human race ought to be abolished”, or “we should all kill one another”, it suggests a kind of unreformed Nazi nihilism, at least to me. So too does his destruction of chairs and wineglasses. He is good for a laugh, but not when you start thinking about him.

Jeannie and the Actor

Considering it is a broadside against Viennese bourgeois society, art naturally enough sits at centre of Woodcutters. Our narrator time and again refers to the way that Vienna consumes talented artists and turns them into mediocrities – Joana and Auersberger are but examples of this. Only Fritz and – we presume – the narrator, were able to escape the Austrian capital’s pernicious influence, and then only by fleeing abroad. Jeannie Billroth, who the narrator once served as lover, is one who has not escaped Vienna’s clutches. Styling herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, she is in the narrator’s eye a phenomenal mediocrity. Her days, he suggests, are spent pandering to politicians to secure pensions and prizes. After all,

“Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honoured grave in the Central Cemetery”.

If Jeannie is as untalented and inauthentic as everyone else at the party, the actor is almost the opposite. He arrives incredibly late, pays decorum no heed, but though he is for the most part boring, he is nonetheless himself. When Jeannie asks him, not once, not twice, not even three times but repeatedly until he cannot ignore her any longer, whether he could say, “at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfilment”, he at last snaps. He hates the party, hates the people there, and hates Jeannie above all. What he wants, what he truly wants, is “to go into the forest, deep into the forest… to yield oneself up to the forest” and be a woodcutter.

The actor, who had described to the uninterested listeners how he had holed himself up in a mountain shack in order to learn his lines and truly feel his role, is the real artist. Of course, he is as petty as the rest of them in many ways, and he does appear slightly ridiculous. Here is the wonderful description of him eating. It is truly amazing how Bernhard manages to convey the rush of the artist’s spooning in his language:

“Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favourite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades.”

Truth-telling and Cynicism

Why mention the spooning? Because it makes the actor look ridiculous. It undermines him, and Woodcutters as a whole is about undermining people. It is about, in some sense, telling the truth.

“For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us.”

It is only, obliterated by another person, that we can ever reflect upon ourselves honestly and turn away from the incorrect path that we are on. Sometimes, not even that is enough. In another moment that had me write “big oof” in the margins the narrator turns to a very drunken Auersberger, quite randomly after the dinner, and say

“that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth.”

Big oof indeed.

Can we ever break out of the cycles that we are in? Are we condemned to them until at last, confronted with the sheer awfulness of other people, we finally snap? The cynicism of the narrator is not without its purpose. There is at least a kind of hope, if only for himself, that life can be better than an artistic dinner in Vienna. And as the novel ends he runs – literally runs – determined to make something of his experience that isn’t just a complaint. There is something to be valued here.

Conclusion

Woodcutters is the first work of fiction by Bernhard that I have read. I remember once starting Frost and stopping, but after Woodcutters I have already ordered another novel. Woodcutters is not quite the closed-box I thought it was. It is hilarious in a way that is relevant to us all, living as we do in a bourgeois cultural milieu (you are on this blog, after all). It is not too long either, and easy to read. Bernhard’s style has his narrator constantly going in circles, searching for perfect barb with which to pierce his old friends’ bubbles. And these barbs are not the end. There is a sense, a limited sense, that underneath the cynicism and the misanthropy there is a good world and a good life to be found, just not the one we live in and not the one we’re living.

But that’s what we have books for. To show the way to something better.

Fragments of Pain – W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants

The Emigrants is the second novel by W.G. Sebald, the late German academic who was based at the University of East Anglia, that I have read after Austerlitz. I read Austerlitz a few weeks ago and was not as affected by it as I felt I was supposed to be, and so I decided not to write a post about it. The Emigrants is concerned with many of the same themes as Austerlitz – memory, trauma, and the like – but it explores them in a way that was slightly more approachable and, as a result, more impactful. Sebald is a pretty unique phenomenon, and even if the horrors of central Europe’s twentieth century do not interest you, his way of writing about them is another reason to read him.

Austerlitz tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, a man who discovers at the end of his schooldays that he is not the Welshman he thought he was, but a Jew from the Prague. This leads him to an odyssey of discovery as he tries to find out the truth of his origins, and whatever became of his parents. Austerlitz’s story comes to us mediated through a narrator who meets Austerlitz over the course of several years, often by complete chance. The Emigrants adopts a similar approach, but because it is made up of four short stories, ranging in length from under thirty pages to almost one hundred, the stories end up easier to follow, and their characters are a little easier to believe in.

Each of the stories focuses on a different émigré, emigrant, or exile, from the lands inhabited by the Jews and Germans, with a final emigrant – Sebald’s narrator himself – as the one who hears and transcribes the stories of others, either from notebooks or diaries or from conversations. One thing that Sebald does well is emphasise the subjectivity of experience. This was perhaps a necessity in Postwar German literature – after all, how could one possibly write objectively about the Holocaust? The Holocaust isn’t even mentioned in The Emigrants, but all but one of the emigrants are Jews, at least in part, and in the suicides and despairs that fill the book’s pages the Holocaust is always present in the background. The Emigrants is less the record of the lives of four emigrants so much as the record of trying to record the lives of four emigrants.

James Wood, the critic, writes of Sebald’s great skill at conveying “whole lives”. Rather than the false omniscience of the third person, or the boundedness of the first, Sebald’s approach is a hybrid form that lets us see from the outside the course of a life – from youth to death – as other people perceive it, even as we understand that those same people are flawed and limited in their perceptions, and never able to see the whole picture. But what we hear in these stories is not to be completely trusted not only because people can never know everything, but also because people will know things and conceal them. We arrive too late to hear the full picture, but we can try to build it out of the fragments the narrator picks up from others. The emigrants have all left their country, and one obvious question that we can never fully answer, is why?

Looking at the first two stories, which were probably my favourites, will make it clearer how Sebald operates in The Emigrants.

Dr Selwyn

Sebald’s narrator meets Dr Selwyn while looking for a place to rent. He lets Sebald and his wife rent part of his house in the English countryside and he reveals the story of his life to them over time. Selwyn is an old man, almost eighty, with a wife of his own, though she is rarely in the house. The house and grounds themselves are all in a state of decay. Selwyn’s great passion, tennis, is one he no longer indulges in. He has a servant who is mentally ill, and apparently no friends at all. But one day a guest does arrive, and the two men invite Sebald and his wife to dinner.

Selwyn describes how in his youth he felt a certain attraction for a mountaineering guide, Johannes Naegeli – “never in his life, neither before not later, did he feel as good as he did then, in the company of that man”. These are the words Sebald’s narrator gives to us, and they are not exactly definite in their meaning. Naegeli, we then learn, died in a mountaineering accident. A short while later Selwyn breaks off his narrative, saying it was probably not interesting. He starts showing slides from a trip he undertook with his guest ten years ago, and Sebald watches them, aware that they are sharing memories, but he remains on the outside.

At another time, Selwyn mentions being afflicted by homesickness more and more. He explains that his family originally came from near Grodno in the Russian Empire. We don’t learn why his family left, though the implication – and it is only an implication – is that antisemitism drove them out. Selwyn explains how he told his wife “the secret of my origins”, and perhaps that is to blame for the decline of their relationship – Selwyn’s name is an anglicised version of his original Seweryn. He also mentions perhaps having sold, “at one point, my soul.” A page later and Selwyn has shot himself.

At the end of each of the stories in The Emigrants I found it was useful to ask myself what the story was trying to say. With “Dr Selwyn” I ended up coming to the conclusion that what it was trying to say was precisely that it is impossible to say everything, and often impossible even to say enough. Like a shattered vase we only have the pieces of Selwyn’s dialogue with which to try to make sense of the shape of his life – his emigration, his possibly homosexual love, his cold marriage, his homesickness and death. We can perhaps put them all together, but the glue can only ever be our imaginations, and as a result, unreliable. In the face of the horror of suicide, we have nothing concrete to offer. We simply don’t know enough.

Paul Bereyter

Dr Selwyn was alive to tell his story, but Paul Bereyter is not so lucky. Instead, Sebald’s narrator learns of his old schoolteacher’s death through the papers: “Grief at the Loss of a Popular Teacher”. But immediately the narrator informs us that the article is, if not full of lies, at least dishonest. It does not say that Bereyter had killed himself as well, by laying himself down on the tracks before an oncoming train, or that Bereyter had been prevented during the Third Reich from teaching because he was a quarter Jewish. Newspapers, though we often hope to rely on them for facts, are just as unreliable as everything else in Sebald’s world when it comes to trying to piece together something approaching truth out of all its many fragments.

Sebald’s narrator’s attempt to recover Bereyter is not easy. Much has been destroyed. Architecture, which in Austerlitz is a way holding on to memory, here does the opposite – Bereyter’s house has been taken down and replaced by a block of flats. In S, the village where Bereyter had taught, people after the war either kept quiet about their role in the gradual removal of Jewish, even slightly Jewish, people from public life, or even forgot it altogether – and we cannot know which. Instead, for the narrator, growing up in the postwar years, Bereyter has a reputation that obscures all that. He has perhaps not grown up properly, he is a bit strange, a bit of a free-thinker. A kind of collective refusal to accept responsibility for Bereyter’s dismissal from his post hangs over the town.

Of course, Bereyter gets his job back and teaches and eventually finds what appears to be companionship in life. His suicide, then, is more complicated than simply his temporary loss of work. The words of the woman he spent much of his later years with describes the way he began an attempt to recover a sense of the lost past, of the suffering of the Jews. He reads authors who suffered as a result of the Nazi era, or those who flirted with suicide – Wittgenstein, Trakl, Mann, Benjamin. The woman seems to suggest that the result of this reading, this research, was that Bereyter no longer felt he could belong in the village where he had once taught. The weight of the guilt that he had revealed to himself was too much. And that, perhaps, is why he ended his life.

The other two stories contain many of the same themes and ideas of the first two, expanding on them, and approaching them from different angles. One thing that is particularly interesting is to consider the role of Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants. We read about those whose obsession with the past and regrets eventually destroyed them. But our narrator too, is scouring the past, reconstructing lives. Where does all this place him? He too is a figure, trying to master a history that is too broad and too horrific for the human heart to bear. The question is, as always, why he does this. There is a moral value in trying to recover the past, but The Emigrants is not wholeheartedly in favour of archive-scouring either. It seems to suggest an approach to the past that acknowledges its own limitations: we cannot know everything, but we must know enough.

Style

The greatest influence on Sebald’s prose was probably the German writer, Adalbert Stifter, who is not read much in English these days. (Though NYRB released a new translation of Motley Stones just last week!). Stifter’s stories are slow, meandering, and don’t appear to be going anywhere. But at the same time, from the few I’ve read, there’s a certain magic in them all the same. Because they are so obviously stories, it is hard to feel pressure to get to the point. We wouldn’t hurry up someone telling a story by the fire – it’s the same feeling. The stories of The Emigrants, whatever their moral heftiness, are also broken up by long stretches of… nothing. Nature descriptions, pointless events, whatever.

“At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.” Thus begins “Dr Selwyn”, not with a bang, but with a drive. This style is so unusual because we are everywhere taught to focus, to not waste time. Even in our reading, we want to be entertained. But I don’t think Sebald’s style here is merely the result of a desire to try my patience, though it does that. I think there is a kind of moral purpose here. Sebald is determined to notice things, to make a record, and this demands attention to the world around us. I also think that the style further adds to the contingency of the stories – Sebald’s narrator comes across them or their authors by chance. Things are found and saved from forgetting only by luck.

It’s worth mentioning the Sebald also uses black and white photographs in his works, another innovation. They generally depict things from the text, or at least seem to. Their low quality, and dubious authenticity, reflects back on the narrative. We often take the accuracy of a photo for granted, even though in reality they are just as unreliable a record as prose. Sebald’s use of photos at first suggests an additional investment in making his stories seem real, but in the end they only further contribute to the destruction of certainty, of wholeness, that takes place in whatever he writes.

Conclusion

In a way, I am not sure how to approach Sebald here. His fiction is unique among authors I’ve read. His stories juxtapose the quiet peace of nature and travel writing against the horrors of the earth, whether Holocaust of repression or whatever else. And yet at the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for the poet Michael Hofmann, who accused Sebald of “nailing literature on to a home-made fog – or perhaps a nineteenth-century ready-made fog.” Hofmann’s description is apt. Sebald’s writing takes us into a fog, into a world of uncertainty and confusion. Like your blogger, Sebald cannot write a simple sentence. And if everything on the earth circles around scepticism about being able to know anything, because our memories and perceptions are hopelessly corrupt, what are we supposed to take away from this?

There are some fantastic descriptions, and I think that Sebald’s topics are valuable. This is not so much Germans berating themselves over their guilt, as one German looking at the way lives can be maimed by trauma. The despair of The Emigrants is unavoidable. But when one’s dealing with that part of the 20th century, I don’t know what else one has any right to say.

For more sad Germans, check out Adorno and Grass.

Thomas Carlyle, Prophet or Petty Pamphleteer?

There are, it seems, two ways of coming to Thomas Carlyle. The first, and tamest, is through the likes of Borges, who praised Carlyle’s experimental novel Sartor Resartus as a model to be emulated. The second route is far less innocent. Carlyle is perhaps the best known these days for his “fascism”. Carlyle’s dates obviously don’t have anything to do with fascism – he was born in 1795 and died in 1881. However, the man’s politics have aged extraordinarily badly. We may overlook or even, unthinkingly, admire his theory of Great Men, at least from a distance, but as soon as his authoritarianism comes out in his writing it only gets louder and louder, and less and less reasonable or coherent.

I have spent a few weeks with the Penguin edition of Carlyle’s Selected Writings, and in this post I suppose my goal is simply to suggest why there might be a reason to read this side of Carlyle, however reprehensible it may be.

Why read him?

One way to read Carlyle is less as a thinker so much as a character. Carlyle was a Scot. His parents wanted him to be a preacher but he ended up losing his faith. Nevertheless, there’s a strong prophetic tone to his writing that is impossible to avoid. Carlyle is completely incapable of writing in clear English. Not prophecy, but “vaticination”, not a standard sentence but all sorts of inversion. There are plenty of allusions, lists, and terrible images. From the back of my book – “Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal… for it is the hour!”

One gets the sense that Carlyle was rather disappointed to be born after the French Revolution, the subject of his major historical work. He has a certain relish for chaos that is distinctly Romantic. And indeed, it’s best to think of Carlyle as a Romantic, one born to late and who lived too long. His fearful view of technology, his praise of the individual and their genius, his loathing for the conforming masses, are all in their essence Romantic. In particular, Carlyle takes a lot from the German Romantics, and was a huge fan of Goethe (seemingly without noticing that Goethe renounced Romanticism later in his life). And these German Romantics were, it must be said, politically suspect. Aside from their support of Revolution, the sheer anti-rationality of the likes of Novalis has left a painful legacy in the intellectual history of the world.

Out of the Romantics grew Carlyle’s views of Great Men. In “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History” Carlyle laid out his view of Great Men as those who take the “dry dead fuel” of “common languid Times” and exploit it to achieve great things. Their conviction is at the heart of their strength. Except, wait a moment, haven’t we by this point in human history noticed that conviction often is little indication of goodness? Stalin, of course, had his convictions, as did Hitler. Generally I disapprove of bringing in these two, because they are classic examples which end up stifling arguments. But in Carlyle’s case the comparison really is appropriate. When he writes that the average man is nothing more than a “dumb creature” saying in “inarticulate prayers: “Guide me, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide myself!”” we see a man who has so little respect for the average human being as to approve of any authority capable of guiding them, without ever questioning their true nature.

So, Carlyle was a fool. That’s no reason to read him, for there have been plenty of fools in history. But I think as a character, he’s interesting. The introduction to my copy is heavy with irony – a particular favourite line is “nothing is more remarkable in Carlyle than the way in which he simply stopped thinking.” But once we get beyond such humour, there’s a sense of sadness in Carlyle’s gradual collapse into authoritarianism. Friends and admirers, even philosophical opponents such as J. S. Mill, turned their backs on him as he grew more and more extreme. Conservatives rejected him for his distrust of the landowners and new money, while those on the side of progress had no time for him at all, even though much of what he said – the criticism of his world – was in line with their own ideas.

Ah, it is not easy, this apologetics business! Carlyle’s works speak for themselves, and not altogether to his credit. The gradual turning inwards of their creator, his isolation, his sense of being outside of time and in a hostile, incorrect world – these are more interesting in a novel’s main character, than in a writer of tracts who had real influence. Carlyle is not without his similarities to Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, which I looked at last week. But still we should read him, I think, and not just because we should always try to engage with ideas we do not call our own. For one, he was incredibly influential in his day, and he has a rather unique style (I shan’t call it good). But most importantly, his criticisms are powerful, however inadequate are his solutions.

Through a look at the essays “Signs of the Times” and “Chartism” I’ll try to demonstrate Carlyle’s worth as a thinker as well as a character.

Thomas Carlyle, in all his glory. What is there in those eyes?

Signs of the Times

“Signs of the Times”, written in 1829, begins by criticising of the world Carlyle was living in. It is a world of prophecy, rather than living in the moment. Nations and thinkers were all in an apocalyptic frame of mind – whether the Utilitarians in Britain under Bentham or the Millenarians who predicted the return of Christ to earth and its somewhat rapid end thereafter. Carlyle’s main problem with all this constant prophesying is that it’s a symptom of an unhealthy age – an “Age of Machinery”. And not just in the simple sense, of spinning jennies and railway engines and steam – things every British schoolchild, even me, manages to learn about. No, if it were only that, perhaps Carlyle would not have to complain, though he does have sympathy for the weavers who lose their jobs to “iron fingers”, or the sailors who are replaced by steam’s “vaporous wings”.

Instead, the “Age of Machinery” is really about what we might nowadays call systems. It is an age of “adapting means to ends” which at first leads to great advances in wellbeing, as machines come into mass use. But then we start becoming so goal-orientated that people become means in themselves, rather than ends. “The internal and spiritual” side of us is overtaken by this thinking. We lose our spontaneity, our sense of individuality. The Romanticism is visible in Carlyle’s idea that instead of a genius weaver, we now only have talented machine users. Skill, which can be made to a pattern, replaces whatever lies deeply inside of us.

Our institutions, whether the church or the arts or the sciences, are all affected by this way of thinking. Christianity, Carlyle enjoys reminding us, spread because of the force of its “Idea” and the passion of missionaries. It did not spread because everyone was organising meetings or giving our pamphlets. In sum, his enemy is a materialism, a belief in science far greater than even the previous century had had. But it is also a hugely destructive belief, for we end up turning our backs on and denying all that “cannot be investigated and understood mechanically”. The spiritual side of human beings is denied in favour a simple happiness – the sort that lets itself be measured.

However appealing this is on the surface, I have a great deal of hesitation about it. It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at human value. One says that the goal of any theory should be the happiness of the many, while the other looks only at the peak of human achievement, vaguely defined. The former is utilitarian, while the latter is Carlylean (or Nietzschean). The danger is that in pursuing personal human achievement, we achieve general human degradation. Nietzsche’s solution, and I suspect Carlyle’s, is simply not to care about the masses. But it’s not a view which I myself much enjoy, even as I agree with Carlyle that any theory that deflates the spiritual side of humanity is pretty awful too.

This essay is interesting, of course, because the problems have not gone away. In our own age we are under the thumb of great systems, with nary a thought given to our spiritual, internal workings. Indeed, much of what Carlyle says seems in line with contemporary thought about capitalism’s effects on the individual. And when Carlyle speaks of the power of passion, of the Idea, to break through the stultifying frames of these systems, it’s a view that appeals. Carlyle’s piece ends with a muted optimism, a sense that out of this conflict between old and new a better world will be born. Alas, it’s taking a long time to come.

Chartism

“Chartism” was written ten years after “Signs of the Times” and is an altogether less pleasant essay to read. All the same, again there are some things here that are pretty sensible. It was written during a time of great working-class upheaval in Britain and asks what the solution is to the problem. Although the Chartists – the group in revolt – had a charter (it’s in the name), Carlyle does not trust them to know what they want – “these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them!” Still, he still less trusts the politicians of the day to know what is wrong.

Carlyle is scathing of Britain’s political elite, and also of the “statisticians”. There is an impressive paragraph when he takes statisticians to task for asking the wrong questions. Impressive because Carlyle lists all of the things that one would need to measure, from social mobility to stability of work, to actually know whether the condition of the working class was good. Simply saying that wages are rising is not enough – that fact alone does not mean that things are getting better. It is a criticism that has lost none of its force. Charitably speaking, there are too many of us unconsciously thinking that a healthy “economy” is the solution to all of the world’s woes, without thinking about such questions as how that wealth is actually distributed or accessed. It’s impressive that Carlyle does not miss this point.

And just as importantly, he sees that an overreliance on statistics is bad in another way, because it devalues life, and reduces us to just a number. Carlyle sees that workers – and human beings – struggle for “just wages” not just in the sense of money, but in terms of dignity too. But just when he seems to be saying something sensible, Carlyle gets started on the Irish. “The time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated.” Yeah, I’m not going to defend this rubbish. Nor what Carlyle says about the Irish spreading bad values like a contagion into Britain itself.

Carlyle talks about dignity, and for him it comes down to justice. But where he goes from there is pretty ridiculous. Might is apparently right. Anyone who has governed a place we must believe is a just ruler, because otherwise they would not have been able to continue ruling. England is fine for Ireland because the Irish haven’t overthrown us (they did). Secret police, guards on every street corner, and a military presence have absolutely nothing to do with control – justice is the reason we continue to rule. “Might and right, so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same”. Carlyle, of course, did not live in the twentieth century. His heart, I am sure, never left the eighteenth. But it must be said that if anything, might has very rarely equalled right, and he’s very much mistaken to think that it ever has.

So, anyway, what do we do with the working class, and with England? Though Carlyle complains that the solutions to poverty in Britain (the “Poor Law”) was a simple solution to a complex problem, and a disaster, his own solutions are no more complex. We do not exterminate the Irish – we merely deport them. Mr Carlyle has heard there’s plenty of land over in Canada where we could send them. As for the British, a bit of forced emigration wouldn’t go amiss either, alongside some education. Now, it is the case that we have some political problems in this country too, so we’d better get a “real aristocracy”. No, Carlyle doesn’t want any of that democracy trash. Strong leaders, powerful Ideas! Man, what a great ideologue Carlyle would have made.

Carlyle, clearly, was struggling for people to support him. In chapter eight he invents (!) a fake book, “History of the Teuton Kindred”, which he quotes for several pages, to support his own ideas. Again, if Carlyle were a literary creation, this would be funny – a little postmodern flourish. As it happens, he was a man, and this just suggests a kind of sad isolation. “Chartism” begins so well, with its diagnosis of the times and how they short-change the individual, but it ends so badly. It was rejected by all the journals of the day and Carlyle had to publish it himself.

Conclusion

Alan Shelston, who penned my edition’s introduction, ultimately gives up on trying to defend Carlyle’s politics and just says they the result of “not ideological belief but rather psychological disturbance and intellectual deterioration”. Maybe. Any belief is the result of something, but finding the correct origin doesn’t change the belief itself. Carlyle is a strange writer. Full of good ideas and bad, unlike a poet or fiction writer it’s much harder to overlook the bad in him. As a man of his time, he is fascinating, but as a thinker, he is deeply concerning. I keep coming back to this idea of him as a character in some postmodern adventure. Ultimately, I think that’s the best way to approach him. Carlyle is someone to look at from a distance, to analyse from one’s armchair, but not to emulate, not to love. That, I think, is fair.