carlyle through nietzsche

7/28/2019 Carlyle Through Nietzsche

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Carlyle through Nietzsche: Reading "Sartor Resartus"Author(s): Jeremy TamblingReviewed work(s):Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 326-340Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20467281 .Accessed: 21/11/2011 04:52

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CARLYLE THROUGH NIETZSCHE:READING SARTOR RESARTUS

I was reading the life fThomas Carlyle, thatunwitting, involuntary farce, thatheroicmoral interpretation of dyspeptic conditions.-Carlyle, a man of strong words andattitudes, a rhetor out of need, constantly provoked by the longing for a strong faithand the feeling of being incapable of it (-in which he is a typical Romantic!) Thelonging fora strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, rather theopposite. If you havefaith, then you can allow yourself the fine luxuryof scepticism: you are secure enough,firm nough, fettered enough for it.Carlyle anaesthetizes something inhimself by thefortissimoof his admiration forpeople with a strong faith, and by his rage against thosewho are less naive: he needs noise. A constant and passionate dishonestywith himselfthat ishis proprium, it iswhat makes and keeps him interesting.Of course inEnglandhe is admired precisely for his honesty [. . .]Now that isEnglish-and consideringthat the English are the nation of complete cant-even fair enough, and not merelyunderstandable. Basically Carlyle is an English atheist seeking to be honoured fornotbeing so.'It is fascinating to see Carlyle, author of the six volumes of theHistory ofFriedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick theGreat (I 858-65), being commentedon by Nietzsche, who was given Friedrich's name since he was born on hisname-day ('this perfect day', as Nietzsche calls it in Ecce Homo).2 For thefirst riter,history, efined s 'the ssenceof innumerable iographies', is thedefinitiveubject,since 'what sallKnowledge [. . .]but recorded xperience,and a product ofHistory?'3 He isconfronted by the philosophy which discussesthe uses, but also stresses the disadvantages, of history for life, and which,rejecting the idea of past knowledge as commanding for the present, writes: 'Iteach toyou the Overhuman. The human is something that shall be overcome[.. .]All things o far ave created omething eyond themselves.'4 ietzsche's'overhuman' breaks the confines of what has been defined as human thus far,including what has been defined as worthy of hero-worship, and in that senseit is the antithesis of any of the right-wing appropriations that have been madeof him: as are his comments on Carlyle.We should look at the detail of these comments. According toHillis Miller'sparaphrase ofNietzsche, Carlyle's proprium, r his propriety, hat was properto him, was 'the impropriety of a constant passionate dishonesty against himself' p.7), anunconsciousself-deception. hile Nietzsche talks fEngland and

1Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans, by Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998), p. 49. The passage isquoted by J.Hillis Miller, '"Hieroglyphical Truth" inSartor Resartus',in Victorian Perspectives, ed. by John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier (London: Macmillan, 1989),pp. 1-20 (p. 7); Miller assumes Nietzsche was reading a German translation of James HurrellFroude's two-volume Life of Carlyle (1882 and 1884), published in German in 1887, one yearbefore Twilight of the dols. His essay draws out Nietzsche's debt to Emerson, much influenced, ofcourse, by Carlyle. For Hillis Miller, the deconstructive properties of language made it inevitablethat Carlyle's writing should be unable to express a fundamental honesty: the point is interesting,but not the argument adopted here.2Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans, by R. J.Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 7.3 Carlyle, 'On History' (1830), in A Carlyle Reader: Selections from theWritings of ThomasCarlyle, ed. by G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 57, 56.4Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans, by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2005), p. 11.

Modern Language Review, I02 (2007), 326-40? Modern Humanities Research Association 2007


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JEREMY TAMBLING 327'cant',Froude, Carlyle's biographer, omments n Carlyle's hatredof 'cant''organised hypocrisy, the art ofmaking things seem what theywere not; and art[. . .] carrying them beyond the stage of conscious falsehood into a belief in theirown illusions, nd reducing hem o the retchedest fpossible conditions, hatof being insincerely incere'.'Yet the mpossibility f getting ut of 'illusions'is at the heart of what makes Carlyle 'interesting', as Nietzsche finds him to be.Later in Twilight of the Idols (Ix. 44), he calls him a 'great man'; while inEcceHomo he distinguishes the idea of the Ubermensch from 'the "hero cult" of thatgreat and involuntaryounterfeiterarlyle' (p. 41).6 'Counterfeiter'uggestsagain self-deception at work, even ifunconscious, but the word also impliesthat not only Carlyle's choice of great men or heroes, but the idea of heroes is aform fcounterfeiting,roducinga dud reading fhistory, omprising eroeswho are counterfeits.Nietzsche's commenton Carlyle pathologizes him, in seeinghim as livingin 'dyspeptic onditions'which are associatedwith his repression nd selfdivision.7 istorically,thedyspepsia inCarlyle seems tohave settled nfromI8I8 onwards.Nietzsche saysnothingabout therelationbetween such selfdivision and thequestion ofCarlyle and his relationship o sexuality, hich,howeverspeculativethematerial, canhardlybe ignored y a latter-dayommentator,but which would certainly ot have lessenedCarlyle's self-dividedstate.8 orNietzsche, dyspepsia relatesto the impossibilityf forgettinghepast, being held by its past constructions, a condition that he sees as broughtaboutwithinmodernity. orgetting nNietzsche isnotsomething hat appens,it is something e actively o, and thefunction f 'activeforgetfulness'resembles thatof a concierge preservingmental order, calm, and decorum. On thisbasis,onemay appreciate immediately towhat extent therecould be no happiness, no serenity,no hope, no pride, no presentwithout forgetfulness.The man inwhom this inhibitingapparatus is damaged and out of ordermay be compared to a dyspectic (and not onlycompared)-he is never 'through'with anything.9On this reading, Carlyle ismarked by obsession about the past, and cannot findthe nsouciance theserenity,hehope, the ride) to live nthe resent.Twilightof the Idols argues that his rhetoric exhibits a desire for a great man, and for

5 J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 2 vols (London: Longmans,Green and Co., 1891), 11, 18.6 G. B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure and Style ofThomas Carlyle'sFirst Major Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 317, simplifies when he saysthat 'Nietzsche himself felt only contempt for Carlyle's search for faith, and dispensed with himas an "atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be so".'7 On Carlyle's continual dyspepsia, and his hypochondria, see Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado:A Life of Thomas Carlyle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), pp. 46-47, 54-55. For areview of Heffer and a comparison with Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1983), see Mark Cumming's review in Victorian Studies, 40 (1997),661-63.8The absence of the sexual inCarlyle's marriage (see Heffer, pp. 88-90) was discussed by J.A.Froude, My Relations with Carlyle (1903; repr. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971):he said 'that theirmarriage was not a real marriage, and was only companionship' (p. 4); and thebook discusses Geraldine Jewsbury's comments to Froude, based on her relations with JaneWelshCarlyle (pp. 20-23).9Nietzsche, On theGenealogy ofMorals, Second Essay, Section 1, trans, by Douglas Smith(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 39.


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328 Carlyle throughNietzschefaith, both things of the past, and acts as a drug to keep him from the awarenessthat such a thing cannot exist in the present, that it can only be constitutiveof the counterfeit; that it is nihilistic to demand it. Further, the knowledge inCarlyle at some level of the futility ofwhat he writes and of the counterfeitingpower of his rhetoric causes him to be in a state of anger against others, thoseless 'naive' who do not require the illusions that he creates through his writing;this would account, partially, for the resentment of democracy in such a textas 'Shooting Niagara: And After?' (I867). The greatness that Carlyle valuesbecomes inseparablefrom imple-mindedness; t is a desire for omething nquestioned and unquestioning, as when, in the essay 'Characteristics' (I83 I),he says that 'the healthy Understanding is not the Logical, argumentative, butthe Intuitive; for the end of Understanding is not to prove and find reasons,but to know and believe'.'0 The language implies, in its resistance to doubt,submission nd simplecertainty; ut inNietzsche's argument rue greatness',inseparable from an accompanying scepticism, isnot at all simple. Carlyle, desiring greatness, is a split subject, and that shows in his anger. He admires thesingle-minded, but he cannot grapple with greatness, because greatness is notsingle-minded.While this paper will explore the implications ofCarlyle's dyspepsia througha reading of Sartor Resartus, his most interesting work, to read Nietzsche onCarlyle will also have to note that what he writes is symptomatic in that itwasproduced by thenineteenth-century discourse he did somuch to create, aswithDickens, who met him in i840, wanted him present in I844 when he read TheChimestohis friends,sed partofLatter-Day Pamphlets n avid Copperfield,dedicated Hard Times to him, and spoke of his 'wonderful book', The FrenchRevolution (1837), in the Preface toA Tale of Two Cities. To read Carlyle isalso to read Dickens." And itmust be noted thatCarlyle considered his societyto be in a pathological state, as the following passage suggests:thewhole Life of Societymust now be carried on by drugs: doctor after doctor appearswith his nostrum, ofCooperative Societies, Universal Suffrage, Cottage-and-Cow systems,Repression of Population, Vote by Ballot. To such height has the dyspepsia ofSociety reached; as indeed the constant grinding internalpain, or from time to time themad spasmodic throes,of all Society do otherwise toomournfully indicate. ('Characteristics', p. 83)Carlyle's persistent dyspepsia must be read as being not a singular or personalstate, but general, as part of the condition of England: the condition of modernity, to follow Nietzsche. This would modify the view of Rosemary Ashton,

10Carlyle, 'Characteristics', inA Carlyle Reader, ed. by Tennyson, p. 71. Further references inthe text.11 I discuss The French Revolution in relation toA Tale of Two Cities inmy Dickens, Violenceand theModern State: Dreams of theScaffold (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 129-54, ana< Carlyle and Dickens in relation to Latter-Day Pamphlets in 'Carlyle in Prison: Reading Latter-DayPamphlets', Dickens Studies Annual, 26 (1998), 311?34; see also my comments on Chapter 58 ofDavid Copperfield inmy edition for Penguin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). See also WilliamOddie, Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (London: Centenary Press, 1972), pp. 41?60;Michael Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), pp. 78-99;and George H. Ford, 'Stern Hebrews Who Laugh: Further Thoughts on Carlyle and Dickens',inCarlyle Past and Present: A Collection ofNew Essays, ed. by K. J.Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr(London: Vision, 1976), pp. 112-26.


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JEREMY TAMBLING 329when she says that Carlyle's 'frequent use of unpleasant smells asmetaphors ornames-Teufelsdrockhmeans "devil's dung", the opular name for safoetida,a strong-smelling herb used as an emetic-represents his striking way of givingvent in his social and political criticism to a disgust which, as he well knew,had its roots in his unfortunate physical condition'.12 It is perhaps not possibleto say whether Carlyle's dyspepsia was rooted in social causes, a dyspepsia atwork there, or whether its physical presence caused a dyspeptic reading of society, or whether the distinction between the two forms of dyspepsia cannot bemaintained. Whatever is true, how Carlyle pathologizes society turns out to betrue of himself. Raymond Williams notes a similar problem: that 'Signs of theTimes' comments on 'veneration for the physically strongest' and on how 'weworship and follow after power', yet that this becomes true ofCarlyle, who hasnoted it in others, so thatWilliams is only following Nietzsche in finding inCarlyle 'impotence rojecting tself s power'.'3Sartor Resartus ['The Tailor Patched'] appeared in Fraser's Magazine, fromNovember I833 toAugust I834, as a book inAmerica in I836 and in Britainin I838. It gives, in fragmented form, the opinions on clothes of the imaginedProfessor eufelsdrockh fWeissnichtwo [Know-not-where], ragmentsof thought put together and commented on by the editor. Teufelsdrockh'swork on clothes concludes that whatever ensibly xists,whateverrepresentsSpirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season,and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightlyunderstood, is included all thatmen have thought, dreamed, done, and been:the whole external Universe and what itholds is but Clothing, and the essenceof all Science lies in thePHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES'.'4 The argumenthas reached this conclusion by saying that 'all visible things are emblems'while all language is the 'Flesh-Garment, the Body, of thought' (pp. 56-57),so that to follow Carlyle's thought would be to find that there was nothingexisting that had not a supplementary character to it, nothing thatwas notthe expression of something that also existed in supplementary form. Thisargument is accompanied by the editor's excerpts from the autobiography ofTeufelsdr6ckh, who 'belongs to thatmystery, aMan' (p. 92). As G. B. Tennysonwrites, the work 'is studded with Carlyle's attempts at a definition ofman'.'5 Inthis,Carlyle isnot different from theUtilitarians whom he most attacks throughSartor Resartus, even if theUtilitarian attempt to form a science ofman he finds

12Rosemary Ashton, Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of aMarriage (London: Pimlico, 2003),p. 36.13Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1850 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 90,quoting 'Signs of the Times' (1829) from A Carlyle Reader, ed. by Tennyson, p. 50.14Sartor Resartus, ed. by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press,iCCC)* PP- 57-58; further page-references are given in the text. See also this edition for bibliographyofwritings on Sartor Resartus. Use has also been made of the edition byMark Engel and RodgerL. Tarr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), given as 'Tarr' plus page reference. Inaddition toTennyson, see Gerry H. Brookes, The Rhetorical Work ofCarlyle's 'Sartor Resartus'(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).15Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus, p. 320; see examples on pp. 320-22. This fits with thework of Foucault on Bentham inDiscipline and Punish, finding the Panopticon a means by whicha science ofman is developed: I refer tomy Dickens, Violence and the odern State, Chapter 1, forthis. To read Carlyle's Romanticism as complicit with this is to see the power of a discourse whichis intent on defining 'man'.


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330 Carlyle throughietzschemechanical, reductive. he third ook returns o eufelsdrockh's pinions, ndit is the section where it is easiest to findCarlyle looking for a 'strong faith' anda great man. There is discussion of those who are exceptional: George Fox, who'stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood, casting aside all props andshoars' (p. i6o); and of the symbol as another name for clothes: 'the Universeis but one vast Symbol ofGod; nay, if thouwilt have it,what isman himself buta Symbol of God?' (p. i66). The editor concludes with Teufelsdrockh as 'oneof those who consider Society [. . .] to be as good as extinct' (p. 176), needing anew birth, ike Phoenix. Chapter 7, 'Organic ilaments', discusses 'Mankind'as in 'living movement' and finding 'Hero-Worship' obligatory: 'So cunninglyhath Nature ordered it, thatwhatsoever man ought to obey, he cannot but obey'(p. I90). The following hapter, n 'Natural upernaturalism', indicateswhatitmust affirm, chief among these being the power of 'wonder', which is dimmedby Custom: the emphasis leads into Mr Gradgrind inHard Times telling hisdaughter, Louisa,neverwonder!'"6'Natural Supernaturalism', thinking of the power of 'custom' to blunt wonder,adds:still the new question comes upon us: What isMadness, what are Nerves? Ever, asbefore, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling up oftheNether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-paintedVision ofCreation, which swimsthereon,which we name the Real. Was Luther's Picture of the Devil less a Reality,whether itwere formedwithin thebodily eye, or without it? In every thewisest Soul,lies a whole world of internalMadness, an authentic Demon-Empire, out ofwhich,indeed, his world ofwisdom has been creativelyput together, nd now rests there,as onitsdark foundations does a habitable flowery arth-rind. (pp. I96-97)The passage reappears as an autocitation in The French Revolution, whereCarlyle calls 'Habit'-which includes clothes-a protection, not a prevention,against wonder. There is a complete reversal of the direction of the argument,as ifCarlyle was on both sides at once, willing change and yet resisting it,anaesthetizing himself against it, as Nietzsche would say:Rash enthusiast ofChange, beware! Hast thouwell considered all thatHabit does in thislifeof ours; how all Knowledge and all Practice hangwondrous over infinite bysses oftheUnknown, Impracticable; and our whole being is an infinite byss, overarched byHabit, as by a thinearth-rind, laboriously built together?But if 'everyman', as it has been written, 'holds confined within him amad-man',what must every Society do? [... .] 'Without such Earth-rind of habit', continues ourAuthor, 'call it system ofHabits, in aword, fixedways of acting and of believing,Society would not exist at all. [. . .] [L]et but, by ill chance, in such ever-enduringstruggle,-your 'thinEarth-rind' be once broken!The fountains of the great deep boilforth; firefountains, enveloping, engulfing.Your 'Earth-rind' is shattered, swallowedup; instead of a green floweryworld there is a waste wild-weltering chaos;-which hasbegun, with tumultand struggle, tomake itself into aworld.'7There is nothing to the human; only an abyss. Or, better, there is nothingbut the power ofmadness, which has the capacity to blast what seems 'Real'

16Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. by Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),P- 64.17Carlyle, The French Revolution, ed. by K. J.Fielding and David Sorensen, 2 vols in 1 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1989), 1,40.


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JEREMY TAMBLING 331out of existence, and that is the motor-force within history.'8 Such a power isoutside the control of thehuman: 'such a singular Somnambulism, ofConsciousand Unconscious, of Voluntary and Involuntary, is this life of man' (I, 4I0).Both passages which have been quoted from The French Revolution are behindLouisa Gradgrind's senseof the oketown chimneys, hen she tells er father:'There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yetwhen the night comes, Fire bursts out, father."9 Carlyle's 'custom' or 'habit'has become inDickens somethingmore specific: hemonotony ofCoketown.Louisa's awareness of energies beneath the surface ready to burst out alignsherwith what the editor calls Teufelsdr6ckh's 'deep Sansculottism' (p. i6o; seealso pp. 13, 46, 49, 5 i,i8i), a rebelliousness which Carlyle's text simultaneouslyadmires and dreads.Carlyle's image of energies which cannot be contained inside but whichexplode outwards contrasts with his other sense of a society clogged by dyspepsia, but the phrase 'swallowed up' in the quotation from The French Revolutionshows an alternative fear,which is expanded in the statement 'the lowest, leastblessed fact one knows of, on which necessitous mortals have ever based themselves, seems to be the primitive one ofCannibalism: That I can devour Thee'(French Revolution, I, 57). There isnothing there except the abyss, and yet, incontradiction, there is a fearof being devoured, which can be traced throughoutSartor Resartus.20' Man' is inherently nothing, but at the same time he is indanger of being consumed. In the chapter 'Getting under Way' the editor thinksthat Teufelsdrockh suffers from an 'afflictive derangement of head', since hereflects hat:Saturn, orChronos, orwhat we callTIME, devours all his Children: only by incessantWorking, may you (for some threescore and ten years) escape him; and you too, hedevours at last. (p. 99)Yet this pessimism is confronted by another attitude that discovers from thephilosophy of clothes: 'Thus is the Law of Progress secured, and inClothes, asin all other external things whatsoever, no fashion will continue' (p. 37). The'Progress' thatmeans that time's improvements can never be negated is alsodestruction, Time as Saturn; again the text seems to put Carlyle on both sidesof the argument at once. And that latter image is not isolated: it returns at theend of the chapter 'The Twenty-Two' in The French Revolution, commentingon the end of the Girondins. Carlyle concludes with a quotation from theirexecuted leader, P. V. Vergniaud: 'The Revolution, like Saturn, is devouringits own children' (II, 329). Yet here there is something strange, which inclinesto identify the Revolution not with the children, which would be expected(in relation to the ancien regime), but with the oppressive patriarchal force,as though the revolutionary children were also the force of Saturn, the old,melancholic god. To read the image in away that gave it sense would mean thatthe Revolution must be understood, not as brought into existence in amoment18See on these passages John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and theBurden ofHistory (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985), pp. 13-14.19Dickens, Hard Times, ed. by Schlicke, p. 132.20On this see Lee Sterrenberg, 'Psychoanalysis and the Iconography of Revolution', VictorianStudies, 19 (1975), 241-64.


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332 Carlyle throughietzscheof time, but as always there, as identifiable with the forces of oppression that arenormally thought to bring it on. Revolution and its opposite are to be identified,in Carlyle, like devouring and progression. The Revolution is seen as a climaxof cannibalism, no sort so 'detestable' (II, 376), and the fear is that it is notyet over, and that it appears as the triumph of the madness that comes frombelow, as in the following assage, which objectifiesthe revolutionary orce:'O mad Sansculottism, hast thou risen, in thymad darkness, in thy soot andrags, nexpectedly, ike nEnceladus, living-buried, rom nder his Trinacria?They thatwould make grass be eaten, do now eat grass, in thismanner?' (I, 2 I6).Yet, as said before, in Sartor Resartus such eating is not part of revolution, butof living:Teufelsdrockhblames theTime-Spiritwhich has imprisonedhimwithin the Time-Element',so that:Me, however, as a Son ofTime, unhappier than some others,was Time threatening toeat quite prematurely; for strive as Imight, therewas no good Running, so obstructedwas the path, so gyvedwere the feet. (pp. 99-IOO)If Life is a continual process of devouring, the text identifies itwith both timeand death.2I And everything else takes on that character: even reading partakesof themodel of devouring, when in 'Characteristics' Carlyle finds that 'Literature' is becoming 'oneboundless, self-devouring eview' ('Characteristics',p. 87). To write is to be consumed; while even friends in 'The Everlasting No'section of Sartor Resartus are said to have 'too-hungry souls' (p. I27).Images of devouring run through 'The Everlasting No', the part ofTeufelsdr6ckh's autobiography where he undergoes a crisis. The editor comments inpartly sympathetic, partly ironic mode upon Teufelsdr6ckh, whose life has a'hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within', while he is at the same timedefining himself as 'Man', and speaking of himself as 'wholly unreligious'. Theeditor reflects that such readers who have found, 'in contradiction tomuchProfit-and-loss hilosophy [. . .] that oul isnotsynonymous ith Stomach',and who understand, in Teufelsdrockh's words, 'that forman's well-being,Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it,Martyrs, otherwise weak,can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross, and without it,worldlings pukeup their sick existence, by suicide, in themidst of luxury', will know that thisloss means 'loss of everything' (p. 124). The 'one thing needful' quotes fromLuke I0. 42, and is quoted in turn in the opening chapter-title ofHard Times.The dyspepsia implicit within the word 'puking' will be noted, as well as itsextremism; it seems thatmartyrdom or suicide and weakness or strength arethe only choices, and because suicide is seen as a form of vomiting up life, andis posited as the likely result of lack of faith, and as happening in conditionsof luxury, which are, by this image, rendered conditions of decadence, thereis also the sense that life can only be vomited up; that the sick are not the'worldlings'-who seem to have the power to be sick, and to vomit up theirlives-but 'existence' itself. The possible choices are, to be devoured or tovomit un- or to he vomited un

21 Philip Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory ofRadical Activism(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), relates this towhat he quotes from Carlyle:'the perpetual Contradiction [that] dwells in us', the 'diseased mixture and conflict of life anddeath' (pp. 26, 43).


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JEREMY TAMBLING 333A speech fromeufelsdrockhfollows n,attacking he foolish ord-monger

andMotive-grinder,who in[his]Logic-millhast anearthly echanism for heGodlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of pleasure'(p. I24). The passage may be compared with two others:That process of Science, which is todestroyWonder, and in itsstead substituteMensuration and Numeration, finds small favourwith Teufelsdrockh. . . 'Shall your Science',says he, 'proceed in the small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshopofLogic alone, andman's mind become anArithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is theHopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises ofwhatyou call Political Economy, are theMeal? (p. 53)The section refers also to 'Logic-choppers, and professed Enemies toWonder,who, in these days, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics' Institute of Science' (p. 53): it is suggestive for the classroom scenes inHard Times, which are also based on theMechanics' Institutes of the i820S.22Starr's annotations toSartor Resartus (pp. 293, 349) find inCarlyle's rhetorical'Logic-mill' and 'Arithmetical Mill' a pun on JamesMill. In keeping with Carlyle's anti-Utilitarianism, hesepassages,which include an almost hystericalsense of the deliberate abolition of wonder, seem to have provided the nameGradgrind. But not just him. In Dombey and Son the son of Polly Toodle ispatronized by Mr Dombey, who sends him off to the 'Charitable Grinders'school, where the number of the son is 'one hundred and forty-seven'.23 Thischaritable school grinds out charity, making itspupil 'Rob theGrinder'.Related images and puns onMill appear in 'Symbols' inBook Third, where,in thepresent,which isrunby 'Motive-Millwrights',Mechanism smothers [Man] worse thananyNightmare did; till theSoul isnigh chokedout of him, and only a kind ofDigestive, Mechanic life remains [. . .] theworld wouldindeed grind him topieces. (p. I67)The 'mill' here is one in which the soul-as opposed to facts-is processed,chewed over, and produced as fragmentary, ground to pieces. In 'The EverlastingNo' the context is that of those who would make the idea ofHappiness 'ourtrue aim': itcritiques Bentham. In the earlier essay 'Signs of theTimes' (I829)the Utilitarian philosopher was seen as 'not creat[ing] anything, but [. . .] [is] asort of logic-mills, togrind out the true causes and effects of all that is done andcreated'.24 The absence of creation, and the sense of Utilitarianism crushingwhat has been created, seems basic.This part of Sartor Resartus makes two further accusations against the Utilitarian: one, that he attempts to substitute for the absent 'Godlike', his 'earthlymechanism' being a desire to produce absolute reality, denying the temporarynature of all forms of reality (their nature as mere 'clothes'). The second isthat Benthamism argues that virtue, or duty, can emerge out of pleasure, thatpleasure comes first, and that when that is consumed (leaving husks: as in22 See on these Robin Gilmour, 'The Gradgrind School: Political Economy in the Classroom',Victorian Studies, n (1967), 207-24.23Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. by Alan Horsman and Dennis W?lder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 65.24Carlyle, 'Signs of the Times', inA Carlyle Reader, ed. by Tennyson, p. 47.


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334 Carlyle throughietzschethe parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke I5)), there is the possibility of Virtue,but the image makes pleasure never more than empty husks. Yet besides this,there seems the unstated fear that the Utilitarian may be right, thatVirtue hasno reality; that the heroic Prometheus (whose liverwas consumed by eagles)was wasting his time, that the only diseases are not those of 'Conscience' but'the diseases of the Liver'-signs of dyspepsia, which the passage wills to bea spiritual condition, the dread being that it could be cured. And the idea ofpleasure has been deliberately reduced to the most material: Utilitarians saythat 'man's Soul is indeed [. . .] a kind of Stomach' (p. 9I). The stomach,which recalls the parable of the belly inCoriolanus, has become, by association,like amill, 'digestive, echanic', undiscriminating ut still 'grind[ing]' nd'chop[ping]' everything that it receives since itmust be satisfied. In this millmotives are fragmented, made into things conducive to pleasure by a machinewhich imposes a constant demand, and is satisfied only in the dissection ofmotives. Hence Teufelsdrockh feels he is being devoured, while meditatingon the 'Infinite nature of Duty' which was 'still present tome: living withoutGod in theworld, of God's light I was not utterly bereft [. . .] in spite of allMotive-grinders, ndMechanical Profit-and-Loss hilosophies' (p. I26).The Utilitarianmill grinds things,nd devours life; ut also inducesdyspepsia in Carlyle and inTeufelsdrockh: what 'Characteristics' called 'a constantgrinding pain'. The opposition of Carlyle to the Utilitarian can be read as thatof the dyspeptic (who can neither digest nor devour) against the person who cando both. But, in another reading, the quotation from 'Characteristics' impliesthat yspepsia producesUtilitarianism,which becomes, therefore, dyspepticstate. In which case the stomach, the devourer, themill, aUtilitarian object initself, ismarked out by 'constant grinding pain'. Carlyle (like Teufelsdrockh)suffers from grinding taking place both within (in his own stomach) and without (from the mechanical age). His stomach, turned into themechanism thathe so resists, becomes the image of life itself,whether as in themechanicalphilosophy ofUtilitarianism, or in revolution. Further, the passage in 'Characteristics', since it continues with the 'mad spasmodic throes of all Society', addsthe implication that society as a stomach suffers the spasms that are associatedwith vomiting. So society either devours or vomits, produces dung or vomit, thetwo possibilities inherent inTeufelsdr6ckh's name and its herbal association.Devouring and vomiting are equivalent forms bringing about destruction.Yet that devouring image must be placed alongside theweak, or nostalgic,sense thatTeufelsdr6ckh gives of having the sense ofGod ('in my heart He waspresent' (p. I26)) even while going through the crisis. In Nietzsche's terms,he cannot admit his 'atheism'; he remains on the side of right, being nontransgressive, passive, in the midst of fears of the devouring power of themechanical age. Since he assumes the rightness of his theism without question,he never fully confronts the challenge of themechanical age, which means thathe simplifies both his own position and that of Benthamism.Perception of being devoured returns in a longer passage which begins byquoting Satan, from Paradise Lost (i. 157-58), that 'to be weak is the truemisery'; yet Teufelsdrockh lacks the heroism of the rebel, and the argumentabout weakness turns into another argument:


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JEREMY TAMBLING 335yetofyour Strength there is and can be no clear feeling,save bywhat you have prosperedin, by what you have done. [. . .]A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimlyinus; which only ourWorks can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Worksare themirror wherein the spirit first ees its natural lineaments.Hence, too, the follyof that impossible Precept, Know thyself; ill itbe translated into thispartially possibleone, Know what thoucanstwork-at. (p. I26)As life is sickness, nducing suicide, so it is attended by self-consciousness,which is also summarily rejected; the self cannot be looked at except throughworks,which act as itsmirror.The note that suggests that elf-knowledgeequatedwith self-consciousness-wouldproduceself-hatreds pparent;hencethe nadmissibilityf the ocratic teaching Know thyself'. nstead, there ustbe an objectification of the self through itsworks; the self is not known, savethrough action, which, by the conclusion of 'The Everlasting Yea' has becomeproduction 'Produce!Produce!' (p. 149)).And that ndicates owmuchTeufelsdrockh is part of the belief in progress, with the implications of enforcing demands on labour; making himself part of the Utilitarian philosophyhe so forcefully rejects. The passage defines 'man' through the ethos of productivity; its denial of the privilege of introspection, which is blocked off asa possibility, allows the dishonesty towards the self that Nietzsche commentson. But Teufelsdrockh feels he has produced 'Nothing'. Hence the sense ofguilt: 'In midst of their crowded streets, and assemblages, I walked solitary;and (excepting as itwas my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring)savage also, as the tiger in his jungle' (p. 127).In this period of unbelief, it is not the absentee God that he fears, but theabsenteeDevil:you cannot somuch as believe in aDevil. To me theUniverse was all void ofLife, ofPurpose, ofVolition, even of Hostility: itwas one huge, dead, immeasurable Steamengine, rolling on, in its dead indifference,to grindme limb from limb.0, the vast,gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! (p. 127)How potent this image is, of a mill which 'grinds' and consumes, whose wheelsroll on in an indifference which is said to be 'dead', appears when it is takenover by Dickens inDombey and Son, in a different context, when Carker, on therun fromDombey, iskilled-if not consumed-by the train:[He] felt the earth tremble-knew in amoment that the rush was come-uttered ashriek-looked round-saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in thedaylight, close uponhim-was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun himround and round, and struckhim limb from limb, and licked his lifeup with its fieryheat, and cast hismutilated fragments in the air.When the traveler [Dombey], who had been recognized, recovered froma swoon, hesaw thembringing froma distance something covered, that lay heavy and still, upon aboard, between fourmen, and saw that others drove some dogs away that sniffeduponthe road, and soaked his blood up,with a train of ashes.25

The chapter is significantly called 'Rob the Grinder Loses his Place'. Theboy, produced by the 'Charitable Grinders', has gone intowork for the equally25Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 823. For the connection between the passages, see Oddie, Dickensand Carlyle, pp. 117-18.


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336 Carlyle throughNietzschemechanical Carker, themodern manager; and here the employer of the Grinderisground down. The train isanimate, alive, with red-as if loodshot-eyes thathunt down their object, but it is also themechanistic mill, and this contradictoryquality in it that gives it the character of thenineteenth-century fetish will needto be discussed further, at the end. It is the 'jagged' mill, that which cuts itsown script on the body, as it cuts a jagged line through towns and country,both breaking it and imprinting the body with the signs of its own automaticwriting-processes. ickens has identifiedarlyle's 'steam-engine', atentedbyJames Watts in I769, with the locomotive engine (first called a 'steam-engine'in I825), and he has identified both with themill: the train as themill, andas symbol of the Benthamite machine age, and more intense in form than themachine-like Carker, consuming his life-blood in a way that the dogs wouldlike to do. The dual image of licking up the blood (devouring) and casting thefragments into the air (vomiting up the body) follows Carlyle. The last image,the 'train of ashes', puns on the train as an industrial mill, a factory-productiveof ashes-and as delivering death, and requiring ashes tobe laid in its 'train'; itstrace, its track, being ashes, like husks, markers of death, likeCarlyle's referenceto 'Golgotha'.Carlyle's 'dead indifference' passage has as sequel the editor referring toTeufelsdrockh's 'sickness of the chronic sort' and quoting from his autobiography about the temptation to suicide:How beautiful to die of broken heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in Practice;everywindow of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as itwere, begrimed and mudbespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole Drugshop in your inwards; theforedone soul drowning slowly inquagmires ofDisgust! (p. I27)The passage concludes with the fear of being consumed (of drowning) and withdisgust at the body (which, via the French degout, would include dyspepsia).But the body has been identified with 'disgust' itself; as though itmakes filthythe intellect; suicide bringing that out further. There is a shift of intensityfrom 'mud' to 'quagmire', which increases the sense of abjection. The state of'smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire' persists into this sense of theself about to disappear:I lived in a continual, indefinite, ining Fear, tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive ofI knew not what: itseemed as if ll things in theHeavens above and theEarth beneathwould hurtme; as ifthe heavens and theEarth were but boundless Jawsof a devouringMonster, wherein I, palpitating,waited tobe devoured. (p. I28)

The crisis climaxes in the dog-days (the time ofmadness) in an episode in theRue Saint Thomas de l'Enfer, when a 'Thought' suddenly rises in him, makinghim ask himself what he is afraid of, and whether he cannot "'trample Tophetitself [. . .]while it consumes thee?" [. . .]And as I so thought, there rushed likea stream of fire over my whole soul' (p. I29). The passage seems integral to thatquoted fromDombey and Son; it is as if the stream of fire is both that ofTophet,the burning power of hell, and the energy of the self which responds. It enablesa reading of the street-name, which is both the place of hell, where the subjectmust walk, the urban landscape of Paris, or Edinburgh, and also, because it isthe place of Thomas Carlyle, itgives the sense thatCarlyle must himself be of


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JEREMY TAMBLING 337hell: that he can take no other position, that he wants to be Thomas of Hell.Suddenly losing fear,his 'whole Me' has 'stood up'-like the Sansculottes-inreply to the 'Everlasting No' which had said:Behold, thouart fatherless, utcast, and theUniverse ismine (theDevil's), towhich mywhole Me now made answer, 'I am not thine,but Free, and foreverhate thee!' It is fromthishour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism;perhaps I directly thereupon began tobe aMan. (p. I29)

The response wishes to be diabolical, transgressive, as the image of theBaphomet implies. The language of hatred is loaded, yet themove isnot towardsheterogeneity,rotherness, ut towards onformityo the entre, tanding pas a 'Man'. The repeated phrase the 'whole Me' shows a will towards beingthought f as a single,unified ubject,with noNietzschean scepticism, hilebeing 'aMan' allows neither self-doubt nor self-consciousness.26 Yet thepassagecannot allow such simplicity, for the 'whole Me' simplifies and objectifies theself, since there remains, outside it, the 'I' who uses that term. Becominga 'Man' cannot be a single state; there is something supplementary, outsidethat state and naming it; no more than the Utilitarian can define Man canCarlyle do that. At the cost of such self-simplification he ceases to 'eat hisown heart' (p. I30), which recalls how he declared he was devouring himselfwhen he was like a tiger in the jungle (p. I27). He has not been separatefrom the forces of life, and time, and revolution, and mechanism, that haveeaten him; he has been sadistic towards himself. Now he has ceased to be ofthe 'inward Satanic school' (p. 130) but only through 'Annihilation of Self'(p. I42). There is a language of hatred when the self is self-accusingly called'nothing other than a Vulture [. . .] that fliest through the Universe seekingafter somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is notgiven thee' (p. I46). This image of a dead world precedes words intended toput self-consciousness behind, opening up the way to purposive action andwork: 'Close thyByron; open thyGoethe'.27 So: 'the self in thee needed to beannihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seatedchronic Disease, and triumphs over Death.' That annihilation of self, throughsicknessdestroying ickness, is 'theEVERLASTING YEA'. The 'chronicdisease' implies the enduring, ongoing sickness or fever described in 'TheEverlasting No', but it also implies sickness caused by time, or by moderntimes. Annihilating the self and themodern age seems tobe the same thing, partof the soul's 'internecine warfare with theTime-spirit' (p. I48). Annihilationof self seems to relate to its unfulfillable desire forhappiness. Two ideas cometogether: a critique of Utilitarianism, as the principle behind the modern agewhich endorses the idea of pleasure, and rejection of the idea that the soulcan ever think of itself in terms of happiness. The appropriate response must

26Rosenberg writes: 'more ardent Freudians than Imight make much of the bold-faced "mywhole ME stood up [. . .] I directly thereupon began to be aMan"' (p. 12).27The passage is referred to inMill's Autobiography (1873) as relating to 1826-27: Mill 'had notheard of the anti-self-consciousness theory ofCarlyle [...] But I now thought that [happiness] wasonly to be obtained by not making it the direct end. [. . .]Ask yourself whether you are happy, andyou cease to be so. The only chance is, to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as thepurpose of life' (J. S. Mill, Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 120-21).


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338 Carlyle throughietzschebe 'renunciation' p. 145).The secondBook endswith Teufelsdrockhgaining'the spirit and the clear aims of aman', everything illustrating 'indomitableDefiance' and 'boundlessReverence' (p. I55).Nietzsche sees Carlyle as producing a 'counterfeit'olution, nwhat can beseen as this pumped-up self, described as a 'Man' in reaction to fear of beingdevoured.Anotherword for counterfeit' ould be 'fetish': hatwhich has, inNietzsche's terms, no 'proprium'. Carlyle uses the word 'fetish' in the satire ondandies, the aristocracy, and the 'silver fork' novel, in 'The Dandiacal Body',which makes funof thosewho live by clothes, whose 'Life-devotedness toCloth'shows a 'willing sacrifice of the Immortal to the Perishable' (p. 207):To the psychologic eye [dandyism's] devotional and even sacrificial character plainlyenough reveals itself.Whether itbelongs to the class of Fetish-worships, or of Heroworships or Polytheisms, may [... .] remain undecided. A certain touch ofManicheism[.. .] isdiscernible enough [... .]To my own surmise, it ppears as if thisDandaical Sectwere but a new modification, adapted to the new time,of thatprimeval Superstition,Self-Worship, which Zerdusht, Quangfoutchee, Mohamed, and others strove ratherto subordinate and restrain than to eradicate; and which only in the purer forms ofReligion has been altogether rejected.Wherefore, if ny one chooses toname it revivedAhrimanism, or a new figureofDemon-Worship, I have, so far as is yet visible, noobjection. (p. 209)28The passagemakes an implicit lliance of 'fetish-worship'-worship f clothesas having magic, animistic powers-to hero-worship. Worship of clothes isworship of symbols, and 'Man' is no more than a symbol of God-but doesCarlyle believe inGod? A question that Nietzsche answers in the negative,saying that he is an 'English atheist seeking to be honoured for not being so';but itmay be said that the language of fetishism isprecisely thatwhich allows forthe question to be avoided, not to be answered finally,and for the text to be onboth sides of the argument, tobe for illusion or the counterfeit, and against it.29This, inNietzsche's terms, isCarlyle's 'constant and passionate dishonesty withhimself', and is an instance ofwhat Freud's essay on fetishism calls 'disavowal'(Verleugnung): where something isboth known and yet the knowledge denied atthe same time.30The passage conjoins fetish-worship and hero-worship, and,surprisingly, since it associates the first of these with polytheism, puts themboth together with 'self-worship', the ultimate monotheism. The latter termassociates with Utilitarian and mechanical selfishness, and appears in thephrase'self-love' in a context also to do with fetishes. The chapter 'Symbols', whichdiscusses their temporality, says that 'a day comes when the Runic Thor, withhis Eddas, must withdraw into dimness [as an immediate, powerful symbol];

28Here, Zerdusht is Zoroaster, the Greek name for Zarathustra, Quangfoutchee is Confucius;and Ahriman is a demonic figure from Zoroastrianism. 'Fetishism' appeared earlier in SartorResartus, where in the 'Sorrows of Teufelsdr?ckh' chapter Teufelsdr?ckh comes out with theaphorism 'that I had my Living to seek saved me from Dying?by suicide' and adds that 'in ourbusy Europe, is there not an everlasting demand for Intellect, in the chemical, mechanical, political,religious, commercial departments? In Pagan countries cannot one write Fetishes?' (p. 121).29 InMarxism, the word associated with fetishism is the 'phantasmagoria'; cf.Teufelsdr?ckh'ssense of living in illusion: 'we sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream Grotto' (p. 42).30 Freud, 'Fetishism', inOn Sexuality: Three Essays on theTheory of Sexuality and Other Works,ed. by Angela Richards, The Penguin Freud Library, 7 (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 351-57(P- 353)


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JEREMY TAMBLING 339and many an African Mumbo-Jumbo, and Indian Wau-Wau be utterly abolished'. Similarly, the Royal Sceptre and the Pyx have become no more thanwood. Hence:

wouldst thou plant forEternity, thenplant into thedeep infinitefaculties ofman ...plant intohis shallow, superficial faculties,his Self-love andArithmetical Understanding,what will grow there.A Hierarch [. . .]and Pontiffof theWorld will we call him,thePoet and inspiredMaker, who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bringnew Fire fromHeaven to fix it there. (p. I70)In this familiar rgument,where several thingshave been unexpectedlyaligned-the fetish and the symbol, hero-worship and self-worship-the mechanical principle prevents anything else from having an effect, and the hero

of the futuremust be a Prometheus, transgressive,ebellious,revolutionary.Dickens's perception of the train inDombey and Son does not separate thesethings: the train, a revolutionary force in the novel, is the mechanical mill, yetits red eyes mean that it is seen as animistic, with a fetish-like reality. Carlyle's sense of the fetish belongs with theMumbo-Jumbo and theWau-Wauas instances of the primitive symbol, destined to be seen as no more than 'giltwood', 'foolish boxes', 'wooden tools'. Yet worshipping the hero may also be aform f fetishizing,ven self-worship.f so,what emergeshas significance orCarlyle's proposition that everything partakes in symbolism, even the categoryof 'Man' as thatwhich, as animated, 'stands up' to the dead universe. To 'thepsychologic eye' such a fetish seems specifically masculine, and, as in Freud,who theorizes the fetish as that which disavows themale fear of castration,its sexual reference is that itdefends 'throne and altar'-masculine fetishisticimages of security-against the feminine ('Fetishism', p. 352). Here, apart fromFreud, the authority isDickens, who annotates 'Mumbo-Jumbo' as thatwhichkeeps thewoman in awe, and protects male illusions:I observe, reading thatwonderful book The French Revolution again, for the5ooth time,thatCarlyle, who knows everything, don't know what Mumbo Jumbo is. It isnot anidol. It is a secretpreserved among themen of certainAfrican tribes,and never revealedby any of them, for thepunishment of theirwomen. Mumbo Jumbo comes in hideousformout of the forest,or themud, or the river,or where not, and flogs thewoman whohad been backbiting, or scolding [... .]Carlyle seems toconfound him with the commonFetish, but he is quite another thing.He is a disguised man, and all about him is afreemasons'ecretmonghe en.3'It seems that a 'disguised man'-this invokes, again, the power of clothessupplements the visible power ofmasculinity by something else, and the needfor that declares the inadequacy of that visible power without it. Carlyle'sand Dickens's interest in fetishism associates with Carlyle's fear, in LatterDay Pambhlets. of 'Dhallus-worshin'.32 This associates with fetish-worship

31To Forster, summer 1851, in The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. byMadeline House and others, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-2002), vi: 1850-1852, ed.by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (1988), pp. 452-53. The editors refer toFrench Revolution, 1. 1. 1 and in. 6. 4. OED cites Francis Moore, Travels to the Inland Parts ofAfrica [i.e.West Africa] (1738), forMumbo Jumbo as idol, as bugbear to keep women in awe, andas language.32 See my 'Carlyle in Prison', pp. 321?24. OED credits Carlyle with the first use of 'phallusworship'.


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340 Carlyle throughietzscheand with what should be its notional opposite, 'hero-worship', but perhaps thewillingness to define 'Man' in terms of greatness and heroism contains as muchphallus-worship in it as Carlyle attacks in those others whom he perceives asliving y thepower of fetishism.Carlyle claims Zarathustra as a figure ho tried to eradicate self-worship,which is now 'revived Ahrimanism, or a new figure ofDemon-Worship'. Butthis attempt tomake Zarathustra a figurewho makes a sharp separation betweenself-worship (yet this is but fetish-worship) and the self that stands up in itsmanhood as independent of that does not relate toNietzsche's Zarathustra,whom Nietzsche revived in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to undo precisely whatCarlyle endorses,thatwhich Nietzsche considersZarathustra'sprimary rror.According toNietzsche, the Zarathustra ofZoroastrianism saw 'in the strugglebetween good and evil the actual wheel in theworking of things: the translationof morality into the realm ofmetaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is hiswork. [. . .] Zarathustra created thismost fateful of errors, morality.'33 Hencethe reification inZarathustra of the demonic figure of Ahrimanes. Nietzsche'sZarathustra must be brought back to undo his error of seeing good and evilas objective, inherent in the world-order. The argument by which he does somoves very complexly towardsundoing thevery concept of stable identity.That associates with the point that Nietzsche finds the idea of a substantialand enduring 'doer' behind any deed an instance of fetishism atwork.34 It is aproduct of the dyspeptic thinking that holds on tovaluations established in thepast as though they could define and control the present moment.Carlyle's 'interest' shows, then, in the way he can see and not see thesecontradictions, and is caught within the illusionism that fetishism implies. Hisrhetoricmakes 'fetish-worship' illusory, counterfeit, just as much as theworshipof other symbols. Yet, as ifhe is held by the rhetoric which says, in the teeth ofthe evidence, that the fetish has magic powers, it remains not quite illusory forhim; something else within him and within the discourse around him, whichNietzsche calls 'dyspeptic conditions', continues to believe in its power. Theresult is that, 'passionately dishonest' tohimself, hemust define 'Man' in singleand simplifying terms ofmasculinity, and heroism, and power, and make anabsolute of all those things whose value he also knows is only as the fetish.UNIVERSITY OFMANCHESTER JEREMYTAMBLING

33Nietzsche, 'Why I am A Destiny', inEcce Homo, pp. 97-98; see also Parkes's introduction toThus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. xi-xii.34 'We become involved in a crude fetishism when we make ourselves conscious of the basicpremises of the metaphysics of language [. . .] this is what sees doer and deed everywhere; itbelieves in the will as cause in general, it believes in the "I"' (Twilight of the Idols, p. 18). For thereading of eternal recurrence?the central idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra?as the undoing of aconcept of the 'same' and of identity, see my Becoming Posthumous :Life and Death inLiterary andCultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).

carlyle through nietzsche

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