In “The Diamond Necklace” (1837), Carlyle’s historian throws a dart at “scientific curiosity” and antiquarian fact checking:7 “O reader, that too insatiatable scientific curiosity of
thine; let thy aesthetic feeling first have place” (115, Carlyle’s emphasis). The aesthetic feeling is all the reader should seek. Calling “The Diamond Necklace”a “true fiction,” he hoped to make a
true fiction out of the French Revolution as well, and even more so, he hoped to “make an artistic
Picture of it” (CL 7: 240-248, Carlyle’s emphasis). By making an “artistic picture” out of a
historical event, Carlyle implies that he intends to write a disinterested account of the past, to provide an aesthetic experience or impression of the past. Carlyle’s own term, “true fiction,”
lends the most appropriate description of his work: a complex narrative of historical fact
sometimes left to speak for itself, but more often than not obscured and “corrected” by Carlyle’s
idiosyncratic imagination. Carlyle’s imagination, however, never imposes order and coherence onto the past. One can certainly argue that Carlyle as historian fails in his own theoretical
practice. His voice is excrutiatingly loud and his verbal pyrotechnics overpower the past itself. And yet his performative style reflects a sort of Bakhtinian polyphony that unravels the complex
layers of the past and its voices. If he fails in letting the past, strictly speaking, speak for itself, he at least enters a cacophonous conversation with the pasts. His imagination, then, both consumes
and is consumed by the past.
But Carlyle’s understanding of “fiction” did not necessarily include “falsification;” rather,
“true fiction” becomes a higher order truth, a truth which knows its limitations and boundaries.
7 Interestingly, however, Carlyle’s historian of the Diamond Necklace affair is always quick to note how a previous
historian falsified a fact or got a fact wrong. For example, there is “endless confusion of dates” in Lamotte’s version of the story (124) and Madam Campan has “no notion of historical rigor” and “requires to be read with
Giving into the unknowable past requires this “aesthetic feeling,” which precludes the reader
from asking too much, from attempting to verify every detail. The “aesthetic feeling” becomes a particular way of approaching and commenting upon the past, motivating a particular type of
ethical response to the past. It is an aesthetic of giving into those who inhabit the realm of the past — the dead. In Truth and Method, Hans Gadamer will explain the aesthetic experience as
one “that suddenly tears the person experiencing it out of the context of his life, and yet relates him back to the whole of his existence,” presenting a “fullness of meaning that belongs not only
to this particular context or object but rather stands for the meaningful whole of life. An aesthetic
Erlebnis always contains the experience of an infinite whole” (60-61). In Carlyle’s historical
narratives, the aesthetic topos of letting oneself be consumed by the aesthetic product, or in our case, the past, is ethical in nature. In Carlyle’s historical narratives, the aesthetic and ethical
come face-to-face.
What would an ethical relation to the past and its translation into history entail? I start
from what Carlyle has to say about reading: “Reading, a speculative study, cannot do all; but it can do much; it is the best foundation for the doing of all” (CL 12: 336-340). There is something
uneasy in this statement about reading. Reading is described as a game of guess work (what did the writer want to say? How do I benefit from this story?) and a “foundation,” but one would
think that a foundation based on speculation is not comforting. Such uneasiness marks all of Carlyle’s writings and in fact instigates “speculative reading” in the sense of reflective and
meditative reading. The statement emphatically gestures to an inherent quality of reading: reading is almost a moral or ethical act — it is the bedrock for the “doing of all” but only after
reading. Reading histories is something he advised above all other reading. “ ‘Ask of the Dead,’
says Plutarch’s old oracle,” Carlyle writes in a letter to Gelarldine Jewsbury; “[i]nquire and see how the Noble and the True, your Brethren of other countries and ages, lead their Life; learn in
many ways to lead your own thereby!” (CL 12: 336-340). For Carlyle, histories when “faithfully studied” end in “biographies as the flowers of History,” and readers of Carlyle are well aware
that most of his historical narratives are, in truth, what we would call biographies. Biographies, according to Carlyle, “are a kind of face to face communicating with the Heroes and the
Teachers.” He concludes his remarks by calling history a “Gospel” and a “solid study [that] takes into question the whole man” (CL 12: 336-340). The topos of face-to-face communication with
the dead, the call on us to “ask of the dead” reoccurs in Carlyle’s texts, and serves as the foundation of his ethical approach to history. Carlyle’s response to life and its present, begins
with the dead and death.8
The face-to-face encounter, which establishes closeness in unsurmountable distance via
reading biographies, is central to Carlyle’s historical vision. This concern prefigures the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Reading Carlyle before the face of Levinas and Levinas
before the face of Carlyle brings these two most distinct figures to a certain proximity. In “Ethics as First Philosophy” (1988), Levinas reacts to the position where the “identical and non-identical
are identified” (78). Western thought, according to Levinas, has been driven by reducing that which is not “I” to the “I” or the Other to the Same: “Since Hegel, any goal considered alien to
8 According to John M. Urlich, the “immediate event that allowed Carlyle to write “‘two Books at once’” (Past and
Present) was not his experience of the St. Ives workhouse or the ruined abbey at Bury St. Edmunds” as suggested by Fred Kaplan in his biography of Carlyle; rather, Urlich suggests, the event is Carlyle’s visit to the London Library on 12 October 1842 (33). It is then that Carlyle borrowed Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, which, Urlich claims, “provided Carlyle with the rhetorical strategy he needed to write two books at once, to be (in this case) in the twelfth century and the nineteenth century at the same time” (33). Thus, the very act of reading, and, through reading, speaking with the dead Jocelin, prompts the writing of Carlyle’s most ethically responsible text.
the disinterested acquisition of knowledge has been subordinated to the freedom of knowledge as
a science (savoir); and within this freedom, being itself is from that point understood as the active affirming of that same being, as the strength and strain of being” (78, Levinas’ emphasis).
Levinas concludes that the “Wisdom of first philosophy is reduced to self-consciousness” (78). The reduction of everything that is not I, the reduction of the Other to the Same is possible
because, according to Levinas, Western thought is “unhindered by any memory or remorse,” always looking onto a “glittering future where everything can be rectified” (78). This position
towards the future exemplifies the tendencies of the growing discipline of history during the nineteenth-century — its rhetoric of progess and development, where the past is used and
employed insofar to mark the diachronic movement of civilization’s progress. Carlyle calls the rhetoric of progress into question when he asks of us to reflect upon the ruins of St.
Edmundsbury, proclaiming that “Life lies buried there!” (PP 54), he forcefully calls our attention to death, the mortality of those before us and consequently points to our own mortality. The very
possibility and inevitablity of death hinders the idea of a “glittering future,” and death lies at the heart of both the Levinisian and Carlylean face to face encounter.
Carlyle demands of us to face the dead. In this demand, he calls for us to posit the past as Other, and in turn historical narrative emerges as ethical in nature. Carlyle thus asks us to enter
into a relation within which the past’s alterity must be recongnized and accepted. The past is not something that the present can make use of for its own purposes. In other words, the past must
not be reduced to the present — it must be handled and respected on its own terms. The present is summoned and called into question by the past’s alterity. In recognizing the past’s alterity, the
possess the past through his narrative. An attempt to possess, to know, the past, would mean to
reduce the past to the terms of the present, to reduce the Other (read past) to the Same (read present). The present has an ethical responsibility towards the past. As a historian, Carlyle sought
to locate a space in which the past can be contemplated responsibily.
In his 1842 letter to Emerson, Carlyle, referring to his inability to complete Cromwell and
begin writing Past and Present,9writes despondently: “One of my grand difficulties I suspect to
be that I cannot write two Books at once; cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the
nineteenth at one and the same moment” (CL 15: 56-59). In his 1841 “Baille the Covenator,”10
Carlyle advises the historian to “read himself into the century he studies” (237). A most
remarkable image and commentary on the role of reading not only texts but cultural references. To read oneself into the past entails a complete immersion of oneself into time that is no longer
available — a nearly impossible feat, yet Carlyle asks us to do it. Reading oneself into the century one studies mirrors the substitution Levinas urges: one must place oneself in the place of
another. Carlyle explains to the reader that the student of history, when studying the past, will “at first entrance [. . .] find all manner of things, the ideas, the personages, and their interests and
aim foreign and unintelligible” (237). The student of history “yet knows nobody, can yet care for nobody, completely understand nobody” (237) in the century he studies. Therefore, Carlyle
emphasizes that “he must read himself into it” and “make himself at home and acquainted, in
9 As John M. Urlich points out both Richard Atlick, in his introduction to the Riverside edition of Past and Present,
and John D. Rosenberg, in his Burden of History, agree that Carlyle’s summer 1842 trip through East Anglia motivated his writing of Past and Present, thus diverting his interest from Cromwell (33).
10 A review of The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, A.M., Principal of the University of Glasgow, 1637-1662,
edited by David Laing from Baillie’s manuscripts. The essay appeared in the London Westminster Review (72), and Carlyle both reviews Laing’s editorial skills as well as Baillie’s own texts and style of record. Halfway through the essay, Carlyle confirms “that is time to let Baillie speak a little for himself” (239) and devotes ample space to long quotations from The Letters.
that repulsive foreign country” (237-38). Only by fully reading herself into the past can the
historian begin to hear the past speak to her: “The daily tattle of men, as the air carried it two hundered years ago, becomes audible again in those pages: an old dead Time, seen alive again, as
through a glass darkly” (“Baille” 249). In the case of historical narratives, the text materializes a particular past: through language, dead time becomes alive but the vision is always marred and
slightly disfigured. Carlyle concludes that Baille’s “hasty chaotic records” are “worth
reading” (238). He asserts that Baille’s letters can provide us a with a clearer picture of the past
than the very newspapers of Baille’s time, which were according to Carlyle, “in fact little other than dull-hot objurgatory pamphlets” and “grown cold enough now” (238). Baille, however, “is
the true newspaper; he is to be used and studied like one” (238). Baille manifests himself as the face of the past, the face we must approach to understand the essence of Baille’s historical
moment. Reading oneself into the past requires of us to dispel our own contemporary frame of mind, a complete dissolution of the self and acknowledgment of otherness.
Frederic Jameson’s assertion that “our readings of the past are vitally dependent on our experiences of the present” (11) helps us understand Carlyle’s awareness of the historical events,
material events becoming texts and textual events. Our own dependence on interpretative master codes hinders and limits our readings of the past, so that we are constantly dealing with what
Nietzsche claimed to be interpretation of interpretations. The foregrounding of interpretation as the act of writing history puts to question the telling of events as they happened. Interestingly, the
tenets of how to approach history as laid out by contemporary historians, certainly influenced and guided by postmodern thought and general acceptance of relativity when it comes to Truth,
surrounding historiography in the nineteenth-century. While Carlyle as historical subject
occupies the historical period we call Victorian, he is fundamentally the product of what we call the Romantic era. More traditional criticism marked Carlyle as the “Victorian sage,” the historian
prophet, who looking into the past predicts the future and maps out humanity’s progress. Thus, Peter Allan Dale argues in The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, the nineteenth-century
philosophical use of history was a “means to comprehending the present and predicting the future” (6). In fact, Dale suggests that the nineteenth-century’s approach to history sought to
answer “every problem, religious, philosophical, moral, scientific, aesthetical, confronting the mind of man” (6). Dale assigns such an understanding of the historical process to both Matthew
Arnold and Carlyle. But Carlyle was more invested in helping society recognize its “spiritual life” than in mapping out a reform program for the ruinous state society has fallen into as a
consequence of the Industrial Revolution.
In “On History,” Carlyle sets forth his primary principles concerning history and
historical knowledge. Like our contemporary historians, Carlyle urges us to understand that it will not “adequately avail us to assert that the general inward condition of Life is the same in all
ages” nor are the “more important outward variations easy to fix on, or always capable of representation” (7). Carlyle brings up fundamental questions that, as we have seen, still plague
historical inquiry: problems of representation, issues of historical event and truth. He proceeds to warn us that there is a “fatal discrepancy between our manner of observing [events], and their
manner of occurring” (7). Our experiences are imperfect; our ability to properly represent
experience (through language) is imperfect, marked by misunderstanding and incompleteness. At
figure clothed in Victorian cloth, but that would lead us astray. We cannot claim that Carlyle
sought to deconstruct the past. At most he deconstructed history in so far as to show the primacy of the past and its universal category. Carlyle’s own narratives imply that writing / language
seeks to totalize and possess reality; in other words, language can materialize realities and realities of the past, but to Carlyle reality, or specifically the past, cannot or should not be
possessed. With all his understanding of the problems that arise in labeling events and totalizing the historical process, Carlyle does not necessarily want to impose anarchy on natural order or to
claim that the only reality one can know is the one woven through language or a particular kind of discourse. Quite the contrary, he believes that there is a reality beyond us, beyond our
capability to grasp it through reason, through language. The desire to possess the past would be contrary to any ethical relation with the past. The past should remain transcendent. So, how does
one deal with the problem of langauge and ethics when our only recourse to the past is via langauge? If langauge and historical discourse always have at heart to totalize and possess the
past, how can a historian write history and retain the Levinisian ethical relation? If historical discourse has the power to possess the past, it follows that the past or the experience of the past
must remain beyond language or representation to preserve the ethical relation. I attempt to answer these questions by reading Levinas into Carlyle and then reading Carlyle on his own
terms, within the context of eighteenth-century philosophy.
In his own work, Levinas struggled with the issue of representation. According to Robert
Eaglestone, Levinas is “suspicious of the idea of representation, in art or otherwise, and either ignores representation or attempts to circumvent it” (99). In “Violence and Metaphysics,”
representation” or the possibility of representing that which is inherenlty unrepresentable. For
Derrida, Levinas’ ethical metaphysics that seems to want to transcend language undoes the ethical relation Levinas wants to establish. According to Robert Eaglestone, Derrida’s essay
inspires Levinas to write Otherwise than Being, in which he faces questions of representation, positing the significance of language for the ethical relation and proposing the idea of “ethical
language.” For Levinas, the face will at once surpass the constraints of form and matter and exist within those constraints (Eaglestone 99), which is what Robert Bernascone argues — in Levinas
there is both an empirical and transcendental understanding of the face (39). While Levinas calls forth the phenomenon of the face, he was equally adamant to qualify the face as a “trace,” as
something that is both present and absent: “A face as a trace, trace of itself, trace expelled in a trace, does not signfiy an indeterminate phenomenon [. . . ] The thematization of the face undoes
the face and undoes the approach. The mode in which the face indicates its own absence in my responsibility requires a description that can be formed only in ethical language” (OB 94). This
ethical language, like the face it seeks to ultimately express, is both empirical and transcendental. Frustratingly, Levinas relegates a reluctant definition of ethical language to a footnote: