Abstract
Thomas Carlyle’s “Count Cagliostro” (1833), a biography of the 18th-centu- ry con-man Giuseppe Balsamo, starts with a long quoted passage, introduced as an excerpt translated from a German philosophical treatise. The passage was, however, written by Carlyle in English. The fictional act of translation in turn fictionalises the position of the writing “I”, setting off a game of redirection and refraction that asks readers of “Count Cagliostro” to join the biographer in the process of interpreting the elusive Count Cagliostro’s life. Similar structures are at work in two other texts written by Carlyle during the same period, his two-part essay “Biography / Life of Johnson”
(1832) and his novel Sartor Resartus (1833/34). This article argues that marking original passages as translated excerpts both intensifies and emblematizes readers’ attempts to decipher Carlyle’s “hieroglyphical work about hieroglyphs” (Hillis Miller).
Résumé
“Count Cagliostro” de Thomas Carlyle (1833), une biographie de l’imposteur
xviiiiiste Giuseppe Balsamo, ouvre sur un long passage cité, présenté comme un extrait traduit d’un traité philosophique allemand. Cet extrait fut pourtant écrit en anglais par Carlyle lui-même. L’acte fictionnel de traduction fictionnalise à son tour la position du “Je” écrivant, tout en déclenchant un jeu de réorientation et réfrac- tion qui demande aux lecteurs de “Count Cagliostro” de joindre le biographe dans l’interprétation de la vie de l’évasif comte Cagliostro. Des structures similaires sont à l’œuvre dans deux autres textes écrits par Carlyle dans la même période, son essai en deux volets “Biographie/Vie de Johnson” (1832) et son roman Sartor Resartus (1833/34). Cet article argumente que le marquage de passages originaux comme des extraits traduits intensifie les tentatives des lecteurs de déchiffrer le “hieroglyphical work about hieroglyphs” (Hillis Miller) de Carlyle.
Brigitte R
ath“No sham, but a reality”
Thomas Carlyle’s “Count Cagliostro” and the translation of facts into truth
To refer to this article:
Brigitte Rath, “‘No sham, but a reality’. Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Count Cagliostro’ and the translation of facts into truth”, in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 19,
Geneviève FabRy (UCL) Agnès GuideRdoni (UCL) Ortwin de GRaeF (ku Leuven) Jan heRman (KU Leuven) Guido LatRé (UCL) Nadia Lie (KU Leuven) Michel Lisse (FNRS – UCL)
Anneleen masscheLein (KU Leuven) Christophe meuRée (AML)
Reine meyLaeRts (KU Leuven) Stéphanie vanasten (UCL) Bart vanden bosche (KU Leuven) Marc van vaeck (KU Leuven)
Olivier ammouR-mayeuR (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -–
Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ingo beRensmeyeR (Universität Giessen)
Lars beRnaeRts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith binckes (Worcester College – Oxford)
Philiep bossieR (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca bRueRa (Università di Torino)
Àlvaro cebaLLos viRo (Université de Liège) Christian cheLebouRG (Université de Lorraine) Edoardo costaduRa (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola cReiGhton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. deckeR (Oklahoma State University) Ben de bRuyn (Maastricht University) Dirk deLabastita (Université de Namur) Michel deLviLLe (Université de Liège)
César dominGuez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella
& King’s College)
Gillis doRLeijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute heidmann (Université de Lausanne)
Klaus H. kieFeR (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael koLhaueR (Université de Savoie)
Isabelle kRzywkowski (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) Mathilde Labbé (Université Paris Sorbonne)
Sofiane LaGhouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François LeceRcLe (Université Paris Sorbonne) Ilse LoGie (Universiteit Gent)
Marc mauFoRt (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle meuRet (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina moRin (University of Limerick) Miguel noRbaRtubaRRi (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa obeRhubeR (Université de Montréal)
Jan oosteRhoLt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté snauwaeRt (University of Alberta – Edmonton) Pieter VeRstRaeten (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
ConseildeRédaCtion – RedaCtieRaad
Anke GiLLeiR (KU Leuven) – rédactrice en chef – hoofdredactrice
Beatrijs vanackeR (FWO-KU Leuven) – secrétaire de rédaction – redactiesecretaris Sophie duFays (UCL) – secrétaire de rédaction – redactiesecretaris
Elke d’hokeR (KU Leuven)
Lieven d’huLst (KU Leuven – Kortrijk) Hubert RoLand (FNRS – UCL)
Myriam watthee-deLmotte (FNRS – UCL)
Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KU Leuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331
B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)
ComitésCientifique – WetensChappelijkComité
David maRtens (KU Leuven)
Matthieu seRGieR (UCL & Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles )
Laurence van nuijs (KU Leuven)
“n
os
ham,
but aR
eality”
Thomas Carlyle’s “Count Cagliostro” and the translation of facts into truth
Count Cagliostro is hard to get hold of. Thomas Carlyle titles his biographical essay on the con-man and “King of Liars” Giuseppe Balsamo (1743-1795) “Count Cagliostro: in two Flights”.1 By moving from one scheme to the next, from one city to another, from country to country, the “Quack of Quacks”2 seeks to prevent an uncovering of his deceptions. Carlyle attempts to trace Giuseppe – “Beppo” – Balsamo’s “Beppic Hegira” with a flight of his own: “‘Stern Accuracy in inquiring, bold Imagination in expounding and filling up; these,’ says friend Sauerteig, ‘are the two pinions on which History soars,’ – or flutters and wabbles. To which two pinions let us and the readers of this Magazine now daringly commit ourselves.”3 Carlyle quotes not only this historiographical maxim from “friend Sauerteig”, but opens the essay with a long translated passage on the role of biographical writing from Sauerteig’s Aesthetische Springwürzel. Sauerteig, however, proves to be even more elusive than Cagliostro. The fictitious Sauerteig and his equally fictitious German Aesthetische Springwürzel exist only in the readers’ imagination. Carlyle’s essay directs its readers to unobtainable originals: the non-existent German original text, pointed to by its English “translation”, and Balsamo’s actual life, presented as a biography and thus, as described in precisely that opening “translated” passage from Sauerteig, as a translation “out of that mystic heaven-written Sanscrit [...] into the speech of men.”4 Contrary to possible post-modern expectations, this gesture towards elusive originals does not necessarily question unified origins from which one may derive sense, but can also be read as pointing towards a dangerous path to truth.5 Thomas Carlyle’s “Count Cagliostro” sets its readers, I will argue, on this path towards a
1. [Thomas caRLyLe,] “Count Cagliostro. In Two Flights”, in: Fraser’s Magazine, 1833, 8, 43, 19-28 and 44, 132-155. All page numbers refer to this first publication of the essay.
2. Thomas caRLyLe, Count Cagliostro, 23.
3. Ibidem.
4. Ibid., 19.
5. Chris R. vanden bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority, Columbus, Ohio State Uni- versity Press, 1991, and Tom toRemans’ and Tamara Gosta’s special issue Thomas Carlyle and the To- talitarian Temptation (Studies in the Literary Imagination 2012, 45, 1) probe the dangers of this approach.
Vanden Bossche argues that Carlyle’s strictly dichotomist separation between the immanent and the transcendent grounds his view that all social order must be based on an “apprehension of absolute and transcendental values” (172), with the unsettling consequence that these values must be trans- mitted by whatever means necessary. Toremans and Gosta position their edited volume as openly facing the political challenges of Carlyle’s writings; toRemans holds in his contribution to the special issue, “‘One Step from Politics’: Sartor Resartus and Aesthetic Ideology” (in: Totalitarian Temptation, 23-41) that (at least for Sartor Resartus) language itself counters and deconstructs any authorita- rian unifying tendencies in an original nontransparent event because it “foregrounds this totalizing tendency as grounded in a moment of undecidability and difference that precedes this totalization and exposes its origin in an imposition” (38). I suggest that the moment that cannot be accounted for “because it eludes the endless chain of metaphorical substitution” (37-38) is indeed presented as elusive in the texts, but that exactly its elusive character is seen as the ineluctable marker of its truth.
necessarily never fully obtainable truth; it is this truth that guides its explorations of the role of fiction when writing a factual text in the mode of translation without a present original.6
Thomas Carlyle’s “Count Cagliostro: In two Flights”, published in Fraser’s Magazine in July and August 1833, forms part of his sustained reflection on forms of biographical writing. In the same magazine and a few months prior, in April and May 1832, he had published a two part review article of John Wilson Croker’s new edition of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.7 The first of eight instal- ments of Carlyle’s only full-length fictional text, Sartor Resartus, completed prior to both essays, followed “Count Cagliostro” in Fraser’s Magazine in November 1833.8 All three texts engage with the process of writing biographies and with their role within literature in a broad sense; they discuss why paying close attention to the lives of fellow human beings and directing others’ attention to them via well-written bio- graphies is such a crucial endeavour. All three texts present their arguments and their biographical sketches in a highly refracted way, in a characteristic dynamics of various voices orchestrated in complex constellations. Although Sartor Resartus is commonly categorized as a fictional text and “Biography / Life of Johnson” and
“Count Cagliostro” as factual ones,9 all three texts were published in Fraser’s Maga- zine without any explicit markers of fictionality, and all three texts can be argued to establish a very similar fictional position of utterance that is intimately linked
6. Its complex relationship to fiction is a long-standing recurring topic in the critical reflec- tion of Carlyle’s work. Hill shine, “Carlyle’s Fusion of Poetry, History, and Religion by 1834”, in:
Studies in Philology, 1937, 34, 438-466, sees Carlyle in a struggle between “the romantic doctrine of harmonious dualism and the Puritanic doctrine of hostile dualism”, from which he ultimately “took refuge in the doctrine of Unconsciousness.” (466); Carlisle mooRe, “Thomas Carlyle and Fiction:
1822-1834”, in: Herbert davis, William devane, R.C. baLd (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Studies, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1940, 131-178, offers a circumspect and comprehensive early ana- lysis of Carlyle’s stance towards fiction, arguing for a fundamental shift in the early 1830s; George Levine, in his “‘Sartor Resartus’ and the Balance of Fiction”, in: Victorian Studies, 1964, 8, 2, 131- 160, and in his The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968, psychologizes the fictional aspect of Carlyle’s texts and reads it as a consequence of Carlyle’s “nervousness and uncertainty” growing “out of a need for self-protection” (Boundaries 77- 78); Gerry H. bRookes, The Rhetorical Form of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Berkeley, University of Cali- fornia Press, 1972, argues that Sartor Resartus, using “fictional devices”, is a “complete and coherent act of persuasion” (172); Patrick bRantLinGeR, “‘Romance,’ ‘Biography,’ and the Making of Sartor Resartus”, in: Philological Quarterly 1973, 52, 1, 108-118 approaches Sartor Resartus through Carlyle’s comments on various fictional and factual genres, mainly “romance” and “biography”, and contends that “Carlyle’s preference of ‘fact’ to ‘fiction’ is, in any case, the opposite of Zolaesque naturalism in literature, and is based on the Transcendentalist’s fusion and occasional confusion of the realms of matter and spirit.” (116); Herbert L. sussman, Fact into Figure. Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1979, connects Carlyle’s figuralism via pictorialism to the Pre-Raphaelite’s visual arts; Clyde de L. RyaLs, in his article on “Carlyle’s The French Revolution: a ‘True Fiction’”, in: English Literary History, 1987, 54, 4, 925-940, reads The French Revolution as “a work of ‘Universal Poetry’ in the romantic ironic mode” (938), arguing that, as “all conventional forms and genres would have been but restrictions and obstructions”, Carlyle instead
“reproduce[ed] the infiniteness of life and […] the eternal process of becoming” by “a ‘genre’ that he best described as ‘True Fiction’ and that Schlegel called Universalpoesie.”(938)
7. [Thomas caRLyLe,] “Biography”, Fraser’s Magazine, 1832, 5, 27, 253-260 and “Boswell’s Life of Johnson”, Fraser’s Magazine, 1832, 5, 28, 379-413. All page numbers refer to this first publication and follow the quotes in parenthesis.
8. [Thomas caRLyLe,] “Sartor Resartus. In Three Books”, Fraser’s Magazine, 1833, 8, 47, 581- 592; Part Two, 1833, 8, 48, 669-684; Part Three, 1834, 9, 50, 177-195; Part Four, 1834, 9, 51, 301-313;
Part Five, 1834, 9, 52, 443-455; Part Six, 1834, 9, 54, 664-674; Part Seven, 1834, 10, 55, 77-87; Part Eight, 1834, 10, 56, 182-193. All quotes follow this first edition; references are also given to book and chapter for easier location of the quoted passage in other editions.
9. For the new Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, published by the University of California Press, the editors categorize “Count Cagliostro” as one of Carlyle’s Historical Essays, while Rodger Tarr’s introduction to Sartor Resartus’ new edition within this series treats the text as an (unusual but unquestionably) fictional text.
to what I call original translation, that is to reading a text as a translated text and simultaneously as an original one.
In a first step, I will briefly sketch my concept of original translation and how these texts invite such a mode of reading; in a second step, I will show how in each of these texts characteristically complex, refracting speaking positions set the uttered propositions in re-contextualizing motion, asking readers to join in a pro- cess of isolating and reinterpreting events along a distinction and recombination of reality and fiction that defines biography; in a third and last step, I will argue that original translation both draws readers into the potentially endless process of rein- terpretation and itself works as an emblem for the underlying model of a present, available immanent world that is the expression of and thus points to a preceding transcendent divine will that is only accessible in the mode of translation.
“Biography / Life of Johnson”, Sartor Resartus, and “Count Cagliostro” all contain central passages that the respective writer of each text claims to have selec- ted and translated from the German: in “Biography / Life of Johnson” and “Count Cagliostro” these excerpts are taken from Professor Gottfried Sauerteig’s Aesthe- tische Springwürzel, while the “editor’s” self-assigned main task in Sartor Resartus is a commented selected translation of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh’s entire philosophical work Die Kleider ihr Werden und Wirken. In all three cases, the German original is explicitly named and the process of translation not only mentioned, but also made visible by residues of the original texts, such as German words or phrases next to their English “translation”. None of these texts ever explicitly contradicts the fiction that these passages are “really” translated from German texts, although many implicit signals – such as the comical names and titles – strongly suggest that these German professors and their work only exist through Carlyle’s texts. Readers can thus decide to oscillate between two frames of communication when reading these “translated”
passages: the present English text can be read as written in English for an English- speaking audience, and also as written in German for a German-speaking audience, made accessible for a secondary English-speaking audience in an act of translation that re-contextualises the text. Oscillating between these two frames opens up a broader range of possibilities for interpretation by – and this is particularly rele- vant for these Carlyle texts – multiplying positions of utterance, making it more difficult to project an interpretation on a stable origin of utterance and thereby
“authorizing” it. It is this mode of reading that oscillates between reading the text as an original – here: written by Carlyle in English – and as a translation of an ori- ginal text written in a different language – here: written in German by Sauerteig or Teufelsdröckh respectively – that I call original translation.10 I claim that reading
“Biography / Life of Johnson”, Sartor Resartus, and “Count Cagliostro” as original translation both highlights and emblematises the endless process of interpretation
10. My concept of original translation differs from the established concept of pseudotrans- lation in two ways: (1) in its programmatic shift from a category of an essential textual quality to a mode of reading, and (2) in its insisting that such a mode of reading should not frame the text as deficient or deceptive, but rather explore the oscillation between two sides of the distinction origi- nal-translation that is both a precondition for such a reading and subverted by it; hence my use of the term “original translation” instead of “pseudotranslation” with its association of falsehood. For references to theoretical contributions to the still developing concept of pseudotranslation / trans- lation without an original / original translation see the introduction and contributions to this special issue and also my brief overview article Brigitte Rath, “Pseudotranslation”, in: Ideas of the Decade.
Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature. [Online], <http://stateofthediscipline.acla.
org/entry/pseudotranslation>.
into which these texts draw their readers in a hermeneutic quest for a divine will woven into the ever-changing fabric of the world from a radically different origin.
Two lives at least intermingle in every biography. “Biography / Life of John- son”, “Count Cagliostro”, and Sartor Resartus foreground that for every biographical text someone dedicates part of their life to researching and writing about someone else. Carlyle’s review of Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson fol- lows these refracted descriptions: the second part of the essay is announced as “all that we have written on Johnson, and Boswell’s Johnson, and Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson”.11 While doing so, Carlyle disentangles these relationships, and so the second part of the essay is dedicated to his biographical character sketches of an utterly clueless John Wilson Croker, a hitherto sadly misunderstood James Boswell, and a very nearly great and very English Samuel Johnson. Croker is quickly dismissed as ha- ving produced hands down the worst edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson since its first publication seventy years earlier: “The whole business belongs distinctly to the lower ranks of the trivial class.”12 Carlyle devotes much more space to redee- ming Boswell’s character. While he agrees with some of the negative characteristics commonly assigned to Johnson’s biographer, these obvious faults, argues Carlyle, have overshadowed Boswell’s rare and highly valuable trait, an “open loving heart, which so few have: where Excellence existed, he was compelled to acknowledge it; was drawn towards it, and [...] could not but walk with it,—if not as superior, if not as equal, then as inferior and lackey, better so than not at all.”13 Carlyle rede- fines Boswell as a perfect biographer and displays his own ability to reconstruct this hitherto undetected trait through accounts that never mention it explicitly.
Having redeemed Boswell, Carlyle pitches his characterization of Johnson against Hume. “Children of the same year, [...] both great, among the greatest”14, Johnson is described as English, with perspicacity and attention to minute detail, and Hume as European, with “widest methodising, comprehensive eye”.15 For full greatness, a blend of the characteristics of Johnson and Hume, of English and European were necessary: “They were the two half-men of their time: whoso should combine the intrepid Candour, and decisive scientific Clearness of Hume, with the Reverence, the Love, and devout Humility of Johnson, were the whole man of a new time.”16 Carlyle’s re-reading of Boswell, and Boswell’s love of and commitment to excellence both exemplify a form of emphatic seeing which the first, general part of the essay describes and for which it advocates: “Half the effect, we already perceive, depends on the object; on its being real, on its being really seen.”17 With a “seeing heart”18, one should only care “for the truth of [one’s] speaking” and then, but opening one’s eyes, “they shall actually see, and bring [one] real knowledge, wondrous, worthy of belief”.19 Two strands of Carlyle’s argument are here intertwined: Boswell and John- son are characterized via their seeing heart that allows for a detailed and emphatical-
11. Thomas caRLyLe, Count Cagliostro, 260.
12. Ibid., 379.
13. Ibid., 383.
14. Ibid., 412.
15. Ibidem.
16. Ibid., 413.
17. Ibid., 259.
18. Ibidem.
19. Ibid., 260.
ly true perception of reality, with the writing “we” joining this line by proving to be able to really see Boswell through distorting accounts. At the same time, this ability, though admirable, is only one half required for a full understanding; the “English”
Johnsonian quality needs to be combined with a “European” Humean one. This combination is achieved by blending the English and the European in Professor Gottfried Sauerteig and his Aesthetische Springwürzel, a text imagined as German and written in English.
The first part of Carlyle’s review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of John- son, simply entitled “Biography”, sets out to describe the double, “scientific” and
“poetic” interest that biography holds for human beings: an interest in the unique individuality of others’ lives, and an interest in the common “struggle of human Free-will against material Necessity”20, the ethical question of how to lead one’s life.
These two aspects are not separate, but connected by a semiotic relationship that one could describe as an integumentum.21 The facts of an individual life constitute that individual life itself and signify it, and can also be interpreted as part of a web of connections that is much broader and more complex than any single life: the reconstruction of a divine plan at once more than the mere facts of existence and also expressed in those facts. The natural is natural and supernatural.22 “Of these millions of living men each individual is a mirror to us: a mirror both scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural and magical;—from which one would so gladly draw aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the image of his own natural face, and the supernatural secrets that prophetically lie under the same!”23 This is the promise of each biography: to write a life and thereby make readable both this life and God’s plan in writing this life. Just as reading Boswell’s biography of Johnson allows an attentive reader to re-interpret Boswell’s motivation, reading God’s wri- ting as embodied in a human’s life allows one to re-interpret at least a tiny sliver of his plan for the world. Such a semiotic structure poses one fundamental challenge:
how do readers know that they should strive for more than a full understanding of a given life? Carlyle’s texts confront their readers with multiple positions that are not easily reconcilable and thus open up various possible strands of interpretation before any of them could be seen as providing a single convincing reading.
In “Biography”, the writer of the article gives space to a foreign position. He includes a quote translated by him from Professor Gottfried Sauerteig’s Aesthetische Springwürzel, “a work perhaps”, as the writer concedes, “as yet new to most English
20. Ibid., 253.
21. Integumentum, one of several related terms describing a text as tropological and in need of an interpretation that exceeds a literal reading, is central for medieval hermeneutics. Frank bezneR, Vela Veritatis. Hermeneutik, Wissen und Sprache in der Intellectual History des 12. Jahrhunderts, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2005, offers a brilliant analysis of the complex uses of this concept in the 12th century, among them in an attempt to connect the immanent with the transcendent. (cf. e.g. 52-53) The Latin word “integumentum” “literally” means covering, as does the English “integument”, which may re- fer to skin and also to clothes; Carlyle uses “integument” three times in Sartor Resartus, most pertinently in a passage on the tropological character of all language, translated from Teufelsdröckh’s book by the
“editor”: “‘Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,—then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments.’”
(1833, 8, 48, 682; Book I, Chapter 11)
22. “Natural Supernaturalism” is a chapter title in Sartor Resartus (Book III, Chapter 8).
23. Ibid., 253.
readers”24, in which Sauerteig compares biography to the epos and the novel within a frame of fiction versus reality. In Sauerteig’s view, “reality” takes precedence; “Fic- tion, while the feigner of it knows that he is feigning, partakes, more than we suspect, of the nature of lying; and has ever an, in some degree, unsatisfactory character.”25 Sauerteig dismisses the epos for contemporary times; it has lost its force because its supernatural elements are no longer believable and have become uninspiring “Ma- chinery”. Novels which discard the impossible and adhere to the probable Sauerteig judges to be less evil, but they still cannot inspire lasting belief.26 (cf. 256) However, the manner in which novels unfold their “mimic Biographies”27 has more impact on their readers than biographies have. Novels tell the wrong stories, but they tell them in the right way, rendering them relatable and significant: some novels “will yield no little solacement to the minds of men; though still immeasurably less than a Reality would, were the significance thereof as impressively unfolded, were the genius that could so unfold it once given us by the kind Heavens”.28 The writer of the essay quotes Sauerteig largely affirmatively, but still distances himself somewhat from his position and especially calls Sauerteig’s views “one-sided, on the matter of Reality”.29 While the writer of the essay agrees that historical facts are much more forceful than fictitious events because everything that really happened is connec- ted to our own lives by contiguity, he sees a place for invention that is not fiction, but rather creates a new truth. The writer’s position reframes Sauerteig’s quote in two ways: it demarcates the differences between the German philosopher and the English editor and allows the reader to follow either side and find their own stance;
and it adds an ironic dimension to Sauerteig’s position. Sauerteig, who so adamantly positions himself against all forms of invention, is Carlyle’s invention. Sauerteig’s status as an invention further complicates the constellation of speaking positions:
as the writer of the passage on biography versus fiction is not Sauerteig, Carlyle is the author, but not the writing “we” of the essay. Carlyle knows that Sauerteig is his own invention, while the writer of the article presents Sauerteig (though playfully) as real, and the English quote as translated from the German by the writer himself.
The separation between the “we” of the essay and Carlyle, this scission fictionalizes the essay’s act of writing.30 The fictional speaking position of an otherwise factual essay discussing the relationship of fact and fiction challenges the readers’ reading of the text. While ascribing positions to Sauerteig and to the writer of the article is fairly straightforward – though readers still have to orient themselves in relation to these two positions – the fact that Sauerteig is fictitious remains marked but
24. Ibid., 255.
25. Ibidem.
26. Sauerteig, who quotes Aristotle at the beginning of “Count Cagliostro”, here gestures to- wards Aristotle’s argument in his Poetics that stories should be motivated by necessity and probability, advising the poet to limit the use of the deus ex machina (cf. 1454b) and to aim for “general truths”,
“the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily” (1451b).
aRistotLe, Poetics, trans. W.H. Fyfe, Perseus Digital Library. [Online], <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1451b>
27. Ibid., 255.
28. Ibid., 256.
29. Ibid., 257.
30. Michel FoucauLt, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1969), in: Michel FoucauLt, Dits et écrits, 1954-1969, Paris, Édition Gallimard, 1994, 789-821; Michel FoucauLt, “What is an Author?”, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in: Donald F. bouchaRd (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1977, 113-138, 129.
implicit and uncommented upon within the article, and it is left to the reader to decide whether and how to re-evaluate an argument about the inferiority of fiction when it is uttered by a fictitious character, and in the context of a long article that argues in many ways for the importance of reality-based biography. Even the “we”
of the writer does not guarantee a stable anchor in this shifting constellation. The plural form could be read not only as a rhetorical figure of humility, but also as fur- ther fragmenting the speaking position. Carlyle’s “editor-we” introduces an English translation of Goethe’s “Mährchen / The Tale”, published in Fraser’s Magazine in the same year as “Biography / Life of Johnson”, and explicitly destroys the notion of the “we” as one undivided speaking position:
The highly composite, astonishing Entity, which here as ‘O.Y.’ addresses man- kind for a season, still slumbered (his elements scattered over Infinitude, and working under other shapes) in the womb of Nothing! Meditate on us a little, O Reader: if thou wilt consider who and what we are; what Powers, of Cash, Esurience, Intelligence, Stupidity, and Mystery created us, and what work we do and will do, there shall be no end to thy amazement.31
“Biography / Life of Johnson” sends its readers from one “mirror” to the next, offering many reflected and refracted positions on the relationship of biogra- phy, fact, and fiction without authorizing any one of them, fragmenting even the semblance of an authorial “we”. Readers are asked to work out for themselves the constellation of positions and their own stance in relation to them.
J. Hillis Miller describes this kind of oscillation that is never allowed to settle as central for Carlyle’s only fictional book-length text, Sartor Resartus: “Back and forth among these various possibilities the reader alternates, without being able by the utmost interpretative efforts to find evidence allowing a decisive choice among them.”32 The systematic reason for the restless oscillation lies in Carlyle’s concept of the symbol as necessarily bound to the transient immanence while also embo- dying an aspect of the infinite transcendent: “Once any symbol of the infinite is seen as transient and as having that sort of inadequacy which is intrinsic to any catachresis, or name for the unnameable, then there is no way in which Carlyle can affirm one version of his doctrine of hieroglyphic truth without at the same time affirming the counter version.”33 Original translation is such a catachresis for the necessity of catachresis that drives Sartor Resartus. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus journals a fictitious British editor’s endeavour at making the fictitious German professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh’s “philosophy of clothes”, put forward in his work “Die Kleider ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes. Their Origin and Influence)”34, accessible to British readers. Sartor Resartus was first published anonymously in serialized form
31. [Thomas caRLyLe, intro., trans., and comments] “The Tale. By Goethe”, in: Fraser’s Magazine, 1832, 6, 32, 257-278, 257.
32. J. hiLLis miLLeR, “‘Hieroglyphical truth’ in Sartor Resartus: Carlyle and the language of parable” (1989), in: J. hiLLis miLLeR, Victorian Subjects, New York et al., Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990, 303-319, 314.
33. Ibid., 318. Hillis Miller describes catachresis as the use of a word which is “neither literal nor figurative: not literal because it is carried over into a realm where it is improper, and not figu- rative because the definition, since Aristotle, of figure is that it substitutes for the proper name. In this case there is no proper name, no other name at all but the symbolic one. It can be said that all Sartor Resartus, all its exuberant ornament of local style and narrative involution, is both an example of symbol in this sense and written for the sake of making clear what symbols are.” (309)
34. Sartor Resartus, 1833, 8, 47, 582 (Book I, Chapter 1).
in Fraser’s Magazine without an explicit marker of its status as fiction. As Fraser’s Magazine contained other anonymous lengthy reviews, its first publication context certainly allows for reading Sartor Resartus as a factual text. Although its ties to the serio-comic tradition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jean Paul are quite obvious35, it maintains deniability and the possibility to be read as a factual attempt at familiarizing the British public with a highly idiosyncratic, obscure, and foreign but still compelling German work. Sartor Resartus – which could be trans- lated as “The Tailor Retailored”, a metaphorical allusion to the “editor’s” cutting up and sewing together of Teufelsdröckh’s “philosophy of Clothes” – consists of three parts. The first and the last part contain many long verbatim quotes from Teufelsdröckh’s work which the editor has selected and translated and rearranged and commented upon to make it easier for his British readers to follow the foreign professor’s foreign train of thought. The middle part chronicles the editor’s at- tempt to write Teufelsdröckh’s biography based on six paper bags full of dubious, heterogeneous and largely unreadable handwritten scraps of allegedly autobio- graphical notes sent to him by an acquaintance of Teufelsdröckh. The editor’s hermeneutic hope that understanding Teufelsdröckh’s work will become so much easier for himself and for his readers after having understood Teufelsdröckh’s life falters when faced with the hermeneutic challenge of understanding and writing Teufelsdröckh’s life. Writing the German professor’s biography is fraught with a host of problems, including technical difficulties with ordering and deciphering the undated handwritten notes, ontological doubts raised by several hints among the notes that they may be fictional, not autobiographical, and an incomplete story due to Teufelsdröckh’s elusiveness: being a foundling, nothing is known about his origins, and at the time of the editor’s writing, Teufelsdröckh has simply vanished without a trace from his home town of many years. Sartor Resartus’ biographical part mocks and subverts factual and fictional biographies that tell a life too neatly and in too unified a shape, including Carlyle’s own abandoned attempt at a bildungsroman, Wotton Reinfred.36 Sartor Resartus stresses instead the hard and dedicated work of the editor:
Daily and nightly does the Editor sit (with green spectacles) deciphering these unimaginable Documents from their perplexed cursiv-schrift; collating them with the almost equally unimaginable Volume, which stands in legible print. [...] Patiently, under these incessant toils and agitations, does the Editor, dismissing all anger, see his otherwise robust health declining; some fraction of his allotted natural sleep nightly leaving him, and little but an inflamed nervous-system to be looked for.37
35. Apart from fundamental stylistic and structural similarities – heavy use of parenthesis and exclamations, a steady address of the reader, long quotes of texts from different genres, and digressions, to name just a few –, there are explicit references to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jean Paul’s work: The subtitle added to Sartor Resartus for its book editions, “The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh”, plays with Sterne’s full title The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman;
Teufelsdröck quotes Tristram’s father Walter Shandy on names in Book II, Chapter 1: “For indeed, as Walter Shandy often insisted, there is much, nay almost all, in Names.” Jean Paul is mentioned in Book I, Chapter 4 as the author of a text that makes Teufelsdröckh laugh uncontrollably.
36. Carlyle worked on Wotton Reinfred in 1827. The fragments were published posthumously in 1892, in three instalments in New Review 1892, 6, 32-34 and as part of an edition collecting Last Words of Thomas Carlyle. For more detailed references see J. P. vijn, Carlyle and Jean Paul: Their Spiritual Optics, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing, 1982, 75-76.
37. [Thomas caRLyLe], Sartor Resartus 1833, 8, 48, 684 (Book I, Chapter 11).
Sartor Resartus encourages its readers to follow and surpass the editor’s sus- tained pursuit of understanding a highly tropological work by creating ever more analogies and connections, by reading every passage as pointing to many others.38 As in “Biography / Life of Johnson”, the translating and otherwise mediating edi- tor sees the German text as potentially very valuable and worth his effort, but still in need of further explanation for its intended British audience, and he distances himself to some degree from the argument he translates and explains.39 And as in
“Biography / Life of Johnson”, Sartor Resartus’ German professor and his philo- sophical text only exist in Carlyle’s text. The lengthy quoted excerpts in English, supposedly translated from the German original, are all that is accessible to readers in a material form, though the “editor” offers a broad outline of the German text.
In addition to the editor’s multiple explicit comments on his laborious translation work, the “original” German phrasing is in many instances offered next to the English “translation”, such as in this typical passage:
“Clothes too, which began in foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! Increased Security, and pleasurable Heat soon followed: but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (Schaam, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, dis- tinctions, social polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us. | But on the whole,” continues our eloquent Professor, “Man is a Tool-using animal (Hanthierendes Thier).”40
These German “traces” of the German “original” repeatedly encourage rea- ders to read the present and accessible text as a translation and to imagine on the basis of this “immanent” and meaningful text the inaccessible and complete origi- nal with its own wealth of meaning that may have gotten lost in the editor’s selec- tion and translation. The reader takes the position of the “we” in “Biography / Life of Johnson”, trying to see the truth through faulty accounts, to see the divine original through the necessary and necessarily faulty translation of the mediating editor.
In “Count Cagliostro”, Professor Gottfried Sauerteig reappears. “Count Cagliostro” opens with another long excerpt from “friend Sauerteig’s” Aesthetische Springwürzel, known to readers of Fraser’s Magazine from “Biography”; Sauerteig again develops a general argument for the central role of biographies in understan- ding the divine will. In this case, Sauerteig chooses translation as his central meta- phor; this is how “Count Cagliostro” begins:
38. “Here therefore properly it is that the Philosophy of Clothes attains to Transcendenta- lism; this last leap, can we but clear it, takes us safe into the promised land, where Palingenesia, in all senses, may be considered as beginning. ‘Courage, then!’ may our Diogenes exclaim, with better right than Diogenes the First once did. This stupendous Section we, after long, painful meditation, have found not to be unintelligible; but on the contrary to grow clear, nay radiant, and all-illuminating.
Let the reader, turning on it what utmost force of speculative intellect is in him, do his part; as we, by judicious selection and adjustment, shall study to do ours:” (1834, 10, 55, 83; Book III, Chapter 8)
39. Tom toRemans, in “Sartor Resartus and the Rhetoric of Translation” in: Translation and Literature 20 (2011), 61-78, argues that Sartor Resartus “establishes an organic model of language that disarticulates itself in the process of translation” (78), questioning the Romantic hope to metapho- rically translate “transcendental meaning” (78) by translating German Idealism; Carlyle realized, Toremans claims, the limits of this project with Sartor Resartus.
40. Sartor Resartus,1833, 8, 48, 671 (Book I, Chapter 5).
“The life of every man,” says our friend Herr Sauerteig, “the life even of the meanest man, it were good to remember, is a Poem; perfect in all manner of Aristotelean requisites; with beginning, middle and end; with perplexities, and solutions; with its Will-strength (Willenkraft) and warfare against Fate, its elegy and battle-singing, courage marred by crime, every where the two tragic elements of Pity and Fear; above all, with supernatural machinery enough,–
for was not the man born out of nonentity; did he not die, and miraculously vanishing return thither? The most indubitable Poem! Nay, whoso will, may he not name it a Prophecy, or whatever else is highest in his vocabulary; since only in Reality lies the essence and foundation of all that was ever fabled, visioned, sung, spoken, or babbled by the human species; and the actual Life of Man includes in it all Revelations, true and false, that have been, are or are to be.
Man! I say therefore: reverence thy fellow-man! He too issued from Above; is mys- tical, and supernatural (as thou namest it): this know thou of a truth. Seeing also that we ourselves are of so high Authorship, is not that, in very deed,
‘the highest Reverence,’ and most needful for us: ‘Reverence for oneself?’
Thus, to my view, is every Life, more properly is every Man that has life to lead, a small strophe, or occasional verse, composed by the Supernal Powers; and published, in such type and shape, with such embellishments, emblematic head-piece and tail-piece as thou seest, to the thinking or un- thinking universe. […] This is what some one names ‘the grand sacred Epos, or Bible of World-History; infinite in meaning as the Divine Mind it emblems; wherein he is wise that can read here a line and there a line.’
Remark too, under another aspect, whether it is not in this same Bible of World- History that all men, in all times, with or without clear consciousness, have been unwearied to read (what we may call read); and again to write, or rather to be written! What is all History, and all Poesy, but a deciphering somewhat thereof (out of that mystic heaven-written Sanscrit), and rendering it into the speech of men? Know thyself, value thyself, is a moralist’s commandment (which I only half approve of); but Know others, value others is the best of Nature herself. […]”
These singular sentences from the Æsthetische Springwürzel we have thought right to translate and quote, by way of proem and apology.41
Three uses of translation meet in this opening passage of “Count Cagliostro”:
First, for Sauerteig, writing a biography means translating heaven-written human lives into human languages. Second, the excerpt itself is presented as a translation from a German original, as marked, for example, by the bracketed and italicized German “(Willenkraft)” as the original expression for “Will-strength” at the begin- ning of the excerpt and as explicitly mentioned by the “we” immediately after the end of the long initial quote.42 Third, the excerpt contains at least two translated quotes: ““[…] ‘the highest Reverence,’ and most needful for us: ‘Reverence for oneself?’”” from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister43, and a quote from Teufelsdröckh’s Die Kleider: ““This is what some one names ‘the grand sacred Epos, or Bible of World- History; infinite in meaning as the Divine Mind it emblems; wherein he is wise that
41. Thomas caRLyLe, “Count Cagliostro”, 1833, 8, 43, 19-20.
42. One more German “original expression” in brackets is quoted towards the end of this passage: “by money of your own (durch eignes Geld)” (20)
43. Three sets of quotation marks are necessary, as I quote the writing “we” who quotes Sauerteig, who in turn quotes (Carlyle’s translation of) Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, Chapter 10:
“Out of the Three Reverences springs the highest reverence, reverence for oneself, and those again unfold themselves from this; so that man attains the highest elevation of which he is capable, that of being justified in reckoning himself the Best that God and Nature have produced; nay, of being able to continue on this lofty eminence, without being again by self-conceit and presumption drawn down from it into the vulgar level.’” Thomas caRLyLe, German Romance. Specimens of its Chief Authors;
with biographical and critical notices, Vol. IV: Containing Goethe, Edinburgh, Tait, 1827, 141-142.
can read here a line and there a line.’””44 This German intellectual network of refe- rences flips into self-reference: read as a translation, the quoted excerpt establishes a German intertextual constellation, with the German Sauerteig quoting the German Teufelsdröckh and the German Goethe, the “we” translating Sauerteig’s German text and the quotes into English; read as an original written by Carlyle in English, the excerpt connects four texts by Carlyle, namely Sartor Resartus, “Biography”,
“Count Cagliostro” and his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. The reference to Carlyle’s Meister-translation connects Carlyle to Sartor Resartus’ mediating “edi- tor” who transplants Teufelsdröckh’s work and to the “we” translating Sauerteig in
“Biography” and “Count Cagliostro”: Carlyle played a crucial role in introducing German Romantic literature to Britain, through numerous translations of German literary texts by Goethe, Hoffmann, Tieck, Jean Paul and others45, his biography of Schiller46, and various biographical sketches and overviews, including some articles on Werner and Novalis.47 While his overviews and his selection and combination of texts established some guidelines, Carlyle’s extensive translations enabled English- speaking readers to draw connections between these German works for themselves and thus develop a genuinely English reaction to a contemporary branch of German literature. His own reaction to Carlyle’s Life of Schiller is one of the main contexts in which Goethe thought about his now famous concept of world literature as a reflection of a reflection:48 Reading Carlyle’s English-based view of Schiller’s German-based work and life opens up Goethe’s German-based view in new di- rections and provides new frames of evaluation; and the large body of Carlyle’s translations allows for a broader, well-founded English perspective on German literature. It is through the “mirror” of a foreign view “wherein the wonders of this ever-wonderful Universe are, in their true light (which is ever a magical, miraculous
44. Here the “we” quotes Sauerteig who quotes Teufelsdröckh: “‘We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume it is,—whose Author and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, does man, so much as well know the Alphabet thereof? With its Words, Sentences, and grand descriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through Solar Systems, and Thousands of Years, we shall not try thee. It is a Volume written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of which even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line.’” ([Thomas caRLyLe], Sartor Resartus, 1834, 10, 55, 84; Book III, Chapter 8)
45. Among other translations from German and essays on German authors, Carlyle published a translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1824); the four volumes of his German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors, Edinburgh, Tait, 1827, contain trans- lations of a large collection of German novellas and of Wilhelm Meister’s Travels; and his “State of German Literature”, in: Edinburgh Review, 1827, 46, 92, 304-354, gives a comprehensive overview on German literature.
46. Thomas caRLyLe, The Life of Friedrich Schiller. Comprehending an examination of his works, London, Taylor and Hessey, 1825.
47. Thomas caRLyLe, “The Life and Writings of Werner”, in: Foreign Review 1828, 1, 1, 95-141;
Thomas caRLyLe, “Novalis”, in: Foreign Review, 1829, 4, 7, 97-141.
48. For a full account of the influence of Goethe’s reception of Carlyle’s Life of Schiller and their subsequent correspondence on Goethe’s concept of world literature see Roger Lüdeke, “Am Anfang war…die Disziplin. Ansätze zu einer Institutionalisierungsgeschichte der Komparatistik”, in: Inka müLdeR-bach and Eckhard schumacheR (eds.), Am Anfang war... Ursprungsfiguren und An- fangskonstruktionen der Moderne, Paderborn: Fink, 2008, 219-232, describes Sartor Resartus as a paradig- matic case for the concept of world literature (see 220 and passim). For a comprehensive analysis of Goethe’s concept of world literature see Anne bohnenkamp, “‘Den Wechseltausch zu befördern’.
Goethes Entwurf einer Weltliteratur”, in: Anne bohnenkamp (ed.), Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften 1824-1832. Über Kunst und Altertum V-VI, Frankfurt am Main, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999, 937-964, and Anne bohnenkamp, “Rezeption der Rezeption. Goethe’s Entwurf einer ‘Welt- literatur’ im Kontext seiner Zeitschrift Über Kunst und Altertum”, in: Bernhard beutLeR, Anke bosse
(eds.), Spuren, Signaturen, Spiegelungen. Zur Goethe-Rezeption in Europa, Köln, Böhlau, 2000, 187-208;
David damRosch’s seminal book What is world literature? Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003, also stresses this reflective quality of world literature: “World Literature is thus always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture.” (283)
one) represented, and reflected back on us.”49 Original texts that are conceived of as translated texts can be read as always already including one part of this double reflection. Read thus, the “translated” quotes from Sauerteig or Teufelsdröckh de- velop additional force. They can be seen as Carlyle’s projection of the great man as a combination of the British Johnson and the European Hume – the editor’s translation and comment provides the British compassionate and common sense tempering to the German “deep-seeing rather than wide-seeing observations”.50 Or, seen from a different angle, Carlyle, so well read in German literature that some of his countrymen called his English prose style German,51 imagines a German philosophical text while writing in English. In “Biography”, the “we” advocates for biographies because they allow the reader to “look with the eyes of every new neighbour [and] discern a new world different for each”52 while becoming aware precisely through these differences how fundamentally similar the challenges of leading a good life are. The imagined position of a German philosopher, marked as different by the need for translation and by the “we” distancing himself to some degree from the German’s argument and style that this “we” decided to translate and introduce, fulfils the same refracting function as a biography, albeit not on the level of a real life, but on the level of debating about its very function.
“Count Cagliostro” intertwines translation, original translation and the inter- pretation of a life as an aspect of the divine plan. The opening passage of “Count Cagliostro” not only connects its own status as “translation” and thus its imagined refracting power to the function of biography, but Sauerteig, as mentioned above, also chooses translation as his main metaphor to describe the writing of biogra- phies. Every life is the expression or translation of the transcendent divine will into immanence. As such, most people find it difficult to emphatically read other people’s lives and to draw inspiration for their own life decisions on them. Biogra- phies translate that “mystic heaven-written Sanscrit” that is a human life “into the speech of men.”53 Each biography thus translates an utterance made in immanent divine language into an utterance in human language. Biographies, much easier to understand and to use as a foil for comparison, may then be rendered into decisions concerning the reader’s own life, into writing a few lines of heaven-written Sanscrit that are the individual outcome of the perpetual struggle between free will and necessity. This argument, ascribed to Sauerteig, is presented in “translation”; the
“original” German text for this argument is thus not materially accessible. That the passage which links biography metaphorically so closely with translation encourages being read as an original translation should obviously be brought into a reciprocal relationship; as “Count Cagliostro” maintains throughout that Sauerteig’s text exists in its original German, the direction of this connection remains to be decided upon by the reader. One possible interpretation could read the original translation as
49. Thomas caRLyLe, “Biography”, 259.
50. Ibid., 257.
51. This is one of Thomas DeQuincey’s criticisms in his review of Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: “the translation too generally, by the awkward and German air of its style, reminds us painfully that it is a translation; and, in respect to fidelity therefore, will probably on close comparison appear to have aimed at too servile a fidelity.” [Thomas deQuinc-
ey], “Goethe. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. A Novel. From the German of Goethe. In Three Volumes. Edinburgh: 1824” in: The London Magazine 10 1824, 189-197, 197.
52. Ibid., 253.
53. Ibid., 19.
encouraging the reader to use all given clues of the present available material text as a basis for imagining the immaterial original. This approach draws an analogy between the available translation and the available lives, both of which are imagi- ned as dependent on and pointing towards a materially inaccessible original text or divine will respectively. Other interpretations could focus on the non-existence of the original text and thus the absence of a guiding directive, an authoritative text on which one could base a close reading. The oscillation between a seemingly straightforward writing “we” that is the centre of a constellation of voices which it orders on the one hand and a relegating of this position as an invented one that thereby becomes part of a now unordered constellation that is directed towards an inaccessible author function on the other hand makes it hard to pinpoint one interpretation. And that seems to be the main argument and its implied semiotic assumption: if a fact, a proposition were to be uttered straightforwardly, readers could follow this direct act of reference and could become trapped in the factual, material details of immanence instead of using their imagination to read these facts also as part of an organizing divine will. By being encouraged to follow a process of signification that seemingly never stops, the reader – just as the exemplary “editor”
and his readers in Sartor Resartus – is forced to work hard in finding ever more com- plex and cohesive interpretations of that text; and this training in interpreting and emphatic “seeing” should then be transferred to reading the world and especially the lives of others: “But the moral lesson? Where is the moral lesson? Foolish reader, in every Reality, nay in every genuine Shadow of a Reality (what we call Poem), there lie a hundred such, or a million such, according as thou hast the eye to read them!”54
While the translation of a life into the divine will requires ongoing, perpe- tual work and will never quite be achieved, the “original” life that is translated into a biography remains elusive as well. This is not only the case with the ficti- tious Teufelsdröckh, but also true for “Count Cagliostro”, and doubly so. On the one hand, the “we” in “Count Cagliostro” does not simply follow the chain of translations as laid out by Sauerteig and sketched above. The writer of the essay cannot just translate Count Cagliostro’s life from its “Sanscrit”-stage into English, for other people to read and learn; in contrast to Boswell, he has never met the person about whom he writes. Instead, he uses a great number of biographies and other accounts of Cagliostro and “translates” them into a new – and better – text.
This is a difficult endeavour because, as the “we” explains, the sources are often unreliable or full of gaps. On the other hand, the “we” describes Count Cagliostro, the “Quack of Quacks”55 and “King of Liars”56 as an entity wholly defined by a lack, a want, a deficit that fuels an ever-accelerating circulation. Cagliostro’s mate- rial body, driven by hunger in the literal and metaphorical sense57 is at the centre of a circulation of goods; and Cagliostro also produces a never-ending chain of promises with proliferating conditions and symbols of symbols of symbols or, more generally, signifiers that always point somewhere else and, as the philoso- pher’s stone, fail to ever materialize and transmute into signifieds. This circulation of signifiers – including a welter of proper names – driven by an empty centre
54. Thomas caRLyLe, Count Cagliostro, 155.
55. Ibid., 23.
56. Ibid., 21.
57. Ibid., 24 and passim.
