Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh

About the book

Carlyle invents the German thinker Teufelsdrockh and an English editor struggling to make sense of his extraordinary account of clothing. Garments become a way of considering the forms, institutions, and symbols through which people perceive a reality they cannot approach without mediation. Fragmentary biographical materials introduce disappointment, wandering, and a crisis of belief into the editor's interpretive task. The competing voices keep the reader uncertain how to divide serious argument from parody, while the prose's eccentric energy resists the neutral manner of an ordinary exposition. The work asks what happens when inherited forms lose their authority but the need for meaning remains. Its difficult, comic structure makes that uncertainty something to experience in reading, rather than a problem the narrator has already solved on our behalf.

• Belief and doubt
• Symbols and appearances
• Interpretation

Why read it

For an unusual literary experiment whose invented editor and philosopher make the search for meaning inseparable from the problem of presenting it.

Philosophical fiction · English text