The Prophet’s Dilemma in Carlyle’s Works
One central problem of Carlyle as a political sage
appears in his use of extended types, such as the brazen serpent. Although he
writes with the language and rhetoric of the Old Testament prophet — particularly
when he lambasts his contemporaries for their
"brutish forgettings of the true God" — he
lacks the one thing Jeremiah and Isaiah believed they had, the details of a
specific religious ritual to which they could call back the Jews who had fallen
away from the true God. He effortlessly dismisses all "liturgies and
litanies," just as he also brushes away "respectable Hebrew and other
fetishes" (20.278), but he cannot replace them with anything to which his
contemporaries can give their allegiance. In the end, we realize that it is not
the Railway King's non-existent monument which must be a true brazen serpent
but Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlet
entitled "
Unfortunately for Carlyle, the existence of an authentic typological relation necessary to make his own work a true brazen serpent requires both a God and a Christ, and he does not really believe in either one in anything like the normal sense — in the sense, that is, which typology requires. Consequently, Carlyle's wonderfully proficient manipulation of the brazen serpent results in the kind of complex image which arises only near the end of a tradition. Like many authors who employ secularized types, he uses them because they permit him to conjure up the imaginative power of a belief system without having to endorse it. Stated in the baldest possible terms, a secularized or extended type uses the materials of Christological typology for effect. Hence it is a "decadent" technique in so far as one defines that term to imply, not moral value, but something appearing near the end of an intellectual, artistic, or other tradition.
As one might expect from such
self-reflective and often ironic handling of a tradition, Carlyle's
brazen-serpent passage in "
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Other
articles written about Thomas Carlyle: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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Forés López
Universitat
de València Press