Sartor Resartus (meaning ‘The tailor re-tailored’) is an 1836 novel by Thomas Carlyle, first published as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine in November 1833–August 1834. The novel purports to be a commentary on the thought and early life of a German philosopher called Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (which translates as ‘god-born devil-dung’), author of a tome entitled Clothes: Their Origin and Influence, but is actually a poioumenon. Teufelsdröckh’s Transcendentalist musings are mulled over by a skeptical English Reviewer (referred to as Editor) who also provides fragmentary biographical material on the philosopher. The work is, in part, a parody of Hegel, and of German Idealism more generally. However, Teufelsdröckh is also a literary device with which Carlyle can express difficult truths.

Sartor Resartus was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. It ironically commented on its own formal structure, while forcing the reader to confront the problem of where “truth” is to be found. In this respect, it develops techniques used much earlier in Tristram Shandy, to which it refers. The imaginary “Philosophy of Clothes” holds that meaning is to be derived from phenomena, continually shifting over history, as cultures reconstruct themselves in changing fashions, power-structures, and faith-systems. The book contains a very Fichtean conception of religious conversion: based not on the acceptance of God but on the absolute freedom of the will to reject evil, and to construct meaning. This has led some writers to see Sartor Resartus as an early existentialist text.

One of the recurring jokes is Carlyle giving humorously appropriate German names to places and people in the novel, such as the Teufelsdröckh’s publisher being named Stillschweigen and co. (meaning Silence and Company) and lodgings being in Weissnichtwo (meaning Know-not-where). Teufelsdröckh’s father is introduced as an earnest believer in Walter Shandy’s doctrine that “there is much, nay almost all in Names.”

According to Rodger L. Tarr, “The influence of Sartor Resartus upon American Literature is so vast, so pervasive, that it is difficult to overstate.” Upon learning of Carlyle’s death in 1881 Walt Whitman remarked: ‘The way to test how much he has left us all were to consider or try to consider, for the moment the array of British thought, the resultant and ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery.'” Tarr suggests the influence of Sartor Resartus on American writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Mark Twain. Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, however, read and objected to the book.

President Jimmy Carter keeps the book on his bedside and remarked that he reads it often in times of need.

Borges greatly admired the book, recounting that in 1916 at age 17 ” discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart.” Many of Borges’ first characteristic and most admired works employ the same technique of intentional pseudepigraphy as Carlyle, such as “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”.

Source: Wikipedia