“One huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine”: Carlyle, Existentialism and Schizophrenia
Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34) was one of the classic coming-of-age texts of Victorian Britain. The protagonist, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, based to a significant extent on Carlyle himself, endures a long period of aimlessness and ostracisation, which he calls the “Everlasting No”, before finding a sort of God and embracing life in the “Everlasting Yea”. One of the most powerful sections of the book is the description of the Everlasting No. This occurs in Teufelsdröckh’s mid-20s, a time when he has no vocation, no money, no friends, has been unlucky in love and has renounced the faith in which he was brought up. Carlyle provides a searing account of the existential despair Teufelsdröckh undergoes:
It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim.
[…]
A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: why should I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!
Sartor Resartus, Bk. II, Ch. 7
Men and women became figures or automatons to Teufelsdröckh, the universe is a huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, he has not even the consolation of a devil on whom to blame the state of his life. His angst and despair is not religious but existential. It is the angst of a non-religious age, when God is dead and leaves a gaping void.
Carlyle’s description is an early and particularly powerful articulation of the existentialist dilemma. Sartor Resartus is sometimes considered an early existentialist text, though perhaps not as often as it should be.
It is also the ultimate anti-poetic vision, the aesthetic nightmare par excellence, cited as such by Aldous Huxley in an appendix to Heaven and Hell. Huxley’s essay, a sequel to The Doors of Perception, is about the artistic vision, which he likens to a mescalin trip. While Huxley has to take mescalin to heighten the sense and, in his phraseology, lift the veil, the artist – Blake, Vuillard and so on – can do it without external stimulant. He goes on to note that a close relation to the negative artistic vision is the schizophrenic:
But for […] the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal – an intense electric glare without a
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (Vintage, 2004), p. 89.
shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to [the schizophrenic] only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.
This schizophrenic, anti-artistic vision Huxley finds in Van Gogh, Kafka and in Sartor Resartus (which he discusses in Appendix VIII, p. 124 of the essay) and it is the Hell of the essay’s title, identical to that experienced by the individual on a bad mescalin or lysergic acid trip (p. 90).
Carlyle’s passage then, is not only a precursor of existentialism, but an early description of both the bad trip and the schizophrenic state. Indeed, R.D. Laing’s famous The Divided Self (1959), a detailed and ambitious investigation of schizophrenia from a combined clinical and philosophical (specifically, existentialist) standpoint, includes excerpts which bring Teufelsdrockh strongly to mind. Laing, too, cites Kafka as the prose artist of existentialism and schizophrenia, though not Carlyle. Laing refers to one patient who declared herself to be “frightened of everything, ‘even of the sky'” (Penguin, 2010, p. 59); another put it that she felt herself to be “scorched under the glare of a black sun” (p. 112). For both the threat is truly existential, emanating from the universe itself. Laing documented that schizophrenics experienced others as automatons, but this, he contended, was different only in degree and not in kind to how sane people did:
Most relationships are based on some partial depersonalizing tendency in so far as one treats the other not in terms of any awareness of who he or what he might be in himself but as virtually an android robot playing a role in a large machine in which one too may be acting yet another part.
(p. 47)
Laing felt that schizophrenia was a particularly 20th-century condition: not an illness, but a response to an insane world. Similarly, existentialism was the 20th-century philosophy. Reading about Teufelsdröckh’s Everlasting No in Sartor Resartus, however, we feel that Carlyle lived the 20th century before it happened, and that he articulated a form of being that was well before his time. It was so far before its time that it has been almost forgotten, subsumed by later articulations of that experience. Yet in Teufelsdröckh’s progress we find a powerful precursor to the existential anguish that was widely experienced in the 20th century and that is still relevant today in the perhaps even more anxious age we live in.
The Victorian Sage 