SOURCE: Jay, Paul. “Carlyle and Nietzsche: The Subject Retailored.” In Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes, pp. 92-114. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Jay outlines Thomas Carlyle's ironic critique of Romantic autobiographical subjectivity in his Sartor Resartus.

Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot rede.

—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

While The Prelude seeks to enact the Hegelian notion that in the practical activity of his art the artist can realize himself, that by passing his own past experience through his mind he can “reduplicate” himself, … the poem is in fact founded on a serious paradox and … its narrative surface registers Wordsworth's consciousness of this fact in its self-referential moments of doubt and hesitation. The poet's difficulties in achieving self-consciousness, that...