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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
The writings of Thackeray provide a particularly rich starting point for an inquiry into the relationship between the novel and what Guy Debord calls the "society of the spectacle" wrought by capitalist ideology. (1) Debord describes a process of reification in modern consumer culture through which the individual is transformed into a politically immobilized spectator who contemplates society rather than attempting to act within it. This reification also takes place on the level of time and history in that capitalist culture is predicated on a shift from what Debord identifies as the cyclical time of agrarian society to the "irreversible" linear time of industrial progress. The issue on which Marxist critics have been unable to reach a consensus, however, is whether the novel participates in the process of reifying society within the logic of capitalism or liberates its readers from ideological blindness by making this capitalist transformation visible to them. The answer to this question lies partly in what Hayden White identifies as the meta-historical perspective of the novel that makes visible the ideological perspectives through which history is narrated. (2) We find Thackeray positioning the historical novel between two divergent approaches to historiographical practice in his day, namely, the subjectivity of Carlyle's Germanism and the objectivity of a more scientistic French model. In identifying and parodying these extremes in historical representation, Thackeray creates a generic vacuum that his works fill with the ironic perspective of literary realism. Providing even further depth to this appraisal of Thackeray's historical consciousness is the fact that he was somewhat of a frustrated historian himself, producing a discrete body of works about, and delivering lectures on, particularly historical subjects. Examining the function of ideology in these more explicitly historical forms of representation will clarify the novel's particular relationship to ideology, as well as the novel's tendency to overlap the territory of the historian.
Thackeray's satire of historiography in The Second Funeral of Napoleon as little more than "works of fiction" full of heroes "whom it can do one no earthly good to remember" emerges largely in response to the imported German philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, particularly Carlyle's treatise On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. (3) The occasion of Thackeray's epistolary report from France is the exhumation of the emperor's exiled corpse and its subsequent transfer to the temple in Paris that had been constructed in Napoleon's honor. The ceremonial pomp and reverence that accompanied this political gesture serves for Thackeray as visible testimony to both the shallow spectacle that is public history and the fallibility of cultural memory. Thackeray wonders whether the fashionable esteem for Greek and Roman culture would persist if, instead of what one reads in a history text, one was "to know really what those monsters were" (361). Applying this argument to the historical figures of his own culture, Thackeray observes that "many of our English worthies are no better. You are not in a situation to know the real characters of any one of them. They appear before you in their public capacities, but the individuals you know not" (360).
This distinction between a public and private persona does not exist for Carlyle. He understands the mission of historiography to be the composition of an inspiring narrative about "Great Men" whose ideas and actions influenced the course of human events and formed the cultural horizons "of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain" (239). Carlyle explains that "all things that we see standing accomplished in the world," namely the visual spectacle of the past, exist as the "outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men" (239). In one sense, this idea parallels the Marxist concept of superstructures that spring from the invisible undercurrents of historical process. At the same time, it relies upon a romantic notion of the role of the individual in history that, as Lukacs argues in The Historical Novel, lends itself to fascist reconstructions of the past. (4)
Perhaps more important to Carlyle than the Great Men themselves, however, is the viability of the narrative that perpetuates their memory. With the ironic historical consciousness characteristic of German philosophy in the nineteenth century, Carlyle identifies the true hero of history as the poet who can best mediate past ages and the present. Historiography tells its readers more about the character of the author than about the figures of the past. According to Carlyle, "how a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it,--is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man" (336). The true historian confronts the subjectivity of true insight. The poet-historian cannot evade crucial decisions by hiding behind a wall of uninterpreted facts or by attempting to conceal his or her presence in the text as a narrator--including decisions regarding "which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending" (Carlyle, 336). As with the eye of a portrait painter, for example, the poet-historian must distort the total, objective image of history in order to allow what is most significant to become visible to the observer.
It is a poetic historiography that most thoroughly recaptures what Carlyle regards as the purest form of historical record, that of oral tradition. He uses the image of "an enormous camera-obscura magnifier" to describe the process by which "Tradition" cultivates the memory of great individuals in the collective cultural consciousness. Like the expanded images produced by the camera-obscura, mythical traditions distort the stature of historical figures beyond realistic dimensions, yet both representations are still grounded in an essential reality. In spite of transcending the boundaries of the science of historical inquiry toward a more phenomenological appreciation of history, myth, and historical poesis, one remains able "to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous camera-obscura image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and something" (Carlyle, 262). Carlyle distinguishes between the artificial amassing of historical data in print culture versus the more organic process of oral culture through which the essence of history is preserved, insofar as "a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it" (262). Tradition operates according to the natural passage of time into historical consciousness. Carlyle explains that it is not with the scientific apparatus of "date or document" but through the appearance "here and there [of] some dumb monumental cairn" and the aesthetic selectivity of tradition that "any great man would grow mythic" (262).
It is against these myth-fostering dynamics of tradition that Carlyle contrasts the reductive logic of modern historical consciousness. He disparages the mania of modern historians for causality and their rigid adherence to the dictates of scientific method in accounting for the sphere of human action, which is not in itself consistently rational. Carlyle takes great issue, for example, with the modern notion of environmental determinism in which individuals are regarded as products of their time. It is absurd to Carlyle to regard "the time" as having sovereignty over the human will, as if the time were alive and the individual not, and as if "the time called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing" (250). Equally offensive to Carlyle are mechanistic theories of the universe that reduce the experience of history to that of "wheel-and-pinion `motives,' self-interests, checks, balances; ... the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities" (399). He prefers instead the image of Idgrasil, the tree of life from Norse mythology, on whose leaves is inscribed "a biography, every fibre there an act or word"...
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