Abstract
The activity of an historian, as described by Thomas Carlyle, is a difficult and demanding endeavour, designed to produce truths about past worlds that will enable us to interpret present and future conditions, and yet destined to be incomplete and incoherent because the manuscript of history is ultimately beyond interpretation. This double vision of history as both an illumination, ‘the true fountain of knowledge’, and a palimpsest, of ‘formless inextricably-entangled unknown characters’, is highly significant because it renders translation of the historical record necessary for the advancement of knowledge while also disavowing the possibility that any sort of interpretive act will be sufficient to understand the prophetic writing that constitutes its invisible core. Conceived in this way, history involves two different models of temporality with the recording of the past via the manuscript differentiated from the overwriting of the past in the palimpsest: the former suggests a sense of history as story, telling of successive events within certain conventions of style, whereas the latter indicates a view of history as conversation, with competing versions of the same tale overlaying, and perhaps erasing, one another. As the broader context for the above passage makes clear, Carlyle was preoccupied with the disjunction between the manuscript account of history as ‘successive events’ and the palimpsest version as an ‘aggregate of activities’:
as all Action is … to be figured as extended in breadth and in depth, as well as in length … so all Narrative is … of only one dimension; only travels forward towards one, or towards successive points: Narrative is linear, Action is solid.2
Let us search more and more into the Past; let all men explore it, as the true fountain of knowledge; by whose light alone, consciously or unconsciously employed, can the Present and the Future be interpreted or guessed at. For though the whole meaning lies far beyond our ken; yet in that complex Manuscript, covered over with formless inextricably-entangled unknown characters, — nay which is a Palimpsest; and had once prophetic writing, still dimly legible there, — some letters, some words, may be deciphered; and if no complete Philosophy, here and there an intelligible precept, available in practice, be gathered: well understanding, in the mean while, that it is only a little portion we have deciphered; that much still remains to be interpreted; that History is a real Prophetic Manuscript, and can be fully interpreted by no man.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’ (1830)1
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Notes
Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’, Fraser’s Magazine, No. 10 (1830).
Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Columbus, Ohio, 1991).
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© 2006 Lucy Hartley
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Hartley, L. (2006). intellectual history and the history of art. In: Whatmore, R., Young, B. (eds) palgrave advances in intellectual history. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204300_5
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