“Imposture, how it burns”: The Death of Krook in Bleak House and Carlyle´s Thoughts on History

Mr. Krook is first introduced in chapter 5 of Bleak House. As with many characters in Dickens, the character and the setting mirror each other. First we are introduced to the setting, the rag and bottle shop and its contents: “old crackled… discolored and dog-eared… rusty… bones in a corner.” Everything suggests age, lack of use and lack of utility. The bones in the corner further emphasize the lifeless quality of the place. Even the weather, and this is also typical of this novel, reflects the mood. It is “foggy and dark.”

So, before Krook enters the scene, we have a very fair idea of what to expect of the owner of such a shop. When he does enter, we are told he is “old… short, cadaverous and withered.” Just as there is something of the sepulchre about the shop, there is something of the cadaver about Krook. Already, we know he belongs to the realm of death. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, Dickens describes Krook´s breath as “issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if we were on fire within.” The first-time reader is very unlikely to divine the import of this simile, so it is there as an Easter egg for the returning reader.

Mr. Krook and His Cat, by Harry Furniss, 1910. http://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/furniss/170.html

Krook is not only closely linked with death, but he also has a disturbing omnivorousness. Just as death eventually claims us all, Krook is determined to take possession of everything he can, for reasons unclear to himself: “All´s fish that comes to my net”. Everything he touches come to partake of a soiled, unusable quality. This introduces another key theme of the novel: infection. Krook´s repellent and grasping being is not a colourful character quirk; it is a social problem that infests London.

Krook is from the beginning associated with the legal system, being “called, among the neighbours, the Lord Chancellor”. He is parasitical upon it and by his infectious deathliness he enhances Dickens’ critique of that system – emotionally if not in terms of rational argumentation. Dickens pours into him all his anger and disgust at the operation of the legal system in England.

Johnny Vegas as Mr. Krook in the BBC Bleak House (2005).

As noted above, the description of Krook´s breath suggesting he is “on fire within” is a foreshadowing. Krook is destined to die by spontaneous combustion, a fire that begins within and consumes his entire being. Dickens claimed there was some scientific validity to the move, though critics like G.H. Lewes disagreed (see also here). It was an audacious and original move by Dickens. Krook dies and, disembodied, becomes miasma, no less disgusting in death than he was in life: “a mouldering suffocating vapor” and “a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceilings” (Chapter 32).

Then, in a famous passage, Dickens denounces Krook in his strongest and most hortatory tones:

The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

Bleak House, Chapter 32

Here again, Krook is referred to ironically as the Lord Chancellor, and it is implied that his death is a result of “false pretences” and “injustice”. These are strange charges to bring against Krook, particularly that of false pretences. Krook’s speech is rather frank than otherwise. He is what he looks like and he doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

In this paragraph, Dickens’ more general anger against society has taken over. He is no longer talking about Krook but about what he symbolises. To make sense of this paragraph, I think, it has to be seen as a Carlylean denunciation of society. First, the apostrophical appeal to “your Highness”, creating an implied reader of the highest in the land, is an effect similar to that Carlyle uses throughout his then recently published Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), much of which is addressed to an unspecified “your Lordship”. For example:

Dismiss that hope, your Lordship! Let all real and imaginary Governors of England, at the pass we have arrived at, dismiss forever that fallacious fatal solace to their do-nothingism: of itself, too clearly, the leak will never stop; by human skill and energy it must be stopped, or there is nothing but the sea-bottom for us all!

¨The Modern Age¨, Latter-Day Pamphlets.

Similarly the notion of false pretences, and the analogous concepts of sham, imposture and insincerity are at the angry heart of the Pamphlets:

It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man’s real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,—a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,—a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther:—fallen insolvent; unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its pot boil any more for the present!

Ibid.

Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other. His sham-work oozes down; finds at last its issue as human Pauperism,—in a human being that by those false pretences cannot live. The Idle Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian quagmire of our affairs?

¨The New Downing Street¨, Latter-Day Pamphlets

Note in the second excerpt the sense of physical disgust contained in the imagery of work that oozes down, the Stygian quagmire and the poison-tank of drainage. This is a characteristic of both the Pamphlets and Bleak House. Note in the first excerpt the connection between falsity and fiery imagery. Carlyle´s powerful if under-argued suggestion is that an excess of falsity in societal relations will lead to overthrow of society as humans simply cannot bear too much falsity. To express the fearsome violence of this overthrow, Carlyle uses the image of “indispensable revolutionary fire”, building on the imagery of the bonfire of imposture in his earlier The French Revolution, one of Dickens favourite books:

IMPOSTURE is in flames, Imposture is burnt up: one red sea of Fire, wild-bellowing, enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois Mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drip fatness […]. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the Earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The world is black ashes […]. For it is the end of the dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is darkness and opaque Fire-damp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.

The French Revolution, 3.7.VIII

In the end, the death by spontaneous combustion of Krook gives Dickens an opportunity to explore Carlylean notions of the burning up of an insincere society. Like Carlyle´s own work, it does not necessarily all hang together in terms of argumentation, but remains powerful, allowing both author and reader to reflect on the insincerity and muddle of society and posit, not without satisfaction, the inevitable punishment and destruction of those who contribute to such a status quo.

Carlyle’s Theory of Imposture

Is it going too far to say that Carlyle had a theory of imposture? Perhaps so, and making such a claim gives one a considerable responsibility to explicate said theory and even to defend it, to some extent. But the idea of imposture in Carlyle is so central that it should be theorized to some extent, to bring it forward in people’s minds when they consider Carlyle’s contribution to the thought of his time. Especially so when we consider that imposture is not a theme we  have much contemporary discussion of. Our postmodern view of truth is that it is an effect of discourse, so imposture has no essential validity – if truth doesn’t exist in itself, neither does imposture. The way we talk about such topics is summed up in the discourse around Imposter Syndrome, which I wrote about earlier. We see such a feeling as a syndrome of external pressures, never asking if we are, in fact, impostors, and, if so, what we can do about it. Such does not have the appearance of an academic question. All the more reason, then, to revisit a thinker who took imposture very seriously indeed.

Carlyle discussed imposture not only at an individual level, but at a societal level. This is the crux of his analysis of the French Revolution: Revolution as a solution to institutionalized imposture. Really? How credible is this? Is imposture unbearable? Carlyle says yes, in the long run, it is. Note here how he is opposed to the conservative Eliotean dictum “Mankind cannot bear very much reality“. Carlyle says the opposite: Mankind cannot bear too much falsity. In our present ideological climate, is this not an audacious and radical claim?

In the context of the French Revolution, imposture had been institutionalized. The two principal ideological state apparatuses were the King and the Church. Carlyle was not opposed to either institution in theory, but felt that both were worn-out symbols that had been created in response to a genuine community need, but had failed to change in response to epistemological, technological and social advances, and had become irrelevancies – but irrelevancies whose power was still institutionalized. This, then, is the ultimate imposture, when institutions are unfit for governance, but are unwilling to jeopardize their privileged position by admitting this. When institutionalized authorities are inadequate, to uphold them can only be “an Imbecility or a Machiavellism” (FR, Modern Library 2002, p. 11). To even take part, with perhaps good intentions, is Machiavellian or Imbecilic. The more these institutions are upheld, the more the return to Nature must be violent and cataclysmic. For Carlyle insists that “a Lie cannot be believed” (FR, p. 14), and that truth will out, for we cannot bear it otherwise. We may think to choose to believe is a viable proposition, but if we don’t actually believe, the imposture will prove impossible, and will call up a rebellion from that part of us that belongs to Nature.

The difficulty is in pinpointing this process: is it at an individual level that we react against lies in this manner? Can we describe it in terms of consciousness, of actions, or what? Is there an empirical historical basis for this view? Don’t people believe lies all the time, and on a long-term basis? From my point of view, the most interesting thing about this theory is that it challenges all dominant theories in contemporary thought. It’s anti-conservative, it’s anti-Foucault, it’s anti-Nietzsche. It’s a theory I would like to able to defend, but it’s one I need to think about, and try and get my thoughts in order.

Much Belated Reflections on the Sokal Hoax

Alan Sokal, author, back in the ’90s, of a famous hoax on postmodern-style writing in the humanities, this week published a new essay on the importance of science and evidence-based knowledge at Scientia Salon. But it’s not this new essay I want to address here; it’s a much belated consideration of the hoax, which has been bothering me since I read it quite recently. The story: Sokal was a scientist, and he felt that the use of scientific terminology by certain pomo theorists was a pretentious attempt to give validity to basically nonsensical claims. Science concepts were being wrenched from their original contexts and grafted onto non-scientific arguments without any comprehensible justification or evidence that the science was understood – because scientific jargon was alien to the social sciences and humanities, these ineptly argued papers were passing peer review on the basis of their impressive-sounding language alone. Indeed, the use of such language had become de riguer in many conferences and journals, much to the detriment of  intelligent investigation into society and culture. So Sokal would argue. So he wrote a nonsensical parody of pomo and sent it in to a prestigious journal, Social Text, and, of course, Sokal being a credentialed name, it was accepted and published.

In some accounts this is considered a key moment in the decline of postmodern academic writing (Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester UP, xv). Of course, this was all far before my time but it’s a topic that interests me. My Carlyle studies have brought me to consider again and again concepts like fakery, quackery and imposture. Carlyle considered Samuel Johnson the greatest writer of the 18th century because, whatever he wrote, on whatever subject, “there was always something in it.” A blunt and naive assessment, maybe, but still, an important one. Who wants to read something of which, however clever and sophisticated it be, one will ultimately say that there is nothing in it? Thus clarity is important, for it aids us to make the judgement as to whether a piece is substantial or not. This attitude is exemplified by Orwell in “Politics and the English Language”, and is still an appealing one: clarity is truth, and jargonism is a cloak for evil or vacuity. It was this suspicion of the obviously jargonistic and difficult language of postmodernism – the possibility that there was nothing in it – that laid the foundations for the enthusiastic reception of Sokal’s text.

Sokal’s essay was entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. Nice title: the theme of transgression was big in postmodernism, and it also promises a synthesis of a respectable old-school methodology from the humanities – hermeneutics – with a concept from the cutting-edge of science – quantum gravity. Sokal’s thesis went like this:

 But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

Now this paragraph gets right to the heart of my problem, and gives rise to the following speculation: what is a parody? Because reading this I don’t get that it’s a parody of postmodernism; I can only read it as postmodernism. Let’s look at the basic features of postmodernism:

1. The undercutting of an all-encompassing rationality;

2. An incredulity towards metanarratives and a challenge to totalizing discourses, which is a suspicion of any discursive attempts to offer a global or universal account of existence.

3. A rejection of modernism.

(Woods, 10)

The third characteristic is irrelevant to this discussion but the first two are central to Sokal’s method. In the excerpted paragrah he undercuts rationality and the metanarrative of science by claiming that knowledge is not objective and its pretensions to universality masks for its actual grounding in culturally dominant ideologies. This is the classic postmodernist stance. He offers little beyond blank assertion in defense of his claim; he doesn’t need to, as that was basically received wisdom/ received unwisdom within postmodern circles, being a reaction against enlightenment principles of empiricism and rationalism, the Sherlock Holmesian observation and deduction.

For example: a high-profile, indeed notorious, work of high postmodernism came with Jean Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” in the early 90’s. Baudrillard meant it in a somewhat metaphorical sense, but the attention-seeking title, with its determined anti-empiric slant, did indeed draw a lot of attention, making its author a public name, though not necessarily a popular one: “Baudrillard has become a byword for what many consider to be the excesses of postmodern theory” (Woods, 28).

The Essence of Parody

But now that we know what postmodernism was/ is and sort of what it did, and can read the extract from Sokal’s article in that light,the aforementioned question is, I think, pertinent: what is a parody? Fortunately, this is not a difficult question to answer. From the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2007):

The parodist must both imitate and create incongruity in relation to the pretext, and parody has, contrary to pastiche, traditionally had a comic dimension.

A simple and elegant definition, consisting of two elements: imitation and creation of incongruity. And here’s where Sokal’s text comes back in: I don’t doubt that he intended to parody postmodernism in “Transgressing the Boundaries”, but I don’t see the incongruity between Sokal’s text and straight-up pomo. Authorial intention is one thing, but formally, in the text, there’s only blank imitation, and no evidence of incongruity. Sokal himself claimed surprise that the hoax was initially not identified as such, until he himself publicized it:

In the second paragraph I declare without the slightest evidence or argument, that “physical ‘reality’ (note the scare quotes)… is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor. (Wikipedia)

While the claim Sokal mentions is indeed a rather farfetched one, and wholly unsupported, that doesn’t make it a parody of postmodernism – that is exactly what postmodernism does, that is just the sort of claim it makes: postmodernism is irrational, anti-empirical, even nonsensical. It challenges by its core principles the idea of physical reality as a meaningful concept in cognitive terms. To restate that position is not to parody postmodernism; it is simply to be a postmodernist. If the reader finds Sokal’s thesis self-evidently absurd, that is because postmodernism is, in principle, absurd. To repeat, the element of incongruity is missing: there’s nothing here that wouldn’t fit in a “real” postmodernist text. So it’s no wonder it wasn’t immediately detected as a parody.

How to Parody Postmodernism

A further question might be, if this isn’t absurd enough to qualify as a parody of postmodernism, how could it ever be parodied? I think an answer might be, by using the terminologies, methods and core assumptions of pomo to set up a proof of something rational, empirical or otherwise scientific but utterly banal (and, crucially, delivered in obscure and intimidatingly polysyllabic terminology): that 2 and 2 equals 4, say. Or even something ridiculous but nevertheless scientifically exact and demonstrably wrong – that 2 plus 2 equals 3.9, perhaps. This would actually create the incongruity by moving past the assumptions of pomo into the realm of exact knowledge, the one place that movement never intended to go and where it could perhaps be shown that it has little to offer except the banal in fancy-dress or the plain wrong. That would be parody.

An Idea Whose Time Had Come 

I doubt many people have read Sokal’s article through. It’s arcane and specialized. It’s boringly written, unless you read it as a parody; and, as I suggest, you never will unless you already know it’s meant to be a parody. So why does it have such a big name?  Perhaps because the sense of postmodernism’s demise was in the air, and it awaited an expression. I’m reminded of Thomas Carlyle’s observation in On Heroes:

It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, all men were longing to say. (Kindle free, loc 304)

So by Carlyle’s standards, Sokal may be a Hero, a Thinker with a capital T, for he said what all men were longing to say at that time. Perhaps more pertinent is Victor Hugo’s quote about the impossibility of resisting an idea whose time has come. In this reading, Sokal’s article is less famed for its merit than for its timeliness; in fact, my reading is that the text of the article is almost wholly irrelevant to its status, only the intent behind it has been of importance. Nevertheless, though postmodernism isn’t as dominant as it was, it still exists; and even where it’s fallen away the tendency to posit extremely abstruse theories as an integral part of literary criticism is still very strong. We’re probably no closer to Orwell’s ideal of clear, frank English, but at an individual level we can perhaps learn from the Sokal affair and should keep in mind the simple, naive but important consideration that we should be able to affirm of everything we read (and write), that there is something in it.