SOURCE: von Mücke, Dorothea. “‘To Love a Murderer’—Fantasy, Sexuality, and the Political Novel: The Case of Caleb Williams.” In Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner, pp. 306-34. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, von Mücke explores Godwin's use of language as a means of creating subjective realities within fictional representations.]

The popularity of William Godwin's novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (first published in 1794) was short-lived. One might wonder why this relatively unknown and inconsequential book should be of interest to anybody besides scholars of eighteenth-century literature. And yet, one of the first consciously “political” novels, this text provides a very interesting test case for an analysis of the relationships between literature and politics, ideology and sexuality. Caleb Williams challenges the reductionist understanding of the political that depends on a straightforward mimesis of history: it does so by constantly confronting its reader with the pragmatic aspects of language, that is, the ways in which language shapes subjective fantasies or organizes social hierarchies. Of course, to the extent that the novel provides a detailed first-person account of Caleb's suffering at the margins of society as the character attempts to escape being persecuted by his former employer, it can be read as a portrait of contemporary social injustice, a truthful representation that documents the necessity for political change.¹ Along these lines Caleb Williams might be read as a mere illustration of the detrimental effects of feudal inequality, as those effects had already been laid out in Godwin's treatise Political Justice (in 1793). However—and this is why I have chosen to analyze Godwin's novel in detail—Caleb Williams also parts with these limiting representational claims by drawing attention to the medium of fiction, the institution of literature, and poetic conventions. More than a neutral medium allowing the objective representation of “things as they are,” language in this novel fundamentally shapes and informs both the realities observed and the observing and speaking subjects. “Things as they are,” injustice, inequality, and the perception of these realities are all affectively supported and shaped by fantasy and ideology—in a manner that culminates in the “willing submission to inequality.”

Though the three books of Caleb Williams are mainly narrated by Caleb himself, we must by no means take this first-person narrator's account as a simple reflection or expression of his own view. Rather, Caleb Williams becomes the victim of his infatuation with the discourse of another, Squire Falkland, and of the latter's poetic ambitions. The novel distinguishes various high and low rhetorical registers and discursive genres, making it clear that while reading habits and literary tastes have a great impact on one's expectations and values, not all genres are equally accessible to every speaker. From the moment when Caleb becomes Falkland's secretary, the poor and orphaned country lad is fascinated and seduced by what he perceives as his employer's enigmatic chivalric charm. Falkland's personality is repeatedly characterized in what the latter's half brother Forester calls “the language of romance.” When Caleb flees his employment, he does not give up his obsession with this dark romantic hero. By then Caleb believes he has the key to Falkland's personality: he has confirmed his initial suspicion that it was Falkland who murdered the unbearably tyrannical Squire Tyrrel. Book 1 of the novel consists primarily of an account of Falkland's youth and early manhood up to his trial for murder, when the finding of his innocence culminates in a drastic alteration of his personality. In books 2 and 3 Caleb's dreary existence is described, consistently in relation to Falkland on the one hand and to the writing and publishing of some kind of heroic narrative on the other. As it gradually becomes clear that Caleb's narrative is distorted by paranoid delusions, that Falkland might not be constantly trying to hunt down Caleb, and that this persecution is partly Caleb's fantasy and partly the doing of Falkland's half brother Forester, we are forced to ask how we should apprehend the novel's representational claims and political aim, how fantasy is related to “things as they are.”

Should one describe Caleb Williams as a novel about the ideological function of literature? Could one view the book as a fictional case study of the disastrous effects of a chivalric code and the “fictions of romance”? What exactly does Godwin mean by “chivalry” and “romance,” and what is their political significance? At this point it might be useful to introduce a citation from a later essay in which Godwin situates the origins of both inequality and love in the feudal culture of chivalry:

Chivalry was for the most part the invention of the eleventh century. Its principle was built upon a theory of the sexes, giving to each a relative importance, and assigning to both functions full of honour and grace. … The woman regarded her protector as something illustrious and admirable; and the man considered the smiles and approbation of beauty as the adequate reward of his toils and his dangers. These modes of thinking introduced a nameless grace into all the commerce of society. It was the poetry of life. Hence originated the delightful narratives and fictions of romance; and human existence was no longer the bare, naked train of vulgar incidents, which for so many ages of the world it had been accustomed to be. It was clothed in resplendent hues, and wore all the tints of the rainbow. Equality fled and was no more; and love, almighty, perdurable love, came to supply its place.

(Godwin 1831, 296)

It should be noted that in contrast to Edmund Burke, his political opponent, Godwin firmly believes that all inequality among men, be it inequality of wealth, power, or status, derives from culture, not nature.² For Godwin human nature is in principle infinitely perfectible. The means to perfection are to be found in education, an increased awareness of one's true motives, and an enhanced insight into the common good. To the extent that it relates inequality to the specific cultural construction of courtly love, the citation above fits into this political perspective. But the passage also makes the critique of the ideology of romance a complicated matter. For once the culture of chivalry and “the delightful narratives and fictions of romance” have become the idealized version of a heterosexual relationship, the ideology that cements social inequality becomes part of the very fabric of identity formation.

This glance at Godwin's critique of the ideology of love and romance should indicate that for Godwin the fictions of romance are to be understood not merely as “misrepresentations” of reality but also in terms of their production of a reality. Literary language and fiction, according to Godwin, must also be analyzed with an eye to their pragmatic effects. In fact, not only literary fictions and poetic idealizations but every discursive genre, literary or not, can be described in terms of its performativity. In this sense it would be impossible to reduce Caleb Williams or any other text to the constative function of stating “things as they are.” If the exact historical representation of “things as they are” is integral to a genre like the confession, for instance, that generic rule will greatly influence the subjectivity and actions of all those who will have to construct their past within the rules of this genre. Although this observation might sound like twentieth-century speech-act theory, it is one that can be found in Political Justice. In the chapter entitled “Sincerity” Godwin recommends the following discursive practice of “mental hygiene” in the interest of crime prevention:

Did ever man impose this law upon himself, did he regard himself as not authorized to conceal any part of his character and conduct, this circumstance alone would prevent millions of actions from being perpetrated, in which we are now induced to engage by the prospect of secrecy and impunity. We have only to suppose men obliged to consider, before they determined upon an equivocal action, whether they chose to be their own historians, the future narrators of the scene in which they were acting a part, and the most ordinary imagination will instantly suggest how essential a variation would be introduced into human affairs. It has been justly observed, that the popish practice of confession is attended with some salutary effects.

(1946, 327; emphasis added)

Note how Godwin's description of the genre of the confession makes it a model of surveillance that would combine features of such innovations as Jeremy Bentham's panopticon with what was to become the psychiatric case history.

Besides the pragmatic considerations that prevent us from reducing a genre to a pure instance of representation, there is another problem with the title's claim that Caleb Williams relates “things as they are.” As I have already noted, Caleb's account turns out to be the writing of somebody whom we would call paranoid, that is, although Falkland is furious about Caleb's spying and does threaten him, he is neither always nor exclusively in search of his former secretary. Thus James Thompson, a critic who discusses this novel as a prime example of the “paranoid gothic,” writes:

The theme of being watched, that is, the thematization of paranoia, is common to the gothic novel, with its noumenal world constantly on the verge of interpenetration with non-human agency. But the eeriness found in a Walpole, Reeve, Radcliffe, Lewis, or Maturin novel is nothing like the anguish of isolation which Caleb experiences in his world as Prison. The passage just quoted is often cited to illustrate the power of Caleb Williams,³ with its terrible, Benthamite combination of isolation and surveillance, the terror of exclusion and separation that George Lukács analyzes as the objectification of social relations under capital. If surveillance is central to this novel, then the passages exposing the brutal condition of the prisons, and the interpolated episodes from the Newgate Calendar, and the notes to John Howard's State of the Prisons are not mere social protest dragged into an otherwise psychological novel out of the reformer's sense of duty: on the contrary, Caleb's vision of his society as a vast prison is Godwin's central insight.⁴

(1989, 183)

In attempting to appreciate Godwin's critical insight into contemporary society, Thompson's account of the novel in terms of the “paranoid gothic” is caught in a strange contradiction, one that might have to do with the rather complex representational claims and status of this text. On the one hand, the novel's sinister description of a world of perfect surveillance and persecution is supposed to portray rather accurately the actual state of affairs in Godwin's England. On the other hand, Thompson calls the description “paranoid,” a term implying that this view of reality is distorted by an unwarranted recourse to an epistemology of conspiracy or a hermeneutics of suspicion. Furthermore, even when we use the term “paranoid” in this colloquial sense, we mean not only that somebody's sinister view of reality is inaccurate but also that the paranoid person has an ambivalent emotional investment in the situation of surveillance and even in the persecutor. Caleb's excessive fear of Falkland is not the only thing that needs accounting for; so too do Caleb's fascination with Falkland, his spying on him, and his intense admiration of what he takes to be Falkland's chivalric ethos. In brief, to deal with the politics of Caleb Williams, we shall have to come to terms with the protagonist-narrator's obsession with his persecutor and his affective investment in being under surveillance. Ultimately, this project requires coming to terms with the special frisson, with the particular pleasures that are connected with Falkland in his capacity as a dark romantic hero.

In order to explain the connection between delusions of persecution and fascination with the persecutor, Alex Gold (1977) has recourse to the psychoanalytic model of paranoia and derives Caleb's paranoid delusion, his excessive fear of being persecuted by Falkland, from Caleb's love for Falkland. He reads Caleb's story as the result of a homosexual love story that in turn is borrowed from Falkland's biographical account in book 1 of Emily's unrequited love for him. Gold emphasizes the parallels between Godwin's political novel and Freud's analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber's autobiography. Concurring with Gold, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes:

The limited group of fictions that represent the “classic” early Gothic contains a large subgroup—Caleb Williams, Frankenstein, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, probably Melmoth, possibly The Italian—whose plots might be mapped almost point for point onto the case of Dr. Schreber: most saliently, each is about one or more males who not only is persecuted by, but considers himself transparent to and often under the compulsion of, another male. If we follow Freud in hypothesizing that such a sense of persecution represents the fearful, phantasmatic rejection by recasting of an original homosexual (or even merely homosocial) desire, then it would make sense to think of this group of novels as embodying strongly homophobic mechanisms.

(1985, 91)

Gold's analysis of Caleb Williams, certainly one of the most sophisticated and detailed analyses of this novel, and Sedgwick's use of this reading in her broader argument about the disciplinary deployments of homophobia lead me to a question that is provoked by these critics' ahistorical approach to sexuality. Like Freud, whose model of paranoia partially depends on a normative model of sexual maturation, one that ideally involves the overcoming of a homosexual stage, Sedgwick refers to an “original homosexual (or even merely homosocial) desire.” Foucault in his History of Sexuality (1978) has shown, however, that this notion of “sexuality” as a fundamental character- or personality-forming trait was merely a nineteenth-century discursive construct, one that found its first full theoretical articulation in Carl Westphal's article “On the Contrary Sexual Sensation” (1871). Analyzing a male transvestite, Westphal argued that there is something like a fundamental sexual orientation, a type of desire that shapes an individual even in its latency, doing so quite independently of the “sodomitical” practices that until the late nineteenth century constituted a quite different version of male-male desire and practices. The psychiatric and clinical construction of homosexuality hence provides some important parameters for its later uses in psychoanalysis and identity politics.

Having voiced my objection to this anachronistic use of sexuality, I hasten to add that my own reading will by no means reject what psychoanalytic theory has to offer literary analyses. If we distance ourselves from its normative tendencies, we will find productive models of sexuality that presuppose the ambivalent and irrational nature of pleasure. Indeed, a model of human sexuality as polymorphous perversion may both support and subvert its normative counterpart.⁵ In other words, I shall not with Gold try to map Freud's analysis of Schreber onto Caleb Williams, an operation that—as Gold has proven—works, if anything, too well; rather, I shall attempt to show why this operation works at all, and how this particular novel as an example of the “paranoid gothic” participates in the history of sexuality.

How should we understand the Gothic novel's literary use of paranoid fantasy in relation to extraliterary accounts of fantasy and delusion? What was the status of “paranoia” in the discourse of psychiatry, which was at the end of the eighteenth century still very new? The first psychiatric case history of paranoia was not taken down until about fifteen years after the publication of Caleb Williams. It was published by John Haslam (1764-1844), the apothecary of Bedlam. In his Illustrations of Madness (1810) Haslam states that with his book he wants to initiate a new genre, one advancing the science of psychiatry. He regrets that England does not yet have a richly documented library of cases of mental illness, of the sort that can be found in Heinrich Spieß's Biographien von Wahnsinnigen (Leipzig, 1795). It is not clear whether Haslam is aware that Spieß is not a medical authority but the author of popular entertainment fictions, primarily robber novels. Spieß's accounts of madness are melodramatic; and their chief interest seems less medical or scientific than sensationalist. This glance toward the psychiatry of the 1790s allows us to note that, since the field was barely emerging when Caleb Williams was published, it must have been from literary fiction that the clinical case history took its cues rather than vice versa.

Though there might be no psychiatric prototypes for this novel's approach to fantasy and delusion, we can certainly think of literary works that explore the delusions of madness in terms of the impact of fiction. To the extent that both Falkland's and Caleb's madness is channeled by the reading of fiction, one might even think of comparing Caleb Williams with Don Quixote, the paradigm of the novel as antiromance. Yet the two novels are worlds apart in the ways in which each contrasts “reality” with the distorting fantasy world shaped by romance's heroic ideals. Whereas Cervantes builds the novelistic counterreality on the sensuality and sense certainty of Sancho Panza and ultimately relies on a commonsense model of “natural” bodily sensations and pleasures, for Godwin the nature of pleasure is more problematic: certainly pleasure can no longer ground a world of sanity and reason. In fact, I will show throughout my analysis of Caleb Williams that this novel's exploration of subjectivity insists on the ambiguity and complexity of pleasure. It is here, in its complex, “unnatural” approach to pleasure that Caleb Williams acquires its significance for the cultural work of the novel. In what follows I shall analyze in detail how the protagonist's paranoia is constituted through a relationship to literature and language. I aim to demonstrate that this novel's treatment of its hero's mental and emotional state participates in the construction of the kind of subjectivity that a century later would become theorized and analyzable by psychoanalysis.

My argument has two stages. First I shall trace the development of Caleb's paranoia, beginning with the moment in the narrative when he flees a gang of robbers. Once I have shown how Caleb's persecution anxiety is worked out vis-à-vis his poetic ambitions, and the allure of sublime postures, on the one hand and the humdrum publishing realities of sensationalist popular literature on the other, I shall focus on the kernel of his narcissistic fantasy, on the specific organization of pleasure that underlies it. In the second part of this article I shall isolate the scenes that condense Caleb Williams's approach to the relationship between subjectivity, knowledge, the organization of pleasure, and writing. These scenes elaborate traumatic relationships between self and other, between pleasure and pain, in an attempt to answer the question of the origin of Caleb's passion, and to motivate the writing and the publication of Caleb's memoirs. Ultimately, I hope to show how this novel is involved with nothing less than the construction of human sexuality as the individual's secret, an encrypted but fundamental perversion.

1

The onset of Caleb's paranoia is marked by a shift from a position of perfect invisibility to one of visibility, and by a shift from a position in which language seems to be a tool to one in which language becomes opaque and conditions one's view of oneself and the world. As Caleb escapes from Falkland's household he has valid reasons to fear his former employer: that is why he joins a gang of robbers who hide in a secluded forest. This episode is described from the position of a quasi-neutral observer; Caleb studies and analyzes these people, speculating on their behavior, character, social interactions, and organization as a group as if he were on an anthropological field trip. Shortly after having left the robbers, Caleb sits in a corner of an inn, disguised as a beggar, and listens to the tall tales that are being told concerning him. Initially, he is frightened, but as soon as he apprehends his own “invisibility,” he begins to enjoy himself:

By degrees I began to be amused at the absurdity of their tales, and the variety of falsehoods I heard asserted around me. My soul seemed to expand; I felt a pride in the self-possession and lightness of heart with which I could listen to the scene; and I determined to prolong and heighten the enjoyment. Accordingly, when they were withdrawn, I addressed myself to our hostess, a buxom, bluff, good humoured widow, and asked what sort of a man this Kit Williams might be? She replied that, as she was informed, he was as handsome, likely a lad, as any in four counties round; and that she loved him for his cleverness, by which he outwitted all the keepers they could set over him and made his way through stone walls, as if they were so many cobwebs.

(Godwin 1977, 237)

Note how at the start his enjoyment is derived mainly from being an invisible observer, from being in control and knowing that he has exclusive access to knowledge. This self-reflexive enjoyment is described, in its autoerotic physicality, as narcissistic pride.

Immediately after this scene, Caleb encounters Forester's people, who are pursuing him. Although his beggar's disguise and assumed Irish brogue forestall his capture, he cannot remain calm:

I could almost have imagined that I was the sole subject of general attention, and that the whole world was in arms to exterminate me. The very idea tingled through every fibre of my frame. But, terrible as it appeared to my imagination, it did but give new energy to my purpose; and I determined that I would not voluntarily resign the field, that is literally speaking my neck to the cord of the executioner, notwithstanding the greatest superiority in my assailants.

(238)

Here, as in the scene at the inn, both autoerotic and narcissistic components are present, since Caleb's fear of being discovered can also be read as a wish to be discovered. His allusions to being “the sole subject of general attention” and “having the whole world in arms” against him reveal the close proximity of megalomania and paranoia.

This fear/wish of having everybody persecute him, of being the subject of everybody's attention, this sudden turn from a position of invisibility to one of total exposure, leaving one at the center of the gaze and under permanent surveillance, is at last realized in a manner that confirms Caleb's paranoia. Shortly after Caleb has boarded a boat in order to flee to Ireland, two officers come aboard and order his fellow passengers onto the deck for examination. “I was inexpressibly disturbed at the occurrence of such a circumstance in so unseasonable a moment. I took it for granted that it was of me that they were in search” (239). In fact, they are in search not of him but of two Irish mail robbers. His vague resemblance to the description of one of the robbers results in his arrest. This confusion confronts Caleb with the fact that no matter which identity he chooses, that identity is not determined by him, not expressive of what he would like it to be, but always determined by others, and in this sense an alienation.

Such an alienation of being within language can, however, be described in more specific terms. It is not Caleb's inability to create his own private language of expression that is at issue; rather, the matter needs to be understood in terms of the prevailing distribution of speaking and subject positions and the classed access to discursive genres. For the novel makes it clear that the variety of rhetorical and literary conventions and genres that Caleb wants to associate himself with, on the one hand, and those he can actually have access to, on the other, are distinguished according to class. When Caleb begins to listen with narcissistic pleasure to the tall tales being told about him as “Kit Williams,” “a devilish cunning fellow,” “breaking prison no less than five times” (236), he identifies with a stock character, the daring criminal who makes it into oral legends and ballads, a character encountered in print primarily on handbills, in prison and execution reports like the Newgate Calendar, and in fictional penny legends. Letting himself be interpellated this way, Caleb seems to be aware merely of the heroic status attached to the outlaw's subject position; he seems far less aware of the fact that, as Foucault argued in the essay “Lives of Infamous Men,” for an insignificant man of the lower classes, there is no way of entering history, of entering any public record or discourse, except by coming into conflict with power (1979). Caleb despises his disguises as an Irish beggar and as a poor Jew as much as he despises the company of the robbers. Clearly he would prefer to fancy himself somebody more glamorous. In fact, when he emphasizes how much his early youth was influenced by books, he makes a point of “ennobling” his character by dissociating himself from the genres of common, everyday life: “I read, I devoured compositions of this sort. They took possession of my soul; and the effects they produced, were frequently discernible in my external appearance and my health. My curiosity however was not entirely ignoble: village anecdotes and scandal had no charms for me” (4).

Caleb's paranoid fantasy takes its cues from what Godwin would call “romance,” that is, from what in the introductory pages I have characterized, with Godwin, as the “life-embellishing,” ideological function of the “language of poetry.” The plot of Caleb's trials and persecutions, however, draws on the genres associated with the “vulgar incidents” of everyday life. Although Caleb would like to associate himself with high heroic rhetoric, he cannot escape the popular robber legend. Disguised as a poor Jew he supports himself as a hack writer for a newspaper: “By a fatality for which I did not exactly know how to account, my thoughts frequently led me to the histories of celebrated robbers; and I retailed from time to time incidents and anecdotes of Cartouche, Gusman d'Alfarache and other memorable worthies, whose career was terminated upon the gallows or the scaffold” (259). Ironically it is his excellence in imitating the robber genre that attracts the attention of the thieftaker Gines, who happens to be the printer's brother:

After having listened for some time upon this occasion to the wonderful stories which Gines in his rugged way condescended to tell, the printer felt an ambition to entertain his brother in his turn. He began to retail some of my stories of Cartouche and Gusman d'Alfarache. The attraction of Gines was excited. His first emotion was wonder; his second was envy and aversion. Where did the printer get these stories? This question was answered.

(264)

Note how the paradoxical formulation, “my stories of Cartouche and Gusman d'Alfarache,” undermines both the notion of authorial originality and an expressive textual model. What matters both in terms of exciting Gines's mimetic desire and in terms of establishing Caleb's “identity” is not the actual story, which can just as easily be borrowed, or the particularities of its narration but merely the position from which it is circulated.

After Caleb manages to escape and change his identity once more, Gines, in order to find him, finally makes Caleb's megalomaniac/paranoid fantasy of universal persecution literally true. Gines imitates in his turn the genre of the robber legend and publishes a halfpenny legend about Caleb Williams, together with a previously published handbill promising a hundred guineas for the latter's apprehension: “It was no longer Bow Street, it was a million of men, in arms against me,” Caleb laments (270). Gines's publication is used twice against Caleb. The first time it leads to his arrest and brief imprisonment; the second time Falkland employs Gines to distribute the legend wherever Caleb wants to settle and by this means repeatedly destroys Caleb's reputation. So far, the compulsive, repetitive nature of Caleb's megalomaniac and paranoid plot can be described in terms of a desire to cast his life as a heroic romance, a narrative of fighting wild beasts and resisting terrible enemies, whereas in actuality the script available to him is merely that of the trivial penny legend, of the runaway prisoner, robber, or traitor. Yet this distribution of speaking and subject positions according to social class does not suffice to explain all the dynamics of Caleb's involvement with Falkland or the way that interpersonal relationships and affective economies are worked out in the novel.

In fact, even before Caleb is set on his paranoid course, before his escape from prison, this novel makes it clear that much as individuals are determined by their participation in different types of speech genres, their most secret wishes, avowed desires, and hidden fantasies also depend on the discourse of others. Consider, for instance, this passage in which Falkland disagrees with Forester on how to deal with Caleb:

I care not for consequences, replied Mr. Falkland, I will obey the dictates of my own mind. I will never lend my assistance to the reforming of mankind by axes and gibbets; I am sure things will never be as they ought, till honour and not law be the dictator of mankind, till vice is taught to shrink before the resistless might of inborn dignity, and not before the cold formality of statutes. If my calumniator were worthy of my resentment I would chastise him with my own sword, and not that of the magistrate; but in the present case I smile at his malice, and resolve to spare him, as the generous lord of the forest spares the insect that would disturb his repose.

The language you now hold, said Mr. Forester, is that of romance, and not of reason. Yet I cannot but be struck with the contrast exhibited before me of the magnanimity of virtue and the obstinate, impenetrable injustice of guilt. While your mind overflows with goodness, nothing can touch the heart of this thrice bred villain. I shall never forgive myself for having once been entrapped by his detestable arts.

(175)

In both cases the attitude toward Caleb is primarily a reaction to a narcissistic injury. Falkland's speech betrays in particular the narcissistic charge that attaches to the construction of the other as an opponent. From a sociological argument against the efficacy of laws in the improvement of men, he tips over into a hyperbolic discourse that recalls God's final boasting in the Book of Job. His opponent is unworthy to be touched by his own sword, and hence he smiles at him like the “lord of the forest” at the insect.

Whereas I have emphasized so far the degree to which Caleb is driven by a narcissistic desire to identify with heroic stereotypes, now I would like to point out that not just any heroic stereotype will do; instead Caleb will borrow almost literally Falkland's own “language of romance.” A good example can be found in the hyperbolic language Caleb uses to describe Gines's hostility toward him after he has left the gang of robbers: “I had fastened upon myself a second enemy, of that singular and dreadful sort, that is determined never to dismiss its animosity, as long as life shall endure. While Falkland, was the hungry lion whose roarings astonished and appalled me, Gines was a noxious insect, scarcely less formidable and tremendous, that hovered about my goings, and perpetually menaced me with the poison of his sting” (261). As Caleb ventriloquizes Falkland's “language of romance,” Falkland's heroic position remains uncontested; the lowly insect's place is no longer filled by Caleb, however, but is now filled rather by Gines. Caleb dramatizes the danger of his own position by making Gines “scarcely less formidable and tremendous” than Falkland. He thus not only creates a rather incoherent, unintentionally comical picture of the “sublime insect” but also marks Gines as a stand-in for Falkland.

Why is Caleb obsessed with Falkland? Caleb demonstrates not only a strong narcissistic investment in being persecuted by some horrendous foe but also a certain obsession with this enemy as a physical threat, with being “stung,” overwhelmed, or mortally wounded by him. Shortly after he has left the gang of robbers, when he still sees himself as an “invisible” hero with superhuman powers, he encounters Forester's people: “It was fortunate for me that my disguise was so complete, that the eye of Mr. Falkland itself could scarcely have penetrated it” (237). If his disguise is to give him any feeling of power and invulnerability, it has to protect him, not against Forester's people, who are indeed searching for him, but against “Falkland's penetrating eye.” This substitution points toward the kernel of his paranoid fantasy: he not only wants to be the center of Falkland's attention, but he also derives physical excitement and pleasure from Falkland's threat to the protective layers surrounding him.

At this point it is possible to describe Caleb's paranoid construction of reality with more precision. His fear of being/wish to be persecuted can be broken down into two aspects: (1) it is articulated in terms of the fear that “everybody is in search of me, watching me, and trying to hunt me down,” a fear that can be translated into the megalomaniac wish “I am a superman, a hero, terribly important, on everybody's mind and everywhere sought after,” a wish informed by the narcissistic desire to assume the heroic postures of the “language of romance”; and (2) it entails a fixation on Falkland: “I have the most terrible foe, he might suddenly overwhelm me because he can penetrate all the protective layers of disguise by which I have surrounded myself.” It is not immediately clear how this fear might be translated into a wish. As opposed to the first aspect of Caleb's paranoia, which can be discussed in terms of ideology or as an interpellation through the discourse of romance, this second aspect is fundamental in representing the mechanism according to which the experience of inequality is anchored in an economy of pain and pleasure. Once pleasure and pain are no longer quasi-natural opposites, once pleasure becomes connected with a state of excitement that originates in the fantasy of the painfully violent disruption of those layers of clothing and skin that would protect the body and the self, we are confronted with a position that in psychoanalytic terminology would be called masochistic.

One scene that explores Caleb's fear of being overwhelmed by somebody like Falkland is exemplary in showing the interdependence of Caleb's fantasy, this peculiar economy of pleasurable excitement derived from physical threat, with Caleb's apprehension of reality. It is through scenes like this that the novel comes closest to the fantastic, because it is here that a model of a rationally apprehensible universe is most thoroughly undermined. This scene is also prominently placed within the development of the plot. As I have mentioned, Caleb's “plot of paranoia” begins with his departure from the gang of robbers. This scene brings about his flight. Caleb is alone in the robbers' hiding place: he is exhausted, dreams of rest, peace, and quiet, and falls asleep. During his sleep he is frightened by a nightmare from which he wakes only to discover that an ugly old woman, hostess and housekeeper for the robbers, is about to murder him with a “butcher's cleaver.” That he should defend himself against an ax murderess and flee her does not seem strange but seems perfectly rational, in line with the interests of self-protection. However, a closer look at the sequence of scenes preceding Caleb's flight makes us doubt precisely this rational economy of pleasure and pain, in which pain seems naturally opposed to pleasure, and in which avoidance of pain, self-protection, and the maximization of pleasure seem to belong together. Whereas the rational model of pleasure would presuppose clear distinctions between a daydream, a nightmare, and waking reality, the following sequence explores the interdependence of these phenomena and, ultimately, exposes the fantastic kernel of waking reality itself.

The passage can be divided into three main phases:

1. Reverie
   • a. “I sighed for that solitude and obscurity, that retreat from the vexations of the world and the voice even of common fame, which I had proposed to myself when I broke my prison.”
   • b. “I pulled out a pocket Horace, the legacy of my beloved Brightwell! I read with avidity the epistle in which he so beautifully describes to Fuscus the grammarian, the pleasures of rural tranquility and independence.”
   • c. “The sun was rising, … the scene soothing the mind … a confused reverie invaded my faculties. … [I] fell asleep.”
2. Dream
   • d. Some person, the agent of Falkland, was approaching to assassinate Caleb.
   • e. “I imagined that the design of the murderer was to come upon me by surprise, that I was aware of his design, and yet by some fascination had no thought of evading it. I heard the steps of the murderer as he cautiously approached. I seemed to listen to his constrained, yet audible breathings.”
3. Awakening
   • f. “The idea became too terrible, I started, opened my eyes, and beheld the execrable hag before mentioned standing over me with a butcher's cleaver.”
   • g. “Her vigour was truly Amazonian, and at no time had I ever occasion to contend with a more formidable opponent.”

   • (231)

Since Caleb's nightmare is introduced by a daydream, it does not take much familiarity with Freudian psychoanalysis to see that the nightmare is also a disguised wish fulfillment. The issue gets more complicated, however, if we ask what kind of wish the dream is supposed to fulfill. Is the dream meant to protect the self-sufficient contentment of the sleeper, that state of narcissistic bliss, solitude, independence, and withdrawal from the world that is invoked in quotation 1a? In this case the dream would provide protection against awakening, a means of integrating external reality and the noise of the approaching footsteps into the dream world and of securing a state of contented passivity. Yet this understanding of the dream's function for the dreamer's psychical economy seems incomplete. It cannot explain why we are dealing with a nightmare rather than a happy dream, nor does it explain why the dreamer wakes up after all. First we should note that the longing for peace and quiet is not immediately fulfilled through a sleepy reverie; rather, it is elaborated and modified through a scene of reading. What appears to be the most intimate and strictly subjective wish—the fantasy of self-sufficiency—is in fact mediated, informed by the discourse of the other in the guise of the pocket edition of Horace that Caleb had received from a dear friend. Is it possible that the “agent of Falkland,” the murderer, takes the place of that longed-for other, especially since the dream seems not frightful but captivating instead? “I imagined that the design of the murderer was to come upon me by surprise, that I was aware of his design, and yet by some fascination had no thought of evading it.” As if he were a voyeur spying on himself at a moment when he was about to be overpowered in a passive and helpless position, Caleb's first affect is fascination, not fright. Furthermore, the awakening is triggered not by Caleb's attempt to flee his persecutor but by “the idea [that] became too terrible”—that is, Caleb flees from the scene of the fulfillment of his own wish. Waking becomes a denial of his wish—or a slightly modified version of his nightmare. Reality then for Caleb is both an escape from his desire and a censored version of it. It wasn't Falkland who was approaching, but merely the horrible old hag. She is both terribly frightful, a castrating witch with a butcher's cleaver, and also just an ugly old woman who seems safely undesirable. Although he describes her from the start as an object of repulsion and contempt, she is also an object of fascination (comparable to the robbers and especially Gines) because of her fierce energy.

In this reverie-dream-awakening sequence, the transition from phase to phase must be understood in terms of the tension between a narcissistic desire for self-sufficiency and independence, on the one hand, and an intensified longing for a masochistic physical pleasure derived from the shattering of the ego's boundaries or penetration of the cutaneous layer, on the other. Whereas phase one (quotations 1a and 1c) would mean perfect stasis and self-enclosure, phase two (1b, 2, and 3) involves contact with a social dimension, through the discourse of the other. Since phase two seems to be fundamentally organized along the lines of a disruptive, if not transgressive, fantasy, it seems that it is exactly here, within the realm of intersubjectivity, that fantasy becomes a force in the construction of reality or “things as they are.” This nexus between fantasy and the social dimension, between Caleb Williams's bizarre economy of pleasure and communication, will be the focus of the following section.

2

In this section I shall analyze Caleb Williams's irrational economy of pleasure in relation to practices of communication. I shall also show how this novel foregrounds its own production in terms of a staging of sexuality. By sexuality I do not mean, of course, anything naturally related to genital intercourse or human reproduction; I refer rather to what, according to Foucault (1978), was being discursively fabricated and managed during the nineteenth century: the secret, key to the individual, that needed to be incessantly confessed, therapeutically treated, normalized, and liberated. One precondition for the discursive production of sexuality was the break with instinct: human beings were in principle free to choose; even what was unfit for them could become an object of desire; only on these grounds could human reason and perfectibility develop.⁶ Another precondition was the fascination with the secret of the individual. It is here that I would locate the contribution of the genres of the Romantic fantastic and of the novels of Gothic paranoia like Caleb Williams, Hogg's The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, or Shelley's Frankenstein.

Let me begin with an exemplary passage in which Caleb explains why as Falkland's employee he tolerated a position of servile submission:

When I first entered into Mr. Falkland's service, my personal habits were checked by the novelty of my situation, and my affections were gained by the high accomplishments of my patron. To novelty and its influence, curiosity had succeeded. Curiosity, so long as it lasted, was a principle stronger in my bosom than even the love of independence. To that I would have sacrificed my liberty or my life; to gratify it, I would have submitted to the condition of a West Indian Negro, or to the tortures inflicted by North American Savages.

(143)

This passage weaves together the elements we have noted in considering Caleb's relationship to an other: curiosity, admiration, voluntary submission, and a willingness to endure pain. Does “curiosity” then mean for Caleb what “love” means in Godwin's essay “Of Love and Friendship,” that is, the end of equality, the willing submission to hierarchy, intimidation, and the other's ability to inflict physical harm? To a certain degree, yes. Yet, whereas in Godwin's essay love and inequality arise from an idealized heterosexual relationship, here the willing submission to inequality and the pleasure-pain ambivalence are the side effects of any truly functioning and hence interesting social contact. The opposite of this relationship of inequality is not brotherly love and understanding but utter indifference. Consider Falkland's indifferent and cold relationship with his half brother Forester, which Caleb glosses in this manner: “They had scarcely one point of contact in their characters; Mr. Forester was incapable of giving Mr. Falkland that degree either of pain or pleasure, which can raise the soul into a tumult and deprive it for a while of tranquility and self-command” (140). Whereas the age of sensibility would also have celebrated the “frisson” of a certain “je ne sais quoi” that could make a relationship interesting and intense, it would never have done so at the cost of the familial and familiar. For Rousseau, for instance, the presupposition of mutual sympathy and understanding is that one conceives of one's fellow being as somebody similar to oneself. In Caleb Williams a lack of contact and communication is blamed not on dissimilarity but on a lack of difference or even an absence of inequality: any functioning social contact or bond presupposes a certain amount of friction or irritation, the ability of one partner to jolt the other out of a state of calm and control. Note both Caleb's emphasis on the disruptive impact required for the establishment of social contact and the fact that pleasure and pain seem here to be exchangeable.

Although there is no question that Caleb's desire is primarily worked out as male-male desire, we still have to examine whether and how this matters. If Caleb is at all defined in terms of his desire, the object of desire is subordinated to its aim. The fact that the object of his desire is male is of little importance in comparison to the fantasmatic component of his desire, a component visible in the scenarios that define the type and the nature of the specific pleasure that Caleb seeks. To put it crudely, this novel is not yet about “sexual orientation” as an issue of “identity politics.” Against Sedgwick's reading of Caleb Williams and Hogg's Confessions in terms of homophobia and “repressed homosexuality,” I would argue that the object of desire has not yet become a problem. Instead, these novels are about the production of sexuality in the first instance: by joining a confessional, autobiographical genre to a notion of the sexual that is devoid of any “natural,” “instinctual,” or “rational” prototype, this novel provides a model for constructing an individual's identity in terms of his specific, highly problematic, organization of pleasure.

If indeed Caleb Williams participates in the creation of “sexuality” as the subject's defining mark, his or her innermost secret and determining feature, we shall have to describe in greater detail the axes along which such “sexuality” unfolds. In the beginning there was a transgression. It is not desire for a forbidden object of love that defines Caleb but the intrusive desire for a “forbidden” knowledge. Caleb is puzzled by Falkland's inexplicable moods. After he inadvertently surprises Falkland kneeling before a trunk and witnesses Falkland's excessive anger over this intrusion, he comes to believe that the trunk holds the key to Falkland's enigma:

After two or three efforts, in which the energy of uncontrollable passion was added to my bodily strength, the fastening gave way, the trunk opened, and all that I sought was at once within my reach.

(132)

No spark of malignity had harboured in my soul. I had always reverenced the sublime mind of Mr. Falkland; I reverenced it still. My offence had merely been a mistaken thirst of knowledge.

(133)

This confessional moment directs us toward a transgressive thirst for knowledge, fueled by a combination of intense physical and emotional excitement, as a crucial clue to Caleb's subjectivity.

Caleb's account of how he managed to confirm his suspicion that Falkland was Tyrrel's murderer represents an intensely climactic moment in the novel. First Caleb observes Falkland while the latter serves as judge in a murder trial. Then Caleb finds himself alone in a garden. It is in this overdetermined locale that he enjoys the knowledge he has gained from Falkland's visible uneasiness during the trial. The allusion to the biblical fall is obvious, yet the connection between the enjoyment of the forbidden fruit and the knowledge gained from the transgression deserves further commentary. The distribution of the two scenes onto different locales divides the issue of transgression, enjoyment, and knowledge into two stages, a primary one of immediacy and absorption and a secondary one of reflexivity. Surprisingly, however, full enjoyment is part of the second stage, during which Caleb is alone in the garden.

Caleb hopes to be able to study Falkland during the trial from the vantage point of an invisible, neutral spectator: “I will watch him without remission. I will trace all the mazes of his thought. Surely at such a time his secret anguish must betray itself. Surely, if it be not my own fault, I shall now be able to discover the state of his plea before the tribunal of unerring justice” (126). However, this Olympian gaze is very quickly replaced by a most intimate exchange of looks:

The examination had not proceeded far before he chanced to turn his eye to the part of the room where I was. It happened in this, as in some preceding instances; we exchanged a silent look by which we told volumes to each other. Mr. Falkland's complexion turned from red to pale, and from pale to red. I perfectly understood his feelings, and would willingly have withdrawn myself. But it was impossible; my passions were too deeply engaged; I was rooted to the spot; though my own life, that of my master, or almost of a whole nation had been at stake, I had no power to change my position.

(126)

Although the moment of mutual transparency of feeling and of a silent exchange of meaningful looks is rendered in the language of sensibility and love, this scene is taken to a very different conclusion. The fact that each knows what the other is thinking and feeling does not establish the equal and symmetrical relationship that we know from Enlightenment models of friendship and understanding—quite the contrary. Caleb is hurled from a position of superiority into one of paralysis, in which a passion stronger than he takes over and cancels any rational concerns that might fall under the rubric of self-preservation. Caleb's indiscreet, voyeuristic gaze is not the lone source of the all-powerful sensation that immobilizes him. That sensation is irresistibly intensified when Caleb is caught in mid-gaze by the one whom he is painfully invading. It is only because Falkland returns his look that Caleb's gaze acquires a sadistic component, while at the same time his own passivity bears a masochistic trait. Thus this scene rehearses the sexualization of the desire to know, to see, to observe, by investing this drive with a passion, energy, and intensity that have no regard for the calculus of happiness, or even for the preservation of the lives of those involved or for the survival of the nation at large. If one were to pinpoint what triggers this sexualization, one would have to conclude that it is the moment of interruption, of loss of control, of a momentary intrusion from the outside.

In the garden the traumatic emotions of the courtroom scene are transformed into a combination of visceral knowledge and intense physical pleasure:

I no sooner conceived myself sufficiently removed from all observation, than my thoughts forced their way spontaneously to my tongue, and I exclaimed in a fit of uncontrollable enthusiasm: “This is the murderer! The Hawkinses were innocent! I am sure of it! I will pledge my life for it! It is discovered! Guilty upon my soul!” While I thus proceeded with hasty steps along the most secret paths of the garden, and from time to time gave vent to the tumult of my thoughts in involuntary exclamations, I felt as if my animal system had undergone a total revolution. My blood boiled within me. I was conscious to a kind of rapture for which I could not account. I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion, burning with indignation and energy. In the very tempest and hurricane of the passions, I seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm. I cannot better express the then state of my mind, than by saying, I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment.

(130; emphasis added)

The conclusion Caleb draws from observing Falkland during the trial, his certainty about Falkland's guilt, is not reached through a rational process; rather it emerges from what seems an involuntary chant accompanied by an intense physical arousal composed of the contradictory sensations of satisfied calm and energetic passion. The knowledge he has gained through this transgressive act, moreover, entails something more than confirmation of his old suspicion that Falkland was guilty of Tyrrel's murder. What matters is not merely factual confirmation but the erotic and self-reflexive dimension of this knowledge: “I felt, what I had no previous conception of, that it was possible to love a murderer, and, as I then understood it, the worst of murderers” (130).

Whereas the climax of Caleb's curiosity is played out in these two scenes in the courtroom and the garden, the “origin” of Caleb's transgressive desire for knowledge lies elsewhere. From the start he is fascinated by Falkland's enigmatic character: “He appeared a total stranger to everything which usually bears the appelation of pleasure” (6). Caleb gains access to Falkland's enigma, his entirely different relationship to pleasure, through three consecutive encounters, each promising to hold the key to the preceding enigma. Yet, instead of resolving the riddle of Falkland's relationship to pleasure, this sequence of encounters radically reorganizes Caleb's own relationship to pleasure.

Let me quote at length from the narration of Caleb's accidental encounter with Falkland beside the mysterious trunk:

Who is there? The voice was Mr. Falkland's. The sound of it thrilled my very vitals. I endeavoured to answer, but my speech failed, and being incapable of any other reply, I instinctively advanced within the door into the room. Mr. Falkland was just risen from the floor upon which he had been sitting or kneeling. His face betrayed strong symptoms of confusion. With a violent effort however these symptoms vanished, and instantaneously gave place to a countenance sparkling with rage. Villain, cried he, what has brought you here? … Do you think you shall watch my privacies with impunity? I attempted to defend myself. Begone, devil! rejoined he. Quit the room, or I will trample you into atoms.

(8)

What is emphasized is the suddenness of this first traumatic encounter. Caleb is caught off guard: he becomes an accidental witness to Falkland's guilty behavior, and Falkland threatens him as if he had been spying on his “privacies” deliberately.

The next encounter is no less enigmatic and sudden; however, the emotional tenor of the scene has changed.

His behaviour, which was always kind, was now doubly attentive and soothing. He seemed to have something of which he wished to disburthen his mind, but to want words in which to convey it. I looked at him with anxiety and affection. He made two unsuccessful efforts, shook his head, and then, putting five guineas into my hand, pressed it in a manner that I could feel proceeded from a mind pregnant with various emotions, though I could not interpret them. Having done this, he seemed immediately to recollect himself, and to take refuge in the usual distance and solemnity of his manner.

(8)

This scene establishes Caleb's complicity with Falkland's guilty secret: he now retrospectively learns to associate Falkland's outburst of violence with an outpouring of attentiveness. To compare Falkland's behavior toward Caleb with the behavior of a child molester toward his victim does not seem that far-fetched. Alternately, one might think of a more generalized scenario of the infant's sexualization as seduction through the encounter with adult sexuality, the enigmatic, guilty adult unconscious.⁷ Certainly the second enigmatic scene suggests to Caleb that Falkland wants something from him, that he is implicated in Falkland's desire. This encounter transforms Falkland's enigma, “what does he want?” into Caleb's question, “what does he want from me?”

The third and last element in the metonymic chain of enigmatic elements is the biographical narrative about Falkland recounted by Collins, Falkland's steward. (It constitutes almost the entirety of book 1.) Caleb is told this story after he confides to Collins the confusion he felt over Falkland's offer of the five guineas. Thus the question that motivates Falkland's biography becomes “What is Falkland's secret, which he has paid me to keep silent about?” Falkland's story is supposed to solve the riddle of his personality, explain his inability to enjoy normal sociability and its pleasures. At the same time it is to provide Caleb with information that requires his utmost discretion. Its effect on Caleb, however, is utterly different. Instead of answering his questions about Falkland, it provokes his determination to spy on him. And instead of ensuring his discretion, it leads to Caleb's retelling and publicizing of Falkland's biography. Note that for the most part it is Caleb who, for the sake of simplifying the speech situation—as he tells his reader—takes over Collins's role as narrator of Falkland's story. Caleb's ventriloquizing, of course, also supports our sense of his strong identification with that story.

Against the backdrop of the two traumatic encounters motivating it, namely, the trunk scene and the scene in which Falkland offers money to Caleb, Falkland's story is the narrative articulation of guilt and adult sexuality, a “case history” of individual pathology beyond a rationally accessible pleasure principle. At least this is the way it is viewed by Caleb, whose desire and sense of pleasure it fundamentally reorganizes. It is Falkland's story that makes Caleb articulate his suspicion/fantasy “what if Falkland were a murderer?” for the first time. And it is in the same context that his desire for knowledge and sense of pleasure are sexualized:

the idea having once occurred to my mind it was fixed there forever. My thoughts fluctuated from conjecture to conjecture, but this was the centre about which they revolved. I determined to place myself as a watch upon my patron.

The instant I had chosen this employment for myself, I found a strange sort of pleasure in it. To do what is forbidden always has its charms, because we have an indistinct apprehension of something arbitrary and tyrannical in the prohibition. To be a spy upon Mr. Falkland! That there was danger in the employment served to give an alluring pungency to the choice. I remembered the stern reprimand I had received, and his terrible looks; and the recollection gave a kind of tingling sensation, not altogether unallied to enjoyment. The farther I advanced, the more the sensation was irresistible. I seemed to myself perpetually upon the brink of being countermined, and perpetually roused to guard my designs. The more impenetrable Mr. Falkland was determined to be, the more uncontrollable was my curiosity.

(107; 108)

Caleb is actually less concerned with gaining knowledge about Falkland than with enjoying the titillating intimacy that being his spy entails. The source of excitement lies in the anticipated repetition of Falkland's anger. He states quite explicitly that to be Falkland's spy is a way to replay the traumatic scenario of surprising him at the trunk.

When Caleb seeks out Falkland's company, when he lures him by way of an assumed naïveté into conversations that have an unmistakable pertinence to Falkland's story, when he seduces him into forgetting himself and betraying his emotions, he is quite aware of the asymmetry of their situations:

There was indeed an eminent difference between his share in the transaction and mine. I had some consolation in the midst of my restlessness. Curiosity is a principle that carries its pleasures as well as its pain along with it. The mind is urged by a perpetual stimulus; it seems as if it were continually approaching to the end of its race; and, as the insatiable desire for satisfaction is its principle of conduct, so it promises itself in that satisfaction an unknown gratification, which seems as if it were capable of fully compensating any injuries that may be suffered in the career. But to Mr. Falkland there was no consolation. What he endured in the intercourse between us appeared to be gratuitous evil.

(122)

In this formulation we find probably the most elaborate articulation of the special kind of pleasure at stake in this novel. Neither the antithesis of pain nor a physical sensation that resembles the state of peace resulting from the satiation of some vital function, pleasure for Caleb is, on the contrary, a state of arousal and excitement informed by traumatic disruption, a shattering of the ego's sense of security and self-preservation. In fact, if there is any “organ” or erogenous zone involved, it is one related not to the body but rather to the mind which receives the stimuli. This purely mental and fantasmatic aspect of sexuality is also relevant to the “sexual relation” between Caleb and Falkland. Our analysis of the courtroom scene has revealed that to the extent that Caleb's pleasure involves an other and escapes its autoerotic confinement, it is informed by both sadistic and masochistic traits. The citation above confirms this: as Caleb enjoys the thrill of imagining himself threatened by Falkland's violent passions, and enjoys a masochistic fantasy of suffering the infliction of pain from a superior opponent, he also enjoys his own mental torture of Falkland.

The last passage I want to examine is from the end of the novel and traces Caleb's thoughts as he takes the decision to come out of hiding. Having moved from place to place, incapable of escaping Grimes's persecution of him, Caleb at last decides to break his loyal silence about Falkland's secret. He decides to make use of Falkland's confession and accuse him of Tyrrel's murder. The postponement of this decision provided the material for a large portion of the novelistic plot, notably, for Caleb's attempts to live a fantasy life of romance and to flirt with being persecuted by a sublime enemy. When I described Caleb's struggle to insert himself into some glamorous heroic genre, a struggle ultimately thwarted when the cheap robber legend and the broadsheet catch up with him, I referred to Foucault's “Lives of Infamous Men” (1979). In this essay Foucault argues that the only opportunity to enter history and acquire a momentarily heroic stature that is accessible to the common, insignificant man lies in a brush with power and a subsequent court hearing. It is finally exactly that speech situation—the courtroom confrontation—that Caleb resorts to. This courtroom scene not only puts an end to the paranoid romance but also, as we shall see below, provides Caleb with a rationale for becoming an author, at least for documenting his miserable life.

The actual courtroom scene—which culminates in Falkland's breakdown and acknowledgment of Caleb's version of events as well as in Caleb's overwhelming sense of guilt toward Falkland—is relegated to the postscript of the novel.⁸ The last page of the novel before the postscript relays Caleb's reflections as he prepares himself for the coming confrontation. Breaking my quotation of this passage into numbered sections, I shall mark three different “truth scenarios,” each of which is reminiscent of prior episodes of the novel:

1. No, I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale—! I will show thee for what thou art, and all the men that live shall confess my truth!—Didst thou imagine that I was altogether passive, a mere worm, organized to feel sensations of pain, but no emotion of resentment? …

I will tell a tale—! The justice of the country shall hear me! The elements of nature in universal uproar shall not interrupt me! I will speak with a voice more fearful than thunder—Why should I be supposed to speak from any dishonourable motive? I am under no prosecution now! … Thou hast shown no mercy; and thou shalt receive none!—I must be calm! Bold as a lion, yet collected!

2. This is a moment pregnant with fate. I know—I think I know—that I will be triumphant, and crush my seemingly omnipotent foe. … His fame shall not be immortal, as he thinks. These papers shall preserve the truth: they shall one day be published, and then the world shall do justice on us both. … How impotent are the precautions of man against the eternally existing laws of the intellectual world? This Falkland has invented against me every species of foul accusation. … He has kept his scenters of human prey for ever at my heels. He may hunt me out of the world,—In vain! With this engine, this little pen I defeat all his machinations; I stab him in the very point he was most solicitous to defend! …

3. The pen lingers in my trembling fingers!—Is there anything I have left unsaid?—The contents of the fatal trunk from which all my misfortunes originated, I have never been able to ascertain. I once thought it contained some murderous instrument or relique connected with the fate of the unhappy Tyrrel. I am now persuaded that the secret it incloses is a faithful narrative of that and its concomitant transactions, written by Mr. Falkland, and reserved in case of the worst, that, if by any unforeseen event his guilt should come to be fully disclosed, it might contribute to redeem the wreck of his reputation.

But the truth or falsehood of this conjecture is of little moment. If Falkland shall never be detected to the satisfaction of the world, such a narrative will probably never see the light. In that case this story of mine may amply, severely perhaps, supply its place.

(314-16; emphasis added)

The first scenario is the anticipated confrontation in the courtroom: Caleb invests himself with the sublime rhetoric of God thundering at Job, depicting the courtroom scenario as a heroic combat or duel between himself and Falkland. Whereas the first truth scenario relies on speech, Caleb's oral account of Falkland's murder of Tyrrel, the second scenario assigns to Caleb's autobiographical memoirs the function of securing his reputation sub specie aeternitatis, should the courtroom confrontation fail. Here the scenario of the duel is replaced by one of murdering, in which Caleb's published account will “stab” Falkland's reputation. In this slide from a duel to a murder, Caleb imitates Falkland's relation with Tyrrel. He also imitates the court case Falkland judged, which concerned a peasant lad who, having been challenged, agreed to combat and then immediately killed his challenger. Indeed, the third and last truth scenario spells out the parasitic relationship between Caleb's and Falkland's stories: Caleb speculates that Falkland's account of Tyrrel's murder might very well be replaced by his own story. This substitution is considerable: whereas in the second scenario Caleb's writing is supposed to kill Falkland's reputation, in the third it is supposed to supplant a text written to rescue Falkland's reputation. Both expectations are actually met after the courtroom confrontation: Falkland dies of grief and shame, Caleb feels like his murderer and publishes his memoirs with the intent that Falkland's “story may be fully understood” (326).

By the end of the novel, to be sure, fame and reputation are no longer at issue; instead we find a hermeneutic concern for understanding an individual in his particularity. And it is here that we can situate the proximity of this novel's generic conventions to the psychiatric case history and the detective novel. Henceforth what defines an individual is not an exceptional life, a list of heroic achievements. Rather, it is some mysterious quality that exerts an intense fascination upon others. Caleb's hermeneutics is that of the detective who is determined to decipher an unreadable text, to find the heinous crime at the bottom of a riddle. It is not an open-ended search for knowledge but one driven by a desire to investigate and represent something horrible and unspeakable. I have shown how the traumatic encounter with the enigma is closely related to what we might call “sexuality.” In the passage quoted above one crucial element of Caleb's obsession and involvement with Falkland reappears. The trunk with the secret becomes the link between the truth status of the narrative and sexuality. Earlier I described the trunk as a metonymy for mysterious adult sexuality and the guilty unconscious, which are first encountered in an accidental and traumatic way but subsequently become a seductive lure and pretext for the fantasmatic organization of pleasure. Earlier, Caleb tells us, he thought the trunk contained “some murderous instrument or relique”; now he believes “the secret it incloses is a faithful narrative” of Tyrrel's murder, which, he concludes, can just as well be replaced by his own narrative. Recalling the well-established eighteenth-century usage of “instrument” and “engine” for the male genitals, and insisting on the double entendre of “trunk,” we can spell out the metonymic-metaphoric chain that has been set up through these truth scenarios and their recombinations: Caleb can finish his narrative, the novel has almost reached its conclusion, once Caleb's own adult sexuality can take the place of Falkland's. Note, however, that the kernel of the secret, be it the pen, the engine, the instrument, or the written document, that which is behind the enigmatic signifier, Falkland's and then Caleb's sexuality, is not a signified but merely another signifier: a piece of writing.

Falkland's narrative and Caleb's are, of course, intricately interrelated. Indeed, Caleb's narration of Falkland's story constitutes a third of Caleb Williams. How do we understand the strange claim that on the one hand, Falkland's secret, the key to his subjectivity, is contained in his story, the kernel of which is his sexuality, while on the other hand, that story can be replaced or supplanted by another, namely, Caleb's story and sexuality? One conclusion we can draw relates to the way this novel constructs sexuality in the first place. Remember that sexuality is not something that is a priori proper to a particular individual. The notion of the sexual as the individual's secret, one awaiting confession or extraction, is already part of Caleb's own sexual fantasy. Rather, sexuality is first of all the effect of a traumatic encounter with an enigmatic signifier (with the other's opaque behavior, story, etc.). It then becomes fantasy's mechanism for regulating the pleasurable repetition of the traumatic encounter. Thus sexuality can neither be defined exclusively as the imposition of a cultural, political, or ideological code on the behavior and affect of an individual subject nor be reduced to something pertaining to a “natural” organization of bodily pleasure. Before the fall there is no natural sexuality that has a definite aim and object. Sexuality is highly problematic in terms of the concepts of pleasure and satisfaction, and its object differs from the one found in the standard heterosexual “romance” pattern. Thus Godwin's novel situates the constitution of subjectivity not only in the realm of the confessional, in the urge and incitement to discourse, but also within the technologies of power and pleasure. At the same time, indeed through the same moves, Caleb Williams invokes the discourse of individuality and freedom, the fall from instinct into freedom, as perversion and illusion or delusion.

Notes

1. See the preface to Godwin 1977: “The question now afloat in the world respecting THINGS AS THEY ARE, is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind. While one party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols in the warmest terms the existing constitution of society. It seemed as if something would be gained for the decision of this question, if that constitution were faithfully developed in its practical effects” (1). This preface, dated 12 May 1794, was withdrawn from the original edition, in compliance with the alarmed wishes of the booksellers.

2. For an interesting analysis of Caleb Williams in terms of Godwin's relationship to Burke, see Butler 1982. Butler sees in Falkland a fictional version of Burke.

3. “It was like what has been described of the eye of omniscience pursuing the guilty sinner, and darting a ray that awakens him to new sensibility, at the very moment that, otherwise exhausted nature would lull him into a temporary oblivion of the reproaches of his conscience. Sleep fled from my eyes. No walls could hide me from the discernment of this hated foe. Everywhere his industry was unwearied to create for me new distress. … My sensations at certain periods amounted to insanity” (Godwin 1977, 305-6).

4. “For myself I looked round upon my walls, and forward upon the premature death I had too much reason to expect; I consulted my own heart that whispered nothing but innocence; and I said, This is society. This is the object, the distribution of justice, which is the end of human reason. For this sages have toiled, and the mid-night oil has been wasted. This!” (Godwin 1977, 182).

5. Important in this respect is the work of Jean Laplanche, who attempts to rethink psychoanalysis without Oedipus—probably the most normative model for the development of the psychical apparatus and its different components. See especially Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1976) and New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1989).

6. See Immaneul Kant's “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (“Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte”) in Kant 1963.

7. On primal seduction and the primal scene, see Laplanche 1989, 89-151.

8. To be precise: this is the second, published version of the postscript. Initially Godwin had written an ending that suggests that Caleb becomes entirely mad after Falkland denies everything.

Works Cited

Butler, Marilyn. 1982. “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams.” Essays in Criticism 32:15-28.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon.

———. 1979. “Lives of Infamous Men.” In Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy. Ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton. Sydney: Feral Publications. 76-91.

Godwin, William. 1946. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. 1793. Facsimile of the third edition, corrected, edited, and with a critical introduction and notes by F. E. L. Priestly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

———. 1977. Caleb Williams. 1794. Reprint ed. David McCracken. New York: Norton.

Gold, Alex, Jr. 1977. “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29, no. 2:135-60.

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