SOURCE: Simms, Karl N. “Caleb Williams' Godwin: Things as They Are Written.” Studies in Romanticism 26, no. 3 (fall 1987): 343-63.

[In the following essay, Simms examines Godwin's use of first-person narration in Caleb Williams.]

In the “Preface” to Fleetwood (1805) Godwin writes: “One caution I have particularly sought to exercise: ‘not to repeat myself.’”¹ This is a curious remark for him to make with regard to his own work, since in writings dated as diversely as 1793 and 1832, the gesture of becoming one's own historian appears several times. In the first edition of Political Justice (1793) this is seen as an effect of the decision of an individual always to employ “real sincerity”:

Did every man impose this law upon himself he would be obliged to consider before he decided upon the commission of an equivocal action, whether he chose to be his own historian, to be the future narrator of the scene in which he was engaging.²

In the third edition (1798) the position is reversed, and it becomes the cause of an effect of sincerity:

Did every man impose this law upon himself, did he regard himself as not authorised 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 on 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.

(PJ 1: 327 f)

In Fleetwood this gesture re-emerges as a reflection by a fictional character on his decision to narrate the story which we are reading:

I hasten to the events which have pressed with so terrible a weight on my heart, and have formed my principal motive to become my own historian.

(Fleetwood 181)

In the preface to Bentley's “Standard Authors” edition of Fleetwood (1832) this gesture is revealed to have determined the production not only of Fleetwood, but also of Caleb Williams (1794), St. Leon (1799), and the subsequent novels:

I began my narrative [i.e. Caleb Williams] as is the more usual way, in the third person. But I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making the hero of the tale his own historian; and in this mode have persisted in all my subsequent works of fiction.

(Fleetwood vii)

This complicity between an authorial creation of a subject being his own historian with that subject's supposed own choice in thus becoming, reveals another layer of repetition. The grammar of our grammar (the term “the first person”) is misleading, since it is really a second person, a repeated self, who is writing, with a trace of the first person (“William Godwin”) behind him, as is seen in the quotation above: “I then assumed the first person, making the hero of my tale his own historian.” In speech this would be a natural consequence of the duplex role of the personal pronoun: as Peirce pointed out, it both designates the speaking subject and functions in the conveyance of meaning of that subject's message. The position of the personal pronoun as a shifter has been well documented by Roman Jakobson,³ and some of the broader consequences of this have been developed by Jacques Lacan.⁴ Jakobson also cites, following Vološinov, reported speech as an example of a repetition of another sort: of a message referring to a message. By alluding to his own works in his Prefaces and other “non-fictional” works, Godwin is performing a similar function, with the important difference that his is a written message. This causes the linguistic duplices which Jakobson is at pains to distinguish to become inmixed with one another: to write about being one's own historian is to contain the problems of allusiveness of the shifter within a framework of repetition of one's message. Whilst Lacan identifies such allusiveness as productive of equivocation, the very word which Godwin uses to describe a duplicity he wishes to avoid, he shares with Jakobson a predisposition towards speech which disables him from considering the effects caused by framing one of these linguistic categories within another.

Already one might suspect, given that shifters can only refer within the context of their message, that since this reference is liable to be transferred from subject to subject both within and without the text's fictional matrix, we may be left in Caleb Williams with a history that is true in a fictional sense, a truth that is fictional in a historical sense and a fiction that is historical in a true sense. Furthermore, one might argue, following Derrida,⁵ that this contextual framing is both dependent on and a condition of (i.e. bears a supplementary relation to) the being-written of the text. If this is necessarily so, then epistemological as well as linguistic problems arise, and I wish to explore some of these in the following pages, thus approaching the awkwardness one feels when reading a fictional text which is claimed by its author to contain certain truths. Such truth-claims are themselves part of a textual framing, and so, in the spirit of repetition which seems to have been evoked by the act of writing about repetition, I shall begin (in so far as I have not already begun) at the beginning.

However, it is difficult to determine where the beginning of Caleb Williams is. Does the text begin with the title page—which bears the anonymous quotation

Amidst the woods the leopard knows his kind;
The tyger preys not on the tyger brood:
Man only is the common foe of man.(6)

—or with the first edition's Preface? Or with the explanatory note in the second edition, apologizing for the non-appearance of the first edition's Preface in the first edition? (If one wished to discuss only the first edition, would this Preface be under the rubric?) Or with the words “Chapter i”? Or with the words “My life has for several years …”? By now we have surely reached the beginning of Caleb's narrative, but there is no indication as to at which point we did so—is it William or Williams who has supplied the chapter headings? Perhaps we may assault this problem by means of an extra apostrophe, and call them “William's' chapter headings,” a written supplement revealing what might be disguised in speech.

To begin our deferred beginning at somewhere near the beginning, we find—another beginning. With Chapter ii, “Mr. Collins's story” begins, and Chapter i may be seen as prefatory to this. Collins' narrative occupies the whole of the rest of the first volume, and since Caleb makes it clear that it is a necessary piece of groundlaying for the rest of his history, it in turn may be seen as prefatory to the other two volumes. But beginning near the beginning, we find that not only is Caleb's narrative both determined and disrupted by framing, but that his own character, as he relates it, is caught in a textual frame: he enters into Falkland's household in a state of extreme naiveté and ignorance; and “[he] had not now a relation in the world, upon whose kindness and interposition [he] had any direct claim” (CW 5). Balanced against this absence, however, is a love of books, from which most of his knowledge of the world is derived. This is linked with an intense curiosity, and he sets out to fill the gaps in his knowledge by reading:

The spring of action which, perhaps more than any other, characterised the whole train of my life, was curiosity. It was this that gave me my mechanical turn; I was desirous of tracing the variety of effects which might be produced from given causes. It was this that made me a sort of natural philosopher; I could not rest till I had acquainted myself with the solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the universe. In fine, this produced in me an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance. I panted for the marvelling of an adventure, with an anxiety, perhaps almost equal to that of the man whose future happiness or misery depended on the issue. I read; I devoured compositions of this sort. They took possession of my soul. …

(CW 4)

Caleb's narrative is a result of his desire to trace a variation of effects, which in turn are to be found in other narratives. As we have already learned from Political Justice, variation is introduced into human affairs by the employment of sincerity, but whether this is a cause or effect of being one's own historian is dependent on whether we read the edition which precedes Caleb Williams, or the one which succeeds it.⁷ According to Caleb's own words, the tracing of effects produces narrative, and, his soul possessed, he becomes a narrative himself: Caleb Williams becomes Caleb Williams by the effect of a silent trace. Through the economy of this trace, it becomes evident that narration is the effect of which it is the cause, a nonsense rendered sensible by Caleb's spacing of temporality when, blind to his own insight, he expresses a liking for the kind of books of which he is himself a part.

It is therefore in perfect accord with this economy that Falkland should frame Caleb in his context, by installing him in the library, as a prelude to framing him in his text by fabricating a story about him:

My station was in that part of the house which was appropriated for the reception of books, it being my duty to perform the functions of librarian as well as secretary.

(CW 6)

Whilst Caleb's actions are governed by curiosity, those actions invariably take place in the library or its annex. This is true of the first discovery of the trunk, of the attempt at entry into the trunk, and of Caleb's first trial, in which events are claimed to have taken place in that same library. The library, Caleb's context, is made the location of a con-text, a place where a fabricated fiction is produced in order to con the law's representative. Within this fiction-within-a-fiction, Falkland recollects “the singular and equivocal behaviour of Williams” (CW 165). Singular and equivocal? Falkland may only say this because, for the moment, he is in control of what is otherwise Caleb's narrative. The unitary subject becomes disunified by being no longer in control of his signifiers, an effect of Falkland making the context a con-text, the frame a frame (-up).

Meanwhile, framing all of this, is Caleb's supposedly true text, the product of his being his own historian. The truth-claims he makes within this text are themselves verified only within the text. Lacking an extratextual referent, the reader is confronted with an aporia: is this history or his story? Caleb's truth is, nevertheless, asserted throughout—near the beginning, “My story will at least appear to have that consistency, which is seldom attendant but upon truth” (CW 3)—and near the end:

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!

(CW 314)

The first of these quotations demonstrates that Caleb's story, consistency and truth go together only loosely: gaps, however small, being opened up by the words “appear” and “seldom.” In the first edition of Political Justice we are told that “No mind can be so far alienated from truth, as not in the midst of its degeneracy to have incessant returns of a better principle,” and that “truth is in all its branches harmonious and consistent” (PJ iii: 246). In the third edition is written:

Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error: Sound reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated: Truth is omnipotent.

(PJ i: 86)

The whole of Godwin's doctrine of perfectibility hinges on this truth, but throughout Godwin's works, we are only told what truth does, or what its attributes are, not what it is. If truth is indefinable (another attribute), it is little wonder that Caleb allows in a possibility of his story not being true. Godwin implies that truth is capable of being communicated because it is omnipotent, but we may suspect that its omnipotence is derived rather from its capacity for communication. When the form of that communication is writing, the delay opened up between what would otherwise be a self-present voice and the reader, necessitates more writing—textual events, attributes—to fill the space, and the truth becomes always deferred.

This is shown in the second of my examples of Caleb's truth-claims by the fact of there being a negative equation of the narration with violence: Caleb uses no daggers, because his narrative will supply their place. It is just as much an incision into the train of events of which it is itself a description. Moreover, he does indeed un-fold a tale, or at least attempt to, by smoothing out into a uniform narrative with a uniform narrator, what is in fact an intertextual network glossed over by his editorship:

I shall interweave with Mr. Collins's story various information which I afterwards received from other quarters, that I may give all possible perspicuity to the series of events. To avoid confusion in my narrative, I shall drop the person of Collins, and assume to be myself the historian of our patron. To the reader it may appear at first sight as if the detail of the preceding life of Mr. Falkland were foreign to my history. Alas, I know from bitter experience that it is otherwise.

(CW 9 f)

Confusion is to be avoided, at the expense of rigorous adherence to the erased original text on which Caleb's palimpsestial text is based, namely the narrative of Collins, so that truth may be potent in it, but not omnipotent.

The position of superiority (towards the reader) that this enables him to adopt is one common to all writing bound by a linear progression across a page. Writing conceals what it reveals by the purely physical fact of the reader having to go through the process of reading it, and this allows Caleb not only to withhold the knowledge of that which he does not know (i.e. the content of the trunk—a point to which we shall return later) but to repeat, within the repetitive gesture of being his own historian, the words of others, appropriating them as his own:

I do not pretend to warrant the authenticity of any part of these memoirs except so much as fell under my own knowledge, and that part shall be stated with the same simplicity and accuracy that I would observe towards a court which was to decide in the last resort upon every thing dear to me. The same scrupulous fidelity restrains me from altering the manner of Mr. Collins's narrative to adapt it to the precepts of my own taste; and it will soon be perceived how essential that narrative is to the elucidation of my history.

(CW 106)

The narrative in question—that of the earlier life of Falkland—is essential to the elucidation of Caleb's history not only in terms of the information it gives for purposes of plot. Another doubling has taken place, in that the reader is put on the same level (“a court”) as those in the novel who judge Caleb; and by the same token that Caleb finds it necessary within the confines of that plot to re-affirm his claims to be speaking the truth, so such a reader can question his textual truth-claims. And at once, within this gesture, a contradiction appears: like an editor, Caleb is faithful to the style of Collins' narrative whilst at the same time usurping Collins and taking on his role. Caleb's “fidelity” is questioned by his own positing of simplicity over confusion (which suggests a loss of accuracy) but a confusion is already at work, in the amalgamating of Collins' character with Caleb's own.

It is through such a confusion that Caleb Williams is produced, and this confusion is itself an anterior repetition of that between Falkland and Caleb. In this it obeys the apparently paradoxical logic of the supplement: the supplement makes possible that which it supplements. The supplement's temporality is not linear, and the effect of spacing which this institutes is demonstrated by Maud Ellmann in an article entitled “Spacing Out: a Double Entendre on Mallarmé.”⁸ She quotes Paradise Lost:

Immediate are the acts of God, more swift
Than time or motion, but to human ears
Cannot without process of speech be told,
So told as earthly notion can receive.

(PL. vii. 176-79, cited in Ellmann 24)

to support her view that

The process of speech supplements, even in the tenuous garden, the full prelapsarian voice. Fallen nature asserts delay. A temporal space intrudes which turns the innocent love of our first parents into a licentious act of writing, repeated and deferred in the hymen between desire and its accomplishment, the eroticism of difference.

(Ellmann 24)

Caleb writes in a post-lapsarian state, whilst his Fall bears more than a passing resemblance to that more originary lapse. His curiosity knows no bounds, and whilst his patron, who assumes his patronage on the day after the death of Caleb's father, is prepared to satisfy that curiosity in most respects, the one knowledge which is forbidden Caleb is the knowledge of the being from whom his education is received. His transgression of these bounds takes the form of a loss of virgin innocence: having being discovered in the act of breaking open Falkland's mysterious trunk, Caleb soliloquizes: “In the high tide of boiling passion I had overlooked all consequences. It now appeared to me like a dream” (CW 133). Following Freud, who states that

Anyone … who has had a little experience in translating dreams will at once reflect that penetrating into narrow spaces and opening closed doors are among the commonest sexual symbols. …⁹

We see how Caleb's curiosity, which we have already identified as intimately linked with textuality, corrupts the writer's innocence by the eroticism of his writing: “This was the termination of an ungoverned curiosity, an impulse that I had represented to myself as so innocent and so venial!” (CW 133). In the repetitive gesture of representing to oneself, the innocent and the venial become compounded into a space at the level of signification. They become empty signifiers, the venal becoming venial by the supplement of an ‘i’, the I of the subject being his own historian, his own history filling the void of that signification.

A dreamlike trace such as that identified by Freud is also to be found in the trunk's introduction:

One day when I had been about three months in the service of my patron, I went to a closet or small apartment which was separated from the library by a narrow gallery that was lighted by a small window near the roof. I had conceived that there was no person in the room, and intended only to put any thing in order that I might find out of its place. As I opened the door, I heard at the same instant a deep groan expressive of intolerable anguish. The sound of the door in opening seemed to alarm the person within; I heard the lid of a trunk hastily shut, and the noise as of fastening a lock.

(CW 7)

The sexual symbolism is indistinguishable from the implicit textual eroticism. Caleb wishes to continue his editorial activity (of putting things in order) at the margins of his context, in a dubious location neither inside nor outside the library. There being “no person” there is necessarily a misconception, not on account of there being a person in the room, which would be a truism, but specifically on account of the person who is there being his patron. This is a prelude to the second episode of the trunk, in which the gestures are repeated, but in reverse: Caleb undoes the work of his patron, and the discoverer becomes the discovered. This discovery converts penetration into dissemination, and the history is conceived:

I snatched a tool suitable for the purpose, threw myself upon the ground, and applied with eagerness to a magazine which enclosed all for which my heart panted. After two or three efforts, in which the energy of uncontrollable passion was added to my bodily strength, the fastenings gave way, the trunk opened, and all that I sought was at once within my reach. I was in the act of lifting up the lid, when Mr. Falkland entered, wild, breathless, distraction in his looks!

(CW 132)

Shortly afterwards the gesture is repeated and reversed once again, when Falkland gives the motive for his confession: “It was better to trust you with the whole truth under every seal of secrecy, than to live in perpetual fear of your penetration … (CW 136). The content of the trunk is a lacuna, and we never do know its whole truth, since the trunk is effectively re-sealed here. The text fills the place of this lacuna as a constant deferral of representation of an impenetrable truth, and it is therefore no surprise that the final revelation of the text proper shall be that the trunk conceals—according to Caleb's conception—another text.

The content of the trunk is the supplement to the narrative which allows its writing to take place. But the temporality of this filling of a space, in that it is a deferral of representation, is not faithful to the Godwinian concept of sincerity. As we noted above, sincerity in Political Justice involves not only telling the truth as opposed to deceiving; but also not withholding that which one knows to be true. Always to tell the truth and never to withhold it is a law which one is to impose on oneself. When Caleb performs this action, he finds himself worthy of condemnation:

I could recollect nothing, except the affair of the mysterious trunk, out of which the shadow of a criminal accusation could be extorted. In that instance my conduct had been highly reprehensible and I had never looked back on it without remorse and self-condemnation. But I did not believe that it was one of those actions which can be brought under legal censure.

(CW 160)

In recollecting one single, unique incident, Caleb can condemn himself, because such condemnation is internally self-reflexive on his part. I identified this as performing an action: being his own legal representative, it is only the shadow of an accusation of which he can conceive, not the real thing. But it is precisely because it is an action, as Caleb says, that it can be brought under legal censure: Political Justice defines being one's own historian as being a “future narrator of the scene in which [one is] acting a part.” Following the law of sincerity, one can be one's own representative, and “equivocation” is removed from one's “actions.” Once he is brought before the law, not of sincerity but of the judicial system, other actors are brought into Caleb's scene of writing. The law becomes one of insincerity, since truth is the truth of direct representation,¹⁰ and the Law never represents itself, but always through someone acting on its behalf—in this case, Forester in the capacity of magistrate. And whilst the content of the trunk is acting as an empty signifier, its signification can be filled by anyone capable of appropriating it, such as Falkland, since Caleb, “under every seal of secrecy,” has no choice but to withhold the truth.

The use that Falkland makes of this signifier is to give it a new signified, namely “bank notes to the amount of nine hundred pounds, three gold repeaters of considerable value, a complete set of diamonds … and several other articles” (CW 164). A referent is then provided when some of these articles turn up, not in Falkland's trunk, but in Caleb's. The signifier is passed from trunk to trunk (the bodily metaphor is not inappropriate)¹¹ and with it the designation of guilt. Caleb identifies Forester as “a man of penetration,” a quality which Falkland is afraid of as capable of revealing guilt. Caleb looks to Forester's penetration as a restorer of his innocence, but in his search for the signifier of the trunk, this Forester cannot see the wood (the thing itself) for the trees (its disseminated representatives, or, the trunks). He therefore finds evidence for Caleb's guilt in the fact that the nine hundred pounds is not present in Caleb's trunk, whilst the nine hundred pounds has only existed in Falkland's verbal account. Any direct appearance of Caleb's innocence is always already corrupted by the disseminating series of repetitions in which he is engaged.¹² Forester, as Falkland's brother, is in a sense a repetition of Falkland himself: he is also a deferral of the Law who is more inclined to favour the deferred representations of verbal accounts against anything “penetration” might reveal. Caleb, by these repetitions, is forced to take part in a repetition himself. Within the narrative of Collins, which Caleb has related with “the same simplicity and accuracy that I would observe towards a court which was to decide in the last resort upon everything dear to me,” Falkland has been acquitted at his trial, in the face of all circumstantial evidence, by a plea of insufficient motive, and a character reference supplied by himself. Caleb employs exactly the same technique at his trial, but finds that the reversing effect of such a rhetoric is also repeated: Caleb's innocence is turned to guilt just as Falkland's guilt is turned to innocence. Moreover, Falkland has the advantage of being able to conceal his guilt behind writing: within Collins' narrative, which has already been framed twice (by “Caleb Williams” and “by” William Godwin) there is yet another narrative, in the form of a written defense, the author of which is Falkland. What Caleb presents us with is not a transcription of this narrative as such, but a transcription of what Collins says when he reads it out, after producing it from “a private drawer in his escritoire” (CW 100). Falkland's story of his innocence is therefore a written account of a spoken account of a written account, taken from a secret place within a place of writing, and (eventually) comes to us as a text within a text within a text. Caleb, meanwhile, does not have the same privilege: forced to give a spontaneous defense in the immediacy of speech, he repeats the gestures of claiming an inadequacy of motive and of giving himself a character reference, but he does not have the framework of deferral with which to carry it off.

Earlier, Forester has advised him to “Make the best story you can for yourself: true, if truth, as I hope, will serve your purpose; but, if not, the most plausible and ingenious you can invent” (CW 162 f). Whilst Caleb is the narrator who re-presents the narratives of others,¹³ his attempts at story-telling in direct speech are obviously insufficient to meet Forester's criteria. As the guardian of a knowledge contained in a trunk that he does not know he does not possess, Forester's judgement (and Caleb's fall) echoes the expulsion from Eden: Caleb is compared to a serpent who, having corrupted nature, should be placed outside it as an unwelcome adjunct:

Vile calumniator! you are the abhorrence of nature, the opprobrium of the human species, and the earth can only be freed from an insupportable burthen by your being exterminated!

(CW 174)

Such a conclusive termination cannot be brought to Caleb's existence, however, since the trial itself—like the earlier trial of Falkland—is only a deferral, a settling of the question of whether Caleb should be brought to trial or not. This delay within the plot is inseparable from the delayed nature of Caleb's intertextual narrative itself: his writing fills this space just as it fills the others. This textual inmixing is closely linked with an inmixing of the characters within the Falkland/Caleb discourse: that they are mutually dependent emerges towards the end of the novel:

Solitude, separation, banishment! These are words often in the mouths of human beings, but few men, except myself, have felt the full latitude of their meaning. The pride of philosophy has taught us to treat man as an individual. He is no such thing. He holds, necessarily, indispensibly, to his species. He is like those twin-births, that have two heads indeed, and four hands: but, if you attempt to detach them from each other, they are inevitably subjected to miserable and lingering destruction.

(CW 303)

Caleb has been able to feel the full latitude of the meaning of solitude precisely because his progress through his narrative has been like that of a twin-birth, his circumstances born out of the transcendence of the quasi-paternal authority of Falkland in the breaching of the trunk. This breach not only establishes a relationship between the characters but, although it is one of mutual persecution, allows the story of that persecution to be told. It is a breach which alters the terms of the relationship, but maintains intact the functional element of mutual dependence. In this is revealed the irony of Caleb's remark that to detach one half of a twin-birth from the other is to subject it to “miserable and lingering destruction.” Such is the passage of the text, which is shortly to be fulfilled in its drive towards death when the present time of writing (for Caleb) is caught up by the temporality of the narrative: “This is the latest event, which I think it necessary to record. I shall doubtless hereafter have further occasion to take up the pen” (CW 312). Blind as he is (must be, as an assumption of “William Godwin”), however, to the necessities of his own literary production, Caleb misplaces the cause of his misery in his detachment from society, provoking, after his condemnation of his solitary state, the following:

It was this circumstance [i.e. Caleb's “separation from the family of Laura”] more than all the rest, that gradually gorged my heart with abhorrence of Mr. Falkland. I could not think of his name, but with a sickness and a loathing that seemed more than human.

(CW 303)

It is not Caleb's detachment from society (he was, after all, completely alone upon entering Falkland's household) but his detachment from Falkland, by the spacing provided by the trunk, which has generated the narrative. It is this separation which has marked the decline of each character: each time Falkland makes an appearance in the novel, he is in worse health than the last; Caleb progressively surrenders his identity, becoming alternately anonymous and other than himself by the adoption of disguise.

But it is in the recognition, or perhaps misrecognition (since it is misplaced) of such a separation, that the path to oblivion and madness for Falkland and Caleb respectively lies. The irony of this is maintained in Caleb's reflection that it is Falkland's name that he cannot think of: upon Falkland's confession of his crime, he has told Caleb: “Though I be the blackest of villains, I will leave behind me a spotless and illustrious name” (CW 136). Caleb, throughout his course of disguise and deception in order to maintain his existence, is re-enacting the persona of Falkland, which otherwise is only approached by Caleb's curiosity. Falkland is not only identified by his name, but his identity is constituted by it. His honour, and inextricably his self, is dependent upon that name, and his existence is allegorical of the act of writing itself, in so far as the act of being written constitutes a deferral of representation of its subject. That Caleb, the writer of this name, should end his narrative with his destruction is therefore no surprise:

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.

(CW 315)

From this point onwards, Caleb's decline, and thus the end of the book in the fullest sense, is determined by madness in the original ending, permanent misery in the revised. In the original ending there is constituted the degeneration of a narrative no longer able to sustain itself in the loss of one half of the equation which enables one to be one's own historian. The only repetition left to draw on (in a double sense) is that of its own origin in lacuna:

I should like to recollect something—it would make an addition to my history—but it is all a blank!—sometimes it is day, and sometimes it is night—but nobody does any thing, and nobody says any thing—It would be an odd kind of a history!

(CW 333)

This supplement, whilst adding nothing, is yet indispensable in providing the possibility of Caleb's history coming to an end. Which in a sense it already has, since the episode of the supplement is within another supplement, that of a “Postscript.”¹⁴ That this shall be so (as a matter of necessity) is foretold in the last words of the main script to which this is post:

The pen lingers in my trembling fingers!—Is there any thing 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 that it contained some murderous instrument or relique connected with the fate of the unhappy Tyrrel. I am now persuaded that the secret it encloses 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 unforseen event his guilt might be fully disclosed, it might contribute to redeem the wreck of his reputation. But the truth or the 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.

(CW 315)

The force of the rhetorical question near the beginning of this passage is derived from the irony of the unsaid. The possibility of the actions which have constituted the plot of the novel up to this point has depended on the said, namely the verbal confession by Falkland of his guilt. Meanwhile, the possibility of that plot being made story, being told to us, lies in the unsaid—in the graphic gesture of the breaking open of the trunk. The unsaid is the written, and writing is left off when it is brought to reflect its own glance. In this is revealed that the content of the trunk has been as much a mystery to Caleb as to the reader. His mastery over the text is dissolved by the breaking of the illusion that he has had access to a tangible truth. The truth of his narrative is contained not as an absolute, but as another writing, a pre-text the existence of which is only conjectural. Until this point his own historian, Caleb's history is now closed off by the realization that truth is dissolved in the empty supplement of writing. The verbal confession of Falkland—the logos of an other—as the truth-basis of the text, is found not to hold: after a constant delay throughout the novel, the reader is brought to the realization that there is nothing to authenticate Caleb's (written) report of Falkland's (spoken) confession. This opens up a threatening possibility, as Caleb himself realizes in the original version:

Perhaps all men will reason on my story as these men reasoned. Perhaps I am beguiling myself during all this time, merely for want of strength to put myself in the place of an unprepossessed auditor, and to conceive how the story will impress every one that hears it. My innocence will then die with me! The narrative I have taken the pains to digest will then only perpetuate my shame and spread more widely the persuasion of my nefarious guilt! How excruciating so much as to suspect the possibility of such an issue to the scene!

(CW 332)

After all his disguises and deceptions, the possibility emerges that he is deceiving himself. According to Lacan (181) hearing oneself speak is the guarantor of the production of a signifying chain. If Caleb cannot take his own place to hear himself, the signifying chain of his innocence, and hence of his narrative, is broken. His innocence would die with him were his self-presence not guaranteed. And it is not, absolutely, when we realize that the trunk contains no referent. After being passed around various characters in the story, the reader can at last play the game of appropriating it for herself. She could even conjecture that the trunk “really” did contain nine hundred pounds, three gold repeaters, and a complete set of diamonds. This would give an extra dimension to the narrative: it would not just be a fiction claiming to be true, but a fiction (of a fiction claiming to be true) claiming to be true. I am not suggesting that we make a conjecture here, since Caleb does enough when he raises the possibility of introducing such an issue to his scene of writing.

Whilst the trunk may contain a “faithful narrative,” that which is handed down to the reader is subjected to a palimpsestial mediation. This maps the act of writing itself, in that it is the repetition of an other which we must assume to be the same, and yet is made different by that other's inaccessibility to us. It is in this difference that Caleb's existence is played out within the confines of his own text, but to make this explicit is to break the spell, and the “played out” of Caleb's existence is determined in a more ontologically definite manner, in that his text is closed off. Closed off, but not yet ended, since the repetition involved in this playing out is an infinitizing gesture. The text continues as a Postscript, but it is—can only be—a blank!, or, in the case of the published version, a post-narrative, in which the stasis of an all-consuming despair forecloses any temporal development:

Meanwhile I endure the penalty of my crime. Falkland's figure is ever in imagination before me. Waking or sleeping I still behold him. He seems mildly to expostulate with me for my unfeeling behaviour. I live the devoted victim of conscious reproach. Alas! I am the same Caleb Williams that, so short a time ago, boasted that, however great were the calamities I endured, I was still innocent.

(CW 325)

The fact of textuality itself has created a reversal of position in that it is now Caleb who is guilty of a crime, the crime being murder, through the termination of the text, of the subject of his writing. “Why should my reflections perpetually centre upon myself?” he asks, yet what else would he expect to find his self reflect? And, being self-reflecting, what claim does he have to being the same Caleb Williams? In his main script, in a parallel movement to the presence of Falkland, he was still innocent—still so, as long as he was the “future narrator” of the scenes in which he was acting a part. Now, Caleb being the present narrator of a postscript, Falkland takes a place in the other self of Caleb's imagination, causing another temporal shift in that he is before him. The residue of these pairings of reflection, repetition, etc. is innocence, which is left as an empty signifier. Another repetition remains: “My despair was criminal, was treason against the sovereignty of truth” (CW 323).

If “the truth or falsehood” of Caleb's conjecture as to the content of the trunk “is of little moment,” what claim can Caleb Williams have to be a reflection of “Things as they Are”? Perhaps the answer lies (provisionally) in the quality of reflection, and Caleb Williams may prove—or at least speculate—to be more of a statement about Being than about Things. There is a graphism at work in the novel which impinges on the text's capacity for being spoken: the read-outable is made redoubtable by what is a purely written difference or, since this is created by spacing, differance. I am referring here to the written lacunae which pervade the work; the literal spaces within the text which play a part no less problematic than those less tangible gaps in the plot.

An example is the temporal placing of the novel, and by “placing” I mean a gesture it makes to an extra-textual reality: “In the summer of the year Mr. Falkland visited his estate in our county after an absence of several months” (CW 5). Here the lacuna is “irreducibly graphic,”¹⁵ yet elsewhere there are extra-textual references which help us—though not fully—to give the text some historical placing:

Mr. Tyrrel was determined to prosecute the offence with the greatest severity: and his attorney, having made the proper enquiries for that purpose, undertook to bring it under that clause of the act 9 Geo. 1, commonly called The Black Act, which declares that “any person, armed with a sword or other offensive weapon, and having his face blacked, or being otherwise disguised, appearing in any warren or place where hares or conies have been or shall be usually kept, and being thereof convicted, shall be adjudged guilty of felony, and shall suffer death, as in cases of felony, without benefit of clergy.”

(CW 74)

The precise quotation of the Act in question is a pointer to some justification outside the text, an appeal to “Things as they Are,” and it is no sacrifice of the rigour of textuality to enter into the same spirit and bring one's knowledge of The Black Act, namely that it was passed in 1723 and repealed in 1827, to the text. This dates the action of the novel at post-1723, if we are to take the text's own word that it is “Things as they Are.” Yet this is undermined at the beginning of the novel by a lacuna where a date should be. This is so, because the grammar of temporality always already subverts its own truth. For the statement “Things as they Are” to be true, the text must be undated: it must enjoy a time continuum which is always already the present, otherwise it would be “Things as they Were,” or “Things as they Will Be.” Yet the proof that the text is not lying, that it is an accurate reflection of real affairs, depends on a reaching-out to some historically ascertainable event, such as The Black Act. If it is historically ascertainable, it is datable, and the lacuna becomes the place where the contradiction is accommodated. The text's truth becomes purely textual, which explains my title Things as they Are Written. My supplement to the text's title is the “Written,” but this is located in the text as an unwritten, a lacuna. “Spacing is writing” (Ellmann 29).

The same argument may be constructed out of the lacunae which determine the spatial placing of the novel. Some place-names will be given whilst others will be missed out, so that an extra-textual correspondence is alternately held out to us and withdrawn. These lacunae are, of course, an application of a convention governing many eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, and in sharing in this tradition of protecting the guilty—lying and lying behind it—is the reflection that that which Coleridge characterized as the “suspension of disbelief”—fiction's claim to be other than it is (its claim to be true)—depends upon the extra-textual gesture that there is an existing and contemporary party to be protected, a protection which is also one of the author from libel.

This positing of an author is not a regression into a biographical inaccessibility, but an assault upon the problem of history from a textual perspective. The bridge between textuality and historicity in Caleb Williams is the gesture of making Caleb his own historian, and the gesture itself is found in the margins of the text. Located in these margins, in the Prefaces to the first two editions, is the affirmed motive by which Caleb Williams has been produced. These margins are the gap between the title page labelling the text “By William Godwin” and the beginning of the text narrated in the first person by one “Caleb Williams.” We have already noted the aporias introduced by Caleb's assertion that his story will at least appear to have that consistency, which is seldom attendant but upon truth. Meanwhile, the Preface tells us:

It is now known to philosophers that the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.

(CW 1)

A metaphysical claim (does “the government” have a “spirit”?) by “philosophers,” based on a judgmental interpretation, is here set up as a “truth” to be communicated. This is a movement which repeats that which it criticizes: the intrusion of despotism is despotically asserted as a point of truth, then used as a means of intervention in the social scene in the vehicle of a novel. But to convey this “truth,” an “invention” is required. It is not surprising that Caleb's story only has the appearance of truth, since, through the medium of fiction, it becomes a “review,” a truth which is re-seen through the writings of philosophy and science: Caleb's story may be a “single” one, but his truth is second-hand, just as his writing is in a second hand, the first being Godwin's. This is a “truth” we can see but not grasp, since we are always one step removed. We can see more clearly, however, in considering the form of the Preface itself. It is a re-move, as Godwin points out in using the past tense (“it was proposed”) to refer to “the following work.” As Hegel points out, prefatory to a philosophical text a Preface may involve a norm of truth whilst being nevertheless an insertion of a fiction into a supposedly true discourse.¹⁶ But Godwin, in introducing “persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach,” is implying a distinction between the philosophical and the literary. This reverses Hegel's position, in that we now have a supposedly fictional work with a supposedly true Preface. The Hegelian point still holds, however, that a preface qua preface necessarily conceals a lie: namely “A pretense at writing before a text that one must have read before the preface can be written.”¹⁷ It would appear that Godwin has led himself into a contradiction by claiming his preface as a truth, when we know it to contain a fiction, and by claiming Caleb's narrative to be a fiction which contains a truth. We should not be deceived by appearance, though:

The following narrative is intended to answer a purpose more general and important than immediately appears on the face of it. The question now afloat in the world respecting things as they are, is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind.

(CW 1)

If the inmixing of truth and fiction leaves us still with the “question” of what claim the book has to be a reflection of Things as they Are, at least the lie inherent to prefacing is made explicit, thus questioning the question:

This preface was withdrawn in the original edition, in compliance with the alarms of booksellers. Caleb Williams made his first appearance in the world, in the same month in which the sanguinary plot broke out against the liberties of Englishmen, which was happily terminated with the acquittal of its first intended victims, in the close of that year. Terror was the order of the day; and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.

(CW 1 f)

This is not only a referral back to its own writing, but a referral back to a writing outside the text: the preface is wholly “Prae-Fatio” in that it distinguishes itself, by a gesture to an extra-textual real world, from the fictional world of the text proper. It is not Caleb who labels his text “Things as they Are,” but William Godwin, and the assertion of an author over his text has consequences for the act of making Caleb his own historian: the title of the work has become confused with that work's narrator and subject. Caleb Williams and Caleb Williams are as indistinguishable in writing as they are in speech, by the removal of a graphic difference which this personification entails. This suppression of difference is the means by which the claim of representing Things as they Are is supported. The claim of accuracy of reflection of the truth by the text not only appeals back to the title, but mimics the process of titling itself: both inside and outside the text, the title is a summary of what it does not tell. (This is paralleled within the text by the trunk.) Meanwhile, the note beginning “This preface …” has a similar status. Since it is untitled, we might assume it to share the title “Preface” that the main Preface comes under. But is “This preface” the one we see above, so that the note labels it as one would a picture in a catalogue; or is it this preface, making the note a part of it? The note was not withdrawn in the original edition, because it was not, as the underwritten dates tell us, written then. On the other hand, both pieces of text made their first appearance in the second edition, under the one title of “Preface.”

The frames to the text—the titles which are both inside and outside and both by and not by William Godwin; the second Preface which both is and is not part of the first Preface, the whole coming before a text it was written after—are, faithful to the logic of differance, different from themselves. This differance accommodates the two otherwise mutually exclusive titles: Things as they Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams. I suggested above that we call the chapter headings “William's' Chapter Headings.” Now, “If the author shall have taught a valuable lesson” (CW 1), and since the author is “himself” within an avowed exposition of his fiction, may we not call him Caleb Williams' Godwin?

Notes

1. William Godwin, Fleetwood: or, the New Man of Feeling (London: Richard Bentley, 1832) vii. Further citations appear in the text as Fleetwood.

2. William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its influence on Morals and Happiness, photo. fac. of 3rd edition, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols. (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1946) iii: 292. Volume iii contains variant readings of the 1st and 2nd editions. Further citations appear in the text as PJ.

3. Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb” (1957) in Selected Writings II: Word and Language (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971) 130-47. Peirce is cited on 132; Vološinov on 130. Jakobson proposes that “Any message is encoded by its sender and is to be decoded by its addressee,” and that “Both the message … and the underlying code … are vehicles of linguistic communication, but both of them function in a duplex manner; they may at once be utilized and referred to (= pointed at)” (130). He accordingly distinguishes four duplex types: message referring to message, code referring to code, message referring to code and code referring to message. Reported speech is an example of the first, and implicit in this is that whatever is denoted is known to the speaker only from the testimony of others, even if that other is oneself at a former time. An example of the second is proper names: they have an obvious circularity in that they mean anyone to whom the name is assigned, whilst no general meaning could be abstracted from them. “A message referring to the code is in logic termed an autonymous mode of speech” (131) as in “‘Pup’ is a noun which means a young dog.” The fourth type is the shifter, which is “distinguished from all other constituents of the linguistic code solely by [its] compulsory reference to the given message” (132): it combines both the functions of utility and of index. Hence the word “I” both designates the utterer (and is existentially related to his utterance) and is also representative of its object “by a conventional rule.” In other words, “I” has both a particular and a general meaning: it is both “I, myself” when I use it, and “you” when you use it. The apparent paradox of these mutually exclusive positions has given problems alike to children learning language and philosophers studying it, but it is sufficient to say that the meaning of “I” depends on the context in which it is uttered. At least, this is true of speech: I wish to show that writing involves further problems, because it allows the possibility of an inmixing not only within this fourth category of Jakobson's, but also between it and the others (most notably the message/message one).

4. Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958) in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977) 179-225. Lacan sees inability to come to terms with the paradoxical nature of the shifter as a cause of verbal hallucination. Hearing a word “loaded with invective” the subject (patient) will recognize that it is allusive, but be unable to say to whom it alludes. The word will, in fact, have been drawn from the subject's imagination to supply the place of the word “I” which the subject finds unspeakable: “In the place where the unspeakable object is rejected in the real, a word makes itself heard, so that, coming in the place of that which has no name, it was unable to follow the intention of the subject without detaching itself from it by the dash preceding the reply: opposing its disparaging antistrophe to the cursing of the strophe thus restored to the patient with the index of the I … it employs the crudest trickery of the imaginary” (183). Obviously, Lacan depends upon an oral/aural relationship between addresser and addressee, whilst our “William Godwin” bears a textual relation to us and an intertextual relation to his texts.

5. On framing and “the frame” as an undecidable, see Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” trans. Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ron and Marie-Rose Logan, in Yale French Studies 52: Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy (1975): 31-113; and Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” in La verité en peinture [Truth in Painting] (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) 19-168, esp. 44-94. On undecidables see Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1981) 39-47.

6. William Godwin, Things as they Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, published as Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970) xxxi. This edition, which I have used throughout, is based on the ms and the 1st edition (London: B. Crosby, 1794) and incorporates variant readings from the subsequent four editions revised by Godwin. Further citations appear in the text as CW.

7. i.e. the third: there are few substantial revisions in the second (1796).

8. Maud Ellmann, “Spacing Out: A Double Entendre on Mallarmé,” in Oxford Literary Review iii 2 (1978): 24. Hereafter cited as Ellmann in the text.

9. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey, Alan Tyson and Angela Richards, “Pelican Freud Library” iv (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) 521.

10. Forester refuses to listen to Falkland's accusations until Caleb “is within reach of a hearing” (CW 162).

11. David McCracken, in a “Note on the Text” to his edition, remarks that “Falkland's mysterious ‘chest’ becomes a ‘trunk’ throughout the second edition” (CW XXV).

12. (Co)incidentally, there is a chain of furniture showrooms in the UK named Court's, whose advertising slogan in 1984-85 was “Seeing is believing.”

13. And of himself: during the trial he has produced a letter which he had written to Falkland previously.

14. This is true both of the ms and of the published versions.

15. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 92: “[Fenellosa's] influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition.”

16. G. W. F. Hegel, “Preface” to The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper, 1967).

17. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator's Preface,” x, in Derrida, Of Grammatology ix-lxxxvii.