The “half-told and mangled tale” of Caleb Williams
by Julian Darius
 While many have touched upon the unreliability of the narrator in Caleb Williams (1794), they have done so primarily in connection with Godwin’s politics, psychology in general, or the novel’s characteristics as detective novel. Godwin as well as the text encourage a political reading. As Maurice Hindle remarks, “that Godwin originally viewed Caleb Williams as a vehicle for the philosophical anarchism preached in his magnum opus Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) is made clear in numerous ways by the text” (x-xi). Godwin’s withdrawn preface described his desire to communicate “truth … to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach” (3). Moreover, as Hindle has observed, “in many ways it is impossible to separate the ‘literary’ and the ‘biographical’ in the case of Godwin,” an anarchist and sympathizer with the French revolution (xxviii).
From this proceeds so many dry comparisons of Caleb Williams with Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, as when George Sherburn interrupts a description of the prison scenes to assert “But Godwin’s real purpose was to dramatize ideas” (ix). Evan Radcliffe contrasts “the austerely logical approach of Political Justice and the narrative account of Caleb Williams” (528), finding that Caleb Williams tests Godwin’s theory through practice or narrative (553). This is not so dissimilar from such dreary statements as Marilyn Butler’s: “The power of fiction to generalize through the particular enables Caleb Williams to enact metaphorically the relationship between hereditary government and governed” (357-58). Similarly, Kenneth Graham, writing on politics without a soul for poetry, occludes the unreliable narrator and conveniently finds that “from the confused motivations of unstable characters in an unstable world develops a firm and assured plot” (81).
There is some good reason, however, for addressing politics and narrative as intermixed. The narrative frequently addresses the relationship between truth and class, utilizing words like “say” and “tell” that connect this relationship with narration. Ordering Emily’s arrest, Tyrrel states: “I tell you she does owe me, -- owes me eleven hundred pounds. -- The law justifies it. -- What do you think laws were made for? I do nothing but right, and right I will have” (85; italics mine). Moreover, trials and legal proceedings, with their narratives and counter-narratives, run throughout the book. Forester tells Caleb how to present his case, dissecting what the whole system of courts and hearings expects: “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” (169). The rules of trials are shown, again and again, to have little to do with truth. For all of these reasons, Cheryl Walsh can assert that
Caleb Williams is a novel about narratives and their credibility, whether … told by an individual, such as in a courtroom deposition, or by society at large in the form of a person’s reputation. Godwin illustrates that, in the context of Caleb’s society, the believability of any narrative is independent of its truth or falsehood. Although truth may ultimately prevail …, it is not by virtue of truth’s … merits, but rather by the strength of its telling. Even if Caleb has the truth on his side throughout the entire novel (and the truth of his story is continually thrown into question by the paranoia of his narrative voice), it is not until he learns how to tell his tale that people allow themselves to hear it. (23)
In this brilliant way of putting it, Walsh is absolutely right. But this too reduces Caleb Williams to a political text, albeit a narrative one.
Some writers have focused on Caleb Wiilliams as precursor to detective novels, incited by the fact that Godwin wrote the three volumes in reverse order. Michael Cohen argues that “Caleb Williams, because of its inconsistencies, is a remarkably accurate anticipation of what is to come in mystery and detective fiction” (204). Other writers focus on the relationship between Caleb Williams and psychology -- while doing a remarkable job avoiding the issue of the unreliable narrator as a literary maneuver. Melinda Rabb has described how most of the characters in the novel are at least partially insane, or insane part of the time. Diagnosing Caleb with a severe case of the nerves, which make people talkative, Peter Melville Logan writes:
[the] association of nerves with narrative makes problematic many narratives in the period that, like Caleb Williams, depend on a nervous narrator to testify, from personal experience, to the injustice of society. (207)
Thus Caleb Williams becomes an artifact, an epiphenomenon of a psychological disorder rather than the author’s biography.
This remarkable insistence not to address Caleb Williams’s narrator as having literary merits can only astound. Perhaps this is because such a focus feels out of place, too proleptic to be serious. Wayne Booth’s (in)famous The Rhetoric of Fiction only addresses modern unreliable narrators. William Riggan’s PÍcaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator includes works as old as The Golden Ass, but makes no reference to Godwin or Caleb Williams. In fact, people are more willing to write about Caleb Williams as a spiritual allegory, arguing that Falkland represents God (as Walter Allen has), than address the unreliable narrator as a fictional narrator -- not a political one or one that demonstrates psychological beliefs on his time, but a narrator of fiction, as we would so easily address a modern instance.
Yet we have every reason to treat Caleb Williams as a novel, rather than a biographical or cultural epiphenomenon. Even in the original intent, Godwin’s political message subordinated itself as a concern to the writing of a ripping yarn. This may be visible in Godwin’s statement: “I will write a tale that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before” (Fleetwood ix). In an unpublished 1798 manuscript, Godwin wrote that he started Caleb “with no further design than that of a slight composition, to produce a small supply of money, but never to be acknowledged: it improved and acquired weight in the manufacture” (quoted by Hindle, p. xxv). In other words, the narrative as narrative got away from him. Hindle has described how Godwin changed his ending both to achieve a better fiction and to better influence his audience (xxxvii-xxxix). Gary Kelly has argued that this choice was based on Godwin’s own feeling that his ending was too dogmatic (197-98). Perhaps the best such statement is that of James Mackintosh, from 1815; he called Caleb Williams “a striking ... example, of the purpose of the writer being swallowed up by the interest of the work; of a man of ability intending to take part in the disputes of the moment, but led by the instinct of his talent to address himself to the permanent feelings of human nature.”1
While Godwin may claim political motivation, Caleb, for his part, claims to be “penning … these memoirs only by a desire to divert my mind from the deplorableness of my situation, and a faint idea that posterity may … be induced to render me a justice which my contemporaries refuse” (5). We have good reason to doubt Caleb as narrator. He confesses that he “derive[s] a melancholy pleasure from dwelling upon the circumstances which imperceptibly paved the way to my ruin” (129). During the fire at Falkland’s, Caleb darts for Falkland’s trunk, which he opens only to be immediately caught. Caleb admits that this “act was in some sort an act of insanity” (138), “a kind of instant insanity” that resulted from the convenience of the circumstances (139). Near the end (324), Caleb confesses: “I sometimes fear that I shall be wholly deserted of my reason” (324). As if to answer that this has already happened, the narrative shifts in style, becoming considerably frenzied, full of exclamation marks and dashes -- and it is exactly at this point that Caleb decides to write: “I will unfold a tale!” (325). And, of course, in the original ending Caleb wound up in an insane asylum.
A number of coincidences spot the narrative and suggest that it is in some way fictionalized. After relating Falkland’s sudden appearance and rescue of Emily from
Grimes,2 having already rescued her from
fire,3 the narrator remarks:
It may seem strange that Mr Falkland should thus a second time have been the savior of Miss Melville, and that under circumstances the most unexpected and singular. But in this instance it is easily to be accounted for. (68)
The narrator proceeds to provide an elaborate, though altogether brief, explanation that has Falkland regularly patrolling the forest with his servants -- all based upon a rumor. By the eighth chapter, then, Caleb is aware of his narrative’s suspiciously coincidental nature and feels the need to make some awkward explanations for Falkland happening to be where he is. The narrative may be perspicuous, but it is hardly convincing -- though we are not altogether sure, at this point, whether this attempt to force the narrative represents ineptitude on Godwin’s or Caleb’s part.
I have already mentioned Falkland’s convenient timing, during the second convenient fire, in entering the room just when Caleb has opened the trunk. Similarly, immediately after remarking that the crowd at the rural assembly “seemed to want a leader” in confronting Tyrrel, we are suddenly told: “At this critical moment Mr Falkland entered the room. Mere accident had enabled him to return sooner than he expected” (98). Similarly, while Caleb talks to forester, “without the smallest notice, and as if he had dropped upon us from the clouds, Mr Falkland burns into the room” (155). Falkland’s arrival is tenuously explained by his having an appointment, but this requires Forester to have conveniently “forgotten his appointment” (156). Perhaps such coincidences are merely the onset of Victorian literature, or Godwin’s incompitence. But we would do well to remember that, by comparison, Falkland’s narration of Caleb’s theft is much more consistent than Caleb’s entire story, in which such coincidences smack of logical fissures in need of sealing.
Indeed, Caleb seems conscious of his work as self-conscious presentation. Having spent a chapter (IX) digressing to detail Falkland’s dispute with Tyrrell over Hawkins, Caleb writes: “I go on with my tale. I go on to … lift the curtain, and bring forward the last act of the tragedy” (82). Stage metaphors are often used, suggesting Caleb’s awareness of the presentation of himself -- and the fictionalizing that inevitably accompanies such presentations.
Forester tells Caleb that he must focus on “the plausibility of your tale, you must take care to render it consistent and complete” (177). For Caleb at the time, this is repugnant: truth should bear itself out, winning over an audience without being “told,” without having itself ameliorated to concerns of “plausibility,” of consistency and completeness. Such concerns, then, are at odds with truth. Yet, from the start, Caleb asserts that his “story will, at least, appear to have that consistency which is seldom attendant but upon truth” (5) -- an utter contradiction and a clear indication that he is presenting a case rather than telling the truth. Similarly, before relating Falkland’s life, Caleb documents his sources and tactics in reporting, showing a desire for objectivity in his attempt to “give all possible perspicuity to the series of events” and “to avoid confusion in my narrative” (11). According to the terms of the narrative itself, these are signs, clear to those who have already read the whole, of fictionalization.
A critical point occurs at the juncture of volumes ones and two. Our narrator begins the final chapter of volume one by stating: “I shall endeavour to state the remainder of this narrative in the words of Mr Collins” (100). He begins volume two by stating:
I have stated the narrative of Mr Collins, interspersed with such other information as I was able to collect, will all the exactness that my memory, assisted by certain memorandums I made at the time, will afford. 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 given 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. The same scrupulous fidelity restrains me from altering the manner of Mr Collins’s narrative … . (111)
In any modern novel, this would be profound call to unreliability. The mentioning of memory’s difficulties, the admission of mixing information, and the protestation itself all argue strongly for such a reading. The utter irony of the passage is astoundingly well-done. Indeed, the only claim to “authenticity” is made in comparison to “a court” -- which we know Caleb, writing supposedly after having lived through the events of the novel, believes has no business with the truth.
It is here that our narrator begins to doubt Falkland. Following the above passage, he quickly observes: “There was a connection and progress in this narrative, which made it altogether unlike the little village incidents I had hitherto known” (111). He then relates:
At present I was satisfied with … considering every incident in its obvious sense. But the story … was for ever in my thoughts … . I turned it a thousand ways, and examined it in every point of view. In the original communication it appeared sufficiently distinct and satisfactory; but as I brooded over it, it gradually became mysterious. (112)
In this brooding, Hawkins becomes “strange”: “So firm, so sturdily honest and just, as he appeared at first; all at once to become a murderer!” (112). Wondering whether Falkland could have really been the murderer, Caleb recounts Falkland’s good character and “the dying confession of Hawkins,” but comes to no conclusions (112). The overall effect is decidedly modernist, which often sought to duplicate in prose what cubism had done in art: turn the subject a myriad ways and examine it in every point of view. This process leads to a lack of discernable truth, both with Falkland’s guilt and with Caleb’s narrative. Indeed, the questioning of Hawkins’s confession prompts us to question not only Falkland’s confession but Caleb’s -- such testimony is unreliable.
There still remains the issue of the trunk. Caleb refers to it as “the mysterious trunk, out of which the shadow of a criminal accusation could be extorted” (166). The trunk appears in the first chapter, in which Caleb enters “a closet, or small apartment, which was separated from the library by a narrow gallery”: “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” (9). Falkland, the person in the room, shows “symptoms of confusion,” giving way “with a violent effort” to “rage” (10). Calling Caleb a “villain,” then a “wretch,” and finally a “devil,” Falkland rants: “you want to ruin me. You … spy upon my actions” (10). Told to leave, Caleb does, hearing “the door shut after me with violence” (10). Later, Falkland acts as if he has “something of which he wished to disburthen his mind,” but only silently presses “five guineas” into Caleb’s hand, interpreted as a bribe for “secrecy” (10). When the trunk next appears, during the fire, Falkland is prepared to kill Caleb for violating it. All of this is indeed strange behavior, but it need not be produced by any one particular source: as Caleb has observed while studying Falkland, the same behavior may be read in multiple ways. Falkland, of course, claims the trunk held the money and other items Caleb stole (171) -- a possibility in some ways more reliable than Caleb’s own 350-page story.
Ultimately, the question is never answered; as Caleb writes:
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 relic connected with the fate of the unhappy Tyrrel. I am now persuaded that the secret it encloses is a faithful narrative of that [murder]. (326)
Such speculations are, within Caleb’s own narrative, quite ridiculous. Falkland’s confession, if true or if it even occurred, was prompted by the extent of Caleb’s curiosity rather than the open trunk; after all, if the ultimate evidence is within the trunk, Falkland could simply move it. Moreover, Falkland’s defensiveness over the trunk occurs, as I have already noted, long before Tyrrel’s murder. The trunk thus serves as a wild card, a floating signifier to which we can imagine any meaning. Caleb chooses to imagine his vindication, even the truth itself, but this can only be fanciful. We may be reminded of Forester’s words to Caleb: “where there is mystery, there is always something at bottom that will not bear the telling” (155). We may also be reminded of James’s use of ambiguity and the way in which any revealed contents cannot satisfy as much as the imagination. Surely this, if nothing else, signals that Godwin’s narrative had run so far away from a political treatise in novel form that Caleb Williams is a great and mature novel in its own right, worthy of being taken on its own terms -- rather than as a trunk which conveniently conceals a political agenda, a demonstration of the era’s psychological beliefs, or the discovery of the detective novel.
The quoted passage, moreover, occurs in a paragraph that begins, “The pen lingers in my trembling fingers!” -- bringing attention to Caleb’s own writing. The “faithful narrative” is what is unavailable to Caleb, whose own narrative has been unfaithful. Caleb does not have all the answers at hand, but he also has admitted to factual distortions. The trunk then, in Caleb’s “trembling” insanity, comes to contain Caleb’s book as it might have been -- a work with “that consistency which is seldom attendant but upon truth,” or something other than, in the last phrase of the revised ending, “a half-told and mangled tale” (337).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Butler, Marilyn. “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams.” Romanticism: A Critical Reader. Ed. Duncan Wu. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.
Cohen, Michael. “Godwin’s Caleb Williams: Showing the Strains in Detective Fiction.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10:2 (January 1998).
Godwin, William. Things as They Are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Ed. Maurice Hindle. Penguin Books, 1988. Citations to the novel and to Hindle come from this edition.
Godwin, William. Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, Volume 3: Caleb Williams. Ed. Pamela Clemit. London: William Pickering, 1992.
Godwin, William. The Adventures of Caleb Williams or Things as They Are. Ed. Herbert Van Thal. London: Cassell, 1966. Cited for the introduction by Walter Allen.
Godwin, William. The Adventures of Caleb Williams or Things as They Are. Ed. George Sherburn. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1960. Cited in connection with Sherburn’s introduction.
Godwin, William. Fleetwood: Or the New Man of Feeling. Standard Novels 22. London: Bentley, 1832. New York: AMS Press, 1975.
Graham, Kenneth W. The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. New York: AMS Press, 1990.
Kelly, Gary. The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
Logan, Peter Melville. “Narrating Hysteria: Caleb Williams and the Cultural History of Nerves.” Novel 29:2 (Winter 1996).
Rabb, Melinda Alliker. “Psychology and Politics in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams: Double Bond or Double Bind?” Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Christopher Fox. New York: AMS Press, 1987.
Radcliffe, Evan. “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist: Political Justice, Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative.”
Riggan, William. PÍcaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.
Walsh, Cheryl. “Truth, Prejudice, and the Power of Narrative in Caleb Williams.” English Language Notes XXXV:4 (June 1998).
NOTES
This essay was first made available on persiancaesar.com on 8 July 2003.
It was written on 8-9 May 2001 for Michael Griffin’s class at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
1 Quoted by Clemit (vii) and cited as “Review of Godwin, The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton … (1815),” coming from “Edinburgh Review 25 (October 1815), 485-501 (487).” [BACK]
2 Grimes is, of course, following Tyrrel’s orders -- or so we are told. [BACK]
3 In volume one, chapter VII. [BACK]
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