The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwin's "Caleb Williams" (review)

174 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:2 Kenneth W. Graham. The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwin's "Caleb Williams." New York: AMS Press, 1990. xii + 226pp. US$37.50. ISBN 0-404-63516-4. The strength of Kenneth Graham's book lies not in its focus on the grand issue of the title or even on the specialized focus of the subtitle but in its wide-ranging and intelligent discussion of die novel itself and its place in literary history. Graham examines the politics of tile novel (including gender, class, and legal issues), the book as detective novel, the psychology of die novel as manifested in narrative discourse, its godiicism ("Caleb Williams is a central and influential work in the Gothic tradition" [p. 133]), its political philosophy vis-à-vis Edmund Burke, and its influence on later authors. What Tysdal did for all of Godwin's novels in a general, comprehensive, critical study (1981), Graham has done for Godwin's most famous novel. But if the book is admirably broad, given its limited subject, politics and ideology do nonetheless have privileged status, as might reasonably be expected in a study of Godwin or of Caleb Williams. The term "ideology," of the subtitle, is usually used by Graham in a negative sense: ideology refers to a system of illusory beliefs, false opinions, and prejudices. "The attitudes and assumptions that strengthen the existing order constitute ideology" (p. 197), and such attitudes and assumptions naturally constitute die enemy in a novel originally titled Things as They Are and written by a philosophical anarchist. Graham writes as a sympathetic Godwinian. In his view radicals employ argument and reactionaries resort to ideology (p. 53). The most important reactionary is Burke, but Jane Austen is a fellow-traveller since she "projects in her novels a reality infused with a conservative, Burkean ideology" (p. 53). Godwin's novel, on the odier hand, "assaults convictions and prejudices about the nature of social and personal reality; it undermines ideology" (p. 58). In spite of sometimes oversimplified political distinctions, Graham does not find easy political truths in die novel; instead, the Caleb Williams of his account consists of complex narrative actions informed by philosophical determinism and uncanny Godiic doublings witilin a corrupt Burkean world. Godwin, Graham says, "has to be placed high in die list of those who gave die modern novel its form" (p. 59), and he lists an impressive number of innovations that may be claimed for Caleb Williams. One of Graham's purposes is to render literary justice to Godwin's novel and in attempting this he finds himself up against tile same enemy as Godwin: "Ideology and the habit of neglect seem to have acted in concert to deny appropriate acknowledgment to an important English novel" (p. 202). Caleb and Falkland, as Graham reads them, are bodi victims of their environment; Godwin was a victim of his time ("it is a sad irony that so great an enemy of prejudice ... should become so great a victim" [p. 2]); and Caleb Williams is die final victim, since "prejudices have persisted into die present" (p. 2). In remedying the prejudices, Graham analyses with insight die narrative methods of the novel, he studies Godwin's use of the Doppelgänger in a series of characters, and he interestingly traces die effect of Caleb Williams on Political Justice, as well as the reverse. He adroitly applies Godwin's concepts of character and of evil to his reading of die novel and to his understanding of the controversial ending, where he finds no evil, no blame, "no simple messages and no simple resolutions" (p. 106). Caleb's final insights about his "overweening regard" for self and die "corrupt wilderness" of society are mistaken products of his solipsism, his perverse sense of responsibility. By seeing REVIEWS 175 Falkland as Christ, Caleb becomes Judas, falling into "an ideology of original sin" (p. 96). "Caleb's closure demonstrates and undermines ideological individualism" (p. 163), the delusion diat masks Godwinian necessity. The battle diat forms die background of this book is diat between the late eighteenthcentury "radicals" and "reactionaries" rather man current literary Üieories or critical debate. Graham draws on some ideas...