Literary Apologies & The Construction ofMeaning:
Making Selves in Wordsworth’s The Pre l ude and Godwin’s Caleb Wi l l iams
One fundamental characteristic of the novel, as Ian Watt has
shown, is its formal realism, or the way the novel replicates
elements of actual lived life. The imaginary realism of the novel
and how it has been able to affect the lives of real people has
been a key part of its dominance over other literary forms. Nancy
Armstrong begins her 2005 book How Novels Think with the claim that
“the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject
are, quite literally, one and the same” (7). In order to create
the individual, Armstrong argues, novels had to overcome
competing visions of the subject offered by other kinds of
writing. Historically the pre-eminent form of imaginative
literature had been the poem, and the rise of the novel is
simultaneously the story of the fall of poetry from its once
secure position at the apex of literary influence. This fall was
directly related to how Romantic poetry conceived of the subject.
Poetry, between the time of Milton and Wordsworth, instead of
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turning towards the realism of the novel, turns sharply away from
it.
Novels, with their focus on quotidian relations, were
inevitably full of human interactions. In contrast, Romantic
poetry, with its ideal of “emotion recollected in tranquility”
studiously avoided such interactions. The presence of others in
the Romantic poem is not something to be welcomed, but to be
viewed as a threat. Think, for example, of Wordsworth’s
discomfort with another human presence in “The Discharged
Soldier,” or the way the wedding-guest must be “compelled” to
listen to the mariner’s story in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner.” Novels, on the other hand, even when the
presence of other people is unpleasant, view the discomfort of
the human encounter as a necessary prelude to better social
relations. Mr. B’s violations of the body and spirit of Pamela in
Richardson’s novel are part of what she must endure to achieve
their reconciliation and marriage. The wrongs he does to her lead
to his personal reformation and their eventual domestic
happiness. So too does Moll, in Defoe’s Moll Flanders, tell her
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story of personal sufferings as part and parcel of her later
redemption and social acceptance.
This pattern of moving from relative isolation to a position
of social integration in many early British novels stands in
sharp contrast to the poetic Romanticism of Wordsworth that
traces a movement from a life among people—in schools,
universities, and cities, to the glories of his near-solitary
ascent of Mount Snowdon in the final book of The Prelude. In a
sense, Wordsworth’s prototypically modern epic is about the
disappearance of other people. The individual of his poem is
formed not through any relationship with society, in the fires of
the face-to-face encounter, but through the conscious avoidance
of others. For example, Wordsworth informs us in Book XII that
cities are “where the human heart is sick.” The sorts of
encounters one has in cities—the inevitable bumping into
strangers on the street, the serendipitous meeting—is the logical
source of that sickness. Though many English novels of the 18th
and 19th centuries avoid cities with equal ardor, yet most remain
narratives of social encounter. Austen’s famous quip about three
or four families in a country village being the proper plot
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setting for a novel, nonetheless leaves her stories populated
with numerous rides in carriages, evenings of dancing, and
discussions in parlors. People are everywhere and are everywhere
together.
I want to illuminate these different perspectives on realism
in the novel and the modern poem by looking one particular kind
of human encounter—that of the apology. More than just a
rhetorical trope, the apology is a negotiation between different
parties about the proper bounds of their behavior. In the novel’s
terms the apology is an encounter involving moral argument. This
everyday social ritual plays an important role in many 18th
century British literary works. My claim in this paper will be
that the apology helps form Armstrong’s modern subject. To write
a complete history of the individual one must, in my view, also
consider the language of apologies. The differences in how poems
and novels treat the apology is closely linked to how they view
subjects. Burney’s Evelina, for example, contains over seventy
apologies, while Fielding’s Tom Jones features well over a hundred
apologies of many rich and varied sorts. In poems of the same
era, however, even a long narrative poem such as Wordsworth’s The
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Prelude, moments of apology are quite rare. Poetic apologies
differ from novelistic ones not only in number, but also in kind.
Most apologies in novels are what we might call apologies of
manners—one character does some wrong to another, and then offers
an explanation or justification for that action. Poetic apologies
also explain and justify actions, but tend to avoid direct human
encounters. In particular, Wordsworth’s strain of Romantic poetic
idealism is caught between two imperatives: one recognizes the
source of wrongdoing in the human encounter itself; the other
wants the text to serve, nonetheless, as a form of moral
instruction. The tension between these two needs often gives
poetic apologies a very different shape from their novelistic
counterparts. To illustrate these differences I want to look at
some key apologetic moments in two Romantic era works:
Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude and William Godwin’s 1793 novel Caleb
Williams.
In Book I of The Prelude Wordsworth describes the commission
of two wrongs—his thefts of birds and of a boat. How Wordsworth
describes and rhetorically responds to these wrongs is an
important element in how he conceives of the subject. In the
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first case Wordsworth steals game birds from traps set by other
hunters.
…Sometimes it befellIn these night wanderings that a strong desireO’erpowered my better reason, and the birdWhich was the captive of another’s toilsBecame my prey; and, when the deed wasdoneI heard among the solitary hillsLow breathings coming after me, and soundsOf undistinguishable motion, stepsAlmost as silent as the turf they trod. (I, 324–332)
From the perspective of the encounter, what are we to make of
this sort of language? Note first the situation: Wordsworth is
walking alone through the countryside late at night. We are miles
from the bustling streets of a city or the domestic interiors of
a home—places where Wordsworth might conceivably meet someone
else. His “deed” is done in darkness, away from the physical
presence of any potential accuser. Since no one but Wordsworth
himself can testify to the commission of this wrong, its moment
of revelation here should really be viewed as a confession.
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But Wordsworth’s claim that a “strong desire o’erpowered
[his] better reason” is an attempt to justify these confessed
actions to the reader. Even as the poet admits to a wrong, he
precedes that admission with a denial of his responsibility. This
combination of rhetorical confession and defense is what we
conventionally think of as an apology. However, since there is
neither accusation nor any negotiation about the status of his
deed, this attempt to justify lacks the social aspect of a true
apology. Rather, Wordsworth’s language here is closer to that of
an excuse. Like the criminal who defends himself with the
convenient claim of temporary insanity, the idea that desire
overpowers reason works to wholly absolve the poet of his crime.
The use of the passive “it befell” supports the contention that
these actions were really beyond any human control. This passive
construction denies causality—the existence of any link between
the wrong and a motivating cause; the wrong has simply happened.
Like Wordsworth’s definition of poetry itself, the bird theft
happens as a result of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings.” In this case neither the theft nor the act of writing
involves society at large; both are essentially private acts. The
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reader is not a participant in this scene so much as a voyeur—
someone who, through writing, is permitted to peer into the
poet’s private life.
Despite his language of excuse in the first part of the
passage, Wordsworth is not quite finished with his confession,
for he tells us that his misdeed results in the rise of a
frightening figure that follows him. This figure is a spectral
form, limited in its emanation to breaths and steps. The poet
cannot tell whether the figure is human or animal. This figure
breathes but never speaks; its steps approach but don’t ever
reach him. Despite this experience Wordsworth continues his
nocturnal meanderings, and like a guard dog on a leash, closely
bound to the place where the wrong was committed, the specter
gradually falls behind. In the end Wordsworth permits himself
neither self accusation nor any overt penance for this wrong.
Society, with its explicit laws and punishments, remains here
largely mute and powerless—present only as a vague, inhuman
figure that momentarily terrifies the poet before it drops behind
him and is forgotten.
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Wordsworth’s famous boat-stealing episode occurs only a few
lines later. The first spectral figure has apparently not
deterred him from the commission of nighttime thefts. This new
misdeed is similar in form to the first, and perhaps equally
wrong: “It was an act of stealth/And troubled pleasure...(I, 388–
9) Wordsworth admits. But because the poet has not learned the
lesson he attempted to teach himself—the injunction against
stealing—the figure that frightens the poet after this second
theft is stronger and far more terrifying than the first.
When from behind that craggy Steep, till thenThe bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,And growing still in stature, the huge CliffRose up between me and the stars, andstill,With measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me… (I, 405–412).
Whereas in the bird theft the presence always trailed behind him,
here the figure rises in front, blocking his way forward. Instead
of being merely breaths or steps, this new form has a head. The
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poet strikes at the figure several times, but like the Medusa of
ancient legend, this violence only makes it more powerful.
Finally, unable to beat this terrifying figure off, the poet
returns the stolen boat to its mooring.
This new figure is closer to a monster than the former, and
though this presence too neither speaks to condemn nor arrives to
punish, yet the fear it causes pushes the social, dialogic aspect
of the apology even further away. The poet satisfies his
conscience here not through any acknowledgement of stealing as a
social and public wrong, but instead through the physical action
of restitution. Because what was taken has been returned, in the
poet’s mind no wrong was committed. The earlier language of
excuse has largely disappeared: Wordsworth’s description of his
theft as an act of “stealth” and “troubled pleasure” is largely
descriptive and almost clinically distant. The moral status of
the deed is framed in rigorously analytical language. Justice, a
social ideal arrived at only through face-to-face encounter and
negotiation, has been essentially reduced here to action and
reaction.
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The bird and boat thefts exist on a similar plane of
apologetic form—in each instance a misdeed done to people is
recognized, but the human interaction that would ordinarily
demand an apologetic performance is subverted by a natural
presence that arouses fear in the poet. Though in each instance
the presence produces frightful emotions, in neither does it
accuse, condemn, or punish. Since neither figure ever speaks, the
conventional apologetic elements of verbal accusation, acceptance
of a limited measure of wrong, and then negotiation leading to
agreement have disappeared. Wordsworth’s attempts at trying to
convert social wrongs into natural ones shows how his moral
individual is created far from the presence of other people, in a
sublime encounter with the primordial forces of nature. Since
apologies are distinguished from events in the world through
being verbal acts, their absence in these scenes means that
Wordsworth’s apologetic performances happen only when the
incidents he has experienced are replayed for an imaginary
audience of readers. In Wordsworth’s The Prelude we find the
apology not in the action of the poem, but in the act of writing
it—in the imagined interaction between the poet and his readers.
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As we move from bird to boat thefts and away from the language of
excuse towards that of description, this element of writing as
apology comes to assume a larger role in the work.
Alan Liu, in Wordsworth: The Sense of History has argued that for
Wordsworth the past is merely a referent, an abstract background
against which the poet seeks to define a sense of self. In Liu’s
reading, while Wordsworth recognizes the past, history is always
constituted as a set of recollections from which the poet stands
apart. For Wordsworth the recollected event is a looming presence
behind, but the realities of that past are never directly
confronted. Liu suggests that the escape from the consequences of
wrongdoing is an important part of how Wordsworth constitutes the
self. In Liu’s view, history for Wordsworth is not narrative or
linear, but is composed of “spots of time” that help define the
individual. These spots of time, interrupting the narrative flow
of life, provide a framework for making sense of wrongdoing.
Caleb Williams takes the conventional novelistic apology
involving a human encounter and takes it to its logical
conclusion—a situation where the face-to-face verbal exchange has
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so intimately bound two characters that responsibility for the
crime is wholly transferred from one character to the other. In a
key incident, Ferdinando Falkland has confessed to his secretary,
Caleb Williams, that he, Falkland, is a murderer. That confession
turns Caleb into the unwitting bearer of Falkland’s wrongs. Their
relationship in the novel is based on the conceit that Caleb
cannot escape the history this confession recounts, and so cannot
perform the apologetic negotiation necessary for the two men to
restore their relationship. Caleb’s continual attempts to flee
from his master are at the same time his attempts to avoid the
consequences of being Falkland’s confessor. But Godwin constructs
his novel so that Caleb cannot escape from this acquired
responsibility. Wherever Caleb goes, whatever he does—even when
in desperation he tries to flee England—Falkland will always be
there, either in person, or indirectly through his influence on
other people. In order to recognize this responsibility Caleb
will ultimately have to make a public apology for Falkland’s
crimes.
In the final stage of his flight, Caleb settles in a small
town in rural Wales, where for a moment he believes he has
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finally found freedom from Falkland’s predations. While there he
comes into contact with a woman called Laura Denison whom he
believes to be kind, virtuous, and of unprejudiced feelings. But
Caleb fails to grasp that even where Falkland cannot physically
reach, a printed text can. In his attempts at securing Caleb from
the revelation of his confession Falkland has had published a
pamphlet called “THE WONDERFUL AND SURPRISING HISTORY OF CALEB WILLIAMS.”
As with the murder Falkland admits to in his oral confession, the
history told in the printed pamphlet makes Caleb responsible for
acts and crimes he did not commit. After Laura reads about
Caleb’s story, Caleb tries to persuade her of the falsity of its
narrative, but she refuses to hear him. As Falkland no doubt
intended, she accepts only the manufactured version of Caleb’s
story told in the text. Her response to Caleb’s attempt at a
defense is to reply:
Your conduct, even at this moment, in my opinion, condemns you. True virtue refuses the drudgery of explanation and apology. True virtue shines by its own light and needs no art to set it off…Virtue sir, consists in actions, and not in words (404).
For Laura, any act of verbal apology would itself be immoral.
Apologies, in her view, can never be virtuous. Though she does
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not say so directly, this is because there is a difference
between oral and written apologies. Oral apologies, in her view,
are merely excuses; virtue comes strictly from actions. The
pamphlet, however, convinces people to believe that the stories
told there recount real actions and events. Indeed, the
representation of real life in print is better than reality, for
it persuades Laura that all the real-world evidence she has had
of Caleb’s goodness and esteem for her is false, and the false
story told in the pamphlet is true. Even as Laura claims to value
actions over words she mistakenly accepts the printed text as a
substitute for what happens in the world. Because of the power of
print, Caleb cannot perform a spoken apology. Explanation and
apology have become one and the same here, so that any attempt to
orally revise a past wrong has become impossible. The power of
the history told in the pamphlet has left Caleb with only one
option: to remain mute or confess to the lies it recounts and
become the false individual the printed text maliciously
represents.
In trying to make sense of Caleb’s aborted apology we should
remember that he was first employed by Falkland as a secretary
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and therefore as someone whose role it is to write for another.
Though Caleb Williams is written by William Godwin, the novel
itself, presented in the form of a memoir, asks us to believe
that Caleb is the author of his own history. We might therefore
call Caleb Williams a fictionalized autobiography. I want to suggest
that in confessing to Caleb, Falkland is merely using Caleb for
the purpose for which he first employed him—to write. Within the
context of the true memoir this eponymous novel pretends to be
then, Caleb has become a writer. As a writer he has the ability
to do something Falkland could never do—to apologize. It is
specifically as a writer, as a creator of written texts, that
Caleb can bear responsibility for Falkland’s crimes. Falkland
signals as much when he circulates the false pamphlet about
Caleb. Only by writing and publishing the text called Caleb Williams
can Caleb hope to overwrite and overcome the fictional history
invented by Falkland. To acknowledge his acquired responsibility
for Falkland’s crimes Caleb must tell Falkland’s story and how it
is intimately bound up with his own. For Godwin the innocent
person takes on the responsibility of absolving the guilty one
because in their publically-shared moral responsibility the
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abstract ideal of justice is created. Godwin views this
establishment of a public moral responsibility through the
creation of a published text as a fundamentally social act.
Godwin argues in Political Justice that, “The actions and
dispositions of men…flow entirely from the operation of
circumstances” (28). The important word “entirely” here leaves
the task of moral judgment exclusively to the rational individual
and argues, as Godwin did elsewhere, that the justice system,
because it is a system, cannot be just. As David Collings has
understood, “both Falkland and [Caleb] are to be found not in the
tale of their errors, but in its interpretation” (861). Godwin
wants to show us that determining the moral status of Falkland’s
murder is less about ascertaining the facts involved than about
understanding the circumstances that surround it. How people,
including we the reading public, interpret Falkland’s crime, will
be a key part in this establishment of justice. Though Godwin’s
text does not mandate our forgiveness of Falkland’s crime, yet it
does argue that we cannot properly judge Falkland until we have
fully understood him.
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Caleb’s job will be to use his memoir to arrange the
circumstances of Falkland’s life into a narrative that
contextualizes the reasons for his crime. Caleb must use writing
to help right a wrong. His interpretation of Falkland’s actions,
by putting them in their necessary context, will convert the
facts of history and biography into the sympathies of fiction. As
Godwin sees it, for justice to be established, the facts of
history must be converted into the sympathies of fiction because
only in this way can the operation of circumstances be properly
understood. Facts themselves, like the systems that use them,
largely ignore things as they are, and so are inherently unjust.
Even if Falkland and Caleb were real, both would have to be
partially constructed as fictional characters because this
process is necessary to allow us to enter human minds and motives
with enough detail to promote sympathy and begin to establish the
fundamental social value of justice. Fiction provides the
contexts and arguments that strictly factual narratives cannot.
Though Falkland is a fictional character, he is a fiction
twice over—once in Godwin’s novel, and once in Caleb’s memorial
reconstruction of him. This process of memorial reconstruction
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becomes an act that even as it aims to truthfully recount
adventures, at the same time prompts our forgiveness of the
person being constructed. The story Falkland wants and needs to
tell—the story of his murder of Barnabas Tyrell, cannot be told
by him. Justice, by its nature, is a public not a private virtue,
and so to establish justice someone else must tell Falkland’s
story. That other person happens to be Caleb. By writing a text
about Falkland Caleb can begin to generate society’s necessary
sympathy for him. In order for Caleb Williams to become the
person he was meant to be, e.g. the person the novel Caleb Williams
represents to us, he must help establish justice by writing an
apology for Falkland’s actions. Without justice, in Godwin’s
view, there can be no independent selves, for otherwise the legal
system will annihilate all independent selves. Caleb Williams the
text, therefore, is both Falkland’s apology and Caleb’s self-
constituting act. Only when a text has become an apology for the
behavior of a character can justice come about. Because the
apology is necessary for invoking the idea of justice, it is
through the specifically literary form of the apology that the
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individual begins to emerge and to take his or her place in
society.
Godwin and Wordsworth both locate the site of the apology in
the act of writing itself, and both see in it a method for
dealing with moral wrongs. But whereas Wordsworth writes an
essentially private work that forms the individual in a sublime
encounter with an animate and morally-virtuous natural world,
Godwin inexorably ties individual selves to social interaction.
For Godwin the novel promotes a broad-based sympathy necessary
for living in the world; for Wordsworth, the individual’s sublime
encounter with nature is all that is needed.
Charles Carroll: The City University of New York
Works Cited
Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think. New York: Columbia U. Press, 2005.
Collings, David. “The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason.” ELH 70 (2003): 847–874.
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Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. Ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley.Peterborough, ON: The Broadview Press, 2000.
Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Other Writings. Ed. K. Codell Carter. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1971.
Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1989.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Fielding, Richardson. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1957.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: The Four Texts. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. London: Penguin Books, 1995.
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