Like Mrs. Radcliff and lesser authors of Gothic novels, the far more serious and politically conscious William Godwin was interested to a point in the killer, persecutor, overlord whose criminality drives the narrative of his most important novel. The original title of Caleb Williams is Things As They Are, id est, unjust and intolerable — the novel is unabashedly a call to change things —and Falkland is a perfectly overt portrait of his class, of his class’ powers and causal/consequent behaviours, although additionally — not although, not additionally, that’s retracted, but via — a superbly achieved mimetic character. The author is interested in making this killer vivid and individual, and in seducing the reader to follow the progress of his villainies, but there’s nothing of revelations, diagnosis, plumbing secret depths in this. Nothing especially ghastly and mysterious in the human heretofore unsuspected or inadmissable to either Christian or Enlightened sensibilities and ideas. It’s all blazingly explicable. Godwin doesn’t pretend to be puzzled by the overlord’s conduct or his mentality. Caleb Williams, the persecuted and pursued witness to the crime, another class which is struggling to become capable of its revolutionary duty, is still the protagonist, not Falkland. The criminality of the aristocracy is given. That’s the explanation. We know why, but what are we going to do about it?
Nonetheless there are passions necessarily involved, and despite the arrogance and rationalizations of the supremacist, conscience, albeit controlled by ideology. We are a little on the way to the modern figure of the sociopathic murderer. But not very far along this path. The whole point is that, to a great degree, and profoundly, tho not totally and not confidently, the social order licenses Falkland — only people-power does not, a force portrayed as subordinated and overpowered, and yet self-evidently in the right and potentially far more powerful than its oppressor (this is a certainty at this point, in the author and in the society) — and that about society which requires destruction could be called Falkland. The people have to free themselves of mental servitude as well as material bondage to disempower this villain:
"Do not speak to me, Master Williams! You have given me a shock that I shall not get the better of for one while. You were hatched by a hen, as the saying is, but you came of the spawn of a cockatrice. I am glad to my heart that honest farmer Williams is dead; your villainy would else have made him curse the day that ever he was born."
"Thomas, I am innocent! I swear by the great God that shall judge me another day, I am innocent!"
"Pray, do not swear! for goodness' sake, do not swear! your poor soul is damned enough without that. For your sake, lad, I will never take any body's word, nor trust to appearances, tho' it should be an angel. Lord bless us! how smoothly you palavered it over, for all the world, as if you had been as fair as a new-born babe! But it will not do; you will never be able to persuade people that black is white. For my own part, I have done with you. I loved you yesterday, all one as if you had been my own brother. To-day I love you so well, that I would go ten miles with all the pleasure in life to see you hanged."
"Good God, Thomas! have you the heart? What a change! I call God to witness, I have done nothing to deserve it! What a world do we live in!"
"Hold your tongue, boy! It makes my very heart sick to hear you! I would not lie a night under the same roof with you for all the world! I should expect the house to fall and crush such wickedness! I admire that the earth does not open and swallow you alive! It is poison so much as to look at you! If you go on at this hardened rate, I believe from my soul that the people you talk to will tear you to pieces, and you will never live to come to the gallows. Oh, yes, you do well to pity yourself; poor tender thing! that spit venom all round you like a toad, and leave the very ground upon which you crawl infected with your slime."
Finding the person with whom I talked thus impenetrable to all I could say, and considering that the advantage to be gained was small, even if I could overcome his prepossession, I took his advice, and was silent. It was not much longer before every thing was prepared for my departure, and I was conducted to the same prison which had so lately enclosed the wretched and innocent Hawkinses. They too had been the victims of Mr. Falkland. He exhibited, upon a contracted scale indeed, but in which the truth of delineation was faithfully sustained, a copy of what monarchs are, who reckon among the instruments of their power prisons of state.
(Falkland is a tyrant, he has a fucked up personality, but, meaningfully, he’s not in the lineage of Gilles de Rais and the (Godwin contemporary) Marquis de Sade, whom I have to set aside for the moment but will come back to. It’s a meaningful difference because the fictional criminals that draw inspiration from those historical sadists, and Sade’s fictional sadists, perform an ideological function of casting the pleasure of the exertion of overwhelming and arbitrary power, the pleasure that is cruelty, into a dark depth of psycho-biological mystery, that is sexuality per se. The larger sexuality per se looms in these stories, the more the sociopolitical vanishes. This is not scientific; this is not to say sexuality really is less or much less or not a bit determined by all the many determinations that shape aesthetic taste or morals or anything else in a personality, but that it appears to be and on the level of fictions signifies as such.)
Caleb Williams is 1794. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is 1824, set however in the late 17th c.. (The American Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland 1798 is really intermediary in several ways, and maybe I’ll come back to it. I meant to write three paragraphs about the development of a genre, and I’m getting all into it despite myself, and want to record my interpretations. Have to show some restraint here.)
Hogg’s reprobate is not the Establishment, exactly. (Although, ultimately, as a cheat of sorts, the evil agent is the eternal infernal establishment, even more general and more established than earthy sovereignty.) The criminal is a reluctantly acknowledged younger son (really the bastard of a fanatical Protestant clergyman) of a (defeated) Jacobite highland Laird at the time of the Glorious Revolution. But the villain is something about the Establishment, a quality of the Establishment, which is new (a new establishment and a new quality). He is nudged away from the centre of the social order, in comparison to Falkland or Lovelace or the frivolously dominating couple in Les liaisons dangereuses, but nudged closer to dead centre of the fiction, being the protagonist, albeit very much antagonist at large, and given an ideological spring for his remorseless serial crimes, his practising crime as a way of life, which powers the polemic: Calvinist extremism, guaranteeing his salvation regardless. Yet, the portrait of the development of this villain much resembles the 18th century tradition of the long tail of which it comes at the end: perverse bigoted education, punitive parenting, somatophobia, dearth of love, and jealousy of a peer enjoying all that he is denied: much like Mr. Blifil. The license to kill that is the doctrine of Predestination is just the spark; the powderkeg is packed by the usual civilizational ills, superstitions, toxic customs, the solution for which Rousseau (oh so ironically) proposed.
But this is a figure of sociopathy, a villain positioned against society, the negation of society, as confirmed by the Satanic hand behind it.
Leap over the main works I mean to discuss in this section (Crime and Punishment and its updated adaptation, Bresson’s Pickpocket, deferred to the next post) to the present now, and Ripley which I was discussing. Forget the awful Netflix thing for a second: thinking about the Godwin and the Hogg clarified for me what’s going on with Ripley in the first novel (haven’t read the others), which is that while the portraiture sharply defines the character as a lumpen petty bourgeois full of ressentiment, the perfect type of Nietzschoid fascist brownshirt in the making, the function of the character, its action and career, figures and embodies the bourgeoisie itself. The class that Dickie has abdicated, in his lazy, slumming, wanna be aristo irresponsibility, is the class that Ripley embodies, and in the literary logic, why he can and must supplant him. This is why Ripley, tho having attained the condition of idle rich, is so busy, like a yuppie. This spectacle of his anxious incessant doings, perception-managing a recalcitrant world, dealing with high priority garbage disposal, is really quite recognizable, tho it’s the sort of thing class warrior authors will transmit without entirely knowing what they’re doing,
finish this