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I am interested in a political art...an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art--and a politics--in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at --William Kentridge (1992) William Godwin's Things As They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) is now regularly published with two endings, both of which take place in the courtroom. In the first Caleb accuses his former master, Falkland, of being a murderer and of having persecuted Caleb relentlessly for having discovered this. Caleb's story is hardly given a hearing and in the following fragmentary postscripts, which he writes from prison, he disintegrates as a subject and the text stumbles to a halt. Unsure now even of what his own story is, an ever more delusional Caleb becomes a BLANK: this version of the novel ends on the words, day long I do nothing--am a stone-a GRAVESTONE!--an obelisk to tell you, HERE LIES WHAT WAS ONCE A MAN! (346). His story, and so the novel, becomes unnarratable. By contrast, in the second ending Godwin wrote and the ending he actually published, Caleb's story is heard and believed in the courtroom, but only through a change of heart that means he becomes his own condemner as much as he is his former master's. Moved by the sight of an ailing Falkland, who is now so fragile as to seem near death, Caleb tells the same story but now declares, I came hither to curse, but I remain to bless. I came to accuse, but am compelled to applaud. I proclaim to all the world that Mr Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness, and that I am myself the basest and most odious of mankind! Never will I forgive myself the iniquity of this day.... I have been a murderer--a cruel, deliberate, unfeeling murderer. (334) After Caleb's speech the novel concludes with a kind of romantic reconciliation as the corpse-like Falkland admits his guilt and throws himself into his accuser's arms. In this ending motivations become more uncertain and persecutor and persecuted difficult to distinguish between. Since the re-surfacing of the original ending in the 1960s, it has been at the center of critical debate about Caleb Williams, provoking questions about the novel's political and aesthetic agenda, and about why Godwin chose to re-write the conclusion to his Revolutionary-era novel so dramatically. (1) This article proposes that Godwin rewrote the ending to Caleb Williams to make the novel more ambiguous in its outcome, or, to use the words of the South African artist, William Kentridge, to use uncomplete gestures and uncertain endings to create [a]n art--and a politics--in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay. (2) For radicals in Britain in the mid-1790s, as in South Africa through the 1990s, it was politically urgent to create an art in which hope remained a possibility, but which also remained faithful to the cruelty of the current situation. That immense and violent repression of civil liberties had become the gothic of the everyday in this period is something that Godwin gestures towards in the original title to his bleak novel--things as they are. A distinction such as D.A. Miller's between the narratable and the nonnarratable receives a vital political emphasis in this 1790s novel because the closure to which, as Peter Brooks puts it, narrative leans, is not imagined as the happiness, for instance, of the successfully concluded marriage plot. It is imagined instead as the defeat of one potential political and social narrative by a stronger and more oppressive one. Such extra-historical, formalist accounts of the novel are given particular urgency when applied to a period in which content was being explicitly policed by the state and people were being prosecuted for what they might imagine let alone speak or write (see Barrell, esp. 30, 306). In a novel like Caleb Williams, Brooks's Freudian death-like ending, needs to be delayed not only so that the processes of narrative will be possible, but so that vital political alternatives will remain imaginable (Miller; Brooks 284, 291,296). …
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