Ends of Enlightenment by John Bender

Author:John Bender [Bender, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, European
ISBN: 9780804784610
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Impersonal Violence

The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams

With a Postscript on My Gross Anatomy Lab

My subject is the violence habituated within certain techniques of impersonal narration typical of realist prose fiction. I want to point to issues at once broad, complex, and by no means intuitively obvious. In developing them here, however, I shall concentrate mainly upon William Godwin’s attempt, in his novel Caleb Williams, at a radical critique of the machinery of character and conscience as socially, legally, and governmentally constructed during the Enlightenment: a critique ultimately overwhelmed from within by the technology it assailed.

I

But I shall begin again, this time with three quotations, the first from Jonathan Swift’s Hack in “A Digression on Madness.” Both Swift’s dichotomy between ordinary vision and the scientific gaze and his metaphor fusing female skin and foppish clothing—his feminization of the body under the knife of scientistic inquiry—emerge as uncannily prophetic:

The two Senses, to which all Objects first address themselves, are the Sight and the Touch; These never examine farther than the Colour, the Shape, the Size, and whatever other Qualities dwell, or are drawn by Art upon the Outward of Bodies; and then comes Reason officiously, with Tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate, that they are not of the same consistence quite thro’. . . . Therefore, in order to save the Charges of all such expensive Anatomy for the Time to come; I do here think fit to inform the Reader, that in such Conclusions as these, Reason is certainly in the Right; and that in most Corporeal Beings, which have fallen under my Cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In: Whereof I have been farther convinced from some late Experiments. Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the Carcass of a Beau to be stript in my Presence; when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected Faults under one Suit of Clothes: Then I laid open his Brain, his Heart, and his Spleen; But, I plainly perceived at every Operation, that the farther we proceeded, we found the Defects encrease upon us in Number and Bulk: from all which, I justly formed this Conclusion to my self; That whatever Philosopher or Projector can find out an Art to sodder and patch up the Flaws and Imperfections of Nature, will deserve much better of Mankind, and teach us a more useful Science, than that so much in present Esteem, of widening and exposing them.1

Swift’s contempt for deluded rationalist projectors leads him to prefigure, from an opposite political perspective, a counter-Enlightenment rebel such as William Blake, and to offer a satiric anticipation of Godwin’s political idealism. Swift’s Houyhnhnms in fact distilled for Godwin an ideal of society governed by orderly thought and practice: that is to say, a society inhabited by Godwin’s peculiar brand of individually autonomous rationalism, by benevolence, and by honesty, rather than by institutions and contractual rights.

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