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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
I was angry with my friend
I told my wrath my wrath did end I was angry with my foe I told it not my wrath did grow
--Blake, "A Poison Tree"
WILLIAM BLAKE'S "A POISON TREE" SUGGESTS THAT ACTING UPON ANGER puts an end to plot; whether we tell or wreak our wrath, its expression is antithetical to calculated narratives. As Philip Fisher says, anger is a fundamentally rash emotion precisely at odds with the "world of plots."(1) On the other hand, the same poem presents the cultivation of angry passions as dependent upon the secret plotting of the speaker, whose hunger for vengeance grows in proportion to the narrative's deferral of satisfaction. In other words, in Blake's poem, anger both requires plots and disables them. This double vision is symptomatic of a broader, historically-specific oscillation in British conceptions of anger during the 1790s, due primarily to the influence of the French Revolution and the ways it was discussed. In English political, medical, and legal discourse of the period, we find a remarkable alignment of changing attitudes towards rage in the wake of the Revolution, as if the fear of popular anger washed over the entire culture and altered the landscape of the mind. As revolutionary anger was being demonized as irrational, destructive rage in conservative political discourse, inflammation (of the body and body politic) was being reconceptualized as a dangerous disease in metaphorical and medical terms.(2) To this extent, the plot of anger was being written as a blind and rash trajectory--the arc of shrapnel in the explosion. On the other hand, a parallel discourse depicted the radical leaders as pursuing a conscious, calculating program of wrath against the state, a plot of anger as sharply directed as a knife in the back. Furthermore, it remained a question of some importance to the revolution debates whether British subjects were discontented (i.e., angry) because of rational causes, such as their lack of representation in parliament, or because they had been inflamed by radical rhetoric that blinded them to their best interests. Was their anger a rational exercise of the will to advance the nation towards reform, or a mindless response to demagoguery, one that followed only a trajectory of destruction?
These questions underlie much of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of reform in England during this period, and answers to them overspill the bounds of political debate into other disciplinary arenas. More specifically, and for our purposes here, changes in the way English courts judged cases of provocation follow the contours of the debate, suggesting a large-scale shift in national consciousness. As Jeremy Horder has shown, a new legal situation at the end of the eighteenth century had its basis in a changing conception of anger:
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the law ceased to describe anger in terms of outrage, the conception of anger in which reason plays the dominant role in guiding action. The law instead described it in terms of a loss of self-control ... according to which passions overwhelm the power of reason, leaving people at the mercy of their desires for retaliatory suffering.(3)
As a result, defendants who could establish that they killed in anger were assumed to have been out of control and thus not fully culpable for their actions. Just as medical doctors were redefining inflammation from curative symptom to irrational disease, lawyers and judges were rethinking outbursts of anger as fits of madness rather than exercises of the will. In this account, anger's narrative logic--a perceived injury followed by a desire for retaliation and an expression of that desire--becomes an automatic reaction that usually thwarts one's larger interests, rather than a rationally-pursued path in keeping with the self and its desires: the angry man kills his best friend; the British worker pulls down the political structures that have sustained him.
The work of William Godwin nicely reflects these developments in the history of anger, politics, the law, and narrative. Following the publication of Caleb Williams in 1794, Godwin imagined that two of his next projects would be "Observations on the Revolution in France" and a "Life of Alexander the Great."(4) Neither was actually completed, but both were clearly prepared for in his novel. Much has been made of its revolutionary (or in any case, politically radical) themes,(5) and I suggest that the figure of Alexander as he appears in Caleb Williams provides a key to Godwin's attitudes towards anger and provocation, revolution and reform--ones quite in keeping with the new Stoicism of the 1790s. This is true particularly with regard to the legend in which Alexander rashly kills his good friend Clitus after being provoked by his invective during a drunken banquet.(6) By Godwin's era, the legend was already well-worn as an illustrative example. Looking back, in the Biographia Literaria, on his boyhood education in the classics at Christ's Hospital, Coleridge remembers "the example of Alexander and Clytus" being forbidden as a simile by his schoolmaster James Bowyer, since it
was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme, Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!--Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!-Anger? Drunkenness? Pride? Friendship? Ingratitude? Late repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus!(7)
Bowyer's objection lies in the various applicability of this ancient anecdote which plays an important role in Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), where its applicability--that is, the recognition of it as an apt allusion--is precisely at issue. Pace Bowyer, I want to unfold the Alexander-Clitus story as a figure indicating Godwin's thoughts on anger, particularly in relation to the intemperate political climate of the 1790s and current conceptions of anger and provocation. More specifically, Caleb's allusion to the story of Alexander and Clitus points to a plot of anger that structures both the novel-as-narrative and revolutionary politics as Godwin saw them. Ultimately, like so much of the writing of this period, Caleb Williams is concerned with the tyrannous consequences (i.e., the plot) of uncontrolled rage: for leaders, for rebels, and for political communities. In Godwin's hands, a biography of Alexander and observations on the French Revolution would have had this same set of concerns at heart.
In Caleb Williams, during his early residence with Falkland, Caleb claims that he often found himself in the midst of conversations with his master that touched upon Falkland's "secret wound": his guilt over the murder of Tyrrel.(8) As the most memorable example, he tells of a discussion on the merits of Alexander the Great, one that reveals much about the two interlocutors. Citing Prideaux(9) and Fielding(10) as precedents, Caleb disparages Alexander as a "Great Cut-throat," "who has spread destruction and ruin over the face of nations" (111). Falkland, on the other hand, offers a spirited defense of the conqueror as "gallant, generous, and free," a "model of honour, generosity, and disinterestedness" who "set out in a great undertaking to civilise mankind" (111). The conversation proceeds amiably enough until Caleb makes the following all-too-applicable remarks:
what is worse, sir, this Alexander in the paroxysm of his headlong rage spared neither friend nor foe. You will not pretend to justify the excesses of his ungovernable passion. It is impossible sure that a word can be said for a man whom a momentary provocation can hurry into the commission of murders--(112; my emphasis)
Hearing in this an allusion to his own vengeful murder of Tyrrel, Falkland is stricken: "The blood forsook at once the transparent complexion of Mr. Falkland, and then rushed back again with rapidity and fierceness" (112). He attempts a stammering defense of Alexander, and seems eager to dismiss the topic, but Caleb cannot resist probing the wound with a more pointed allusion: "Clitus, said I, was a man of very coarse and provoking manners, was...
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