Anthony Trollope and the Ends of Realism

Abstract

162 Victorians Journal •flnthony Trollope and the Snds of Realism by Ken Crowell By the common consent of all mankind who have read, poetry takes the highest place in literature. .. . When that has been in truth achieved, the reader knows that the writer has soared above the earth, and can teach his lessons somewhat as a god might teach. He who sits down to write his tale in prose makes no such attempt, nor does he dream that the poet’s honour is within his reach;—but his teaching is ofthe same nature, and his lessons all tend to the same end.—Trollope, Autobiography Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.—Forster, Howard’s End When Anthony Trollope claims for prose the same “nature” as poetry, I read this as a statement on form; Victorian novels teach Victorian audiences by initiating the same break with the everyday that underpins the Romantic lyric and by using the same formal, grammatical devices to create this break. In fact, Trollope’s novels dwell remarkably often on Romantic poetry, and I suggest part ofthe reason is the author’s anxiety of influence. His novels critique Romantic notions of character and deep subjectivity precisely because they employ the same techniques to construct his often lackluster, formulaic plots. Romantic poetry ruptures the horizontal axis of diachronic history, introduces new and alternate historicisms, and seeks through grammatical relationships depth in moments rather than linear progress. Just as did many Victorian novelists, Trollope incorporated similar forms of transcendent depth in his novels. In that his novels rupture and refigure narrative time through characterological transcendence, Trollope was a late Romantic. However, just as the Romantics shifted the direction of mimesis inward, Trollope’s Victorians Journal 163 formalism startlingly reformed the direction of depth-based narratives back outward, forging new connections and new forms for narrative. Yet curiously, as Deborah Denenholz Morse notes in Reforming Trollope, even of those few studies allowing complexity to Trollope’s work, fewer have allowed Trollopian form as revisionist or indeed “Reforming.” In The Realist Imagination, George Levine provides a definitive statement on Trollopian form: “Technically ... Trollope is profoundly uninteresting.... [H]is work points to no changes in fictional art” (185). Levine’s statement reflects a standard consensus on Trollope, who “accepted the conventions and limits of art quite comfortably” (187). Like Morse, I argue against that consensus in favor of an experimental Trollope, “a Trollope that would have been unthinkable until recently” (np). I argue not only the acuity of Trollope’s formal preoccupations but also that his form marks a significant shift in realist narrative, one that lays bare realism’s techniques and shows its hallmark of deep characterization to be simply a manifestation ofRomantic ideology. Ite£f, ©szszr, and a Glass of Realism An example of the experience of reading for which realism in general aims can be summed up in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s oft-quoted description of Trollopian mimesis: solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of. (qtd. Trollope, Autobiography 126) Often missed in the many citations ofthis passage is the combination of distance and immediacy in the image Hawthorne evokes. I understand this now de rigueur description of realist writing to be more concerned with the artifice of realism than with its verisimilitude. What Hawthorne describes is not an experience whereby he is convinced ofthe reality of Trollopian description, but 164 Victorians Journal one whereby he is convinced by Trollope ofthe propriety of looking at the world through beer-goggles and a beef-induced stupor. In his own assessment of realism, expressed in his 1879 Life of Thackeray, Trollope asserts Thackeray’s position as a realist; but then, after noting the difficulty ofrealism—“Realism in style has not all the ease which seems to belong to it...