Trollope's Fictional Autobiography

Abstract

IROWLAND HILL'S DAUGHTER says that Trollope's old associates at the Post Office were in the habit of declaring that his 'Autobiography' was one of the greatest, and certainly not the least amusing, of his many works of fiction.' I admit that it takes considerable wrestling to twist this silly and defensive sneer into the basis for serious inquiry. It would also be naive and smart-alecky to claim that autobiographies simply are novels. No writer on autobiography-and there are many-would take such a notion seriously. At the same time, some might agree that autobiographies are fictions, not necessarily in the sense of being a bundle of lies, though they may be, but fictions in the formal sense. Autobiographies must provide characters, motivations, connections between events -and, most importantly, a narrative pattern. Doubtless an autobiographer faces constraints a novelist might not, but one wonders how important such constraints are. In any case, the imposition of fictional patterns on events or memories provides the only way in which we can order and understand them. Whatever our lives are, if that phrase has any meaning, our reconstructions of our lives are the reconstructions of fiction. As Trollope says at the opening of his Autobiography, without speaking of himself, without writing a firstperson fiction, that is, he would not know how to throw my matter