TROLLOPE THROUGH THE WINDOW-PANE

Abstract

By now, arguments about thefamiliarity of realism in general, and the novels of Anthony Trollope in particular, are themselves familiar. D. A. Miller's suggestion that the “easy chair” is “still the most likely place to read Trollope” because such a location is congenial to novels that allow one to fall “into the usual appreciation of his appreciation of the usual” is the touchstone of such arguments (107). In Trollope's own day, reviewers and commentators did not use the term “the usual” to describe the domain of his novels, but they convey the same notion as Miller by maintaining that the transparency of his novels creates verisimilitude. What follows here suggests that an “easy chair” is not “the most likely place” to read Trollope. I reveal the surprising extent to which Trollope himself investigates and thinks at length about “the usual,” instead of merely allowing his reader to “appreciate” the transparency of his novels, by attending to his ideas about classical perspective in relationship to the novel form. I focus on Trollope's complicated relationship to issues of classical perspective because the transparency of his novels described by his contemporaries continues into today's critical descriptions of his novels as the domain of the ordinary, the everyday, and the familiar. Such descriptions, however, do not fully illuminate Trollope's own complicated relationship to issues of perspective. I throw Trollope's own ideas on perspective into full relief in an effort to disrupt accounts of his work that emphasize its natural qualities. On the one hand, Trollope's work is described by contemporaries as perspectival, and his own comments in hisAutobiographyand his handling of issues of intimacy in his novels demonstrate what he sees as the virtues of perspectivalism. Foremost among those virtues is the ability of perspectivalism to abstract its observer, which is confirmed as Trollope accomplishes a universal, generalized intimacy with characters that is felt by the author, the narrator, and the reader. By attempting to align readerly, authorial, and narratorial perception, Trollope works to recreate the “objective ground of visual truth” that a classical model of vision supplied (Crary,Techniques14). Nevertheless, he worries about issues of point of view. Perspectivalism relies on its viewer's attitude in a particular position. That is, in its ideal form, pictorial perspectivalism allows any viewer who inhabits a particular position to see the same objects and to see them in the same way as any other viewer. In this sense, perspectivalism depersonalizes and abstracts the observer because it does not rely on the individuality of any particular observer. Trollope, however, fears that this impersonal model of the observer creates a vacuum that the personality of a particular observer fills. The narrator is the name Trollope gives to the personality that fills the vacuum, which Trollope fears indicates that his novels are subjective and represent only one way of understanding the world. In such a case, the point of view that characterizes his novels is not familiar – as we are accustomed to believe – because it represents the everyday world. Trollope believes that because novels are oriented from the narrator's point of view, the catholicity implied by pictorial perspectivalism is not available to the novel. The presence of a narrator, to Trollope's mind, veers the novel away from the objectivity to which perspectivalism seems a means. As Trollope notes fundamental differences between novelistic and pictorial point of view, we see that he himself did not consider his novels as natural or naturalizing.