“Whoever Explains A ‘But’”: Tact and Friction in Trollope’s Reparative Fiction

Abstract

138 Victorians Journal “Whoever explains f? 'Sat’”: Tact and friction in Trollope’s Reparative fiction by Jonathan farina In July 1849, as a Surveyor’s deputy for the Post Office in Ireland, Trollope stood witness against local postmistress Mary O’Reilly, whom he had caught stealing a marked coin from the mail (Hall 106-08; Mullen 229-32; Terry). Trollope’s testimony was rebutted by the prominent Irish barrister, Isaac Butt, an eventual MP and founder of the Home Rule League, who was nicknamed “The Rebutter” for his infamously aggressive cross-examinations. 1 According to the newspapers, Trollope adeptly parried Butt’s rebuttal with crowd-pleasing repartee, yet Butt’s acerbic manner vexed him. To discredit Trollope’s testimony, Butt questioned his character by broaching his unsavory portrayal of Mr. Allewinde of The Macdermots ofBallycloran, one of several lawyers who viciously rebut witnesses for professional necessity rather than the pursuit of truth. Thus, Trollope later parodied Butt with browbeating barristers like Mr. Chaffanbrass of The Three Clerks, Orley Farm, and Phineas Redux. Butt seems to have personified for Trollope how rebuttal formally instantiated and institutionalized the indecorous presumption that witnesses were duplicitous and partial. Rebuttal moreover routinized a narrative practice that adjudicated a matter by doubting all of its witnesses—its narrators—although they obliged the court with testimony and were not charged with malfeasance. And yet few things resemble rebuttal so much as Trollope’s fictional practice; not only does he explicitly and consistently subordinate plot to character, but many of his novels might be summarized as sustained rebuttals ofcharacter testimony: The Eustace Diamonds, to be sure, centers on the rebuttal—or the many indirect, would-be 1 May Laffan Hartley negatively portrays Butt as “Mr. Rebutter” in Christy Carew (255-80, passim). Alas, the novel does not inflect Mr. Rebutter’s idiolect with a Trollopian abundance of adversatives. Victorians Journal 139 rebuttals—of Lizzie Eustace. The Last Chronicle ofBarset assails Josiah Crawley until the trial is avoided by Mrs. Arabin; Orley Farm crosses Lady Mason; and in The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily Dale is subject to the crossexaminations of her mother, uncle, and friends, all of whom doubt her decision to decline Johnny Eames’s proposals. Butt’s surname is even more wonderfully apposite than his nickname: as an adverb, coordinating conjunction, and preposition, but occurs frequently in English prose and most frequently in Trollope’s novels.2 In Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Eustace Diamonds, in particular, Trollope uses but about thirty percent more frequently than other nineteenth-century novelists do—almost once every one hundred words and often in succession. In a 1960 article, Hugh Sykes Davies aspires to affirm a “hunch” that Trollope’s prose has a distinct “cadence” against prevailing assertions to the contrary, yet he also nicely catalogs some ways but functions. It can “introduce a qualification or exception” (78); it can “lay bare the perplexities of motives in conflict,” imply “the presence of motives not quite conscious” in characters, and “reveal indecision,” and in this sense it facilitates Trollope’s representation of processes of decision making (78-79). Further, it periodically discriminates the difference between a character’s “own estimate of himself, and the real estimate” (79); and, finally, it can “point the discrepancybetween theory and practice in moral conduct, the almost universal failure to practice what we agree ought to be preached” (80). Adversatives, including but, then, and yet, are the signature ligatures of Trollope’s style. As such, they evidence a specific and concurrently aesthetic and social form; they grammatically instantiate a manner of ordering the world. I refer to this form as 2 In Doctor Thome, but comprises 2,159 out of 220,553 words, a frequency of 0.009789; in Framley Parsonage, 2,097 out of 211,290 words, a frequency of 0.009924; in The Small House at Allington, 2,569 out of263,246 words, a frequency of0.009758; and in The Eustace Diamonds, 2,331 out of274,376 words, a frequency of 0.008495. The standard frequency of but in a sample collection of 150 canonical and popular nineteenth-century British novels is...