Now there had come one glorious day - a Trollope proposal, a Trollope hunt

I have mocked Trollope for his excessive number of proposal scenes – Trollope had mocked himself for the same thing – but The Eustace Diamonds only has maybe six proposals, far fewer than in the previous Palliser novel, Phineas Finn, where they became an aggravation.

In smaller quantities, I can be more impressed with Trollope’s inventiveness.  Sir Florian Eustace is proposing to Lizzie Greystock.  One proposal out of the way, and we are still in Chapter 1:

The speech he made was somewhat long, and as he made it he hardly looked into her face.

But it was necessary to him that he should be made to know by some signal from her how it was going with her feelings.  As he spoke of his danger, there came a gurgling little trill of wailing from her throat, a soft, almost musical sound of woe, which seemed to add an unaccustomed eloquence to his words.  When he spoke of his own hope the sound was somewhat changed, but it was still continued.

I do not think of Trollope as much of a descriptive writer, but “a gurgling little trill of wailing” is pretty good.  And the most effective touch is that her strange sound adds color to his speech, or so he thinks, since I take that as Sir Florian’s thoughts, or illusions.  In other words, the beautiful, penniless, deceitful adventuress has hooked the rich, “vicious and… dying” baronet but good.  By the end of the chapter he is dead and Lizzie is a rich widow in possession of the diamond necklace that gives the book its title and the plot its momentum.  Again, I mean  by the end of Chapter 1 – this novel really cooks at first.

The six Barchester books had no hunting scenes.  I believe that Trollope, in real life, had not yet become a fox-hunting addict when he began that series, and as we know from Framley Parsonage, clergymen should not hunt.  All four non-Barchester novels I have read feature long, detailed hunting scenes.  When he is interested enough, Trollope cannot stop himself from describing a scene in detail – every horse, every obstacle, every movement of the game.  Some readers must find these chapters as dull as a play-by-play of a fictional baseball game.  Trollope does make use of these chapters, so they are not entirely there for his own Fantasy Fox-hunting entertainment.  The hunt in Chapter 38, for example, results in, what else, a  proposal.

I will save that for tomorrow, though, and turn to the poor fox:

They were off again now, and the stupid fox absolutely went back across the river. But, whether on one side or on the other, his struggle for life was now in vain.  Two years of happy, free existence amidst the wilds of Craigattan had been allowed him. Twice previously had he been “found,” and the kindly storm or not less beneficent brightness of the sun had enabled him to baffle his pursuers.  Now there had come one glorious day, and the common lot of mortals must be his.  (Ch. 38)

Trollope is so fluid – “They” are the hunters, “stupid” and “absolutely” are their words, collectively.  It is practically dialogue, from when one of the huntsman recounts the hunt at the pub.  Omniscient Trollope takes the reins and begins sympathizing with the fox – he sympathizes with everyone – and the rhetoric heightens, including some pleasing indulgence in the pathetic fallacy, entirely appropriate, since what reader will not feel the pathos of the death of the fox?

A Ming Dynasty magic fox cautionary tale - don't steal books from foxes

“Divine Foxes Lose a Book at Small Water Bay” by Feng Menglong, a story published in Constant Words to Awaken the World in 1627, translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang in Stories to Awaken the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection, Volume 3 (University of Washington Press, 2009).  Constant Words to Awaken the World is not much of a title, so I can see why it was changed.  “Divine Foxes Lose a Book at Small Water Bay” is an unsurpassable title.  Its only problem is that it overpromises.

Ricardo de la Caravana de Recuerdos was asking forfavorite short stories several months ago.  Amid the usual suspects, commenters supplied many curiosities, none more curious than “Divine Foxes,” suggested by humblehappiness aka Cleanthess, who I am pleased to say also visits Wuthering Expectations on occasion.

The narrator begins with an old story about a man who saves an injured bird and is rewarded by the bird with good fortune.  Everyone knows this story in some form.

Why even bother to tell it?  Well, dear audience, I did so because I plan to move on to a story about a young man who also hit nonhuman beings with slingshot pellets.  But, unlike the one who repented after having hurt the bird, this young man ruined his family’s considerable fortune as a consequence of his action and became an object of ridicule.  (117)

The young man who errs, Wang Chen, “had only a slight acquaintance with the classics and histories and barely knew the rudiments of writing,” which is what makes his sin especially serious when he comes upon “two wild foxes talking and laughing” who “were discussing the book that one of them was holding in its hand” and injures them both with his slingshot just to get a look at the book.  What does he care about books?  And then it turns out that it is “printed in ancient tadpole-like characters completely unknown to him” (119).

For the rest of the story, the foxes, who have magic powers mostly related to disguise, try to get their book back.  Wang Chen keeps it from them out of nothing but peevishness.  Eventually, the foxes succeed through a scheme that seems unnecessarily complex, in the process not exactly ruining Wang Chen, but causing his family to lose half of its wealth.

The narrator occasionally inserts poems and italicized commentary, such as this one at the end (Wang Zai is Wang Chen’s brother:

(What did Wang Zai do to deserve such punishment?  The foxes were wicked enough.  That’s why they don’t get reincarnated as humans, after all.)

A glimpse into another ethical world appears there, almost as strange as the central mystery of the story, the book that the foxes were discussing so intensely.  What could be in it?  The true catalog to Borges’s Library of Babel; the key to all mythologies.  Something like that.  Or perhaps just the Tang Dynasty fairy fox equivalent of George R. R. Martin, stolen before either fox had reached the end.

Book bloggers will sympathize with the foxes.

I guess this counts as a kind of Halloween story.  Magic Chinese foxes instead of ghosts.

Of the 2,800 pages of Feng Menglong that has been translated, I have only read “Divine Foxes.”  Cleanthess – what’s the wise thing to do next?