Thursday, January 28, 2016

Not a vestige of propriety, or any beastly rules to be kept! - angry, cruel Trollope

Three more examples of Trollope’s use of the sympathy device.  The Way We Live Now is Trollope’s angriest novel (disclaimer: that I have read).

First, the inversion and eventual removal of sympathy, Trollope playing against the natural tendency to fall in line with the interests of whichever character happens to be in front of me.  Some of the funniest scenes star a group of degenerate proto-Wodehouse characters, dissolute noblemen squandering their money, status, and livers.  Bertie without Jeeves and with a gambling problem.

One of them describes their club:

“Not a vestige of propriety, or any beastly rules to be kept!  That’s what I liked,” said Nidderdale.  (Ch. 96)

I know Trollope well enough to know that in the ethos of his novels, these are the words of a monster.  And Nidderdale is hardly the worst of them.

A different one, worse but also not the worst, Felix Carbury, gets the most attention, the closest interior inspection.  Trollope gives him a chance to reform.  The key moment is when he discovers that a friend cheats at cards and is bothered.  Perhaps cheating at cards is wrong.  And if that is wrong, a number of ideas follow.  Trollope brings the character, and my sympathy, up to a precipice.  Do we dare jump?

The villain of the novel, Melmotte the financier, is a blank for most of the novel, but Trollope eventually takes him up, too.  In ordinary terms, the possibilities for sympathy are limited here.  Trollope even waits until he has committed a plain crime to spend time alone with him.  A character in Orley Farm (1862) commits a similar crime, yet receives the full sympathetic attention of the narrator.  Melmotte is allowed to induce pity while also indicting himself.  And even the narrator will not quite follow him to the end of his story.  No, reader, I will not put you in danger by suggesting you pity that.  A bit like what George Eliot does in Adam Bede, but with an easier case.

The complex case in The Way We Live Now is that of Georgiana Longestaffe, an aging (you know, 28) aristocrat who has priced herself too high in the marriage market and is ready to start cutting deals.  Georgiana is awful – sarcastic, peevish, petty, shallow.  Hilarious as a background character, but what a surprise when I found that she got her own subplot.  What a character to spend time with.  I knew that The Way We Live Now had an anti-Jewish component; it is pretty much entirely contained in this subplot.  One way to create sympathy around a bad person is to make everyone around her worse.  The narrator, usually plenty chatty, keeps his mouth shut during these scenes.

By the end, I had plenty of sympathy for horrible Georgiana, who was making the best of a bad hand.  Well done, Trollope.

Georgiana’s subplot was cruel, in the fictional sense.  The Way We Live Now is Trollope’s cruelest novel (disclaimer as above).  It is most exquisitely cruel in this line, near the end:

How Mr. Flatfleece went to law, and tried to sell the furniture, and threatened everybody, and at last singled out poor Dolly Longestaffe as his special victim; and how Dolly Longestaffe, by the aid of Mr. Squercum, utterly confounded Mr. Flatfleece, and brought that ingenious but unfortunate man, with his wife and small family, to absolute ruin, the reader will hardly expect to have told to him in detail in this chronicle.  (Ch. 96)

Dolly Longestaffe is Georgiana’s appalling brother.  Mr. Flatfleece is nobody, just a name and a function, turned into a character, barely, with one phrase just before his ruin, along with a “wife and small family” who are introduced only to be instantaneously crushed by the narrator, who blames the unfeeling, impatient reader, me.

The question for me now is: did Trollope become angrier and crueler in spite of his gentleness towards his earlier characters, or because of it?  Does sympathy destroy sympathy?

15 comments:

  1. Have you read 'He Knew He Was Right'? That takes anger to a new level for Trollope...

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  2. No, I haven't, how interesting. Who is Trollope angry at in that novel?

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    1. The anger is less that of the writer and more the product of the main character, but it's rather intense. It's probably one of his best books, so one you'll probably have to get around to at some point ;)

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    2. Ah, an angry character. When I say a book is angry, I really mean the author is angry. Book IV of Gulliver's Travels, that's what I mean, that kind of satire. The Way We Live Now is full of Yahoos.

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    3. It's years since I read it, but if I remember rightly Trollope is angry in He Knew He Was Right. Paradoxically, Trollope's anger is directed at the main character's (I've forgotten his name, I'm afraid) anger. As The Way We Live Now shows, Trollope's own anger is not obsessive and it can veer into sympathy; in He Knew He Was Right the anger is obsessive, pharisaical and disproportionate.
      I don't think "The Way We Live Now is full of Yahoos", actually. There is an obsessiveness in Swift's portrait of the Yahoos which isn't there in Trollope's portrait of England. Trollope condemns with a detachment that is all the more damning.

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    4. Angry at the anger, I like that.

      The members of the Beargarden club are in search of their inner Yahoo. Yahoos who play cards.

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  3. Right now He Knew He Was Right is my own favorite Trollope novel. The anger is diluted with a lot of gentle satire and genuine romance, but yes, it is intense.

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  4. Good questions which I have no answer for as I haven't read the book, and can't judge it on the miniseries.

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    1. I loathed the miniseries, it ruined a great book. Whoever came up with the idea of breaking the fourth wall...

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    2. Breaking the 4th wall is central for Trollope, isn't it? But the character who speaks to the audience should be Trollope, wandering through the sets, commenting on the characters, mocking the viewers.

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    3. Absolutely, but the characters should never do so - they are unaware of any walls.

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    4. Yes, bizarre to have the characters do it. This ain't Laurence Sterne.

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  5. I should add that I think it shows a writer's skill when he/she can make the see-saw swing back and forth when it comes to sympathy.

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    1. Yes, me too. A great skill, and Trollope is among the best with it.

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  6. Yes, no room for Flatfleece in the TV series, much less his poor, ruined family.

    He Knew He Was Right is one I need to read, along with the last two Pallisers.

    The gentleness, or otherwise, of the satire is an interesting issue. Parliament and politics could be a ripe target for some attacks, but Trollope seems to respect the institution too much. Same goes for the Anglican Church. Same goes for fox hunting.

    But dissolute gentlemen and financiers - no need to hold back with them.

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