Yesterday�s post about Trollope�s The Prime Minister ended just as I was about to get into the first chapter � the marvelous first chapter. Anyone who doubts Trollope�s artistry should read the first chapter of this novel, which has the clean unswerving course and direction of a well aimed pistol shot. He begins the chapter with one of those authorial interventions that fascinate my friend Sarah, the woman I mentioned in yesterday�s post. Her dissertation, in fact, is an attempt to get at these moments in the classic 19th century novel and look at what they really do. The authorial intervention, according to Sarah, who I hope won�t be mad if I borrow one broad feature from her upcoming diss, finds itself most at home in the generalization. At least in Trollope, this is certainly true. He love these authorial asides. It is no use ignoring them, because they are a very real part of the text's structure. But we should ask - how can we talk about them?

First, let's recognize that these generalizations are modeled on that most political rhetorical form, advice. They fall into topics common to what Kant called prudence - hedged truths about society, sex, age, or status. This is an old tradition, running through sermons and moral essays (going all the way back to Seneca), and reiterating the truths of egotism. French moralistes, like La Rouchefaucauld, turned this into the maxim. And the maxim, in turn, was systematized by the ideologues - I mean, the ideologues proper, in the French Revolution, Tracy Destutte and the like.

Because our tendency is to think, oh, here�s the author, a real being, interfering in his story, which consists of made up beings doing made up things, we have trouble reconciling these moments, on a theoretic level, with the basic premise of fiction � that it be fictional. That's why Victorian fiction sometimes seems so moralistic to us. On a reading level, however, we don�t have this problem. That�s because stories don�t emerge in self-selected contexts � reading a novel, I don�t myself become novelistic. The reader, unconsciously, recognizes the maxim as a passage between the reader�s world and the fiction�s world. The generalization, in other words, is, on one side, a reader�s ritual, and gives us those kinds of truths native to ritual � performative truths. On the other side, for the fictional character, the maxim is fate, and the authorial intervention always has a slight whiff of destiny. This, incidentally, should remind us that the mythic root of Kant's counsels of prudence is found in the oracle. In fact, if we see this textual mode as originally home in the essay, and migrating to the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, we should think a little bit about the importance of oracles for the ancient essayists - Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca. What distinguished them as essayists, rather than philosophers, was their fascination with fate - with the irrational arrangement of the life of rational beings. Stendhal, who was very consciously close to the ideologues, picks up this thread in La Chartreuse de Parme.

So here's one way to think about these moments of authorial presence. In them, fate speaks. If our fates could, in fact, speak, they would speak in just these kinds of generalizations. We would, then, understand our luck.


Well, we don�t, and neither do fictional characters, who never hear what their authors have to say.

But Trollope does not make heavy going of the oracular mode. He simply paints a picture of Ferdinand Lopez which tells us he is ineffably foreign, that his origins are mysterious, and that gentlemen, according to Samuel Johnson, are distinguished in one thing above all others � that their origins are never mysterious. Ferdinand Lopez is no gentleman, then. Trollope takes, at least consciously, the normal position of the privileged class with regard to gentlemen � they are the summit of English civilization, the vital difference between the Anglo-Saxon race and all lesser breeds without the law. A man with the name Ferdinand is, of course, going to be especially suspect. King Ferdinand was a notoriously Machiavellian ruler, much disliked by Whig historians.

So we have a moral sketch of Lopez, and then we see him going into the City by an almost hidden, dark route, to the office of a vulgar man vaguely connected with finance, Sextus Parker. We are never told Parker is a moneylender � we assume he is a jobber, a man who makes his money work in many different and hard to pin down ways. Perhaps an unsightly man, perhaps an unethical man, but certainly a necessary man. Lopez pops the question to him right away:

�Then he [Lopez] continued without changing his voice or the nature of his eye. 'I'll tell you what I want
you to do now. I want your name to this bill for three months.'

Sexty Parker opened his mouth and his eyes, and took the bit of paper that was tendered to him. It was a promissory note for 750 pounds, which, if signed by him, would at the end of the specified period make him liable for that sum were it not otherwise paid.�

Notice that sum, that beautiful sum. A thousand pounds would have been too much � Parker would never have gone for it. Five hundred pounds would be too little � our sense of Lopez� largeness would have been dampened. But 750 is just right. It is the kind of sum that inevitably turns up in political scandals, which never seem to be about really large sums � how much did Spiro Agnew take, something like 10,000 dollars? No, they are always those awkward, intermediate sums � and Trollope has that down. It is that 750 pounds which makes us trust him.

Oh well, I�m probably boring those of you who haven�t read, and don�t care for, Trollope.
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