Grease, Balance, and Point of View in the Work of Anthony Trollope

Summary

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Park discusses several literary works of Anthony Trollope, particularly focusing on the composition of his characters. Many critics have noted Trollope's habit of balancing his characters' pluses and minuses, their serious virtues and serious faults. Moreover, even Trollope's villains are not simply villainous: they are "complex," complex enough to retain their capacity to surprise. However conflicted some of his characters are, Trollope does best when he doesn't have to sympathize with a point of view to render it convincing; he dives right into the character's mind.

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Extract

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Grease, Balance, and Point of View in the Work of Anthony Trollope

Many critics have noted Trollope's habit of balancing his characters' pluses and minuses, their serious virtues and serious faults. It is the best explanation-if one is needed-of the extraordinary hold he exerts on his readers, who tend to respond as Nathaniel Hawthorne did:

Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste-solid and substantial . . . just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their business, and not suspecting they were made a show of.

It's become unfashionable, of course, to admit that such characters precisely suit our taste. Earlier critics might praise them for something called "complexity," even accept, if gingerly, a claim to reality ("just as real as"). We, though, should know better. Critics tend to be teachers, and we've had some forty years to absorb what diey've been teaching. Reading like Hawthorne is unsophisticated, radically naive. Still, we go on doing it, wanting characters to be "convincing," complaining that an author hasn't made us "care about" them, incorrigibly treating as real what is ...

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