The Novel-Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope

by Professor Walter Kendrick

Originally published in 1980. The first section of The Novel-Machine consists of five short chapters that rewrite Autobiography as an undisguised theory of realistic fiction, exploring its paradoxes while placing it in the context of mid-Victorian criticism. Chapters 6 and 7 survey the manifestations in Trollope's novels of what his theory sets down as the primary difference of its way of telling its readers how to read. Chapter 8 is a close reading of He Knew He Was Right , a neglected novel that, in Kendrick's estimation, deserves to stand in much higher critical esteem than it does. Kendrick shows how deeply woven into the texture of Trollope's writing the rhetoric of realism is. Kendrick's reading is a departure from the usual method of criticizing Trollope—surveying the whole of his work a novel at a time, saying a little about every novel and always too little about each.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book looks at what Kendrick sees as Trollope's grand unified theory of writing as laid out in his autobiography. I think what Trollope has to say about writing is really interesting and is not far afield from what some of today's writing manuals suggest is necessary to form a writing discipline, but his treatment of writing as something to diligently practice and then sell is exactly what led his contemporaries to devalue his writing (according to Kendrick).

Also, did Henry James ever like anything? Every time I run across a James quote, he just sounds like the worst kind of snobby jerk.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sort of book is—not in the leather-jacket sense—The Most Dangerous kind there is, because the brand-new reading you're using to map hidden currents in the work of a particular novelist does not produce falsifiable claims. Frequently a book like this is much more about the year it was written than the years it covers, or much more about the live author than the dead one.

This one is built around a really clever—dangerous word—reading of Trollope's Autobiography. The Novel-Machine suggests a book focused on Trollope's unreal productivity and assembly-line production style, but it's less about the consequences of that production style than the inputs that made it possible. He takes Trollope's lifelong habit of building "castles in the air" and wandering around thinking about his characters, and his almost total lack of outlining or (unless prompted by editorial or publisher considerations) revision, and combines it with a not-at-all-outlandish reading of Trollope's fiction to propose a plausible Trollopian Theory of Life.

Trollope is, by this reading—and to some extent my own—a novelist whose success lies in his amazing powers of sympathy, and who (speaking very broadly) believes that people go wrong when they start thinking too much instead of... well, sitting down and writing their novel, or whatever it is they're trying to do. (Trollope would no doubt have told you something like this, very loudly, if you asked him.)

What I like about this is that each step in Kendrick's argument is something I've thought about in my 10 years of reading 35-or-so Trollope novels 80-or-so times. It is true that his most sympathetic lovers, and nearly all the successful ones, feel love, while his villains (such as they are) are shown thinking through the consequences of it. Trollope is the undisputed master of the "Guy rationalizes a slightly bad decision and it makes his life miserable" novel, and you can't rationalize a decision you know to be bad until you've thought about it, and Trollope almost never gave himself time to think about something once he began to do it... that's a very fun connection!

That's all you can hope for to keep a book like this on the straight and narrow: Rather than seeming to create its premises out of thin air, it found them lying around in my head, in my secondary reading on Trollope, in my Kindle highlights. Really strong work.