Critics

 Critics 

i

A farable after the manner of Jesop*

A dog, a cat, and a donkey determined to undertake a journey together. They would leave at sunrise and head west. They would turn to the southeast when the sun got low enough it was in their eyes. In three days, they would arrive at wherever they were going, and there they would build a house. Then, the night before they were to set out, the cat refused to take his part. But, he said, he would still write a critical history of the journey and the settlement. It did not matter that he did not go. It was the idea of the thing that was important.

ii

Tony and Hank**

Henry and Etta James

James wrote of Trollope that he wrote too much, about the stuff of the everyday. He gets caught up in particulars, and he can’t get beyond them. “Mr. Trollope’s devotion to little things, inveterate, self-sufficient as it is, begets upon the reader the very disagreeable impression that not only no imagination was required for the work before  him, but that a man of imagination could not possibly have written it.” But there was worse: somehow this was pleasing to the reader. Perhaps that was because Trollope far too good a companion. Certainly, he accompanied. He was too, too present in the novels, reminding his readers that they were both, author and reader, involved in a work of fiction. Or so James. Trollope kept breaking in on the illusion of reality. Finally, he shattered it.

     Yet, are we ever, in a James novel - are we ever under the slightest illusion that we are in the presence of anything real, not a too, too carefully crafted fiction? We are in the British Museum walking around and peering at the figures painted under the glaze on the urn. We are never among the laughing, panting merrymakers themselves.

iii

The rule of three

In a world like that - like Trollope’s (lacking imagination) - it may well not apply.

     Nor here.

 12.13.19 

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 *An online reproduction of the 1887 edition of Jesop’s Farables (with an afterword by Ted Riich) are available here.
**There’s an excellent review here.