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difference exists, however, as I shall specify, with Trollope s
help.
The young Anthony Trollope s daydreams were remarkably
like the grown-up Trollope s novels in one important way at
least. They were long continuous stories that strictly obeyed
rules of consistency and probability. The reader can count on
several reassuring things in any Trollope novel. The characters
will go on being consistent with themselves from one end of
the novel to the other. The world they dwell in will remain the
same too. Moreover, nothing beyond the usual will often
occur. The English girl, for the most part, will win her true
love and live happily ever after. The exceptions to this are of
great interest, just because they are unusual, for example the
story of Lily Dale s failure to marry as it is carried on from The
Small House at Allington to The Last Chronicle of Barset.
That Trollope s published novels were a transformation
of his youthful habit of daydreaming is made explicit by
Trollope himself. Speaking of that bad habit of daydreaming,
Trollope says,
There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental
practice, but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my
practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this
way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a
work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world
altogether outside the world of my own material life.
By this point, toward the end of the passage I have been
53
The Secret of Literature
analyzing, Trollope is describing the imaginary universe of
his daydreams or of a given novel as having been created,
perhaps, by his own imagination, but as then coming to have
an independent existence. He can enter into it and dwell
within it.
Two crucial differences differentiate Trollope s daydreams
from his novels. The daydreams remained private, secret,
hidden, solitary. We shall never know anything more about
them than the meager generalities he gives in this passage.
The novels, on the contrary, were written down and pub-
lished. This made them accessible to all who choose to read
them. A Trollope novel, one might say, is the transcription
in words of a world altogether outside the world of
[Trollope s] own material life. In that peculiar way I am
attempting to define, the imaginary world is not dependent
on words for its existence. It is not brought into existence by
words. The novel s words are performative, all right, but their
performative function is to give the reader access to a realm
that seems to exist apart from the words, even though the
reader cannot enter it except by way of the words.
Another difference is equally important. Trollope was his
own hero in his youthful daydreams. The novels are about
imaginary characters, many of them women. These can only
by a series of hypothetical and unverifiable relays be identified
with Trollope himself. Trollope says as much at the end of the
paragraph: In after years I have done the same [i.e. dwelled
in imaginary worlds], with this difference, that I have dis-
carded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay
my own identity aside. Literature begins, as Kafka asserted,
when Ich becomes er, when I becomes he (or, in
Trollope s case, often she ). That transformation turned
Trollope the guilty daydreamer ( There can . . . hardly be a
54
On
Literature
more dangerous mental practice . . . ) into Trollope the great
and admirably productive novelist.
HENRY JAMES S UNTRODDEN FIELD OF SNOW
Trollope s novels are radically different from Dostoevsky s.
Nevertheless, they unexpectedly have, according to the
authors themselves, somewhat similar origins in imaginary
worlds outside the real world. Henry James (1843 1916)
differs sharply from both these writers in the texture and
quality of his fictions. James s work deals with super-subtle
nuances of intersubjective interchange between characters
who are nothing if not intelligent and sensitive. A whole
page, for example, is devoted in The Wings of the Dove to report-
ing the analysis by one character of the implications of an
Oh! uttered by another character. Nevertheless, for James
too, in an even more surprisingly affirmative way, a literary
work does no more than report with more or less accuracy an
independently existing hyper-reality.
In the last of the magisterial prefaces James began writing
in 1906 for the New York edition of his work, the preface to
The Golden Bowl, James discusses his re-reading of his novels and
tales. He re-read them not only in order to write the prefaces,
but also in order to perform the work of revision to which he
subjected some of them. This was especially the case with the
earlier works. An example is The Portrait of a Lady, for which he
made hundreds of small and large revisions. The Golden Bowl, he
reports, did not require any revision. The figures James uses to
describe his experiences of re-reading are characteristically
extravagant and baroque. The figures define James s sense of
the way each work gives access to an independently existing
imaginary world, a different one for each work. Re-reading,
James says, is re-vision. To re-read is to see again what James
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The Secret of Literature
calls the matter of the tale. This matter is its basic sub-
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