SOURCE: “Trollope's Metonymies,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3, December, 1982, pp. 272-92.

After a century of criticism, much remains to be said about Trollope's technique. His approach to traditional or perhaps obsolescent concepts of the novel and his morality have been much studied. But relatively little is known of his writing practice other than what he himself revealed in his Autobiography. Indeed there exists no thorough, detailed analysis of the formal and semantic structures of his narrative and descriptive style. As a step in that direction I propose to examine Trollope's use of the descriptive detail in sketching his characters. The function of the detail is complex. It is not merely to add precision or color to the description. It is not merely to help the reader visualize the object depicted. Nor is it solely to make us marvel at some clever observation and at the author's keen way of noticing something that would have eluded most of us. Granted, the detail does all this. But its true function is to induce a semantic displacement. It refers to and ultimately symbolizes something other than its “natural” referent.¹ I shall focus on those details that are used to represent a whole of which they are only a part—in other words on metonymies.

I shall not try to distinguish between metonymy and those figures that rhetorical tradition considers to be related to it, such as synecdoche, antonomasia and metalepsis. Traditional definitions in fact do little more than list different possibilities (pars pro toto, or the reverse; the cause for the effect, or the effect for the cause; the use of a proper name, which would designate a specific member of a class, to refer to any member of that class; etc.) and give them various labels. But in order to explain the phenomenon, a unifying principle is needed: one word is used for another with which, in usage, it already has a relation of contiguity.² Metonymies are used differently according to genres. In the novel the trend has been to dissolve or disperse the image of a character into surrounding objects or to suggest a state of mind or the significance of a dramatic situation through physical details that invite certain deductions or inferences on the part of the reader.

In the specific case of portraits, the metonymic detail does not summarize the whole person so much as it does an ensemble of psychological or behavioral traits about which society³ and therefore the reader, more often than not, hold definite opinions. The reader will therefore react to those traits in accordance with social custom or his individual wont, and, as a consequence, empathize with the character who now embodies these traits. I shall concern myself with only one class of metonymies—those which cause the reader to infer all sorts of moral judgments about a character from his behavior or some minor feature of physical or sartorial appearance.

My field of inquiry may seem narrow, but Trollope so clearly favors this type of metonymy that its study is likely to identify factors truly typical of his style as a whole. To be sure, such devices are commonplace in Victorian novels. Yet further examination discloses traits that are uniquely Trollopian.

First, his metonymies are essentially comic devices. The apparently disproportionate attention Trollope lavishes on Mr. Rubb's gloves (Miss Mackenzie), or on Tom Tringle's “ornamental gilding” (Ayala's Angel), or on a hairdo never fails to produce a humorous effect. These comic devices, however, do not necessarily cease to be components of realism. Second, Trollope's metonymies generate textual amplifications turning sly humor into broad comedy. Third, this dual function, comic and descriptive, is the nub of a contradiction that is one of the earmarks of Trollope's manner. The descriptive function creates verisimilitude. The comic function tends to cancel it, for it literally points to the author's intrusion, suggesting that the novel does not so much represent reality as make use of it to a specific end. We can hardly avoid seeing the comic as a manipulation. In metonymy, therefore, the mimesis of reality coexists with a display of artifice. I hope to show that although artifice would seem to pose a threat to verisimilitude, the two nevertheless coexist comfortably. Indeed, the comic distortion or reduction remains harmless; it does not detract from the truth of a portrayal, for we come to recognize and accept it for what it is: a game, but not a gratuitous one, in other words, a factor of literariness.⁴

The humorous or comical effect of metonymy is entirely caused by the trope's ability to lower its object by several degrees on the scale of values assigned that object in its normal, usage-regulated representation. If the portrait of a human being, for instance, substitutes a thing or a physical detail for a moral quality or psychological trait, this displacement is unfailingly perceived as reductionist. This very thing or physical detail may very well function as a symbol of the moral or of the psychological without being reductive so long as the text makes the relationship explicit and places the moral content and its material sign side by side. Again, there will be no caricature if the relationship is customary and so established in usage that convention makes up for the implicitation of the moral content. Metonymy, on the other hand, need not be conventional. If it is not, content implicitation emphasizes the explicit physical detail—the way a throne loses its majesty if it is not named a throne but is described as a gilded chair. In The Small House at Allington Trollope portrays the vanity of a minor railroad functionary thus:

a stern official who seemed to carry the weight of many engines on his brow; one at the very sight of whom smokers would drop their cigars, and porters close their fists against sixpences; a great man with an erect chin, a quick step, and a well-brushed hat powerful with an elaborately upturned brim. This was the platform-superintendent, dominant even over the policemen.⁵

Even though “powerful” applies literally to the headgear's bold design, we cannot help feeling that the adjective acquires its strength from the hat wearer himself, and that, as a consequence, the hat metonymically stands for the superintendent. He himself is seen a few lines further “keeping on his hat, for he was aware how much of the excellence of his personal dignity was owing to the arrangement of that article.” But in this sentence, of course, since it is explanatory and makes explicit the rationale for wearing such a hat, “that article” has ceased to be a metonym and has become a symbol.

Metonymic reductionism need not apply directly to man. It works just as well when it affects the established values of any kind of symbol. So it is with the following sketch of a man about to jilt his fiancée and pledge his troth to a socially more prominent bride. The cad is lying in a canopied bed as he meditates his deed:

he repented his engagement with Lilian Dale, but he still was resolved that he would fulfil it. He was bound in honour to marry “that little girl,” and he looked sternly up at the drapery over his head, as he assured himself that he was a man of honour. Yes; he would sacrifice himself.

(The Small House at Allington, ch. 18, p. 165; emphasis added)

Supine as he is, he perhaps cannot help but gaze upwards. But this is not reality. The mimesis specifies “sternly,” an adverb that activates the symbolism of his bold eyes: they bespeak unwavering steadfastness and firm purpose. “Upwards,” however, or “uplifted” alone would do to describe a stern gaze. The metonymic substitution of the real and decidedly down-to-earth curtain ironically undercuts the connotations of firmness and announces vacillation and betrayal.

This vis comica of metonymy does not weaken when the metonym blossoms into a metaphor. Rather it increases. Witness the following passage in Rachel Ray, in which a nephew is described as the heir to a tradition begun by his uncle, on the model of a commonplace double metonymy—a chip off the old block. The commonplace is humorous as is; Trollope's rephrasing is even more so, since it substitutes for chip and block the names of wooden objects typical of the uncle's trade. He is a brewer.

Who had taught him to brew beer—bad or good? Had it not been Bungall? And now, because in his old age he would not change these things, and ruin himself in a vain attempt to make some beverage that should look bright to the eye, he was to be turned out of his place by this chip from the Bungall block, this stave out of one of Bungall's vats! “Ruat coelum, fiat justitia,” he said, as he walked forth to his own breakfast. He spoke to himself in other language, indeed, though the Roman's sentiment was his own. “I'll stand on my rights, though I have to go into the poor-house.”⁶

Substitution particularizes and emphasizes the fact that there is no similarity in reality between a father or uncle and a block, and between a son or nephew and a chip. The whole trope rests on an abstract analogy; the commonplace image does no more than suggest a make-believe similarity; the nephew is to the uncle what the chip is to the block. Without the buffer of the commonplace, the same abstract relationship, now actualized with “stave” and “vat,” will appear even more remote from the human, the reductionist strategy, more artificial, and its effect, decidedly funny. As if this were not enough, another make-believe textual strategy seems to attribute the learned quotation to a tradesman who presumably had little Latin. This new contrast sets “vat” and “stave” in relief, closing the frame, as it were, and emphasizing the playful artificiality.

The second characteristic of Trollope's metonymies is their ability to generate texts. The transformation of a word into a text (that is, a multi-sentence semiotic unit ending on closure)⁷ can be described as a simultaneous process of conversion and expansion.⁸ Expansion consists in making explicit one or more semes, or semantic features, of the matrix word in the form of periphrastic sentences. Expansion does not in itself give formal unity to the text. It does no more than record a mental process, equating an undeveloped implicit signification (usually no more than a word) with its explicit development (always a set of sentences). The equivalency, however, would remain unperceived in most cases. It would be lost in the thicket of descriptive details, which might be mistaken for a description or a narrative in its own right. Its complex syntactic structure would not immediately be recognized as a mere variant of the matrix word. The equivalency becomes inescapable through conversion. Conversion creates the equivalency by modifying every constituent of the expansion-generated text with the same factor. The working of conversion is especially evident in the following passage in Miss Mackenzie. The whole paragraph is the complex syntactic equivalent of two family names. As patronyms, these names designate two attorneys, both fairly typical, familiar characters in the nineteenth-century novel. Both names also function as the first actualization of the text's matrix, for both are emblematic of the slow pace of justice—again a familiar theme, but one that lends itself to many representations:

Mr. Slow was a grey-haired old man. … He was a stout, thickset man, very leisurely in all his motions, who walked slowly, talked slowly, read slowly, wrote slowly, and thought slowly; but who, nevertheless, had the reputation of doing a great deal of business, and doing it very well. He had a partner in the business, almost as old as himself, named Bideawhile; and they who knew them both used to speculate which of the two was the most leisurely. It was, however, generally felt, that, though Mr. Slow was the slowest in his speech, Mr. Bideawhile was the longest in getting anything said.⁹

At first, one might think that a mere repetition of “slow” or its synonyms is comical and that this comical portrayal progresses, like all depictions, from detail to detail. In fact, there is no more real progression than there is any difference between the two partners. Their two portraits are but a variation on the first phrase, which develops the implications of Mr. Slow's name: “very leisurely in all his motions.” The variation consists in repeating procrastination, an essential seme of the word “attorney.” That there is no progression becomes evident when the first attorney, the only one who actually plays a part in the novel, is suddenly divided into two. Aside from the fact that law partners come in pairs (at least), there is not a shadow of a narrative motivation for Mr. Bideawhile's presence, unless one recognizes in this scissiparity a “legal” variant of the stereotype “six of one and half a dozen of the other.” Had Trollope chosen the oxymoron rather than the tautology as his motivating trope, we would have had an attorney Swift and his partner Quick. Be that as it may, both synonymous names and the description of their bearers make the characters metonyms of human justice, or rather of its literary representation that progresses pede claudo. The significance of this double portrait—the irony of Themis's “deliberate speed”—could make a whole novel the equivalent of this vignette: from a transformational viewpoint there is no difference between an expansion from “Slow” into two patronyms and an expansion from the pithy Trollope portrayal into a protracted narrative like Bleak House.

Derivations similar to the one I have just discussed are the factors that guide the reader's interpretation of a novel. They are longer and more complex but are always generated by metonymies. Because they reflect the long fictional narrative in miniaturized form, as it were, they make it easier for the reader to identify the significance and perceive the unity of the novel. They are fragments of the larger text, immersed in it and mirroring the whole. I shall therefore call them subtexts.

A subtext must actualize the same matrix as the whole narrative, or a matrix structurally connected with that of the encircling text. These subtexts operate as units of reading, so to speak, not unlike themes or motifs, except that a theme or motif has a matrix of its own, born elsewhere and existing before that of the larger text, so that theme or motif functions like a quotation, or borrowing, or, rather, like an embedding in the syntax of the narrative. The subtext obtrudes on the reader as a segment that could stand alone and be remembered as a passage representing the whole and representing the author, as an episode may be remembered; only an episode is a link in a chain of events, while a subtext is no such thing, since it can be omitted without unraveling the fabric or obscuring the logic of the narrative. The subtext works like those units of reading or fragments or vectors in a reading sequence that Roland Barthes called lexies,¹⁰ except that Barthes's lexies depend upon the individual's choice, upon his ideological grids. The subtext, by contrast, is objectively defined and resists subjective, reader-initiated segmentation. The subtext itself, and its limits—in particular the connection between closure and incipit—are identified when the reader becomes retroactively aware that one textual component is echoing another component, formerly read and now remembered. The component from out of the past, thus recollected or reread with the eye of memory, takes on features not noticed during the first or primary reading, for they are noteworthy only because they are the first step or rung in a repetitive series. For the same logical reason that a rhyme is perceived only when the eye or ear has reached the second rhyming word, a narrative prolepsis¹¹ is perceivable only after the fact. It carries nothing in itself pointing to its proleptic function until the narrative sequence arrives at the consequences of the premises posited in the prolepsis. For the subtext to be noticed, then, there must be homologues within the narrative from which flow recognizable, well-marked derivations constituting the formal and semantic constants any literary text must be able to show. When the reader does finally stumble upon one or more of such homologues, but a homologue whose shape and meaning indicate that the series is coming to an end—for instance, when this latest homologue reverses the order of components in the initial one—then the subtext closes.

Subtexts, however well defined by closure, are hardly ever solid, uninterrupted verbal sequences. They usually overlap other subtexts, or are simply disseminated throughout the novel.

Subtexts derived from metonymies are thus not foreign bodies inserted into the fictional text but playful variants of that text, concentrating the realistic features dispersed throughout the narrative continuity. These features form a network of signs on which the mimesis of a way of life is built. Whenever Mr. Neefit, the breeches-maker, appears in Ralph the Heir, allusions are made to his trade and words quoted from the language of that trade. Soon, entire chapters become saturated by these references to the tailor's art. Nothing could be easier, since the tradesman intends to make a lady of his daughter by forcing the aristocratic protagonist to marry her: Ralph's inordinate fondness for riding habits has made him Mr. Neefit's debtor. Not only the characters' language but their whole life becomes inseparable from breeches-making. This specialized language is no longer limited to the depiction of a milieu; it becomes a code for any representation. Similarly, everything and everybody coming in contact with Sir Thomas, the former Solicitor-General, becomes tinged with his dryness. Like old Casaubon in Middlemarch, he pursues an impossible dream of scholarship in his chambers. A dust code seems to permeate the contexts in which he figures.

We may say that linguistic forms, especially lexical ones, are used as a code when they do not designate their habitual object, the referent they seem to have in common usage, or when their normal reference now plays only a secondary role: this is the case when words suggest an atmosphere rather than represent a specific scene or setting.¹² More specifically, a fragment of discourse, or a lexical set, becomes a code when its connotations displace its denotation. When this occurs, the descriptive or narrative discourse appears less motivated in context, more loosely connected with the sequence of events, and less justified by the exigencies of the mimesis. The most obvious instance of such a displacement of meaning is the symbolic or metaphorical use of discourse. But the displacement is just as real when there is a shift from the denotative to the connotative rather than from the literal to the figurative. An apparently descriptive sentence may thus be no more than a grammatical frame, the sole purpose of which is to provide space for a sequence of connotation-laden words. For instance:

They all walked home gloomily to their dinner, and ate their cold mutton and potatoes in sorrow and sadness.

(Rachel Ray, ch. 4, p. 53)

It is clear that the epithet in “cold mutton” is culinary at the level of denotation, but pathetic at the level of connotation. Similarly, “mutton” and “potatoes” denote a menu and connote inglorious mediocrity. Thus, the seemingly descriptive sentence merely prolongs the pejorative paradigm of “gloomily,” “sorrow,” and “sadness.”

Rachel Ray is a novel characterized by a food code. The central conflict between a brewer and his young business partner is naturally enough linked to a controversy over the quality of beer and the respective merits of cider and beer. Before long, the whole novel turns into a mock epic of beer. The election subplot is also couched in a food code, since no electioneering can take place without many banquets and much potation. Likewise, family life revolves around menus, party preparations, and the taming of husbands with clotted cream (ch. 14, p. 175)—clearly a reduction this, since literary strategies of seduction are usually sexual. Everything, including spiritual matters or less worldly concerns, is translated into terms of eating and drinking. Witness this stab at a minister's hypocrisy:

[Mr. Prong's] teapot was still upon the table, together with the debris of a large dish of shrimps, the eating of small shell-fish being an innocent enjoyment to which he was much addicted.

(ch. 9, p. 112)

While the food code gives the whole novel the atmosphere of the earthly living and of robust healthy appetites that one associates with English country life and the denizens of rural counties, the subtexts color the whole tableau with its humorous tinge, and at times, its ironic overtones. One such subtext is a series of “tea” episodes—tea both in the British sense of an afternoon meal with tea, and tea as the accompaniment to a social call. We cannot suppose that the series merely reflects the routine of Devonshire afternoons. While the routine in the reality of everyday existence may remain as inconspicuous a regulator of life as a clock's chime, its literary depiction must be visibly symbolic and connotative. For repetitiveness in a text cannot remain inconspicuous and must represent, as a sign in its own right: as “tea” represents food and custom, its recurrence represents comforting continuity or the rut of boredom. In Rachel Ray it links together the main plot, with its central drama and love interests, and the consequent tribulations of Mrs. Ray, the heroine's mother. It does so in a mildly comical way, for tea taking and tea pouring come to stand for Mrs. Ray herself and her moral outlook. Tea as a pleasurable occasion in her uneventful life metonymically becomes equivalent to her very relative moral weakness (she is sweet-tempered, good-humored, and enjoys life) and to her dilemmas as a devout and timid Christian (“she would have taught herself to believe this world to be a pleasant place, were it not so often preached into her ears that it is a vale of tribulation”; ch. 1, p. 7). Because this equation of a moral outlook and tea cannot fail to amuse, the subtext provides an ironical commentary, a tale bordering on tragedy and a comic counterpoint to the sorrows of the protagonist.

The subtext unfolds at regular intervals from the very beginning of the novel to its last pages. It appears when we are introduced to the small pleasures of Mrs. Ray, a lady in reduced circumstances:

She could gossip over a cup of tea, and enjoy buttered toast and hot cake very thoroughly, if only there was no one near her to whisper into her ear that any such enjoyment was wicked. … When the clergyman in his sermon told her that she should live simply and altogether for heaven … and that nothing belonging to this world could be other than painful … she … would bethink herself how utterly she was a castaway, because of that tea, and cake, and innocent tittle tattle with which the hours of her Saturday evening had been beguiled.

(ch. 1, p. 7)

Her enjoying tea may still appear to be only an example of sin, but the very next page completes the metonymic substitution, by the same stroke of pen that shows a discrepancy between the parson's own conduct and his doctrine:

Twice or thrice a year Mrs. Ray would go to the parsonage, and such evenings would be by no means hours of wailing. Tea and buttered toast on such occasions would be very manifestly in the ascendant.

(ch. 1, p. 8)

Grammar gives “tea” the initiative, as it were, or an independence that makes it a synecdoche of creature comforts and therefore a metonym of worldly pleasures—the token for the class. In later passages, tea will therefore symbolize Mrs. Ray's weakness as she vacillates between encouraging her daughter's love for a worthy young man and yielding to her minister's strictures. Conversely, tea will represent puritanical contrariness:

There was no hot toast, and no clotted cream. … In truth, such delicacies did not suit Mrs. Prime. … She liked the tea to be stringy and bitter, and she liked the bread to be stale. … She was approaching that stage of discipline at which ashes become pleasant eating, and sackcloth is grateful to the skin.

(ch. 5, pp. 65-66)

As metonymy begets more details, the descriptive grammar allows for reversals of the symbolism: all that is needed is for the verbs to be modified with negations and for the adjectives to turn pejorative. The very continuity of this practice emphasizes its artifice and therefore its comical nature. Hence the development of a discreetly farcical sequence, in which Rachel Ray's growing unhappiness at being kept apart from her beloved is expressed through her preparing increasingly austere and spare teas for her mother.

The metonymic subtext is now so well established as a grammatical frame representing Mrs. Ray's mental constitution that the scene in which she learns to appreciate her daughter's worthy suitor appears in a chapter titled “Luke Rowan Takes His Tea Quite like a Steady Young Man.” Significantly, as metonymy evolves towards symbolism and may lose its reductionist tendencies, subsidiary metonyms spring up, maintaining the comic discrepancy between man and thing: the wearing away of Mrs. Ray's reservations about the young man and his progress in her esteem are marked by the jerky motions of the “tea-caddy” in her hands (ch. 11, pp. 142-43).

As the novel comes to a close, so does the subtext. When her daughter goes away to her husband, Mrs. Ray experiences the sadness of a parent left behind, but not directly in terms of loneliness: “those little evening festivities of buttered toast and thick cream were over for her now” (ch. 29, p. 382).

The subtext's recurrence acts as a catalyzer of the metonymy's comic potential. A mere hint of whimsy at the beginning becomes outrageously funny by dint of repetition. Outrageously so since the realistic facet of metonymy tends to become less convincing as reduction becomes more ludicrous. Verisimilitude and farce are hardly compatible. Trollope nonetheless is easily carried away, perhaps less by the lure of comedy (although what we know of him suggests that the man's sense of humor, if not the author's, tended to uproarious slapstick) than by the accelerating momentum of phrases building into periphrases, and of these into hilarious playlets. This accelerating tempo is almost a verbal automatism, deeply ingrained in techniques of composition, namely rhetorical amplificatio, that have been basic school training ever since antiquity and part of our Latin heritage in the humanities. To be sure, at any point Trollope could have checked this momentum, but the fact is that he did not. Far from it, subtexts increase in scope from the rapid notation of a potentially funny detail to comedy to elaborate mock epic. As subtext grows larger and more complex, the reader is less able to hold back. Even if he were to resist the comedy (but he does not), the subtext would still orient his interpretation and its irony would continue to serve as a hermeneutic guideline.

Such a development can be seen in Miss Mackenzie with the “squint” subtext. The most obsessive and most mercenary of the heroine's suitors is a Reverend Maguire, a preacher whose physical charms and spellbinding eloquence she would be unable to resist were it not for his eye:

Mr. Maguire she did notice, and found him to be the possessor of a good figure, of a fine head of jet black hair, of a perfect set of white teeth, of whiskers which were also black and very fine, but streaked here and there with a grey hair,—and of the most terrible squint in his right eye which ever disfigured a face that in all other respects was fitted for an Apollo.

(ch. 4, p. 45).

He is by no means the only fictional character whose inner flaws are comically externalized by an inability to look you in the eye. A certain Miss Pucker's pharisaic mentality, in Rachel Ray, is suggested by a squint to which the novel briefly alludes. In Harry Heathcote of Gangoil suspicions are aroused against a foreman turned arsonist by this concession to the emblematic obviousness of moralistic literature. The motif does little for the narrative—the detail generating no more than reactions of watchfulness and hostility among the other characters. The cross-eyed arsonist is simply a sign of evil, like the one-eyed Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. In Miss Mackenzie, however, the subtext is fully integrated in the sequence of events and functions as a figurative gloss on the narrative. The eclipses and reappearances of that fearful strabismus add suspense to the seduction scenes. The reader alternately trembles for the heroine and hopes for her salvation depending on whether the Reverend is able to enthrall her when she can see only his good profile or whether she is trapped in a position where she finds it “impossible to avert her eyes from his eye” (ch. 4, p. 46).

It is significant that when Trollope is at his artistic best we should find him working with metonymy. I am well aware of my perils here and how facile this subjective impressionism must seem. I can at least shore up my value judgments by invoking a consensus. Most critics, for instance, would agree that unity in a work of art, manifesting itself both in form and content, is a criterion of esthetic excellence. Such, at any rate, is the view shared by the interpretive community¹³ in Trollope's time, and it still is a perception of a majority of academic Trollopians. How significant then to find this unity most successfully achieved in those metonymic subtexts that mesh the descriptive and the diegetic portrayal and narration. And to find unity again in the way metonymy turns into symbol, smoothly combining a light, incidental satire of mores and penetrating psychological analysis, for the metonymic derision has become the viewpoint of the characters themselves—it is the way they see themselves and others. Such is the case in the “chignon” subtext, one of the principal props of the narrative in He Knew He Was Right, and a hermeneutic model that dictates the reader's interpretation of the novel's main subplot.

The central plot spins out the tragic tale of a marriage destroyed by a sincere, honest, but prideful wife whose unbending spirit drives her husband literally to madness. The subplot contrasts this with the happily ending story of a wedding won by sincere, honest, but meek Dorothy whose modesty conquers the hearts of both her lover and her wealthy and cantankerous spinster aunt, old Miss Stanbury. The subplot also brings comic relief to the high drama of the plot. Comedy stems from a subplot within the subplot: Dorothy's modesty, freshness, and guileless good nature are contrasted to the cunning affectations of two sisters past their prime, who have learned the hard way “that of all worldly goods a husband is the best” (ch. 50, p. 467), “the two Miss Frenches from Heavitree, who had the reputation of hunting unmarried clergymen in couples” (ch. 15, p. 141). They vie with each other in trying to catch Mr. Gibson, a minor canon of the cathedral, who in turn is trying to catch Dorothy's dowry. When Dorothy turns him down, Camilla French manages to net him. This is where the derivation from a metonymy transforms the stagy farce—the clergyman's shuttlecock to the Miss Frenches' battledores—into high comedy with psychological truth. The purely mechanical accidents of a circular chase give way to the language of symbolism and emotions.

Dorothy's natural freshness and artlessness are symbolized by her “soft hair which [her aunt] loved so well,—because it was a grace given by God and not bought out of a shop” (ch. 73, p. 684). Her opposite's crafty snares have a chignon for their emblem, a postiche purchased by Arabella French in an attempt to repair the injuries of Time and to remain fashionable. Note that the thing is more than just a grotesque detail: it does give its bearer some claim to the reader's sympathy. The anxieties and yearnings it betrays in her are actually moving:

It was natural enough that he shouldn't want her. She knew herself to be a poor, thin, vapid, tawdry creature, with nothing to recommend her to any man except a sort of second-rate, provincial-town fashion which,—infatuated as she was,—she attributed in a great degree to the thing she carried on her head. She knew nothing. She could do nothing. She possessed nothing. She was not angry with him because he so evidently wished to avoid her. But she thought that if she could only be successful she would be good and loving and obedient,—and that it was fair for her at any rate to try.

(ch. 47, p. 446)

The subtext opens with Miss Stanbury bitterly railing at this headdress, for her religion finds such secular adornments iniquitous. Comedy shifts into high gear when Mr. Gibson in his anxiety to escape Arabella focuses on the ghastly thing that was meant to be his bait. As the threat of matrimony comes closer, the chignon takes on epic proportions. As the victim has to face the thought of connubial intimacies, the chignon nightmarishly replaces and embodies the bride. We come as close to lifting the veil on nuptial mysteries as Victorian prudishness would allow:

And as he regarded it in a nearer and dearer light,—as a chignon that might possibly become his own, as a burden which in one sense he might himself be called upon to bear, as a domestic utensil of which he himself might be called upon to inspect, and, perhaps, to aid the shifting on and the shifting off, he did begin to think that that side of the Scylla gulf ought to be avoided if possible.

(ch. 47, p. 440; emphasis added)¹⁴

Verbal fireworks now signal the rise of paranoia in the poor clergyman as he feels the trap shutting on him. Significantly, Trollope had just abandoned all stylistic restraints and used the fish and bait metaphor literally, daring to say things such as “landing the scaly darling” caught in the “bucket of matrimony”¹⁵ “out of the fresh and free waters of his bachelor stream.” Poor Gibson hallucinates seeing the chignon as a “shapeless excrescence,” as “that distorted monster,” growing “bigger and bigger, more shapeless, monstrous, absurd, and abominable, as he looked at it” (ch. 47, p. 443). Such are the dynamics of this accelerating verbal derivation that the writer's taste and sense of balance seem to desert him, and that the text explodes into fantastic literary allusions: English no longer suffices, Vergil is called into play, and the chignon looms above Gibson as Polyphemus over Ulysses:

he thought that he never in his life had seen anything so unshapely as that huge wen at the back of her head. “Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens!” He could not help quoting the words to himself.

(ch. 47, p. 441)

By now the reader is carried along irresistibly and finds it natural for the metonymy to have become the hallucination of an evil presence: “Poor young woman,—perishing beneath an incubus which a false idea of fashion had imposed on her!” (ch. 47, p. 445).¹⁶ That we accept this can be explained by the sheer rhetorical impact of accumulation, but also by our sense that Trollope, in pulling out all the stops, is indulging simultaneously in verbal giddiness and in a very conscious parody of it. Above all, our acceptance is guaranteed by truth in portrayal: the exaggerated style escapes being ridiculous since it no longer seems the writer's sin but rather a reflection of the character's attitudes. Trollope simply records Mr. Gibson's idée fixe. Better still, his panic, the obsessiveness of the metaphors, and their very hysteria are the ultimate but thoroughly logical and justified consequence of verisimilitude much earlier in the novel. These derivations, which have by now invaded the narrative and contaminated all the involved characters, and the very metonymy that triggers them are motivated almost four hundred pages earlier by old Miss Stanbury's principles of Christian living. As she prepares to do her duty by a poor relative and take her under her roof as her adopted daughter, she is afraid Dorothy may have been spoiled by worldly fashions:

[She] was intensely anxious as to the first appearance of her niece. Of course there would be a little morsel of a bonnet. She hated those vile patches,—dirty flat daubs of millinery as she called them; but they had become too general for her to refuse admittance for such a thing within her doors. But a chignon,—a bandbox behind the noddle,—she would not endure.

(ch. 8, p. 74)

Dorothy is unspoiled, but a rule of derivative grammar has been formulated that will also apply to any description of the people Miss Stanbury encounters later on. In this way a subtext shapes up, one that will help to overdetermine the unfolding of the novel.

The esthetic and mimetic anomalies of the metonymic derivation tend to increase geometrically as the derivation extends from phrase to sentence to text. But even so, its efficacy and its acceptability to the reader are insured, guaranteed, so to speak, by the constant presence of a compensatory factor. In the case of the chignon, this factor is a convincing representation of the characters' mental quirks or prejudices. There is, however, a more permanent and more generally applicable guarantee for the derivation's stylistic vagaries, for its ungrammaticality (in the sense that it comes to flout the rules of verisimilitude, of prevailing taste, and occasionally of common sense). This guarantee is the authority of language and of the mythology of commonplaces it embodies, in short, the authority of the sociolect.

The subtext's lexicon is generated by a metonymy, but its syntax is modeled on a stereotype, cliché, or proverb already established in usage—the linguistic equivalent of a symbol of truth. My example is from The Warden. A campaign is being waged by radical newspapers against what they regard as the excessive material wealth of the Church of England. A zealous reformer discovers that the salary paid to the warden of an institution for old pensioners is absorbing altogether too much of the endowment by the founder. These disclosures arouse in the thickheaded old beadsmen a not unnatural desire for a larger share for themselves. Archdeacon Grantly, the warden's son-in-law, will not hear of it: the archetypal worldly cleric, a rich man, son of a bishop, he sees nothing wrong with a Church whose cup runneth over. He comes to the almshouse to address the disgruntled pensioners:

As the archdeacon stood up to make his speech, erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical statue placed there as a fitting impersonation of the church militant here on earth; his shovel hat, large, new, and well-pronounced, a churchman's hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker's broad brim; his heavy eyebrow, large open eyes, and full mouth and chin expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well to do was its estate; one hand ensconced within his pocket, evinced the practical hold which our mother church keeps on her temporal possessions; and the other, loose for action, was ready to fight if need be in her defence; and below these the decorous breeches, and neat black gaiters showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the decency, the outward beauty and grace of our church establishment.¹⁷

The reader's interpretation is strictly controlled by the incompatibility between the genre that the subtext actualizes and the manner of its actualization. This piece fits into the moral allegory in its narrow sense as personification: a character represents an abstract idea, and the reader knows how to identify the idea from this character's symbolic attributes. If a woman in long skirts holds a sword and a pair of scales, she must be Justice; if she holds a sword and shield, she must be War, and so forth. A written rather than visual allegory is free to extend the range of significant attributes: a representational verb may posit an equation between details describing the character and aspects of the ethical reality it represents, even though there may be no natural analogy to justify the symbolism. Such metalinguistic statements, of course, lead to parody and lend themselves to comic interpretation. On the one hand is a statue allegorizing the Church Militant; on the other, we are told its attributes correspond to the virtues of the Church—but the reader finds the correspondences by and large unacceptable: equating the beauty of breeches and gaiters with the moral beauty of the Church, for instance. A polarization pulling further apart the tenor and the vehicle of comparison makes the satire more pungent. For the vehicle—breeches and gaiters—is emphatically unspiritual; these garments lack the acceptability of a standard clerical metonym like cloth, used earlier in the passage. Whereas the tenor—grace—is more spiritual than mere outward beauty. Thus tension exists between two codes, the allegorical, the statue discourse, and the literal, the clothing discourse, the clergyman depicted metonymically through his professional accoutrements. This forced equivalency, however, does not seem gratuitous, because it is predicated on a verbal double authority: the authority of a cliché or quotation, and the authority of the text from which it is culled—The Book of Common Prayer: “Let us pray for the whole state of Christ's Church militant here on earth.” What is kept of the prayer's phraseology generates the whole parody. The allegorical code, the statue's belligerent stance, is derived from the words “Church militant.” The clothing code derives from a sly misprision of the words “here on earth” to mean “all-too-earthly.” Again The Book of Common Prayer generates the subtext's closure: the metonymies substituting the outward symbols of self-interest for the signs of spiritual militancy form a sequence concluded by the words “archdeacon militant.”¹⁸ No reader can help noticing it as a well-marked clausula, a violent substitute for “church militant.” First, because of the unusual word order. Second, because of a sociolect tradition that views the image somewhat ironically. Third, because replacing “church,” open to spiritual interpretation, with “archdeacon,” associated only with hierarchy and temporal matters, is the same as replacing the spirit that quickens by the letter that deadens.

Nor is this all: yet another commonplace overdetermines the derivation and gives the initial metonymy the weight necessary to authorize the subtext's fanciful imagery. Indeed the entire allegorical sequence is but the expansion of the proverbial phrase “clothes make the man.” The incipit of the subtext is found long before its allegorical climax: the initial metonymy is a vernacular reduction of the archdeacon to his calling, of the calling to the cloth that symbolizes it, and of the cloth to a satirical synecdoche of it—equating the divine with his gaiters: as Cavaliers used to reduce Puritans to Roundheads, so an insurgent beadsman calls him “Calves.” Adds Trollope: “I am sorry to say the archdeacon himself was designated by this scurrilous allusion to his nether person.” Another rebel upbraids his timid confederates: “some men is cowed at the very first sight of a gen'leman's coat and waistcoat” (ch. 4, p. 55), only to doff his own hat to the “black coat and waistcoat of which he had spoken so irreverently” (ch. 5, p. 71) when actually face to face with the archdeacon. Within such a context the whole allegory has to be interpreted the way it is because it functions as if clothes really and literally did make the man, as if the relationship between spirituality and gaiters were indeed akin to that uniting soul and body. That such is the mechanism of satire is proven by the transformation of a sentence about the archdeacon, “he was every inch a churchman,” forty pages earlier, into “a churchman's hat in every inch” (ch. 3, p. 33; ch. 5, p. 72).¹⁹

Without giving too much weight to one aspect of Trollope's art, it seems to me that his choice of metonymy as a favorite tool explains neatly how he can be at one and the same time an objective observer, faithfully depicting reality, and a satirical one, artfully distorting it. This is made possible by the two-faceted nature of the trope. On the one hand, metonymy focuses precisely on suggestive details. On the other, its reductive function makes the selfsame details (seen as substitutes rather than taken in their own rights) the words of humorous discourse.

Finally, it appears that the generative power of metonymy is what makes this figure most fundamentally germane to the novel as a genre. Metonymies can be found in texts other than fictional ones. What seems peculiar to the novel is the combination of metonymy and the subtext periphrastically derived from it. The fact that the subtext derivation proceeds from word to word, rather than from word to nonverbal referent, as well as the fact that this derivation is facilitated²⁰ by preexisting linguistic models, may explain how Trollope could write so fast and so unerringly.

Notes

1. On displacements in the literary mimesis, see Yale French Studies, No. 61 (1981), which is the issue on “Towards a Theory of Description,” ed. J. Kittay.

2. See Michel Le Guern, Sémantique de la métaphore et de la métonymie (Paris: Larousse, 1972); Jerzy Pelc, “Semantic Functions as applied to the analysis of the concept of metaphor,” in Poetics, Poetyka (Warsaw, 1961), pp. 305-40; Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 106-10, 115-17; N. Ruwet, “Synecdoques et métonymies,” Poétique, 23 (1975), 371-88; Peter Schofer and Donald Rice, “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Synecdoche Revis(it)ed,” Semiotica, 21-1/2 (1977), 121-49.

3. Society, that is, as represented in the sociolect—language, including its descriptive systems and ideology-induced stereotypes.

4. As opposed to literature. Literature is a canon and a corpus. Literariness, of course, refers to the universals that must be found represented in any canonical rule of literature.

5. The Small House at Allington, Everyman's Library (New York: Dutton, 1963), ch. 34, p. 323, emphasis added; subsequent citations in my text are to this edition.

6. Rachel Ray (1863; rpt. New York: Dover, 1980), ch. 13, p. 171; this is a reprint of the first edition, published by Chapman and Hall. Hereafter citations in my text are to this edition.

7. A complete definition of the text should of course comprise the opposition significance vs. meaning, and the whole intertextuality network.

8. On these concepts, see my Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978); and La Production du Texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979).

9. Miss Mackenzie (London: Ward, Lock, n.d.), ch. 17, pp. 214-15; further citations in my text are to this edition. Cf. Roman Jakobson, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry,” Lingua, 21 (1968), 597 ff., esp. 601-2.

10. The word is left in French in the English version of his Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), II, 2.3 (pp. 45-47). The translators gloss it as “large unit of reading.”

11. On prolepsis, see Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 82, and p. 112 (the amorce type).

12. Trollope's metalanguage occasionally underscores the displacement from denotation to connotation, e.g.: “she had no regret, no uneasiness, no conception that any state of life could be better for her than that state in which an emblematic beefsteak was of vital importance” (He Knew He Was Right [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948], ch. 96, p. 905; emphasis added. Subsequent citations in my text are to this edition).

13. Stanley Fish's term, of course. See his Is There A Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980).

14. The Miss Stanbury satire has been mentioned before (ch. 22, p. 211). The reader will recognize phrases where “she” is the normal pronoun. As one indication of the perfect symmetry of the novel and of Trollope's memory and planning, this revelatory glimpse of what a bridegroom never says aloud echoes phrase for phrase what had come to Dorothy's mind when Mr. Gibson proposed to her and the “feeling of the closeness of a wife to her husband” had occurred to her and conjured up unbearable images (ch. 42, p. 393).

15. The “bucket of matrimony” appears in ch. 13, p. 120. Another sign of the cumulative power of the subtext derivation is that metaphors are now mixed together.

16. When Arabella sacrifices her chignon (in vain), she is compared to a ship lowering her flag in sign of surrender (ch. 48, p. 452).

17. The Warden, Everyman's Library (New York: Dutton, 1953), ch. 5, p. 72; further citations in my text are to this edition.

18. Intertextual overdetermination is reinforced here by the latent presence of yet another model—the cliché “from head to toes,” translated into ecclesiastical code (from “shovel hat” to “gaiters”).

19. No doubt, other writers have made abundant use of the clothes metonymy: Dickens everywhere, Balzac, Thackeray (think of Colonel Newcome's great-coat). I suspect it has a deeper meaning for Trollope, perhaps unconscious. On the one hand, other variants evince a surprising intertextual stability, using as they do the same wording practically as in our allegory (e.g., The Golden Lion of Granpère, Everyman's Library [New York: Dutton, 1924], ch. 1, p. 8). On the other hand, certain instances suggest that a powerful repression is at work behind all this, e.g.: “A man can hardly bear himself nobly unless his outer aspect be in some degree noble. It may be very sad, this having to admit that the tailor does in great part make the man; but such I fear is undoubtedly the fact. Could the Chancellor look dignified on the woolsack, if he had had an accident with his wig, or allowed his robes to be torn or soiled? Does not half the piety of a bishop reside in his lawn sleeves, and all his meekness in his ante-virile apron?” (Castle Richmond [New York: Harper, 1860], ch. 27, p. 305; emphasis added). Without presuming to build a psychoanalytic interpretation on such slim evidence, I find it suggestive that Trollope should have chosen to equate or connect Christian meekness and a Latin (and technical) displacement of its (sexual) antithesis. The effect at any rate is to emphasize the reductive function of the metonymy.

20. In a sense akin to that of Freudian facilitation (Bahnung).