The Princess Oedipamaassima

[Dave Monroe]

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the 
Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell (New 
York: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

"In his quarrel with Edagr Allen Poe, [Henry] James insisted that 'the 
fantastic' should loom through 'a most ordinary consciousness' [The Art of 
the Novel, p. 256].  As an Orange County Republican housewife locked in the 
most most trivial suburban routine, circumscribed by her narrow education in 
the smug fifties, Oedipa has, at least at the outset, a consciousness as 
'ordinary' as they come.  But once she has been 'pierced,' her consciouness 
becomes just that 'pierced aperture' (James's phrase ['Preface,' The 
Portrait of a Lady, p. 7]) through which an increasingly fantastic, perhaps 
phantasmic landscape is perceived.  Indeed, the Tristero underground, the 
hidden empire of disinheritance Oedipa stumbles upon (or so it seems) is 
highly reminiscent of the London anarchist underground James described in 
his novel about the disinherited, The Princess Casamassima; and Pynchon's 
technique for presenting it follows, in broad outline, James's rule: 'My 
scheme called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered 
life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, it power 
and its hate: a presentation, not of sharp particulars, but of loose 
appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible 
presences and general looming possibilities' ['Preface' to The Princess 
Casamassima, in The Art of the Novel, p. 76].  As Oedipa steps across the 
tracks and into a territory lying both beyond and beneath the official grid, 
the 'effects' produced on her as well as on the reader are just those James 
claimed he was working for, 'precisely those of our not knowing, of 
society's not knowing, but only guessing and suespecting and trying to 
ignore what "goes on" irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug 
surface' [ibid., p. 77]." (pp. 139-40)

Citing ...

James, Henry.  The Art of the Novel.
   New York: Scribners, 1934.

__________.  The Portait of a Lady.
   New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1963 [1908].

But wait, there's more.  From Henry James, "Preface," The Princess 
Casamassima (New York: Penguin, 1987 [1886]), pp. 33-48 ...

"The simples account of the origin of The Princess Casamassima is, I think, 
that this fiction proceeded quite directly, during the first year of a long 
residence in London, from the habit and the interest of walking the 
streets....  One walked of course with on's eyes greatly open, and I hasten 
to decalre that such a practice, carried on for a long time and over a 
consderable space, positively provokes, all round, a mystic solicitation, 
the urgent appeal, on the part of everything, to be interpreted ....  and to 
a mind curious, before the human scene, of meanings and revelations the 
great grey Babylon easily becomes, on its face, a garden bristling with an 
immense illustrative flora." (p. 33)

"But what would the effect of the other way, of having so many precious 
things perpetually in one's eyes, yet of missing them all for any closer 
knowledge, and of the confinement of closer knowledge entirely to mat ters 
with which a connexion, however intimate, couldn't possibly pass for a 
privilege?" (p. 35)

"It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a 
story to tell about us ....  Therefore it is that the wary reader for the 
most part warns the novelist against making his character too interpretive 
of the muddle of fate, or in other words too divinely, too priggishly 
clever.  'Give us plenty of bewlidement,' this monitor seems to say, 'so 
long a there is plenty of slashing out in the bewliderment too.  But don't, 
we beseech you, give us too much intelligence; for intelligence--well, 
endangers ....  It opens up too many considerations, possibilities, issues 
...." (p. 37)

"The whole thing thus comes to depend on the quality of bewilderment 
characteristic of one's creature, the quality involved in the given case or 
supplied by one's data...." (p. 39)

"I had for a long time well before me, at any rate, my small obscure but 
ardent observer of the 'London world', saw him roam and wonder and yearn, 
saw all the unanswered questions and baffled passions that might ferment in 
him--once he should be made both sufficiently thoughtful and sufficintly 
'disinherited' ...." (p. 43)

"Accesible through his imagination, as I have hinted, he would become most 
acquainted with destiny in the frm of a lively inward revolution." (p. 43)

"The complication most inetresting then would be that he should fall in love 
with the beauty of the world, actual order and all, at the moment of his 
most feeling and his most hating the famous 'iniquity of its social 
arrangements'...." (p. 44)

And ending up roughly where Petillon leaves James's "Preface" above ...






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