AtD teasers and a spoiler

[Dave Monroe]

I call the 1st Chapter for the group read ...

--- Mike Beiderbecke <beider19 at comcast.net> wrote:

> Pg 4, Line 2 (continued from previous page).
> The Princess Casamassima
> http://www.henryjames.org.uk/pcasa/home.htm

>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 simplest 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
one's eyes greatly open, and I hasten to declare 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
matters 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 ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=59073


 
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