AtDDtA1: The Princess Casamassima

[Dave Monroe]

   "'I say, Pugnax--what's that you're reading now, old fellow?'
   "'Rr-Rff-rff Rr-rr-rff-rrf-rrf,' replied Pugnax without looking up,
which Darby, having like others in the crew got used to Pugnax's voice
[...] interpreted as, 'The Princess Casamassima.'
   "'Ah.  Some sort of ... Italian romance, I'll bet?'
   "'Its subject,' he was promptly informed by the ever-alert Lindsay
Noseworth, who had overheard the exchange, 'is the inexorably rising
tide of World Anarchism ....'" (AtD, Pt. i, pp. 5-6)


Mr. Henry James

http://www.henryjames.org.uk/

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hjames.htm

http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_James

http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/james.htm

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0107&msg=57554


Casamassima, Italy

http://www.casamassima.net/

http://www.comune.casamassima.ba.it/


Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1886)

http://www.henryjames.org.uk/pcasa/home.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Casamassima

http://www.io.com/~hcexres/dissertation/diss_james.html


>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 Edgar 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 e 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].

And 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 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 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)

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