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)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114339

"... 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]."

--Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the
Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49 (ed. Patrick
O'Donnell). pp. 139-40

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

A review of the Henry James novel
The Princess Casamassima

The Princess Casamassima, Henry James, Penguin.

James peoples his novel with figures from the London anarchist scene
of his day. He makes the indefatigable Johann Most serve as the basis
for three characters: a bookbinder, a chemist, and a German
international revolutionist, all of which Most was. Kropotkin, still
tired from his journey, perhaps, will do for only one, but James
compensates by giving him a sex change and making him the expatriate
noblewoman of the book's title, who abandons a life of luxury to side
with the oppressed.

In his preface, James claims to have gathered the information with
which to set the scene by sheer dogged observation: "pulling no wires,
knocking at no closed doors, applying for no 'authentic' information";
instead, it was his practice to "haunt the great city and by this
habit to penetrate it, imaginatively, in as many places as possible".

When it comes down to it, James's "imaginative penetration" consists
of projecting his personal hang-ups and his class prejudices onto the
working class in general and the revolutionary socialist movement in
particular. The central figure, the bookbinder, has a grudge against
the nobility, while at the same time he hankers for their "cultivated"
life: a clear metaphor for James's own persistent bourgeois-colonial
hobnobbing.

The actual absence of any true independence of mind and total
incapacity for any enlightened social thinking that are the rule among
both the state/industrial baronry and the academic mandarins who are
their cerebral proxies — this chronic intellectual debility, which is
concealed by their impressive titles, appearances, and generally
exalted positions, James projects upon the would-be revolutionaries,
who are all muddle and dither. The murderous selfishness of the
privileged and mighty, so elegantly promoted in that day in the
apparel of the academically approved doctrine of social darwinism,
finds its reflection in James's novel in the portrayal of social
revolution as culminating in a massive slaughter of the rich and the
share-out of their property. This despite the fact that anarchist
communism, i.e. collective ownership, self-management and free
exchange, was well established as a revolutionary doctrine before
1886.

The instrument of the revolution, at least in its early stages, is to
be an international terrorist conspiracy that binds its members by
oath before giving them its orders. For of course, since the violence
of the ruling class really is originated in hidden hierarchical
conspiracies (for the sake of "national security"), and carried out by
mere myrmidons, whose slave status is sealed by swearing them in, so
must revolutionary violence be ordered by shadowy command structures
that enforce blind obedience by the administration of oaths so
terrible that they cannot be reported.

James cannot see the inhumanity, idleness, and cowardice of the rich,
because of their veneer of "culture". These vices, however, are all
too obvious to him in the poor: insurmountable obstacles to the
creation of a just social order. Yet the evidence of tenderness, the
skill, the courage of the dispossessed was all around him. It was into
the bosoms of working women that the rich thrust their children for
nursing, it was into the hands of the working men that they put their
very lives when they went travelling, it was the sons of working men
and women in the army and navy that kept them safe from their enemies
and defended or extended their dominions for them. The idea that it is
the sheer usefulness of the poor that makes the rich determined to
keep them poor was evidently beyond Henry James.

To describe and comment upon the actual plot of the novel would be to
dignify it quite unjustifiably. In their blurb, the publishers
describe the book as portraying "the crucial era of England before
socialism". Of course, what they mean is authoritarian socialism, with
its bourgeois, parliamentary, statist and militarist tactics. It would
have been fascinating to read an account of life before this disease
had infected the labour movement. Unfortunately, all we get is an
account of the author's prejudices. Since these correspond to the
ideology of the ruling class today, just as much as yesterday, they
are of little interest.

Recently, James's old house in Sussex was acquired by the Rolls-Royce
car firm, to be used for their directors' frolics. Words or wheels,
the social reality expressed is the same.

MH
>From Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review #5 (1980)

http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/james.htm

Thanks again, Henry ...