The Liberal Imagination

[Dave Monroe]

>From Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: NYRB Books,
2008 [1950]), Ch. 2, "The Princess Casamassima," pp. 58-92:

Henry James in the eighties understood what we have painfully learned
from our grim glossary of wars and concentration camps, after having
seen the state and human nature laid open to our horrified inspection.
 "But I have the imagination of disaster — and see life as ferocious
and sinister." (p. 60)

Like any great artist of story, like Shakespeare or Balzac or Dickens
or Dostoevski, James crowds probability rather closer than we nowadays
like.  It is not that he gives us unlikely events but that he
sometimes thickens the number of interesting events beyond our
ordinary expectation.  If this, in James or in any storyteller, leads
to a straining of our sense of verisimilitude, there is always the
defense to be made that the special job of literature is, as Marianne
Moore puts it, the creation of "imaginary gardens with real toads in
them." (p. 65)

In the thirties the book was much admired by those who read it in the
light of knowledge of our own radical movements; it then used to be
said that although James had dreamed up an impossible revolutionary
group he had nonetheless managed to derive from it some notable
insights into the temper of radicalism .... (p. 67)

James himself helped to throw us off the scent when in his preface to
the novel he told us that he made no research into Hyacinth's
subterranean politics.  He justified this by saying that "the value I
wished most to render and the effect I wished most to produce were
precisely those of our not knowing, of society's not knowing, but only
guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what 'goes on'
irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface."  (p. 67)

... the truth is that there is not a political event of The Princess
Casamassima, not a detail of oath or mystery or danger, which is not
confirmed by multitudionous records.  (p. 68)

... he imagined a kind of revolution with which we are no longer
familiar.... There is no organized mass movement; there is no
disciplined party but only a strong conspiratorial center. There are
no plans for taking over the state and almost no ideas about the
society of the future. The conspiratorial center plans only for
destruction ... (pp. 68-9)

In 1872, at its meeting in The Hague, the First International voted
the expulsion of the anarchists ... (p. 69)

Anarchism never established itself very firmly in England as it did in
Russia, France, and Italy.  In these countries it penetrated to the
upper classes. The actions of the Princess are not unique for an
aristocrat of her time ... (p. 73)

In short, when we consider the solid accuracy of James's political
detail at every point, we find that we must give up the notion that
James could move only in the thin air of moral abstraction. (p. 74)

... Hyacinth is in effect plotting the murder of his own father ... (p. 76)

... at the very moment when this brilliant pair think they are closest
to the conspiratorial arcanum, the real thing, the true center, they
are in actual fact furthest from it. Paul and the Princess believe
themselves to be in the confidence of Them, the People Higher Up, the
International Brothers, or whatever, when really they are held in
suspicion in these very quarters. (p. 79)

... "the fabric of civilization as we know it" is inextricably bound
up with this injustice; the monuments of art and learning and taste
have been reared upon coercive power. (p. 83)

Suppose that truth be the expression, not of intellect, nor even, as
we sometimes now think, of will, but of love. (p.86)

... James represents the poor as if they had dignity and intelligence
in the same degree as people of the reading class. More, he assumes
this ... (p.87)

People at the furthest extremes of class are easily brought into
relation because they are all contained in the novelist's affection.
(p. 87)

James had the imagination of disaster and that is why he is
immediately relevant to us; but together with the imagination of
disasterer he had what the imagination of disaster often destroys and
in our time is daily destroying, the imagination of love. (p. 92)

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=8311
http://books.google.com/books?id=XKP0I6LL8KMC

See ...

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

Cf. ..

>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:

... 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, its 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)

http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521388333

And see as well, e.g., ...

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