an opinion on TRP and HJ

[Dave Monroe]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> As Doug M. says we all know it must mean something that Pugnax, a dog, is reading "Princess Casamassima"....

>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
(NY: 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)

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

Citing ...

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

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

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