Misc. on Pynchon: Romancing the novel----goes out to Alice

[Mark Kohut]

Henry James, as we may know, was an early theorizer about the new form, the novel,
in the prefaces he wrote to his complete New York edition reprints.....
 
From another book, not his, I learn that in his preface to The American he suggests that when
we read any work of fiction, we are projected out into imaginative space in a balloon. In the form of
prose fiction we call 'novel', the rope attached to our balloon is always in evidence, he says. [We 
are attached to a 'real world'] 
 
But that form we call 'romance' is quite different: the art of it consists in the narrator's ability to cut the rope
without our detecting him in the act. 
 
James against the day......
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