ON AtD's ballon and romance and going north: Misc.

Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 11 06:32:16 CDT 2011


Has this been posted before? It seems ole Henry James wrote about Romances..
 
"projected romance...deals with experience liberated. so to speak; experience disengaged,
disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions we know usually attach to it.....
[Cf. Pynchon's--thru his publisher--- words about AtD being like our real world but not] 
 
"The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks
to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodius car of the imagination; but it is by the rope
that we know where we are.....the art of the romancer is 'for the fun of it' insidiously to cut the cable."....
[we all noticed when the Chums cut themselves loose] 
 
"It is as difficult ...to trace the dividing line between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between
north and south"--still James........
 
Tony Tanner, from whose Prefaces to Shakespeare I got this sez it is "impossible' to
plant that milestone....................................
 
And dya think Pynchon had this in mind with his early north-south words in AtD and his balloon boys? 
 
Tanner adds as further implication: 'To be REALLY real, James discovers, the novel must incorporate 'romance'. 
 
Being REALLY real is a nuanced leitmotif in AtD, yes?
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