Maas o menos

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

Eric's list of Inverarity and Maas associations is impressive indeed.
I have only a few more associations.

Inverarity is also mentioned in Joyce's _Portrait of the Artist_, some
brothers Inverarity being the previous owners of a copy of Horace which
keeps Stephen under its spell. (As Jules kept me, which probably caused
some spelling errors.) I read this some years ago from the book _Paradoxical 
Resolutions_ by ?. Werner, and found it quite a clumsy study on Joyce's
influence on 20th century writers. David Cowart, a hepper Pynchon scholar,
has pointed to the similarity between _Portrait_ and _Lot 49_, both being
radical conversion stories of the writers' alter egos.

As somebody pointed out in the 70s already, the heroine is also OM.

(Among possible allusions that some may consider far-fetched:
 _To the Lighthouse_'s Mrs Ramsay contains Maas also, maybe it's even
possible to see it as Mary, Ma(ry)as. But whereas _TtL_ is on one level 
Lily Briscoe's epiphanic elegy to the lost mother figure Mrs Ramsay, _Lot
49_ is on one level Oedipa's non-epiphanic elegy to the land which the
founding father has destroyed.
 
But even though I won't buy any straightforward interpretations of Oedipa
as a new Mary, as some have suggested, she may still carry inside herself
something. But this something may well be plural. 
 
In which case she might be a plural mother herself, not a Ma, but Mas....
I guess I have to stop now.) 

If you want to read some interesting connotations of 49 in addition to
those that are more commonly known, read Jeff Meikle's article on
Lovecraft and _Lot 49_ in _Modern Fiction Studies_, which year was it,
Jeff? Jeff makes some interesting connections between 49 and I Ching,
49 and Psalms, and I guess he was also the first to notice that there
is a Conan Doyle story called "Lot 249". (Kansas City; was it The Other 
Side, Jeff? It did remind me of some deserted intermediary stage, indeed.)

Heikki