COLGR49: Inverarity

[Tim Strzechowski]

In _A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49_, J. Kerry Grant states the following:

" . . . Mac Adam claims that Inverarity represents the artist.  'His given name,
Pierce . . . evok[es] the phallic stylus violating the white purity of the page,
while his last name, Inverarity, hints at such concepts as inveracity and inversion,
the illusory or lying aspects of writing'" (Grant, p. 8).

Given the story of Joyce's Stephen D and his search for a true aethetic, and
Pynchon's Oedipa and her search for truth amid webs of deceit, I find these comments
interesting.


> The name "Inverarity" also appears in James Joyce's _A Portrait of the Artist as
> a Young Man_:
>
> "The pages of his timeworn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own
> fingers were cold: they were human pages: and fifty years before they had been
> turned by the human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother,
> William Malcolm Inverarity.  Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf .
> . ." (Viking edition, p. 179).
>
> This passage comes toward the beginning of the final chapter, in which we now
> see Stephen as an erudite, albeit slightly arrogant, young man who is about to
> discuss his theory of aesthetics with the Dean.
>