COLGR49--famous first lines

[Kato du Bois]

>From: Paul Mackin:
>
>
>One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party to
>find that she had been tranformed into Mr. Thomas Pynchon.
>
>Do I have it all wrong or does Oedipa in chapter 1 sound more like a
>wide-eyed twenties something recent Cornell graduate with a penchant for
>college humor than a  somewhat jaded Penisula housewife?  In any case it's
>good fun.
>
>                                                 P.

One of the essayists in the Vineland Papers makes that point when he lays 
out comparisons of Pynchon's career and Joyce's ...

... that V, in its ensemble cut & paste, is a mirror of Dubliners; that CL49 
is Pynchon's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both self-portraits; GR 
and Ulysses ('nuff said); ... and his punchline being that Vineland's 
lukewarm reception may have been due, in part, to the literati and the 
public expecting some sort of post-modern Finnegan's Wake. I can agree that 
Oedipa has some Tom in her, up to a point, particularly in light of some of 
the playful gender-bending that happens in the book ...

... that being said, I'm happy to have jumped on here at an opportune time 
(I hate missing the beginning of the show, fer sure), and, and just how 
important will Vineland be to this reading of CL49? CL49 informs Vineland, I 
suppose, just by virtue of existing in the sixties; but Vineland, in 
instances, informs CL49 immensely ...

K d B




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