Creeping Figs

[Paul Mackin]

On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:00 AM, David Morris wrote:

> This sentence doesn't seem at all akward to me.  It seems very
> American-english, leaving out words in a sort of shorthand-slang.
> Vineland is full of slang and pop, and this just seems to fit in with
> that.
>


Doesn't  the slight sense of having left out a word or two provide a  
more poetical beginning than would otherwise have been the case?  
Emily Dickinson would have approved. There's  a King-James-version-of- 
the-Bible feel, a dream-like, postmodern cachet, a not-quite- 
rational  getting of things off to the appropriate kind of start. And  
the presence of the  "creeping fig" is  comical and discordant ( in  
the way a "climbing rose" would not have been)--for a distinctively   
Pynchonian type of daring and zaniness to come.

Or something like that . . . .

> David
>
> On 9/16/06, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted  
>> awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window,  
>> with a squadron of blue jays..." etc.
>>
>> Ok, leaving everything else aside, does that 'in sunlight through'  
>> strike anyone else as slightly jarring, as if we'd expect  
>> something else between 'sunlight' and 'through'? Some variant on,  
>> say, 'in sunlight that', I dunno, 'shone through', 'filtered  
>> through'.......?
>>
>> Any thoughts?