Re. Vineland, page 3

[Carvill John]

Worth noting (once again) how this book begins, as does Gravity's Rainbow, with a protagonist waking from a portentious dream, and with light percolating in.
 
I take the points raised by Kai Frederik, about the eternal return of every link, post, and annotation that can ever be posted, given that this is (at least) the 3rd VL Group Read . But I disagree that complete p-list silence ought to be maintained. Anyway, if you strogly agree that only original posts are worthwhile, stop reading this one now, coz it's a reheat of a retread....
 
Ok, I posted this before, not during a Group read, just as it occurred to me on one of my many solo reads of Vineland. I got no response whatsoever, so I put it on the Vineland wiki, where it got - you guessed it - no response whatsoever. So here it is again, I promise this wil be its last outing:

I love Vineland passionately, and utterly refute any suggestions that it's Pynchon Ordinaire. But, that very first sentence....
 
"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 stomping around on the roof."
 
...has always struck me as odd. That '...in sunlight through a creeping fig...' is a strange, slightly awkward construction, is it not? And we know how much care P takes with his opening lines, so it's even stranger that he opens the book with this, dare I say it, vaguely ungrammatical turn of phrase? Of course, this being Pynchon, the mind recoils from such thoughts, which just leads to more pondering.....
 
Well, is it? Ungrammatical? Probably not. Awkward? Jarring? It seems so to me. You'd expect something in between 'sunlight' and 'through', no? Maybe "...in sunlight which streamed through a creeping fig..."?
 
Oddly enough, the same phrasing is used in the exceprt from Inherent Vice:
 
"They stood in the  there'd never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town."
 
The "streetlight through the kitchen window" is exactly the same construction, yes? So Pynchon certainly seems to think it's ok.
 
Am I the only one who finds this odd?  
 
 
 
 
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