On "sunlight through a creeping fig"

[Mark Kohut]

John quoted TRP and asked: 
>"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..."?
_______________________

Yes, I expected something like 'streamed through' as well. So, encountering it, I think it reinforces the presentness, the NOW, and is imagistic with minimal verbiage, with all verbal 'laddering', so to speak, gone. 

Zoyd is 'awake in sunlight' [as if preexistent; doesn't stream, just is]......with them stomping blue jays on the roof.....[now]...

One of TRPs deepest influences is T.S. Eliot, as we know. He was aware, in sympathy with--through Ezra Pound at least--- of a poetry movement of his time labelled Imagism. {I recently read a short book about it]. The movement was a reaction against "saying" in poetry---so last [19th]  Century--- vs. 'showing': impressionistic imagism inspired by Asian poets(and others)....and symbols, verbal embodiments yoked together without explanation. 

Pound's most famous imagistic poem is: 
IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

Pound's editing---"the better maker", Eliot called him---of The Waste Land
consisted almost entirely of eliminating such verbal connections for the sake of imagistic immediacy. "desolate and empty the sea"---The Wasteland.

Pynchon is a poet in prose, as we know, and this is a good example. But we all know many, many other sentences---esp. in GR, I say---that are such compacted images reinforcing the present, the now. 

Vineland haiku

Drifting Awake in Sunlight
Through the Creeping Fig--
Blue Jays Stomping Around


Add in the lines necessary for place
in a novel......