Re. Vineland, page 3

[Che Molava]

That first sentence struck me as odd too.
The grammatically plausible interpretation has "sunlight " as the subject of
the prepositional phrase  "through a creeping fig ". This would place the
description from Zoyd's point of view (with the bluejays as some kind of
noisy intrusion).

But as well as this syntax-endorsed sense, there is also the more immediate
flow of images; the way that the sequence of images from Zoyd, to fig,
window and roof suggests the  movement of a tracking shot pulling backwards,
in which case it is Zoyd who is seen through the foliage (by the retreating
camera eye), rather than the sunlight streaming in. From this  perspective,
the creeping fig and blue jays enframe the image of Zoyd awakening, as if
composing an ornamental headpiece or vignette:

(Wikipedia) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette>
The word <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word> *vignette*, from the same root
as *vine <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine>*, originally referred to a
decorative border in a book. Later, the word also came to be used for a
photographic portrait which is clear in the center, and fades off at the
edges, and also short descriptive literature focusing on a particular moment
or person.

(everything2.comhttp://everything2.com/title/vignette)
Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner offer an explanation for the vignette's eager
adoption of the vignette by painters of the nineteenth century : The
vignette, by its general appearance, presents itself both as a global
metaphor for the world and as a fragment. Dense at its center, tenuous on
the periphery, it seems to disappear into the page: this makes it a naive
but powerful metaphor of the infinite, a symbol of the universe; at the same
time, the vignette is fragmentary...incomplete, mostly dependent upon the
text for it's meaning..

A sleeping figure disturbed by vague threats at the periphery? Innocence
motif?


On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> 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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