IVIV (1) "She came along the alley and up the back steps ..."

[Mark Kohut]

I sometimes think of this way [below] of sorting Pynchon's beginnings. I don't know if it came from a P commentator/scholar but I do remember some academic or biographer writing on Ross Macdonald that he began all his novels with a take agaisnt the sky....then, often those jays of his, showing that, once again, the cosmos was not serene......

this was one of Vineland's homages to MacDonald---America is not serene; the mystery of why unfurls....

P's big three all begin against the sky, announcing another book about the cosmos and, with him, the opening lines are like internal metaphors for major themes.....GR: pain: M & D: happy domesticity, so anti- a rocket image, purposely it seems, AtD: cosmic adventure. 

Oedipa comes home to her tower, which is everywhere, we soon learn. 

V. is Benny on the streets, perhaps like Shasta on the streets/alleys, the street is where the profane happens, but, as I found out when I once Googled Christmas Eve, that was the first evening that NORAD, with roots in Boeing, tracked "Santa Claus" against the sky [due to a misprint in Sears' Talk to Santa ad....NORAD went with it...and the rest became a tradition......about everyone thinks this is just a Kute Korrespondence so,
I'll go with Benny on the streets.....


--- On Tue, 8/25/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: IVIV (1) "She came along the alley and up the back steps ..."
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 3:13 AM
> 
> > "She came along the alley and up the back steps the
> way she always
> > used to." (IV, Ch. 1, p. 1)
> 
> This differs somewhat from Pynchon's other first lines,
> which can more
> or less be grouped into two different categories:
>  
> 1) The first lines of V., Lot 49 and VL all introduce an
> important
> character by his/her full name and situates him/her in a
> specific time 
> and/or place:
>  
> "Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis,
> suede jacket,
> sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through
> Norfolk, Virginia."
>  
> "One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a
> Tupperware 
> party [...]."
>  
> "Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler
> drifted 
> awake [...]."
>  
> Welcome, dear reader, here's a new character, this is what
> s/he's called,
> and this is where s/he's at.
>  
> 2) The first lines of Pynchon's Big Three tend to be more
> abstract or 
> impersonal. No named characters are introduced, and the
> emphasis is on 
> actions or objects or concepts.
>  
> "A screaming comes across the sky."
>  
> "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs [...]."
>  
> "Now single up all lines!"
>  
> The first line of IV is closest to the first category, in
> that it 
> introduces a character, but it differs significantly from
> them in
> the familiarity, almost intimacy, it implies. Not "Shasta
> Fay Hepworth
> came along the alley," but "she" came along the alley, as
> if we already 
> knew her. The intimacy is underscored by that "the way she
> always used
> to." It's almost as if we've been here before. So IV's
> intro is not like
> the gentle, more or less traditional introductions from
> category 1. It's
> more like we're thrown right into the thick of it, from an
> intimate  
> perspective which in these first few lines seems close to
> Doc's.
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