Talk:Real Time and Narrative Time in Inherent Vice

How do you account for "It was late winter in Gordita" (page 298, line 5) or, on page 102, "the wintertime smell of crude oil..." (line 11)? Spring comes sometime between the 19th to the 23rd of March, so according to Pynchon here we're sometime before March 29, yes? WikiAdmin 23:43, 16 October 2009 (PDT)

Just below the page 98 reference to winter, the narrator explains how the calendar is out of whack, with summer not occurring until August, and how there probably wouldn't be any winter until spring. It's also stated that this had been going on for what seemed like weeks now, which could correspond to the gap I'm having trouble explaining.

By the way, I think that the point of the article is that there is no point-to-point correspondance between real time and narritive time in this book. I don't think that there will be any Gravity's Rainbow-like revelations revealed by watching the television programs on in the background. As far as I can tell, the only TV shows that show up when they should are NBA playoff games and the Lawrence Welk show.

It's just too easy now. In 1973, getting BBC radio logs and London weather reports for 1944 and 1945, combing through them to match plot events with real-time days, and connecting all of this to liturgical calendars must have taken months of research. I paypalled a few bucks to newspaperarchive.com, and was downloading TV guides within minutes. There's no fun in being a famously obscure author if everyone can get at your source materials quickly.

Yeah, I'm aware of the "out of whack" stuff that comes after, but to me he's just referring to the weather, and not the calendar. I live on the California coast and it's as he describes it, with summer not hitting till fall, etc. But the larger point, which you indicate above, is the trap of trying to nail down an actual day-by-day calendar-based chronology. It'll be interesting to see how close you get to that. It sounds like an enjoyable project. WikiAdmin 10:02, 18 October 2009 (PDT)