VLVL2 (1): Title and Setting (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

from David Cowart, "Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon's Vineland." (pp. 3 - 13)

[...] "Vineland retains a myth that its author celebrates rather than deconstructs.  Pynchon's setting is a representation of the American land; and he refuses to surrender the myth of American promise, which he seems to construe in terms of some continuing, provisional validity of a leftist political alternative to contemporaneous conservatism.  The novel's title announces the mythic ground.  It evokes more than the California setting and reputation for viniculture.  The author situates the imaginary town that gives the novel its name up near the California border with Oregon, and he expects the reader to make the nominal connection with a town on the other side of the continent.  The latitude of the real Vineland -- Vineland, New Jersey -- pretty much coincides with that of the imagined California "Vineland the Good" [Pynchon, 322], haven for Zoyd Wheeler and other displaced persons.  This implied spanning of the continent at the latitude of its greatest breadth jibes with the novel's symbolic detail to suggest that Pynchon's setting is really the whole vast tract that the Vikings discovered and named Vineland at the end of the first millenium.  Thus the title of Pynchon's fourth novel, published at the end of the second millenium, reminds his American readers that their land las been known to history for exactly a thousand years" [...] (9 - 10).


from Elaine B. Safer, "Pynchon's World and Its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland" (pp. 46 - 67)

"Suggesting the pastoral world of years gone by, Pynchon's Vineland is still geographically a "Harbor of Refuge" as it was in the 1850s "to vessels that may have suffered on their way North from the strong headwinds."  It looks out on the bay (probably Humboldt Bay) with the city of Vineland curving "the length of the harbor's shoreline" [Pynchon, 316].  Even in later years, as one drives toward it, one comes "at last up a long forest-lined grade [ . . .and as] the trees fold away [ . . . ] dizzily into view," one sees Vineland, with its pale bridges, salmon boats, and beautiful shoreline [317].  The narrator muses over Vineland: "Someday this would be all part of a Eureka-Crescent City-Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what earlier visitors in Spanish and Russian ships had seen" [317].  Such thoughts recall the celebrated reveries of Nick Caraway at the close of The Great Gatsby: "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world."  Pynchon's passage has been described as ringing "a dirgelike note of corroboration.  Out there at the New World's newest New world -- the coast of California -- one catches an echo of hopes mislaid, a continent betrayed."  The novel's title also recalls the discovery of America by Leif the Lucky and his fellow Vikings.  For these Norsemen exiled from their homeland, Vinland represented an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate" [...] (49 - 50)

both quotations from:

The Vineland Papers. Ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery.  Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.


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