What does "Vineland" mean to you?

[Monte Davis]

In the latest comment thread at Chumps of Choice, I've been spinning grand
generalizations about what I think all TRP's novels have in common: a
concern with historical causation and individual choice, "how things might
have gone differently" in the Zone of 1945 or late colonial America or the
run-up to WWI.

I slotted Vineland into that as "how all that Sixties change-the-world
energy sabotaged itself, ending up as quaint and impotent and nostalgic by
the 1980s as a sit-com rerun or a Yurok folktale."

You don't have to buy into the implications of that wording, but FWIW I get
there via: 

1) The historical Vineland was the Newfoundland and adjacent coast visited,
and briefly colonized, by Leif Ericsson c. 1000. It was long known through
Norse sagas, but 100% substantiated by archeology for only one site (L'Anse
aux Meadows) so far. 

2) For American readers at least, the meme Vineland -- given all the later
context of Columbus, Jamestown, Plymouth, American epic yadda yadda --
signifies first and foremost "false start" and/or "dead end." That is,
unless you're a Scandinavian-American convinced there are runestones in Lake
Wobegion, "Vineland" is short for an aborted alternate history: "the
European reach to the New World could have gotten going 500 years earlier --
but it didn't, and was all but forgotten."

3) So when Pynchon sets the novel in 1984 in an imaginary California town
and county of Vineland, and its central narrative concerns people hanging
out / hding out in the woods and the working-out of what they did in the
1960s. symbolic association leads me straight to: this is a meditation on
alternate history, inviting me to think about why 1984 turned out to be much
more Vond's and Zuniga's version than what the Zoyd and Frenesi of the 1960s
were hoping for.

So. whether you agee with my step (3) or not, is there consensus on (1) and
2)? Are there other chains of association from the title that I'm missing?
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