What does

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The all-important Vineland, NJ?

-----Original Message-----
>From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>

>
>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?