What does
Mr Haney
bonhommie-man at live.com
Sat Nov 17 13:22:40 CST 2007
eeenyeh... a bunch of stuff... probably not all relevant, but maybe some is?
1) Vines - Christian reference ("I am the vine, you are the branches")
2) Tarzan, swinging on vines - could Vineland be a coded reference to "Tarzana" California?
3) Grapes, wine, relating both to communion -- (like, tracing back the
communion wine to its source) and to those
parables about vineyards (the one about those 3 workers arriving at different
times & getting paid the same...et al)
4) Ok yes, the Viking Vineland didn't last as a settlement per se, but if you allow
a slightly different metaphor -- "Turtle Island" as the place those Vinelanders got to
first, but to which lots more people flocked eventually, (and despite our
sociopathic foreign policy, or maybe because of it, continue to flock)...
likened to
..."The 60s mindset" as a multi-culti, "conscious of immortality",
ecstatic herbally-enabled state of mind that will likewise get (over-)populated, and
continue to attract immigrants in the 70s, 80s, 90s, down thru the (Rock of) ages...
(to ramify the metaphor intelligently, one would then have to account for
the native Americans being there even when Sven and Erik & them were arriving,
placing the Vikings as not really discoverers, but instead
as "yet-another-wave" of immigrants...which also changes the balance point
on the previous metaphor...but aboriginal wisdom isn't non-Pynchon, so
it might still go...)
5) Vines, as in Baanisterii Capii
6) "Banyan Vines" - networked communication
etc etc...
> Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:22:24 -0500> From: kelber at mindspring.com> To: pynchon-l at waste.org> Subject: Re: What does> > 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?>
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