What does "Vineland" mean to you?

[Mark Kohut]

I'll be part of the general consensus on (1) and (2) I think--if, as we are always being reminded---
the associations of Vineland are not 'reduced' to false start, dead end, so to speak. 

With "Mr. Natural" Pynchon, I see trees embodied in Vine; that incredible natural richness of America per
Tocqueville and other commentators on America............betrayed 

And, like ideas around the meaning of V., I see the idea/ideals of America which is a kissing cousin I guess to 
"false start" and "dead end"...

And it is NOT Iceland, (in Pynchon's north/cold, south/warm internal working metaphors)

MK



----- Original Message ----
From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 11:55:55 AM
Subject: What does "Vineland" mean to you?


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?


      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better sports nut!  Let your teams follow you 
with Yahoo Mobile. Try it now.  http://mobile.yahoo.com/sports;_ylt=At9_qDKvtAbMuh1G1SQtBI7ntAcJ
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20071117/63f6c475/attachment-0001.html>