What does "Vineland" mean to you?

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Dirk Vanderbeke (Greifswald)

Vineland in the Novels of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon (1)


. . . .But the setting of the novel in the year 1984 certainly does suggest a 
dystopian view of contemporary America and thus the Vineland region, a dwelling 
place of marihuana farmers, old hippies, and large sections of the counter 
culture, may very well indicate the other America, which is now under siege, the 
land of myth and eternal childhood. But Pynchon's novel is far too ambiguous to 
offer us a simplistic alternative of a better world, even if this world is 
eventually doomed to fail and to succumb to the evil forces of Reaganite 
persecution. His Vineland is a complex web of intertextual references and hidden 
allusions, and I want to suggest that one of the most important texts in this 
context is John Barth's novel The End of the Road which is partly set in 
Vineland, New Jersey - Barth's title would, of course, be a very suitable 
subtitle for all of Pynchon's novels.

Vineland, New Jersey, was, by the way, the site of a utopian community 
in the 19th century, based on strictly teetotal regulations. The fact that 
Pynchon's Vineland is rather the last refuge for dope 
heads and the grass-growing segment of American agriculture may tie in with 
concepts of complementarity in his earlier novels.(2) And maybe the oversized 
grapes of the mythical Vinland were simply translated into modern modes of 
intoxication. . . .

http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/amerika/vanderbeke.htm