Vineland
Vineland is a
1990 novel by
Thomas Pynchon, a
postmodern tale of cultural tumult, social upheaval, rock music and drug use. Its central locale is Vineland, California, a fictional small town in
California's
Anderson Valley (perhaps based upon
Boonville). The title
Vineland may be a play on the word "
Hollywood", or a reference to the first Viking civilization in North America,
Vinland. Still others contend that the title refers to
Vineland, New Jersey, the hometown of
Patti Smith. However, the most obvious explanation is that the title is a reference to the area in which the novel is set, which is near California's grapevine-filled
Napa Valley wine country.
Vineland disappointed many critics and readers who waited almost twenty years since
Gravity's Rainbow in
1973. In contrast to Pynchon's earlier works,
Vineland was seen as overtly political and polemical, as if Pynchon, disgusted with
Reaganomics, penned an angry modern adaptation of George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the other hand, one reviewer argues,
But such appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates. There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of
Walter Rathenau in
Gravity's Rainbow, is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing pattern of executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of
Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in
Vineland something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has simply gone unrecognized.
Others note, however, that the novel is as relentless in its
satire of representatives of the
counterculture and oppositional movements as it is of government authority and agents.
Politics aside, Pynchon's technique is still recognizable: from a cameo of Mucho Maas (from
The Crying of Lot 49) to a bizarre episode hinting at Godzilla, Pynchon's "zaniness" pervades the novel. Some readers contend that
Vineland does not take itself seriously enough to be
leftist literature. For example, Pynchon laces the book with
Star Trek references: he has his characters watch a
sitcom named
Say, Jim, about a starship all of whose officers "were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled white redhead named Lieutenant O'Hara." Several characters are Thanatoids, victims of
karmic imbalance and inhabitants of a strange state of being "like death, only different". In addition, the novel is replete with
female ninjas, astrologers,
marijuana smokers,
television addicts, musical interludes (including the theme song of
The Smurfs) and, naturally,
metaphors drawn from
Star Trek.* Pynchon, Thomas R.
Vineland. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
*
Rushdie, Salman. "
Still Crazy After All Those Years",
The New York Times 14 January 1990.
* Geddes, Dan. "
Pynchon's Vineland: The War On Drugs and the Coming American Police-State",
The Satirist* Gordon, Andrew. "
Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir".
The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994): 167-78.
* Thoreen, David. "
The President's Emergency War Powers And The Erosion Of Civil Liberties In Pynchon's Vineland",
Oklahoma City University Law Review 24, No. 3 (1999).
* John Diebold and Michael Goodwin:
Babies of Wackiness, a "reader's guide to
Vineland"
