1990
"This
Vineland is a
wild off-spring: an odd-shaped egg from the old boiler himself, so curiously
egg-bound for so long (seventeen years! -shit, it's already a teenager by
the time it's born!)" (
1)
"It is the Summer of 1984 in Vineland, California. That is to
say, what we are presented with here is a very specific sense of time and
place, a contingent locality, a "present." Vineland's primary
narrative, though punctuated by various ellipses and flashbacks, unfolds
in a semi-fantastic version of "our" 1984; not the year of the
same name imagined by George Orwell. There is, however, a kind of symmetry
at work in this case —an intersecting political history— and
it is perhaps no accident that the events of Pynchon's Vineland are
bracketed by this notorious digits. In fact, comparing Vineland to
this "other" (Orwellian) 1984 begins to reveal how the Kunoichi
will provide an effective way of examining Pynchon's own "state of emergency" —that
all important link between the particular and the general."
Quoted from: Samuel Thomas. "Chapter Six. Sir Yes Sir! Doing it
to Yourself and Doing it for Yourself in Vineland." Pynchon
and the Political, Routledge, New York/London, 2007: 131-150 (133).