GRGR2: Hawthorne & Pynchon

[jm]

>
>10) Hooker was one of the early Puritan settlers in the US wilderness,
>    adding a certain grand historical or maybe even messianic overtone
>    to the image of garden love vs wild love. For goodness sake,
>    someone please draw in colonialism, Puritanism, the chaos/order
>    divide, technology, nature in the raw, science vs revelation,
>    Hawthorne, Melville, . . . knot them all in! Oh and is the rest of
>    Hooker's writing so melodious?

Few works of Hawthorne's with which I'm familiar seem more closely aligned
with P's favorite themes than his story "The Maypole of Merrymount."  This
story has its quite precise Pynchonesque counterpart, not in GR, but rather
in Vineland--in the section known as "The People's Republic of Rock 'n
Roll."  In each, the Puritans line up against the
Dionysians/Deadheads/hippies or what-have-you.  And in each case the latter
group gives up all too readily, perhaps due to the interiorized puritan
lurking in us all, or maybe cuz they were just out-gunned.  John Endicott
and Richard Nixon versus William Blackstone and We-Datman, I suppose.
(William Blackstone also appears as the consul's alter-ego in that other
great puritanical book, _Under the Volcano_, which is probably worth just
this brief mention.  A-and then there's Milton's "Comus," too, with its
quite different take on this matter.)    

A Hawthorne story relating to the paranoia theme in GR would be "Young
Goodman Brown."  I think YGB fits much better with COL49 than with GR,
however.  YGB and COL49 both seem more concerned with the effect paranoia
has on its victims than on the presence or absence of an actual
"they-structure" sufficient to warrant the paranoia.  GR, on the other hand,
seems to be more of an examination of the they-structure than a serious look
at the pyschological effects of paranoia.  Slothrop does indeed disintegrate
as GR winds down, but the causes aren't really clear.  The rocket or the
dope or The Zone or paranoia--all seem like possible causes.

                                                  -jm