TRP influence, Hawthorne

[Mark Kohut]

Promised no grades but this earns extra credit ....
to overcome some failed web-spinning in your past. 

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2012 8:23 PM
Subject: Re: TRP influence, Hawthorne

Hawthorne wrote allegory. Are his allegories about people who felt
they lived in an allegory? Not exactly. Although it is a question that
invites examination of the self-conscious elements of the American
Romance and the Gothic tradition in American Letters. For example,
"Young Goodman Brown" is an allegory. But is the tale about Goodman
and his Wife, Faith, and the Devil? Not exactly. Hawthorne is an
American Romantic; his tales are not about Puritan Typology. He makes
use of allegory and puritan themes, and ideas, incliuding typology,
but his tales are about his own life and his experience of America. In
this sense, his allegories are no more about Puritans than A. Miller's
Crucible is about Hawthorne's ancestors.  Now, as I know you are a
huge fan of Shakespeare, I will try to convince you that Hawthorne &
Co. were playing much the same game that William Shakespeare played
with his plays. Plays that often featured plays within plays, plays
presented within the court and within the globe, that mind of the
times much distracted or the distracted mind, but, as America was,
maybe still is, though all the trees be cleared to make way for
Gatsby's house, though Vineland the Good has been un-fluxed and made a
grid, a dream, if not a romantic midsummer night's dream, a dream of
something that might be, or the pursuit of such a happy dream, well, a
fiction, a forgery, a play, is the thing, within, or the conscience,
or conscious Recogniition, of the play-thing.

How's that for a Rec tall Brownian Notion?

On 6/14/12, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In an essay on hawthorne, i was struck with this observation...which I
> think the essay writer felt he was extrapolating from hawthorne himself:
>
> Re: Puritan theme, he--hawthorne--ask: how do you write even a loose
> allegory
> about people who felt they lived in an allegory...
>
> Riff...
>
> There are no wrong answers. F to all who don't riff, he jokes...
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