GRGR 31 Shit'n'Shinola (is Re: Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)

[Terrance]

> 
> No character-narrator here, no apologies either. He's talkin' to you, white
> boy (and me too). Deal with it.
> 
> best

I don't think so. 


On page 207 of his Companion Weisenburger says that Wolfey
has demonstrated that Brown's Life Against Death is present
throughout GR. See Wolfey, Lawrence. "Repressions Rainbow:
The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel."
1978, In Pearce 99-123

Several critics have confirmed Wolfey's claim. I would go so
far as to say (as I have suggested in my posts on the
"strange case" of Mr. Rilke, Mr. Swift, and Mr. Blake) that
Brown's (compare Brown's Bibliography with Pynchon's known
sources) reading of Part IV of Swift's GT may be the most
important work for understanding Part IV of GR. Moreover,
Brown's explanation for why and how Swift's critics
"misread"  Part IV of GT applies to "misreadings" of, or
claims that, Part IV of GR cannot be read. 


   ... Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of.
Shit is the
   presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with
a scythe but
   the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's
warm and
   private own *asshole*, which is getting pretty intimate.
That's what that
   white toilet's for. You see many brown toilets? Nope,
toilet's the color
   of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that
white porcelain's
   the very emblem of Odorless and Official Daeth. Shinola
shoeshine polish
   happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm's
in the toilet
   slappin' on the Shinola, working off whiteman's penance
on his sin of
   being born the color of Shit'n'Shinola. ... (688)

Red Malcolm (a parody of Malcolm X, when he had a  "slave"
shining shoes at the Roseland State Ballroom) tries to
sodomize Slothrop (GR.64). Sodomy is an important theme and
metaphor in GR. Whappo is sodimized by  Crutchfield and of
course the screaming when Blicero sodomizes Gottfried in
order to break out and leave the cycle of infection and
death is an orgasmic screaming that opens and closes the
novel-the sado-masochistic coming together in death. The
victim and the oppressor define each other, the guilt and
innocence of both is debunked by Pynchon and the behavior,
"the long daisy chain of victims and victimizers" or the
unity of "destroyer and destroyed" (V.) is founded on  the
fundamentally antagonistic aspects of the human psyche. So
the black/white binaries are not only useless in life, they
are useless when reading GR.  In my opinion, Jody's  reading
is confirmed by the novel.