GRGR 31 Shit'n'Shinola

[jbor]

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>From: Terrance <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>

> Red Malcolm (a parody of Malcolm X,

Yes, "Red Malcolm the Unthinkable Nihilist".(64.31) Malcolm X, yes, but
"parody"?

> Red Malcolm (a parody of Malcolm X,
> when he had a "slave"

Correction (I assume): when he *was* a "slave". (If you're going to try to
slam Foucault for "sloppy" scholarship and stereotype teachers of African
history as "so-called scholars" with poor editors then I think the least you
could be doing is reading over your own texts and making sure that they make
sense before you hit the send button!)

> shining shoes at the Roseland State Ballroom) tries to
> sodomize Slothrop (GR.64).

This is indeed part of Slothrop's sodium amytal dream at St Veronica's,
although the actuality of the sodomisation (or even attempted sodomisation)
is, as usual, problematic. When Slothrop follows his harmonica down the
toilet (it is a *dream*, symbolic, representing Slothrop's innermost fears)
the earth begins to heave in 11/12 time to the tune of:

    Now don't you remember Red Malcolm up there
    The kid with the Red Devil Lye in his hair . . .
                                           (67)

This suggests that the sodomy is actually occurring. But it is *Slothrop's*
xenophobia which has been on display here:

     If Slothrop follows the harp down the toilet it'll have to be
   headfirst, which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up in the air
   helpless, and with Negroes around that's just what a fella doesn't want
   ... (64.8)

This passage continues and the physical sensations Slothrop is experiencing
are real to him in the dream (" ... brown fingers, strong and sure ...
unbuttoning his fly ... cold Lysol air on his thighs ... a gob of very
slippery jelly or cream comes sliding down the crack now towards his
asshole, chevroning the hairs along like topo lines up a river valley ... "
Now that I reread that bit it seems to me to have something to do with the
Red River Valley sequence which follows, as if the setting for it is in fact
Slothrop's asshole. So, symbolically, is Slothrop coming to grips in the
Whappo/Crutchfield scene with his own inherited racial oversimplifications?)
Anyway, saying that Malcolm X is trying to sodomise Slothrop at this point
is to identify with Slothrop's drug-dream-memory -- the narrative at this
point is most definitely under sway of *his* psyche.

> Sodomy is an important theme and
> metaphor in GR.

There are actual acts of homosexual sodomy represented in the narrative
(Blicero and Gottfried, Weissmann and Enzian). This one, however, is not
that. Pynchon, in the graphic description of Slothrop's fantasy-sodomisation
by Red Malcolm (and the Whappo-Crouchfield scenario), is in fact confronting
the white male reader with his own deepest fears, his xeno- and homophobia.
But, as the text goes on to demonstrate, in the real world it has been the
white guys who have invariably done the fucking, whether "on paper" or in
life.

> 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.

I don't agree with this reading, but I think we can leave it till we come to
it in the GRGR. What about Enzian: "*We make Ndjambi Karunga now, omahuna* .
. . a whisper" (100.2-3) It doesn't fit your oversimplification at all.

> 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.

I would agree that there is no black and white in terms of morality in *GR*
but this, I would suggest, does not in any way correlate to black and white
in terms of skin colour. To conflate the two things as you are is
mystification, untenable and odious. Racism exists. Historical fact. It
exists in the novel: Malcolm X is depicted -- *by Pynchon* -- "working off
whiteman's penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit'n'Shinola."
The historical existence of the Roseland Ballroom and the "Negroes all over
wasted Roxbury" (63.23) are not of the same tenor, are not called into
question by the narrative, as the details of Slothrop's dream are. The
narrative at 688 is explicitly synthesising the material from the "St
Veronica Papers". We are not in Slothrop's psyche here at all.

> In my opinion, Jody's reading
> is confirmed by the novel.

porter's reading seems to be that the 'Shit'N'Shinola' fragment refers to
Roger Mexico's relationship with Jessica. To me, this seems to be on a par
with millison's reading that Slothrop burning the doll's hair at 282
"recalls the Nazi fires that consumed so many Jews". In both instances the
connections are being made by the reader, they are not present in the text.
Personally, I don't think they are at all defensible as interpretations of
the particular excerpts.