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

[Dave Monroe]

... very quick note, though, here, on that "long daisy chain of victims and
victmizers,"  cf. Samuel Beckett, How it Is, which has its own peculiar--and very
resonant, here--take on G.W.F. Hegel's master/slave dialectic (in The
Phenomenology of Mind).  Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil),
Franz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) ... however, what might of particular
relevance here is the African-American Marxist C.L.R. James on "The Negro
Problem" (currently available in the C.L.R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw) ...

Terrance wrote:

> >
> > 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.