Re: GR translation: working off whiteman’s penance on his sin

[ish mailian]

It's not penance in that sense. A very critical conflict in Pynchon is
found in the idea of Grace. That's what this penance is playing on. So look
up grace and good works. Ah, it always comes down to work of some sort you
know.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 10:38 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Syntactically, I don't see any reasonable reading except that it's
> "shoeshine boy Malcolm" -- not his white customers -- who is working off
> the penance that they impose.
>
> On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 10:02 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <
> kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> Could the whiteman's penance be the few coins they sling Malcolm as a tip
>> for shining their shoes? Nothing like slipping "the less fortunate" some
>> pocket change to feel absolved of all one's privilege.
>>
>> LK
>>
>>
>> Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> V688.6-19, P701.27-40   Well there’s one place where Shit ‘n’ Shinola do
>> come together, and that’s in the men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the
>> place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet, as revealed in
>> the St. Veronica Papers (preserved, mysteriously, from that hospital’s
>> great holocaust). 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 Death. 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.
>>
>> First, I just want to make sure I got the literal meaning right. So the
>> whitemen have done penance for his (Malcolm’s) sin, and now Malcolm is
>> paying them back for it.  Is that correct?
>>
>> Second, it's obviously sarcasm, but what could the whiteman’s penance
>> possibly be?
>>
>
>
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