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

[Mark Kohut]

I think it is a multivalence 'penance' as almost all the key concepts
have in Pynchon.
That "7 Types of Ambiguity" kind.......P got penance from Catholicism, from the
Puritan tradition, from Weber's Protestant Ethic and from wherever it is used.

And used it, I think, as Monte sez and with Morris's focus on the
sarcastic tone in the text.
 he let it carry
those resonances within a racial/class insight into Blackness, a black
man, a real man
in history who did shine shoes when young. ..Correct me if I'm wrong,
Monte, but I don't
think you implied the penance was payable.
Simple wikipedia piece just puts in context
the historical servant to master role such shoe shiners have had in
history (and taught me how that
has been subverted a bit by some bootblacks...)

Remember this resonance: they were usually called 'shoeshine boys'.
'Come here boy'...boy.

and, misc,  TRP magnificently subverts the meaning of Grace (mostly)
in his fiction, imo. not too relevant
to penance use here, imo.

Later discussion on THAT maybe.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 11:22 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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