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

[Monte Davis]

I don't see a lot of multivalence or ambiguity in what is, as David said,
simply sarcastic: the offense of enslavement and its aftermath is
whiteman's, yet in this scene whiteman is exacting penance for the
shoeshine boy^h^h^h man's color.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
> >>
> >>
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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