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

[Mark Kohut]

Penance to me does carry the White man's religious superiority, per
Ish; does graft/add Catholic and Protestant Ethic
meanings onto the work done because he is black.

Maybe we are all saying close to the same thing, maybe I'm adding too
much in general and certainly for a literal translation
what Monte wrote works.


On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 1:14 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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