The Rifles: An Excerpt

[umberto rossi]

I feel I have to send the list a small piece of my paper in Malta 
because I repeatedly asked for your help about sundry matters, and 
since I have a different opinion about a matter that was discussed in 
list, I'd really like to share this with you. And discuss it--why 
not?

We're obviously talking about M&D and the scene in Ch. 70, when 
Catfish shows the Lancaster Rifle to the Surveyors.

	We then learn that Catfish has killed and scalped the owner of the 
"sterloop" Rifle. But the novel does not tell who is he. The issue 
has been discussed on the Pynchon-L mailing list in summer 2002, and 
there was some consensus that the White man scalped by Catfish might 
be Lord Lepton, because he was the original owner of the rifle. But 
Pynchon does not overtly tell us that. Surely the "bad man" is 
someone either Mason or Dixon have met (this is how the matter is 
described in the novel: "Either Mason or Dixon might reply, "We've 
met,"-- yet neither does." 681.70). But there is not much in the 
Lepton Castle (or better, Plantation) episode (Ch. 41-42) which may 
explain why Lord Lepton, a ruined British aristocrat who settles in 
the American colonies and becomes a miner (he is also described as "a 
journeyman", 416.41) and then a successful entrepreneur in the steel 
industry, should leave his iron plantation and his wife and move to 
the then wild Ohio to be scalped and robbed of his rifle by the 
Delaware Chief.

It is true that Lepton, after squandering his fortune in Britain, 
became a "Nabob" (301.30) in America thanks to the production of 
"Iron in an hundred shapes" (411.41), and that those shapes are 
widely "used against living Bodies,-- cutting, chaining, penetrating 
sort of Activities" which are "a considerable Sector of the Iron 
Market (
) directed to offenses against Human, and of course Animal, 
flesh" (412.41); but the character Pynchon shows us does not resemble 
the "Monomaniack" expected by Mason (681.70) or the very bad White 
man Catfish has "wish'd to meet for a long time" (id.): Lepton, in 
his apparition in Ch. 41 is more a fop than a bloodthirsty 
frontiersman. A rich and frivolous Macaroni, not a Paxton Boy. Women 
seem to be much more attractive to Lord Lepton (who firmly believes 
that "Bodices are for ripping" 419.41) than solitary frontier 
adventures.


umberto rossi
___________________

		"A mulatto
		An albino
		A mosquito
		My libido"