OFF Re: The Rifles: An Excerpt

[jbor]

Umberto

I've just noticed that you have been editing and responding to my offlist
posts and then posting them on to the pynchon-list. You initially sent me an
offlist email (below) which I responded to offlist; I've been replying to
you offlist ever since.

Rob Jackson
 
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From: umberto rossi <teacher at inwind.it>
Reply-To: teacher at inwind.it
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 11:45:03 +0200
To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
Subject: Re: The Rifles: An Excerpt


In data 19 Jun 2004, verso le 21:49, jbor si trovò a scrivere su Re:
The Rifles: An Excerpt:

> I'm not sure where in
> the text you're getting the KKK stuff from, but the narrator says that
> Lepton was one to "drive the African slaves as basely as a Creature of his
> Sort might be expected to do" (416).

Pynchon hints at the KKK in the Cape Town part of the novel, and
wherever the Rifle appears. Not that there are them Ku Kluxers in the
text; we're well before 1865. But many phrases, sentences, words
foreshadow the KKK. The armed White Horsemen at Cape Town, for
example; the Paxton Boys (proto-Kluxers in their own right, though
their hate is aimed at another ethnic group), etc. Wherever the rifle
appears the racial question is evoked.

As to your argument re. Lepton as the white man killed by Catfish,
I'll have to reread the pages you mentioned.

umberto rossi
___________________

  "A mulatto
  An albino
  A mosquito
  My libido"