rifles again

[umberto rossi]

Now it's time to answer jbor's argument about the rifles--but what 
was important in that discussion was the matter of the owner of the 
rifle, the bad White man (681) scalped and probably killed by Catfish 
in Ch. 70. Jbor has defended the Lepton Hypothesis, that is, that the 
owner of the rifle, hence the scalped White man, should be Lord 
Lepton (some day someone should explain what is the connection of the 
foppish industrialist to leptons, "any of a family of elementary 
particles that participate in the weak interaction, including the 
electron, the muon, and their associated neutrinos"...).

Anyway, jbor brought forward evidence which should make the character 
of Lepton, as presented in Ch. 41-42, that is a gambling womanizer 
more interested in ripped bodices and cards than in frontier 
adventures, compatible with his purported presence in the then wild 
and unknown Ohio, where Native Americans are busy scalping bad White 
men. That's how jbor countered my argument about Lepton not looking 
much like Natty Bumppo or Daniel Boone.  He explained that in the 
recent past Lepton has been exposed to the regenerating effects of 
frontier life (cf. Slotkin), and may have become as hard as the most 
renowned frontiersmen, be they hunters, explorers or both.

So maybe there's a Steven Seagal (or a Chuck Norris) behind the rich 
fop. Ok, maybe this is true. But the problem is quite another.

IN fact in my Malta paper I argued that the starry rifles appear in 4 
points of M&D:

"(1) We started with the "long Rifles styl'd "Sterloops,"" carried by 
White Horseman near Cape Town in ch. 10; here sterloop is the name of 
the rifle. (2) In Ch. 34 we found the tavern sign in Lancaster, Penn. 
with the "Weapon depicted" (342.34), but now the sterloop is no more 
the rifle, it is the "Silver Star of five Points, revers'd so that 
two point up and one down" (id.); when that star is right-side-up it 
"is known as the Sterloop" at the Cape. (3) In the Lepton 
Castle/Plantation scene (Ch. 41) the term "sterloop" does not appear, 
though Mason's insisting that the "sterlooped" rifle [endowed with "a 
Five-pointed Star upon its Cheek-Piece, inverted" (428)] comes from 
the Cape connects this episode with the first [But Mr Wade LeSpark, 
who is a weapon merchant, hence a connoisseur, maintains that the 
rifle is American]. Then (4) a sudden change: when Catfish takes it 
out of the scabbard in Ch. 70, the notorious weapon is "a Lancaster 
Rifle (
)" with an unmistakable "inverted Pentacle upon the Stock" 
(680.70), and the "sterloop" is once more the name of the disquieting 
star sign, not the rifle (Catfish in fact notices "the Sterloop as if 
for the first time" id., that is, the sign on the stock). Yet in the 
Lancaster sighting of the rifle, the Sterloop was the right-side-up 
good luck charm, while here the term Sterloop indicates the devilish 
inverted Pentacle."

As you can see the recurring term (sterloop) changes its meaning in 
different parts of the novel. And surely M&D are NOT always seeing 
the same rifle throughout the novel. And, what is even more 
important, nothing in the text tells us that the rifle in Catfish's 
scabbard is the same rifle the Surveyors have seen on the mantelpiece 
in Lepton's house. What is "unmistakable in the Moon-light" (680) is 
the inverted Pentacle, not the rifle, which is described as "*a* 
Lancaster Rifle"; Pynchon does not overtly (or covertly) say that the 
two rifles, the one in Ch. 70 and the one in Ch. 42 are the same. "A 
rifle" should mean any rifle, an unspecified rifle. The indefinite 
article "a" should in fact mean "a single but unspecified person or 
thing", not the one we have already met (you should use the definite 
article "the" to express that meaning). So nothing tells us that we 
are authorised to identify the scalped white man with Lepton.

Pynchon often cheats us with such textual tricks. This reminds me of 
Tyrone's map's hoax, which has been brilliantly debunked by Bernard 
Duyfhuizen in his PN article. He creates unstable textual artifacts 
that make readers believe that there is identity where what you 
actually have is a brilliant sleight of hand. Which does not mean P. 
is just a gifted liar; since he's a great writer he can tell us 
something by means of these unstable artifacts. What? What does the 
Lancaster rifle really mean, or at least hint at? Well, I guess 
you'll have to wait for the publication of my paper, if I manage to 
publish it somewhere.

umberto rossi
___________________

		"A mulatto
		An albino
		A mosquito
		My libido"