V.V. 3--McClintic Sphere and Inanimateness

Thomas Eckhardt uzs7lz at uni-bonn.de
Fri Nov 3 07:30:51 CST 2000


Terrance wrote:

> Interesting, I read it just the other way round. Let me say,
> the narrator does compliment his playing and I think the
> links s~Z provided and the comments that jbor added recently
> and all that critics have compiled from biographical scraps
> and so forth all seem to add up to the common reading of
> Sphere and his stoical statements about love and cool and
> care, but I think there are some problems with this
> generally accepted reading. One problem is that they rely on
> all sorts of things that clash with the novel itself. The
> symbolism in this novel is very important. One big one is
> the Ivory sax. Why Ivory? I can't for the life of me explain
> this one away by saying it's Monk's piano. Ivory? No one
> plays an Ivory sax so it seems that TRP gave him an Ivory
> sax not because of Coleman or Monk but because of what Ivory
> symbolizes in the novel.

Not only in this novel but also in Moby Dick, which we agree is an important source for the imagery of V. - along with The Education of Henry Adams probably the most important. It might be helpful to read the passage in the light of Melville's novel.

Ahab's ivory/whale bone leg is a symbol of death-in-life, an emblem of the inanimate universe Ishmael and Ahab are so afraid of. But Moby Dick is all about the union of opposites and the crossing out of lines. The most important dividing line is the one between life and death, which Ishmael finally, with the help of his friend Queequeg, manages to cancel out. The novel ends death-in-life becoming life-in-death. This is the same metamorphosis Ishmael will later (after the time the action of the novel is set in) experience in the Bower in the Arsacides where the whale skeleton becomes a potent symbol of an indifferent nature ceaselessly turning life into death and vice versa. The whale skeleton is white, it is inanimate and indifferent, it is the very image of death, it is related to ivory, yet out of it grows new life. Ishmael, in other words, in the course of the action of Moby Dick
learns to acknowledge death as a part of life.

As far as V. is concerned I beleive it is useful to distinguish between the inanimateness of, for example, the rock and the wind, and the tendency towards inanimateness in human beings. The latter is related to the inanimateness of the machine. The rock and the wind are inscrutable, just like the skeleton in the Arsacides or the sperm whale's head which is questioned by Ahab about the meaning of the universe, but they are not good or evil. They can't be, they just are. The machine on the other hand can only be understood in terms of the technological progress of mankind and the social and psychological changes it brought about. Machines are part of the human world, which the rock or the wind are not, and they form a realm of the human world that is without emotions or ethics. In the course of technological development and the growing dependency of humans on technology they affect the
human psyche, which is a major theme in Pynchon, of course. In V., if I am not mistaken,  technology makes it possible for humans to enter a state of mind in which they regard other human beings as objects, and at the same time provides the means for killing people in large numbers and stack up their corpses like "car bodies" (295).

Now, in a perhaps futile attempt to return to McClintic Sphere and his saxophone: The ivory sax and the sounds Sphere creates with it - music of the invisible spheres that, as Ishmael suspects, were perhaps "formed in fright" - corresponds with the inanimateness of the wind and the rock, which is, unlest we forget, also a womb. Sphere's music is an acknowledgment of the endurance of the natural world, inscrutable to the listeners, but letting those who have ears experience for a moment the majesty of an indifferent universe. But Sphere is not merely a spokesman for nature's indifference to all things human, a function for which the ivory sax serves as an emblem. He is not only cool, he also cares. But read on below.

> Why wouldn't McClintic be subjected to the same inanimating
> forces that affect the others? The description of him begins
> with his "swinging his ass off" and his  "hard skin, as if
> it were part of his skull: every vein and whisker on that
> head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot:
> you could see the twin lines running down from either side
> of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure,
> looking like extensions of his mustache."

Compare this to the following: "There was no hair on his head - none to speak of at least - nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull." There are some more passages about Queequeg's head and face in "The Spouter-Inn", which may or may not be relevant here. For the sake of my argument I of course chose the first option: It seems that McClintic Sphere just like Queequeg represents a union or balance of opposites. Queequeg is so immensely important to the symbolic action of Moby Dick and the development of the novel's narrator precisely because he is on good terms with death. He does not perceive death as the annihilation of the soul or as the separation of the soul from the body, or as a transition from this world to the next, but as a natural part of this world, and paradoxically - Queequeg is
explicitly described as a living paradox more than once in the novel - it is this quality which enables him to repeatedly save other people's lives and in the end bring about Ishmael's rebirth. Likewise, McClintic Sphere is able to care for other people precisely because he is familiar with nature's indifference towards human life and death, an indifference he acknowledges with his beautiful music.

Thomas, hoping all this makes some sense




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