Does McClintic Sphere in V. stand for Thelonious Monk?

[Keith Davis]

Sphere sounds like Ornette.

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>wrote:

> Maybe in the sense of "alluded to" (as per Charles' word associations).
> But, if Pynchon had wanted Monk to be there, why not mention him by name,
> rather that associate him with the sick crew?  Where he surely doesn't
> belong. True Sphere was cool but all jazz musicians of the era were cool.
>  Both had mistresses but what else is new.  And Paola wasn't aristocratic,
> except maybe spiritually. Not saying the association isn't there, but WHY?
>   I'm really asking.
>
> If Pynchon did "character" (back then I mean),  looking for models (like,
> say, Proust used)  would be a different matter, but . . . .
>
> P
>
>
>
> On 9/28/2012 12:27 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:
>
>> Does McClintic Sphere in V. stand for Thelonious Monk?
>> by
>> Charles Hollander
>>
>> Ornette Coleman Wily coyote that he is in V.(1963), Thomas Pynchon
>> adorns McClintic Sphere with a "hand-carved ivory saxophone," getting
>> us to think Sphere is somehow a stand-in for jazz great Ornette
>> Coleman. There was, in the civil-rights era of the '60s, much ado
>> about Coleman's "new sound" and his "new" white plastic sax. Like
>> Coleman's group, Sphere's group in V. features "no piano," plays music
>> vaguely expressive of "African nationalism," but (the narrator tells
>> us) Sphere is wrongly viewed as a "kind of reincarnation" of Bird
>> (Charlie Parker). A minor figure who drifts in and out of the
>> narrative of V., Sphere is often led by Paola Maijstral's maieutic
>> (O.E.D.; maieutic = Socratic) intellectual midwifery, through some
>> laborious dialogue, until he delivers what has come to be taken as the
>> novel's motto: "Keep cool, but care." (V.; 366) To whom does he speak?
>> For whom does he speak? To properly answer these questions, we should
>> figure out who he is.
>>
>> Arguably the musician McClintic Sphere most recalls is another
>> esteemed figure in jazz history, pianist Thelonious Monk. I've
>> demonstrated elsewhere that one of Pynchon's favorite methods of
>> allusion is to use a half name of a famous person with a humorous
>> connecting name; Wendell "Mucho" Maas, Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz, for
>> but two examples. In Lot 49, Pynchon means for us to summon political
>> figures Wendell Willkie and Henry De Lamar Clayton, on the subtextual
>> level. Also in Lot 49, Pynchon half-names "Secretaries James and
>> Foster and Senator Joseph," and similarly means for us to decrypt them
>> as Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, Secretary of State John
>> Foster Dulles, and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. By naming his jazzman
>> McClintic Sphere, Pynchon signifies he wants us to decode to
>> Thelonious Sphere Monk in the subtext. If for Gertrude Stein, "a rose
>> is a rose is a rose"; for Pynchon, a Sphere is a Sphere.
>>
>> Thomas Fitterling, in Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music (1997),
>> points out that Monk's middle name, "Sphere," derives from his
>> maternal grandmother, Sphere Batts. Not a hipster's cool affectation,
>> "Sphere" was part of Monk's given name according to family documents.
>> Monk didn't learn his middle name until the 1940s, when those
>> documents made their way from North Carolina to New York, and: "From
>> then on he used it as a hip accessory. He would joke that owing to his
>> middle name he could never be called a 'square'." (Fitterling, 20.)
>>
>> Another telltale touch is Pynchon's use of disguises and aliases in
>> the text, like the various identities Slothrop dons during Gravity's
>> Rainbow. Slothrop poses as British correspondent Ian Scuffling, and as
>> a nameless Russian soldier; he masquerades as a pig, becomes known as
>> Rocketman, Raketemensch, and finally Rocky. "Ruby" is the alias
>> Pynchon gives the disguised Paola Maijstral while she is entertaining
>> and instructing Sphere. Not coincidentally, one signature tune in the
>> Monk oeuvre is titled, "Ruby, My Dear."
>>
>> Thelonious & The Baroness Fitterling documents the widely known and
>> long-standing relationship between Thelonious Sphere Monk and the
>> Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, called "Nica" for
>> short. They were often seen together in public. Monk wrote songs using
>> her name or that of her apartment building, The Bolivar, in the
>> titles; "Pannonica", and "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are". Being born into
>> the English line of the Rothschild family, growing up in Paris, and
>> attending a strict religious boarding school, seem to have stimulated
>> some rebellious streak in Nica. Being free of the usual financial
>> concerns allowed Nica to express her discomfort with traditional
>> women's roles. She became an aviator, a then-glamorous and adventurous
>> calling in the era of Amelia Earhart, "America's First Lady of the
>> Air." Soon she married fellow pilot Jules de Koenigswarter, a French
>> diplomat and later resistance fighter. During World War II, Nica went
>> on various missions for De Gaulle, which was not surprising if one
>> knew her brother served as Churchill's courier to the White House.
>> (Fitterling, 54) No ordinary woman, in the middle 1950s Nica chose to
>> become Monk's mistress and muse. In 1982 Monk died in the arms of his
>> wife Nellie, at Nica's New Jersey estate.
>>
>> What, one might ask, does this have to do with Pynchon scholarship? It
>> is an early example of Pynchon's indicative naming. As a literary
>> ironist, Pynchon was likely drawn to Monk as an extraordinary
>> musician, a humorist, and a musical ironist (as Ronald Gray so ably
>> demonstrates in his article "Something in Blue-Thelonious Monk and
>> Henry Adams," on The Thelonious Monk Website: ). Probably Pynchon
>> recognized and appreciated Monk's use of irony. But Dizzy Gillespie
>> obviously had a humorous, ironic way about his music and his on-stage
>> persona. Why then did Pynchon choose Monk, not another, say Dizzy, on
>> which to pattern his jazzman? Pynchon chose Monk because his
>> well-known affair with Nica, The Baroness, suited his literary
>> purpose.
>>
>> First, indicative naming is the use of a half-name where a fictional
>> character leads us to a real historical person. Second, the textual
>> reference leads to something extra-textual that is important for
>> understanding the work at hand - what I term Pynchon's misdirection.
>> Finally, this misdirection leads to a historical situation - though
>> never mentioning it in the text.
>>
>> In this case, McClintic Sphere leads us to Thelonious Sphere Monk, and
>> Monk leads us to Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter and her life. There
>> are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as
>> V., who started her career with "'...a young crude Mata Hari act.'"
>> (V.; 386) Stencil remembers that somewhere along the line V. "'stole
>> an airplane: an old Spad...God what a flight it must have been: from
>> le Havre over the Bay of Biscay to somewhere in the back country of
>> Spain.'" (V.; 387) Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she
>> is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext.
>> Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us
>> to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret
>> agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, "The Big One, the
>> century's master cabal," and "the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name,"
>> (V.; 226) and the effect of World War II on the old-money crowd.
>>
>> If McClintic Sphere somehow allusively stands for Monk, who connects
>> to The Baroness, then Pynchon has him speaking for the victims, the
>> noble remnant of the old dynasty (J.P. Morgan, The Rothschilds, etc.);
>> and has him speaking to those who view themselves as the disinherited,
>> the preterite, the passed-over in American society.
>>
>> We see, then, that McClintic Sphere is not a one-to-one stand-in for
>> Ornette Coleman, and how and why Pynchon means Sphere to signify
>> Thelonious Monk and his mistress, the Baroness. We see how Pynchon's
>> use of irony and camouflage will mislead readers lacking the trained,
>> or magic, eye.
>>
>> © 1999,
>> by Charles Hollander
>> Baltimore, MD
>>
>> This essay is scheduled to be published in "Notes On Contemporary
>> Literature."
>>
>> http://web.archive.org/web/**20110719161859/http://www.**
>> howardm.net/tsmonk/pynchon.php<http://web.archive.org/web/20110719161859/http://www.howardm.net/tsmonk/pynchon.php>
>>
>>
>


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