James Incandenza, Sr.

Consolidated record of false matches and unresolved date/identity puzzles; as printed throughout. For this character the ledger IS most of the work: "James Incandenza," "Dr. Incandenza," and bare "Incandenza" in this novel virtually always mean the son (J.O.I., Himself), and both father and son are, at different removes, "Himself" and "Sr." The census below records every disambiguation call.

The "Incandenza Sr." string trap. The literal string "Incandenza Sr." occurs three times in the source text, and in two of them it denotes the SON, not this page's subject — the honorific floats with the generation under discussion:

• 089 — Clipperton asks for "the counsel of Incandenza Sr. himself": this is J.O.I. ("Sr." relative to the Incandenza boys at E.T.A.). NOT cited here.
• n176 — "the love thing in Incandenza Sr.’s film had concerned not Tine and a Québecois fatale...": J.O.I.'s adult ONANtiad, "Sr." relative to Mario the adapter. NOT cited here.
• 071 — "allowing James Incandenza Sr. to retire from a sad third career...": the one place the style names this page's man. Cited (7, 9, 10).

Relatedly, 020's "Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide" marks the son as the Jr. of the pair — corroborating the Sr./Jr. naming without ever styling the father in full.

Scenes that only seem to carry him. Father-, grandfather-, Brando-, and Tucson-language pulls in a large penumbra of hits with no genuine James-Sr. material; none of the following is cited in any event's Scene(s):

• "his father" = the son as father (J.O.I.): 081 ("his late father’s archivists" — Mario's late father); 094 (the alpaca tennis jacket "that had been his father’s" — Hal's father); 132 ("his father’s cartridges"); 150 (Orin/Joelle's Incandenza material throughout — "his father’s films," the Thanksgiving scene, and Orin's "his father’s face any room’s fifth wall," all about J.O.I.; see the fifth-wall echo below); 062 ("his father’s optical beloved" — Joelle on J.O.I.); 179 (Himself teaching Orin to shave — J.O.I. as father).
• "his father" = other families entirely: 069 (Poor Tony's father, in seizure visions); 098 (Marathe's father and the videophonic pacemaker death); 154 and 102 (Avril's father and grandfather — the St. Pamphile potato-farm line, "your maternal grandfather"); 013 in part (the same sentence that attests Sr. opens on "his father had drunk" = J.O.I.; the file carries both lanes in one clause and is cited only for the father's-father segment).
• "grandfather" false hits: 062 ("a hideous grandfatherly flannel suit" — a costume); 154 (maternal line, Avril's).
• Brando lane: 096 — every hit is "Brandon," the Brandon Psychiatric Center in Manitoba (partial-string match); n024 — Brando appears in the Marat/Sade-film synopsis (J.O.I. discoursing "on the implications of Brando’s Method Acting" — the father's grievance one generation down, on film); 150 — J.O.I.'s Thanksgiving discourse on "the Method actors Brando, Dean, Clift et al." (same, at table). Genuine Sr. Brando material exists only in 049.
• Tucson lane: the Marathe/Steeply desert serial sits on a mountainside outside Tucson (029, 035, 036, 038, 072, 088, 096, 098, 103, 123, 128, 137 and kin) — no Sr. content; the WhataBurger Invitational is played in Tucson (057, 065, 094, 102, 157, 165, n321 — Hal's "at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself," 157, is the tournament); 094 also has Coyle's Tucson suburb; 138's "breathtaking exteriors shot outside Tucson AZ" is a J.O.I. film. Genuine Sr. Tucson: 049 (the dateline), 020 ("his native Tucson AZ"), 071 (the stairway), 005 (the Tucson Citizen).
• 012 (Orin, Phoenix): "the conscious horror Himself had somehow developed about the Southwest’s black widows... the widows are all over the place, both here and Tucson" — attested as Himself's horror, with no printed link to his father; the garage widows (049) and the father's "obsessions with death by spider-bite" (020) sit one generation up. Echo noted; not imported. The same scene's "near the Tucson of his own father’s desiccated youth" (p. 0046) — Orin on J.O.I.'s boyhood — corroborates the Tucson household of events 4-5 without adding a Sr. datum.
• Other sweep kills: 037 — "Montclair" is Millicent Kent's hometown (Montclair NJ), not the Mercury Montclair; 049 is the car's only carrier. 003 — "Green Valley" is a ranch in Hal's frame, not the oculist's practice. 154 — the frozen, four-times-a-year-drunk father and the harvest-rich grandfather are Avril's Mondragon side.
• The S. Johnson lane (swept at the census brief's direction): every "S. Johnson" in the book is Avril's dog — 155 (the Hal/Mario bedtime reminiscence), 179 (Hal's Weston memories), n269 (the Volvo dragging and its aftermath). No passage anywhere names the dog for anyone or ties the name to the Incandenza father-line; the lane is empty for Sr. and is recorded as a kill; the book's one "Samuel Johnson" (n064) is a pedagogy aside with no Incandenza content. (The attested naming lineages that DO touch this page are Mario-for-the-oculist, 071, and the middle-name-Orin sentence, 170 — see the genealogy tangle below.)

Census result: 11 scene files and 3 endnote files carry genuine James-Sr. material — 005, 013, 020, 034 (the Umbrian-lineage sentence), 049, 051, 071, 099, 162, 167, 170, plus n024 (the restaging synopses), n114 (Glad-corporation support), and n208 (the memoir's published source). Everything else above dissolves on inspection.

Dating / identity puzzles:

• Birth year (derived, not printed): he gives his age at the 1933 fall as "your age... I was thirteen, and I’d started to play well, seriously, I was twelve or thirteen" — the wobble is his own; a ~1920-21 birth is a derivation from it, flagged as such and used nowhere as a datum.
• The son's ages mesh: "Son, you’re ten" (Winter 1960, 049) and the son "already taller than both my parents" at the Winter-1963 afternoon (099) mesh with each other and with the son's obituary ("untimely suicide at fifty-four," 020). The son's chronology is owned by the J.O.I. page and is not re-adjudicated here.
• The Avalon wrinkle: the Winter-1960-stamped monologue laments "those swim-trunk and Brylcreem beach movies that snake Avalon is making his mint on" (049, p. 0168) — the mint is spoken of as already being made in 1960. In-world chronology as printed; no outside dating imported.
• The genealogy tangle (071 vs 170 vs 020): 071 says Mario "had been given the name of Dr. James Incandenza’s father’s father" — the Green Valley oculist — and then names the dying oculist "Mario Sr." But 170 says "Himself’s middle name had been Orin, his father’s own father’s name." Read with "his" = Himself, the same oculist is named Orin — a flat collision with 071. Read with "his" = Hal (the sentence's narrator), the name Orin belongs to James Sr. himself — which would mesh with 020's "James O. Incandenza, Jr." (a true Jr. wants a same-named father) and with the boy's initials already being J.O.I. in 1960 ("That’s my J.O.I. of a guy of a joy of boy," 049). Both readings are recorded; neither is adopted; the grandfather's and Sr.'s given names are left exactly as tangled as the print leaves them. One sequencing datum meshes across sources: the 1960 monologue still has the grandfather alive — "when he finally kicks on the tenth tee" (049, p. 0163) is cast as future — consistent with 071's placing the mid-putt death "just after Jim grew up and fled east."
• The career count: 071's "a sad third career" is not itemized. The record shows junior/collegiate tennis, stage-and-screen acting, resort tennis-pro stints, the Desert Beat Theater Project, and the Glad contract; which three the narrator counts is left as printed.
• Glad dating: "served for two years" (099) inside "the B.S. 1960s" (071); the Winter-1963 stamp falls within the contract; n114's mock-copyright for the Glad company ("© B.S. MCMLXII") meshes with the frame but dates the company gag, not the contract. Small name variance, as printed: 099 has "the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio"; n114 has "The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH."
• Death date: unattested. Bounds: after the desert return (071's sequence); "late" by every subsequent reference (earliest dated mourning: 1 April Y.T.M.P., scene 005). The wraith's "an early cerebral hemorrhage" (162) glosses the timing without giving a date. The two 071 death attestations — "dropped dead on a set of stairs" (p. 0312) and "drink himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway" (p. 0313) — are read as one event, same referent; noted explicitly since they sit a page apart in different registers.
• The monologue's evidentiary status (registry crux — resolved nowhere, least of all here): As of Yore (n024, Y.T.M.P., 181 min.) is a film of exactly scene 049's situation — a drunk tennis-instructor father's garage monologue at his weeping son — and scene 049 is the record's principal source for events 1-5. The relationship between the printed scene and the son's film belongs to the theory registry (the joi-father-scene apparatus); this page records the scene as the print gives it (a dated first-person section) and the film as the filmography gives it, and adjudicates nothing between them.
• The Mercury echo: the monologue's cherished machine-body exemplar is the 1956 Mercury Montclair (049); in scene 005 Hal needles the disguised J.O.I. about "the Mercury up on blocks" (p. 0031). Whether the son's Y.T.M.P. Mercury is the father's Montclair is nowhere stated; echo, not resolved.
• The verbatim tic: "That’s the way she wants doing, Jim" appears in both of his scenes — 049 (p. 0159, the garage door) and 099 (p. 0496, the box spring) — the same sentence, three years apart in the story, in two differently-sourced tellings. Cross-reference, as printed.
• The "Himself" appellation: Sr. calls his own father "the one and only Himself" (049, p. 0165); the grandsons' standing name for J.O.I. is "Himself." One generation's title recurring a generation down; noted as a cross-reference only, no claim attached.
• The fifth-wall echo: J.O.I.'s lament makes the father's newspaper "the room’s fifth wall" (5); Orin's phrase for J.O.I. himself is "his father’s face any room’s fifth wall" (150). Two speakers, two fathers, one image; ledgered, not evented.
• Stairway echoes: death on a Tucson stairway (071) → J.O.I.'s stair-dread at Mario's birth ("His own father had dropped dead on a set of stairs," 071) → the ghost seen "on stairways" (167). One motif, three printed sites; recorded as cross-references.
• The great uncle: 099 notes "a great uncle had accidentally electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent" — which side of the son's family is unstated; not assigned to the Incandenza line here.