IJ study archive

Scene 032: locker room quiz

Scene
32
Pages
95–97
When
Tuesday 3 Nov YDAU (2009), 1640h
Where
males' locker room, Comm.-Ad. Bldg., E.T.A.in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. locker rooms
POV
3rd person, hovering near Hal

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

Post-P.M.-challenge-matches, the towel-kilted upperclassmen slump on the locker-room floor, "stunned with fatigue," while Troeltsch — fresh from the day's prescriptive-grammar exam on the syntax of Tolstoy's famous unhappy-families sentence — drives a study-quiz for tomorrow's History of Entertainment midterm under Disney Leith: broadcast TV vs. cartridge-capable TPs, analogs vs. digitals, Leith's tic-word "seminal," the definition of acutance. Hal answers flawlessly — Struck's "The Incster has the last word once again" invites the name-chorus ("The Halster. Halorama. Halation"), Rader supplies the definition ("a halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on chemical film at low speed"), and a separate, untagged voice caps it: "That most angelic of distortions." — while Hal's eidetic vision of the highlighted page arrives after the chorus, eyes shut. The ball-busting is "all only half-nasty"; Hal sits quiescent, chin on chest, "just thinking it's nice finally to breathe and get enough air."

What to notice

The scene opens mid-sentence, on an ellipsis — "to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel it in the first place?" — and the orphaned question, never answered, hangs over an entire novel of people who can't feel what they're feeling. Most of the quiz runs untagged: a dozen lines with no speaker attributions, the locker room talking as one collective organism the reader is trusted to parse — and inside that chorus Hal speaks exactly twice, both answers flawless, so his portrait gets assembled almost entirely out of other people's riffing on him. Watch the eidetic eye's small tell: the plate mirrors catch part of the loogie's "quivering flight, Hal sees" — even that gets registered and archived, and the very next clause is Hal closing his eyes, the only off-switch he has.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 95: The day-list (drills, classes, prescriptive-grammar exam, conditioning run, two challenge matches, circuits, sauna) deadpanned as one schedule-sentence; Troeltsch mid-question about whether unhappy families even feel their unhappiness; Barbicide hair, Pemulis's Allston wide-furrow comb-style.
  • p. 95: Hal's quiet correction: "The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy families." John Wayne's Canadian leg-lift fart; Schacht's "distant ghastly sounds" from the stalls.
  • pp. 95-96: Pemulis's ten-second tolerance for communal silence (the loogie into the sink); "Tired," someone exhales; Stice and Wayne's top-player neural shutdown, "removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events."
  • pp. 96-97: The quiz: Cathodeluminescent Panels, no analogs, "Seminal, seminal," the InterLace de-digitizer; Pemulis's exam-strategy counsel ("He wants an argument made").
  • p. 97: Stice fingering the jock-stripe: "Boys, I ever become president, the first thing to go's elastic"; acutance defined by Hal; the Halster/Halorama/Halation chorus and Rader's halation definition; "We'll be like vying for the seats all around Inc tomorrow"; Hal seeing the yellowed-up page mentally; Pemulis and Stice both saying leave him alone/be.
  • p. 97: "It's all only half-nasty"; littler kids hanging around listening; Hal breathing.

Themes in this scene

  • Language and Grammar: a tennis academy where the day includes a prescriptive-grammar exam and Hal polices the use/mention distinction on Tolstoy — Avril's curriculum ambient in the children's banter.
  • The Body and Tennis: fatigue as communal sacrament — the slumped towel-kilted rows, neural shutdown of the top players, squeezing and breathing; the regimen's cost made convivial.
  • Entertainment and the Self: entertainment is literally an examinable subject at E.T.A. (Leith's course) — the kids are being trained in the history of the apparatus that funds and threatens their world.
  • Film and Optics: acutance and halation — JOI's professional vocabulary surviving as his son's quiz answers; "that most angelic of distortions" names Hal via lens-pathology.
  • Memory and Forgetting: Hal's eidetic gift stated and demonstrated — his flawless quiz answers come from mentally seeing the yellowed-up highlighted page (p. 97), and the plate mirrors show the eye archiving even the loogie's flight; recall so total that closing his eyes is the only off-switch he has.
  • Communication and Solipsism: the orphaned opening question — whether unhappy families even realize "what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness" — hangs unanswered over the banter, and Hal's use/mention reflex ("the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy families," p. 95) keeps words about things standing in for the things; he speaks exactly twice while the room assembles his portrait for him.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • "The syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not... real unhappy families": Hal's use/mention reflex is his pathology in miniature — words about things in place of things (the YG interview crisis, scene 001, is this skill metastasized); also a sly self-description of the book's own unhappy-family method.
  • Hal's closing relief — "nice finally to breathe and get enough air" (p. 97) — quietly rhymes with Kate Gompert, these scenes' other marijuana user, who "seemed both to be fighting for breath and to be breathing rapidly" (p. 69, scene 024); breath as the shared somatic tell (Carlisle catch).

Forward

  • Halation: the nickname ties Hal to his father's optics (scene 020) and to the Entertainment's lethal "lens" effects; "angelic distortion" is also exactly what Hal is to the others — radiant, slightly unreal (cf. p. 101's "radiantly dark" portrait in scene 034).
  • Disney Leith is a JOI-filmography alumnus (acted in Cage II, n.24) — the History of Entertainment teacher literally appeared in Himself's entertainments; his restricted "esoteric Optics" courses (p. 95) keep JOI's optics inheritance institutionally alive at E.T.A. (cf. the optics-lab history in scene 048's orbit).
  • Troeltsch's quiz-drive continues his broadcaster persona (scene 018); same-day continuity with his A.M. fever is confirmed in scene 034 (p. 103).
  • Stice's anti-elastic presidential platform and black-towel trademark build "The Darkness" toward his Hal match and the ceiling-stuck weirdness late in the book.
  • The locker-room slump scene continues directly as scene 034 (the catalog splits at the towel-inventory paragraph).

Notable passages (4)
  • p. 95: the one-sentence day-schedule — E.T.A. routine compressed; the-body-tennis anthology.
  • p. 95: "The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy families" — Hal's use/mention tic; load-bearing for communication-solipsism across the book.
  • p. 96: "removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events" — the top player's detachment; proto-Lyle stillness.
  • p. 97: "Halation... That most angelic of distortions." — nickname as thesis; film-optics anthology.

What links here Timeline events here (17) · Connected from (7) · Passages quoted here (18) · Motifs (2)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs