IJ study archive

Scene 068: orin bu punting joelle

Scene
68
Pages
283–299
When
retrospective sweep, B.S. ~2000-01 through YDPAH (2008), narrated from YDAU (2009)
Where
retrospective: E.T.A. and HmH, Enfield; B.U. campus and Nickerson Field, Boston; East Cambridge co-op; Shiny Prize KY; Toronto (Blood Sister shoot)in: metro Boston (unspecified) · E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) (also)
POV
3rd person omniscient, focalized through Orin and the Incandenza family (with a long embedded C.T. monologue)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 8)

Summary

The full pre-history of Orin Incandenza: a low-70s-ranked E.T.A. senior whose competitive spirit broke with delayed puberty, he takes a tennis Ride to mediocre B.U. (brokered by Charles Tavis, who then stays on at E.T.A. and — after JOI's suicide — inherits the Headmastership and the family's resentment), then defects in his third week from tennis to football out of a decapitating crush on a shunned, transhumanly beautiful baton-twirler, Joelle van Dyne. A freak punting accident reveals his genius: the punt is just his old over-relied-upon lob with a leg, and Orin becomes a stadium-shaking coffin-corner star, in love with the crowd's single coital "One Soul" roar. He and Joelle fall into the only cardiac-grade romance of his life — Xmas in Shiny Prize KY, her recreational cocaine, her film ambitions — and JOI begins using the P.G.O.A.T. in his own films, "the end's start, gradually, in hindsight." The scene closes with Orin alone in the dimmed co-op, rapt before Joelle's ten-second clips of himself punting, frozen High-Def right before impact: "Of particular interest are the eyes."

What to notice

Avril's support is staged so you can watch the contortion work: she demands nothing, flees any room Orin enters with both hands clapped over her mouth rather than risk influencing him — and the decision comes out exactly as her lists and advantage-charts had it, control exercised entirely through renunciations of control. Tavis's aria runs on the same fuel: a self-devouring cascade of disclaimers that he wasn't "in this for the Thank-Yous", which still manages to bill the family for its selflessness down to the Blue Cross statements. The romance is built as pure spectacle-courtship: Orin and Joelle fall in love "without one exchanged personal phoneme", across grassy expanses, through "their respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle" — the book's great love story begins as two performers synchronizing inside an entertainment, and when they finally speak it's because she wants an autograph on a football for her Daddy. Then notice what the last movement does with tense: the narration slides into present — "Here he is back against Delaware" — because we are no longer in memory but inside the cartridge, watching Orin alone in the dimmed co-op watching himself; the Incandenza men's instinct to put a lens between themselves and what they love appears here in embryo, years before anyone calls a film lethal. And every clip is cut by the diskette's tiny capacity so that it ends just before contact — the punter's terror of being touched preserved as a formal property of his beloved's footage.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 283: Orin at late seventeen, ranked low 70s, facing the junior player's three terminal options; period of pre-Experialist upheaval and C.U.S.P.'s emergence; the prorector purgatory he could have had a family lock on (n.93: deLint's WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT banners; n.94: prorectors as embittered low-prestige memento mori for marginal juniors).
  • p. 284: peak at thirteen (National Clays quarters), then JOI-style delayed puberty "sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him"; the one phenomenal weapon, the lob, honed via Eschaton — Orin was Eschaton's first E.T.A. game-master (n.95: c:\Pink2).
  • pp. 284-285: the recruiting circus (U. New Mexico's mariachi band, Ohio State's groin-icing weekend, Cal-Tech's Strategic Studies offer); Orin picks B.U., three clicks from E.T.A.; Avril's "support" choreography — fleeing rooms with hands clapped over mouth — and Orin's line to Hal that the Moms is "a kind of contortionist with other people's bodies" (n.97: the Ride as self-esteem salvage for an admission of defeat).
  • pp. 285-286: Tavis flies down to liaison with B.U.'s septuagenarian coin-profile coach, who falls over sideways first at Orin's churn-sized left arm, then the other way at Avril; Full Ride plus the sprinkler-job plum; Tavis cashes in his return ticket and stays as Assistant Headmaster (n.96: Throppinghamshire; n.98: his beady obsessive eye on Mario, the C.T./Avril collision of flight-vectors).
  • pp. 286-288: the embedded Tavis aria (4 July YDPAH; Convocation 31 Aug YDPAH): was he a genuine 3-D person or a cutout?; Orin's resentment over C.T. changing the 'TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT' door "before Himself's microwaved head had even cooled"; JOI's felo de se of 1 Apr YTSDB amid a catalog of administrative crises (n.99); why Avril couldn't be Headmaster — Militant Grammarians, Green Babies, grief; upperclassmen mime razor-to-jugular during the annual speech; black armbands, half-mast flags.
  • pp. 288-289: third week of freshman year, the defection to football; the offered reason (burnout — true) vs. the lyrical Pep-and-dewy-turf fiction; Avril demands he feel no need to explain.
  • pp. 289-290: the real reason: the P.G.O.A.T., a baton-twirler so "almost grotesquely lovely" she induces the Actaeon Complex and is universally shunned; the strabismic doubles partner's warnings; "It took three hearings for him to figure out that her name wasn't Joel"; the dandelion attar decocted by her chemist Daddy in Shiny Prize KY.
  • p. 291: football tryouts a catastrophe of contact-aversion ("bona fried pussy"); the Coach points him to the south tunnel; solo disconsolate walk off the field.
  • pp. 291-292: the AA-trite truth about powerlessness over destiny-grade events (n.100: the White Flag 99.9%-none-of-your-business formulation that purples Gately's forehead); the punter's leg snapped by the toothless coloring-book tackle; the blocked ball rolls to Orin, too far to throw — his first kick ever, the "unengineered and kind of vulnerable revelation" that later moves Joelle more than status or hang-time.
  • pp. 292-294: meteoric rise (the Gauloise-smoking S.T. Assistant calls him 'ephebe'; Orin phones his youngest brother to check the word); Schtitt's Viewing Room diagnosis: Orin is "still just only lobbing," punting as a way to legitimate the dependency that kept him from risking weakness — puberty was never the real herbicide; Schtitt has "several very bad feelings about Orin's future, inside."
  • pp. 294-295: coffin-corner mastery; the romance takes root at a distance "without one exchanged personal phoneme," two stylized dances of devotion to the same spectacle; the baptismal Syracuse punt into Row 52, sounding like Rolling Thunder's incendiary tonnage.
  • pp. 295-296: the Columbus Day function — Joelle approaches him with the sousaphone-extracted football to autograph for her Own Personal Daddy; Orin's spiritual confession: 30,000 souls as One Soul, the womb-roar, "he literally could not hear himself think out there," self-transcendence he never found on court; "He hadn't had to promise her anything... It was all for free."
  • pp. 296-297: cohabitation in East Cambridge; Joelle survives Avril at midnight Thanksgiving; Xmas with Joe Lon's litmus-solution Pyrex collection; New Year's Eve cocaine, recreational, "the whole substance issue was natural and kind of free" (n.101: 'prettier than the women in the films'). While Joelle travels for Boating Is No Accident with Himself and Mario, Orin recuperates from quadriceps surgery at a Mass General where "no fewer than four nurses and P.T.s in the Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation from their husbands, with custody" (p. 297; a deadpan gap Carlisle catches).
  • p. 297: JOI enters the couple's orbit: Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell has "a major impact"; Joelle understudies Leith, gets a stage name, acts in three JOI films; drunken Toronto nights with Himself during Blood Sister — "This might have been the end's start, gradually, in hindsight."
  • pp. 297-299: Joelle films #78 with the Bolex and Orin-bought Angenieux zoom; Orin, lukewarm on all spectation, becomes rapt sole spectator of her clips of himself, dimming lights, burning Jiffy Pop, "He saw something different each time he rewound"; the Delaware-debacle clip frozen on his helmeted face right before impact — "Of particular interest are the eyes."

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: an anatomy of plateaux and broken competitive spirit — Schtitt's reading of the punt as the lob's evasion of weakness makes Orin's whole career a body-shaped character flaw.
  • Family and Hamlet: the Tavis-as-usurper material is the novel's most explicit Claudius scaffolding — the brisk replacement who moved in next to the master bedroom and changed the dead king's door before the head cooled; Avril's non-lobbying support as politeness roulette perfected.
  • Entertainment and the Self: Orin's ecstasy is being the focal point of mass spectation (the One Soul roar), and its private inversion — sitting alone, rapt, compulsively re-watching entertainment made of himself — is a miniature of the Entertainment's lethal self-regard.
  • Fathers and Sons: JOI keeps his counsel and may not even know which city Orin's in; the father enters his son's life only through film, and via the son's girlfriend — the triangle that curdles into the Notkin-alleged catastrophe.
  • Film and Optics: Joelle's apprenticeship (Bolex, Leith, JOI's sets) starts here; refraction is the scene's master image — sprinkler rainbows, the lens-framed P.G.O.A.T., the zoomed-in frozen eyes.
  • Addiction and Recovery: proleptic and ambient — JOI's 13 rehab facilities in three years, Joelle's "recreational" ingestion under the red balls, the AA framing of destiny (n.100); the seeds of scene 058/062's freebase suicide-attempt are planted as "natural and kind of free."

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Directly answers scene 064's phone call (pp. 242-258): the "Helen" profile and wheelchair tails are happening to the Orin built here; Hal's forbidden-topics list ("you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle," p. 247) is this scene's whole final act.
  • Tavis's 3-D/cutout anxiety and Avril's contortionism elaborate scene 064's HmH timeline (C.T. moving in days before the suicide, pp. 247-248) and n.98's farce of mutual avoidance.

Forward

  • The Actaeon Complex and U.H.I.D. terminology (p. 290) reach forward to Joelle's veil and Madame Psychosis (scenes 053, 058, 062) and to Molly Notkin's account of the acid disfigurement and of JOI/Joelle (pp. 788-795) — note Notkin's version makes Joe Lon's obsession incestuous; this scene's wholesome Shiny Prize Xmas (pp. 296-297) is the dramatic-irony setup.
  • Orin's Eschaton game-mastership and the lob-Eschaton link (p. 284) feed straight into scene 073 (the Eschaton debacle, pp. 321-342) and the Pemulis comparison made explicitly at p. 293.
  • "Eliminated his own map" (p. 286) — the book's death idiom (cf. maps-territory in Eschaton, "de-mapping" in the Poor Tony/yrstruly thread, scene 069).
  • Orin's seduction tech ("Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive...", p. 290) is the Subject-machinery of scene 012 (pp. 43-45's Subject riff is early-book material) and of the later Swiss-hand-model honeytrap (pp. 971-972).
  • The clips-of-himself rapture (pp. 297-299) foreshadows both the medical attaché frozen before the Entertainment and the wraith's lament about figurant-hood and being watched; also Joelle's later line that Jim's lens work was about what cameras do to the watched self.
  • Marlon Bain (p. 284) gets his full epistolary treatment at endnote 269.
  • n.95's Pink2/InterLace detail and n.114's Glad sponsorship (cited in scene 071) knit the family's commercial-tech world into Subsidized Time's frame.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 285: "a kind of contortionist with other people's bodies" — Orin's definitive Avril verdict, relayed through Hal, who's "never been able to forget" it; prime family-hamlet anchor.
  • p. 286: "changing the door's 'TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT...' before Himself's microwaved head had even cooled" — the usurpation image.
  • pp. 291-292: "Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst" — the scene's thesis on powerlessness; AA epistemology in one image.
  • pp. 295-296: Orin's One Soul speech ("the sound of the womb... the voice of what might as well be God") — entertainment-self in ecstatic register; the denial-of-silence line pairs with his horror of solipsism.
  • p. 294: Schtitt's lob diagnosis and "several very bad feelings about Orin's future, inside" — character-as-fate stated outright.
  • p. 299: "Of particular interest are the eyes." — closing freeze-frame; the watched self right before impact, proleptic of everything the A.F.R. wants Orin for.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (47) · Connected from (14) · Passages quoted here (54) · Motifs (5)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs