IJ study archive

Scene 071: mario birth defects

Scene
71
Pages
312–317
When
n/a (expository; Mario's birth ~Nov B.S. 1990 narrated from the YDAU (2009) present, Mario 'at 18+')
Where
expository: the Back Bay brownstone staircase (birth); E.T.A. and environs, Enfield/Brighton; JOI's shoots and motel roomsin: Back Bay / East-Cambridge co-ops · E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) (also)
POV
omniscient 3rd person (with Hal-flavored interpolations: 'Hal's older brother Mario,' 'Hal suspects')

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

The Mario dossier: his "first birth" arrives as a total surprise on the brownstone stairs in the seventh month of a pregnancy Avril never showed, the fetus scraped out "like the meat of an oyster" from a womb he clung to spiderishly (n.113). The catalog of his challenges — elf-to-jockey stature, bradyauxetic S-curled arms, block feet and forward list, the prosthetic eyelid, khaki corticate skin, homodont teeth (n.119), Stanford-Binet slowness that is really refraction — is rendered with the narrator's strange tenderness, alongside his history as Himself's inseparable shoot-companion and heir (the head-mounted Bolex willed to him in a gaily-wrapped codicil), his role as E.T.A.'s beloved walker-and-recorder, and his odd gravitational pull on Lyle, Loach, Schtitt, and troubled younger players. A closing movement (pp. 317-318) gives Hal's secret near-idolization of his brother — "People who're somehow burned at birth... either curl up in their fire, or else they rise" — Avril's transcendent, carefully concealed love, and Hal chasing off the veiled U.H.I.D. legate who came to offer Mario the openness of concealment.

What to notice

The opening phrase is a planted riddle: "The first birth of the Incandenzas' second son" — first, as if another is coming — and the chapter quietly delivers it: thirteen Christmases on, a codicil births Mario again as a camera, the second nativity gaily wrapped. Notice where the paternity question actually lives: not in any assertion but in a simile — the description of Mario's hair cannot get through its own sentence without turning into a full portrait of Charles Tavis's combover, resemblance smuggled in as comparison, left in the syntax for you to trip over (with "possible half-uncle" arriving two pages later to show the narration knows what it did). Orin's cruelties are grammar-buried the same way: the shoves, the eyelid-snapping, the vise all ride in subordinate clauses — "whether given a bit of a shove from behind by his older brother Orin or no" — abuse mentioned the way this family mentions things, structurally prevented from ever being the sentence's point. And watch the epithet recurring inside an ostensibly omniscient dossier — "Hal's older brother Mario" — plus "Hal suspects" and "floats, for Hal": the possessives tip the whole inventory as secretly Hal's, which is why a catalog of deformities keeps coming out sounding like love.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 312: the hidden pregnancy ("she threw up some mornings but who didn't in those days?"); the staircase scene — broken water gleaming on the maple steps, "It's pain," JOI watching "in a light like he was Vermeer" and thinking she's dying as his own father died on stairs; C.T., conveniently upstairs on his portable StairMaster after the Skydome snafu, scuttles down and takes charge.
  • pp. 312-313: the birth: Mario scraped out, spiderishly clinging by neural-gray sinew (n.113), fist stuck to his face; weeks in incubators, head cradled by a thumb; named for JOI's grandfather, the golf-addicted X-Ray Specs oculist whose windfall let James Sr. retire from the Man From Glad (n.114: Glad — sponsor of the last Subsidized year, i.e. the Year of Glad) and drink himself to a hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway.
  • pp. 313-314: the inventory: toddler-to-jockey size; Volkmann's-contracture-like arms (n.115's brady- lexicon: bradylexia, bradypnea — the four pillows — and bradykinesia, the slowness that "both resembles and permits extremely close slow attention"); block feet, lordosis, the vaudeville-inebriate lurch; Orin's casual childhood cruelties (the shoves, the eyelid-snapping, the vise) folded in deadpan; the blepharoprosthesis with horsehair lashes; the friendly pirate's squint and involuntarily constant smile.
  • p. 314: khaki corticate skin, nonprehensile talon fingers; the C.T. hair-and-yarmulke comparison detour; "slow... but not, verifiably not, retarded... more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water."
  • pp. 314-315: Mario and Himself "no pun intended, inseparable": honorary assistant production-assistant, the joint-of-beef backpack, motel rooms, Big Red Soda Water fetched to "the apparently mute veiled graduate-intern down the motel's hall" (Joelle, unrecognized); "the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart's final and best-loved love."
  • p. 315: the police-lock vest and lead block for standing; the technical grounding in lighting; Xmas YTSDB — the codicil-willed, gaily wrapped tri-lensed Bolex H64 head-mount (n.116: Paillard of Sherbrooke, annularly hyperfloriated; n.117: the hyperauxetic two-to-three-size head), foot-treadle controlled; the palsied juvenilia.
  • pp. 315-316: five years hence: the fundraising documentary, stroke-taping from Schtitt's transom, arty à-clef pieces; post-Orin, everyone "just vaguely prefer[s] it when you're around"; the prodigious slow constitutionals, stills behind Comm. Ave. deli counters; Lyle's cliquey affection and the ticklish referrals; Loach all but kisses his ring (n.118: oddly, Mario and the blue-collar/halfway-house staff have nothing to say to each other); Schtitt's sidecar; deference toward "his possible half-uncle" C.T.; Denny's players vie to cut up his Kilobreakfast.
  • p. 317: Hal's secret idealization — Mario "floats, for Hal"; the blocks-and-balls childhood at 36 Belle Ave., Weston; Mario at thirteen wanting Hal's help bathing "for Hal's sake, not his own"; Avril seeing Mario as "the family's real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type," her noble/pitiable discipline of leaving him alone; Mario hauling Hal's first O.E.D. home by his bicuspids; Avril insisting Mario live with Hal, not in HmH.
  • pp. 317-318: YDPAH — the veiled U.H.I.D. legate at the portcullis offering "the openness of concealment the veil might afford"; Mario laughs and half-bows; Hal, brandishing his Dunlop stick, "told the guy to go peddle his linen someplace else."

Themes in this scene

  • Disability and Deformity: the definitional Mario text — deformity catalogued exhaustively and yet rendered as buoyancy ("they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise"); the U.H.I.D. offer of the veil is explicitly declined on his behalf.
  • Family and Hamlet: the hidden pregnancy, C.T. on the StairMaster upstairs, and "possible half-uncle" (p. 316) quietly install the novel's paternity question; Avril's transcendent but performed restraint toward her "real prodigy" is her politeness-system at its most sincere and most unreadable.
  • Fathers and Sons: three generations of Incandenza men dying near stairways and bottles frame Mario's birth; Himself's best fathering — the shoots, the willed camera — goes to the son who can't play tennis; the codicil is the one unambiguous bequest of love in the book.
  • Film and Optics: Mario is built into an optical instrument — lens-frame hands, head-mounted Bolex, police-lock tripod-body; he literally becomes his father's camera and successor.
  • Irony and Sincerity: the involuntarily constant smile, kindness and cruelty taken "the same way," the half-bow that mocks his own posture "without pity or cringe" — Mario as the book's single-entendre human being, narrated in a register that keeps testing him with irony and failing to dent him.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • James Sr.'s Tucson stairway death (p. 313) closes the loop with his flask monologue (scene 049, pp. 157-169) and JOI's stair-terror here; the Man From Glad detail (n.114) wires the family directly into the Year of Glad — the frame-year in which brain-damaged Hal narrates the book's opening (annularity by sponsorship).
  • Mario fetching Big Red Soda Water to the veiled graduate-intern (p. 314) is Joelle on JOI's late shoots — Mario already loves her voice as Madame Psychosis (scene 053, pp. 181-193) without knowing he's met her; the U.H.I.D. veil offer (p. 317) is the same institution that holds Joelle.
  • Orin's vise-and-shove cruelties (pp. 313-314) darken scene 068's portrait and rhyme with his adult Subject-machinery: the brother who tortures what can't feel pain vs. the brother who fears Mario's opinion most (p. 317).

Forward

  • The birth's surprise and C.T.'s spring-long visit before it (p. 312) are the strongest in-text basis for the Mario-is-C.T.'s-son reading ("possible half-uncle," p. 316; cf. n.98's beady obsessive eye on Mario in scene 068, and Marlon Bain's own jaundiced Avril dossier, endnote 269 — where Orin appears only as Bain's subject).
  • The willed Bolex (p. 315) produces Mario's ONANtiad puppet-film (interdependence-eve party scenes, pp. 380-442) and the Tennis and the Feral Prodigy cartridge (scene 051, pp. 172-176, "narrated" by Hal for Mario).
  • Lyle's referrals to Mario on "rallying-what-remains" (p. 316) extend scene 055; Mario's night-walk encounters (the Ennet House warmth — "the people cry in front of each other," a place that feels "very real," pp. 589-593) and his radio-grief when Madame Psychosis goes off the air develop from exactly the status sketched here.
  • Loach's ring-kissing (p. 316, n.118) is the teaser for the full Barry Loach / Boston Common saga told at pp. 967-971, scene 183 — Mario's literal Christlike handshake.
  • Hal's O.E.D.-by-bicuspid (p. 317) sits beneath the lexical-prodigy material from scene 001 onward; "shunted around for the assessment of possible damage" plants the early-childhood-testing thread (cf. the DMZ/mold and Hal-damage questions, p. 10 ff.).

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 312: "It's pain." / the Vermeer-lit staircase birth — the family's founding accident rendered as a lighting setup; JOI sees even this through optics.
  • p. 313: "scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he'd been found spiderishly clinging" — nativity as horror transmuted to tenacity.
  • p. 314: "more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water" — the book's definition of Mario's mind; optics again as the family's metaphysics.
  • pp. 314-315: "the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart's final and best-loved love" — the fathers-sons sentence of this scene.
  • p. 317: "People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic Mario floats, for Hal." — Hal's credo about his brother; disability-deformity and irony-sincerity in one credo.
  • pp. 317-318: Hal brandishing the Dunlop at the U.H.I.D. legate — "go peddle his linen someplace else": concealment refused on Mario's behalf, in ironic counterpoint to Joelle's veil.

What links here Timeline events here (51) · Connected from (9) · Passages quoted here (47) · Motifs (7)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs