IJ study archive

Scene 072: marathe steeply choosing

Scene
72
Pages
317–321
When
night of 30 April / 1 May YDAU (2009) (dateline, p. 318; the whole mountainside serial is this one night)
Where
mountainside shelf/outcropping above Tucson AZ, U.S. desert night; the city's nacreous lume belowin: Mountainside outcrop above Tucson
POV
Marathe (3rd person, his Québecois-English idiom inflecting the narration)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 12)

Summary

The mountainside dialogue resumes and reaches its philosophical core. Marathe argues that the Entertainment is not a Canadian attack but a U.S.A. self-diagnosis: the cartridge was made by an American, and the appetite for death-by-pleasure it exploits is home-grown — "you cannot kill what is already dead." Against Steeply's case for personal freedom, Marathe distinguishes freedom-from (constraint) and freedom-to (the learned capacity to choose), delivering the parable of the rich father who cries "Freedom!" while letting his child eat only candy. Steeply counters that the A.F.R. itself treats Americans as children, and accuses Marathe of totalitarian nostalgia ("Cuba with snow"); Marathe retorts that Steeply argues with invented ventriloquized opponents — "You speak to yourself, inventing sides... I am not even here, possibly, for listening to." The installment closes on the running gag turned ominous: neither man has any idea how he'll get up or down from the shelf in the dark.

What to notice

Watch how the scene routes belief through bodies neither man controls. Marathe's tell is fussy blanket-smoothing, and when the argument matters most he leans forward "leaving the machine pistol to use both his hands in saying" — sincerity literally disarms him. Steeply's costume fails in the same direction: the wig "slipped hard to starboard" whenever he moves with force, and at the candy parable "Excitement of some belief" makes his electrolysis rash redden through the makeup — conviction erupting out of the female disguise exactly the way Marathe says belief escapes him around Americans, like a bodily indiscretion. Notice too that the debate is a rerun both men know by heart: Steeply announces Marathe's own set-piece before he can start it — "Now the story of the rich man." — which is what makes Marathe's closing pounce land; anticipating your partner's lines is either long intimacy or proof you were always talking to yourself, and the scene refuses to say which. And the desert stages the thesis in real time: mid-speech Marathe suddenly understands that the starless dome over Tucson is the city's own auto exhaust hiding the stars from it — America blotting out transcendence with its own pretty lights — while young U.S. voices laugh somewhere on the desert floor and he "saw no headlights or young persons": the nation as sound without bodies, lume without stars.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 318: dateline 30 APRIL / 1 MAY YDAU; blue desert stars, the city's starless pearly blank; Marathe: Canadians aren't "the real root of the threat" — the Entertainment is "a U.S.A. production... The appetite for the appeal of it: this also is U.S.A."; "this is why choosing is everything"; he leans forward off his machine pistol to gesture, and Steeply can tell he really believes it.
  • p. 318: Marathe's indictment: a nation that would die — and let its children die — "for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving" cannot survive as a nation of peoples, against peoples who still know how to choose to die for something larger.
  • pp. 318-319: Marathe's aftertaste of shame at revealing belief around Americans ("as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief"); Steeply, smoking like a woman, restates it: our worry about the Entertainment "speaks volumes about the nation itself."
  • p. 319: "We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing" — dissemination as mere offer; the narcotics analogy (killing Colombians and Bolivians; "How long was it before the Brazilians replaced the dead of Colombia?"); Steeply: dealers want your money, "Fortier wants us dead"; Marathe: "You cannot kill what is already dead."
  • p. 319: DuPlessis's genius credited — the exact time and way of death no longer matter once the choice for "death of the head by pleasure" exists; the attaché incident as proof the thing exists; "Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: 'Someone is to blame'" — but the killing enemy is internal: "Someone or some people among your own history sometime killed your U.S.A. nation already, Hugh... someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what."
  • pp. 319-320: temples torn down with the promise none were needed — "now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple... this confusion of permissions"; Steeply's rejoinder: the National Socialist Neofascist State of Separate Québec, "Cuba with snow... Unfree." Marathe: "Unhappy."
  • p. 320: freedom-from vs. freedom-to: "Your freedom is the freedom-from... But what of the freedom-to?... How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?"; Marathe realizes the city's starlessness is its own exhaust hiding the stars; the parable of the rich father and the candy — "is the rich man who cries 'Freedom!' the good father?"
  • pp. 320-321: Steeply stamps a high heel; "Human beings are not children"; then ventriloquizes Marathe's next move at length — and Marathe pounces: "you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens... This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to."
  • p. 321: "Unmentioned by either man was how in heaven's name either man expected to get up or down from the mountainside's shelf in the dark of the U.S. desert's night."

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: the serial's thesis statement — the Entertainment as offered choice, lethal only to a people already trained to "choose nothing over themselves to love"; death by pleasure as formality, not cause.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: A.F.R. strategy articulated from inside (DuPlessis's doctrine, Fortier's aim, the Reconfiguration as Gentle's manufactured ennemi commun); the Concavity dispute reframed as metaphysical rather than territorial.
  • Irony and Sincerity: Marathe's shame at expressing sincere belief to an American — whose culture answers conviction with "Herrrrrre we are going" — dramatizes the U.S. ironic reflex as itself part of the national disease.
  • Fathers and Sons: the argument's load-bearing metaphor is paternal — "no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose"; the rich-father/candy parable indicts a whole culture of failed fathering.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Steeply argues with a Marathe he invents and supplies lines to ("You speak to yourself, inventing sides") — even this all-night dialogue is partly one man talking to himself on a ledge.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The narcotics analogy and "make only available" rhyme with the book's addiction architecture: Ennet House's substances (and Gately's powerlessness, n.100 via scene 068) are the domestic version of the choice Marathe describes.
  • The attaché "razzle incident" points back to the medical attaché's viewing (scenes 007 ff.) — the first proof-case both sides reason from.
  • The Schenectady mirror-suicide of the serial's previous installment (scene 070, p. 312; Mario's birth interlude 071 sits between) — choosing the impending lights "as Grace" — is the narrative's own pre-emptive example of Marathe's death-by-chosen-pleasure thesis.

Forward

  • Continues the 30 Apr/1 May mountainside serial (earlier installments within pp. 87-109); next installments at p. 375 (scene 077, the scenery/betrayal-reflections interlude), pp. 418-430 (scene 088, American vs. Canadian values), and the pleasure-experiments exchange at pp. 470-475 (scene 096) — per the archive's adopted dating, all one night.
  • "Choose with great care in loving" picks up Marathe's earlier fanatic-of-desire/temple argument (pp. 106-108): you are what you give yourself away to; his own secret betrayal-for-love (Gertraude's care: "beloved Gertraude" and her treatments, pp. 752-755, scene 153; "Choosing Gertraude to love as my wife was necessary," pp. 774ff, scene 156; first confessed at p. 529, scene 103) makes him the argument's living test case — the quadruple agent chose his wife over the State he's lecturing about.
  • "You cannot kill what is already dead" and the candy parable map directly onto the wraith's confession (pp. 838-845, scene 162): JOI made the Entertainment to lure anhedonic Hal back to appetite — a loving-filled father trying, catastrophically, to teach choosing; the Entertainment's lethality and its paternal origin are two faces of the same failure.
  • "Someone is to blame" / ennemi commun: Gentle's Reconfiguration logic gets full treatment in Mario's ONANtiad film (pp. 380-442); DuPlessis's murder by Gately (pp. 55-60, scene 016) gives the invoked name its plot weight — the botched burglary that will hunt Gately all book.
  • The closing no-way-down line is the serial's literal cliffhanger — and it stays one: the serial's last installment (pp. 638-648, scene 123) runs to dawn with both ideologues still on the outcropping, the descent never staged; two men stuck on a ledge above the U.S.A. they're arguing about.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 318: "Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving" — the Entertainment's victimology in one sentence; core entertainment-self anchor.
  • p. 318: "as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief" — sincerity's social cost among Americans; irony-sincerity in miniature.
  • p. 319: "You cannot kill what is already dead." — the A.F.R.'s entire strategic premise.
  • pp. 319-320: "Someone sometime let you forget how to choose... no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple." — the temple/map speech; bridges maps-territory idiom and the book's theology of worship (cf. the 'everybody worships' logic of the serial's earlier installment).
  • p. 320: the rich-father/candy parable — the freedom-to argument crystallized; pairs with the wraith's account of why he made the samizdat.
  • p. 321: "Unmentioned by either man was how in heaven's name either man expected to get up or down..." — comic deflation that doubles as the scene's verdict: neither ideology can get off the ledge.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (9) · Echoes (2) · Connected from (12) · Passages quoted here (41) · Motifs (1)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Echoes

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs