IJ study archive

Scene 080: lyle joi weight room

Scene
80
Pages
379–379
When
undated, habitual ('often,' 'sometimes'): late-night sessions in the 'newly outfitted' E.T.A. weight room, B.S./early-Subsidized era up to JOI's death (1 April YTSDB/2004); narrated from YDAU retrospect
Where
E.T.A. weight room (the sauna/towel-dispenser area), Enfield Tennis Academyin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. weight room
POV
impersonal 3rd-person narrator, partly through what Mario drifts awake to

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

A one-page portrait of "the odd couple of libations": Lyle the sweat-licking fitness guru with his Caffeine Free Diet Coke and JOI with his Wild Turkey, sitting on the weight-room towel dispenser till all hours, with Mario literally standing by — asleep upright against his police lock and lead receptacle — in case the ice ran out or Himself needed help reaching the urinal. Sober, Incandenza was quiet, centered, almost affectless; drunk, he swung to the far edges of the emotional spectrum and opened up "in a way that was almost injudicious" — e.g. the night Mario drifted awake to hear his father grade his marriage a C–. Lyle, who got tipsy himself as the bourbon came back out through Himself's pores, would read Incandenza William Blake in the voices of various cartoon characters, which Himself eventually started regarding as deep (n.146 dryly cross-references the Blakean film title Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell).

What to notice

Everything in this vignette circulates as fluid: bourbon goes into Himself, comes back out through his pores, and gets Lyle tipsy secondhand — intimacy as the literal absorption of another man's poison — and confession receives the same metabolic imagery, JOI pouring out "his heart's thickest chyme", the heart's contents rendered as stomach matter already partway broken down. Notice whom the narrator's dry phrase "for all to be affected and potentially scarred by" actually indicts: the only "all" present is a sleeping child propped on his police lock, who drifts awake into the C– grade like a transmission he never asked to receive. And the scene's tenderest joke is also its saddest diagnostic — Blake in cartoon voices, "which Himself eventually started regarding as deep": the great optician losing the ability to tell parody from profundity, in the same room where his sons' academy sweats.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. ~379: the tableau — guru and "tall slope-shouldered optician/director" on the towel dispenser, Diet Coke vs. Wild Turkey; Mario the standby valet, dozing forward into his police lock as the hour "got severe."
  • p. ~379: JOI as profound-personality-change drinker — affectless sober, way out on the human emotional spectrum drunk, opening up injudiciously.
  • p. ~379: the C– marriage grade, overheard by a drifting-awake Mario; "Mario, like Lyle, tends to take data pretty much as it comes."
  • p. ~379: Lyle's secondhand intoxication — getting tipsy as Himself's pores excrete the bourbon (Lyle's sweat-diet turned darkly comic); Blake read in cartoon voices, eventually regarded by Himself as deep (n.146: the Infernatron-Canada animated Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, height of the anticonfluential period).

Themes in this scene

  • Family and Hamlet: the marriage graded C– in front of a son — the Incandenza family system's damage administered as data; the father confessing to the guru rather than the wife.
  • Fathers and Sons: Mario as Himself's silent nocturnal attendant and accidental confidant — the son who keeps vigil over the father (and later carries his memory most simply).
  • Addiction and Recovery: JOI's alcoholism in its domestic-habitual register — the Wild Turkey institution, intoxication as his only channel of openness.
  • The Body and Tennis: Lyle in his weight-room seat of office, sustained (here literally inebriated) by athletes' and now a director's excretions — the body as medium of exchange.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Direct continuation of scene 078: these are the same all-night Lyle sessions out of which Found Drama and anticonfluentialism were born; n.146's Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell shows the Blake readings leaving fingerprints on the filmography (full corpus at endnote 24) — and the title's Marriage→Pre-Nuptial downgrade rhymes bleakly with the C– grade.

Forward

  • Lyle's guru function for E.T.A. players (first seen p. 128, scene 039; the LaMont Chu fame-dialogue pp. 387-390, scene 082) here extends backward to the founder himself — Lyle as the institution's confessor across generations.
  • Mario's police lock and lead receptacle: his body's standing apparatus per the long Mario portrait (pp. 313-317, scene 071); "takes data pretty much as it comes" is the Mario epistemology that later makes him the only Incandenza who can ask direct questions (e.g. of Hal, pp. 772, scene 155ff).
  • JOI's two-mode personality (affectless sober/uncorked drunk) feeds the Hamlet scaffolding — the father whose real voice the sons rarely heard sober — and undergirds the wraith's later complaint that he had to make a whole movie to talk to Hal (pp. 838ff); cf. the professional-conversationalist gambit (scene 005).
  • The C– marriage and confessional drinking sit upstream of the marriage's documented pathologies (Orin/Avril material in the n.269 Bain correspondence; Joelle's and Notkin's accounts pp. 736ff/788ff) and of JOI's suicide (1 Apr YTSDB ruling).

Notable passages (3)
  • p. ~379: "They'd been the odd couple of libations…" — the framing image; pulls the whole Lyle/JOI institution into two clauses.
  • p. ~379: "if he had to grade his marriage he'd give it a C–." — the Incandenza marriage in a single grade, overheard by a child; family-hamlet distilled.
  • p. ~379: "Lyle… often brought some Blake out… in the voices of various cartoon characters, which Himself eventually started regarding as deep." — comedy curdling into pathos; JOI's loosening grip on register (n.146).

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (6) · Connected from (3) · Passages quoted here (15)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here