Scene 088: marathe steeply soup

• p. 418: dateline; Marathe "did not quite sleep" — the detachment learned after losing his legs to a U.S.A. train, part of him hovering above "nibbling at his consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn"; his wife fourteen months in irreversible coma (p. 419).
• p. 419: Steeply's persona anatomized via his feet — "the ugliest supposedly female feet of his experience," blistered loaves throttled by straps; the B.S.S.'s allegedly sadistic persona-assignments (men as women, healthy operatives made "to actually suffer actual deformity"); Steeply's side: the Caillou Bay oil-platform meeting, Marathe's boggling arms, the unsafetied Taurus PT9 taped to his shaved inner thigh — why he won't sit.
• p. 420: Marathe's insight that Steeply needs the humiliation — mortification as fuel, "the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very rôle that offended his dignity of self"; the magenta-robes year, head shaved, teeth removed, infiltrating an aminotetralin import ring (n.169: the 'Happy Patches' hallucinogen of the Subsidized West).
• pp. 420-422: the fantods thesis: F.L.Q., Montcalmists, even Ragheads and Spic Separatists had "a third thing," a playing field of context — the A.F.R. wants only the harm itself; "This seems personal"; Marathe's counter-position: he feels with U.S.O.U.S. "like a caged rodent being regarded blandly by bland men in white coats" — the quadruple-agent's games of truth and betrayal.
• pp. 422-423: asked what Americans desire, Steeply goes single-entendre: freedom from tyranny, meaningful work, "To be loved irregardless of whether you can tell them Classified stuff about your job," down to frozen yogurt and "a tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing"; Marathe deadpans "The loyalty of a domestic pet" and "High-quality entertainment."
• pp. 423-424: Marathe names it — utilitarienne — and asks whose pleasure the equation maximizes; Steeply recites the grade-school catechism: each pursuing his maximum good "results together in maximizing everyone's good"; the bonfire below burns "in a seeming ring instead of a sphere."
• pp. 424-426: the Habitant soupe aux pois thought experiment (nn.171-172) — one Single-Serving can, two ravenous sacred individuals, a conveniently deceased third party; Steeply's market answers (bid, negotiate, Safeway) keep missing the point; "The fast shadow of pain across the face of Steeply" at the divorced man's acquaintance with Single-Serving products.
• pp. 426-427: Steeply pre-emptively ventriloquizes the Canadian objection — the foreigner outside the community has no claim, and worse, is the one the speaker gets to "saddle... with my greed's waste" under "some sham-arrangement of quote Interdependence" — experialism as the soup parable's dirty no-deposit can.
• p. 427: Marathe's interior idyll — the Boston Public Garden duck pond, willows, gliding ducks "as if legless below," "Like films' idylls in cities the moment before the nuclear blast."
• p. 428: ventriloquism touches Marathe's oldest nerve — both brothers, who inserted his words for him, "kissed trains head-on before reaching marriageable age" (n.173 defers to n.304); Marathe "had been part of the audience for the death of the better one"; Barges of Land below: some waste "would be vectored into the Sonora region of Mexico, but much would be shipped north for displacement-launch into the Convexity" (a Carlisle catch: experialism flows south as well as north).
• pp. 428-429: the real question: not nations but two selves and one soup — "How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my road?"; Steeply: delayed gratification, "enlightened self-interest," the candy-eating child who can't be trained like a rat but "has to learn by his own experience"; the U.S. educational crux: "Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free." Marathe farts mildly into his cushion, nodding as if with thought.
• pp. 429-430: ambient interlude — Venus rising, the wig, the Flanderfumes, Mme. Marathe's skull-less birth once blamed on parental smoking; then Marathe springs it: entre nous, which type is this U.S.A. — the mature or the candy-eater? "How could it be that A.F.R. malice could hurt all of the U.S.A. culture by making available something as momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment?"
• p. 430: Steeply looms, Venus lighting his face "to the color of pallid cheese": "The Entertainment isn't candy or beer. Look at Boston just now"; Marathe concedes there may be no choice after the first watching — "But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still a choice, no?... No? Yes?"

Backward

• Serial continuity: follows the installments at pp. 87-97 (scene 029), 105-109 (scene 035: Marathe's wife and the betrayal calculus), 317-321 (scene 072: choosing your attachments/temple), and 375 (scene 077: the betrayal frame); always the same night per the dating ruling. Marathe's temple argument ("choose with care... you are what you love," pp. 107-108) is the positive doctrine for which this installment supplies the negative proof.
• "Look at Boston just now" (p. 430): the medical attaché's spreading household of Entertainment victims (pp. 33-37, scene 007; pp. 78-79, scene 025; p. 87, scene 028; the attaché chain continues through the YDAU scenes) — the empirical situation under the abstract debate.
• The ring-shaped bonfire (pp. 423, 426) and waste-launch barges (p. 428) keep the annular-waste machinery in frame; cf. scene 086's Concavity cabinet material and n.168's Schtitt/waste connection (scene 087).

Forward

• AA as the answer Marathe says America lacks: Gately's scenes (esp. 092, pp. 442-449, scene 092) live out exactly the problem of "how to think past this soup" — the day-at-a-time, knees-A.M.-and-P.M. machinery is a working technology of delayed gratification built on surrendered rather than enlightened will; the juxtaposition of these two scenes ~12 pages apart is structural, not accidental.
• n.173's "Q.v. Note 304" defers Marathe's brothers' deaths to the A.F.R. origin material (le jeu du prochain train; endnote 304) — first clear signal that train-kissing is an organized Québecois practice, and that Marathe was audience to a lethal game (spectation at the death of the better brother) long before the samizdat.
• Steeply's credo "Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free." (p. 429) gets its family-history rebuttal in his own later account of his father's MAS*H-dissolution (pp. 638-648, scene 123) — an American freely choosing his own annihilating spectation.
• The persona-sadism catalog (p. 419) and Steeply's needed humiliations connect to "Helen" Steeply's field-assignment around Orin and E.T.A. (the Moment profile thread, n.147 / scenes 081, 077) — the grotesque journalist about to walk into the novel's main stage is here given an interior.