IJ study archive

Scene 091: fresno quik subsidized time

Scene
91
Pages
436–442
When
8 November YDAU (2009), I-Day gala, late in the screening; film-within: Gentle's first term, around/just before the Year of the Whopper; lore: an undated B.S.-era Fresno tragedy
Where
E.T.A. dining hall (gala screening); film-within: Gentle's velvet-lined Cabinet Room; Las Vegas's renamed Forsythia Bowl referencedin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. dining hall (West House)
POV
3rd person communal E.T.A. voice, then the film's screenplay-format transcript (headlines + Cabinet scene)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 8)

Summary

The Clipperton saga widens into a general theory of "unprepared-goal-attainment-trauma," illustrated by jr. tennis's most ghastly case: the unaffiliated Fresno kid who wins the Pacific Coast Hardcourts and that night drinks sodium-cyanide-laced Nestlé's Quik, whereupon mouth-to-mouth resuscitation serially kills his father, mother, and all six CPR-trained siblings — "one historical reason" accredited academies must staff a Ph.D. counselor, an office E.T.A. fills with the parroting Dolores Rusk, "regarded by the kids as whatever's just slightly worse than useless," while "Lyle, a dewimpled Carmelite who works the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario Incandenza, and many times Avril herself take up most of the psychic slack." Back at the flagging gala — Wayne expressionless, Hal's eyes fevered, everyone sugar-crashing — Mario's film reaches its Subsidized-Time genesis: a headline montage of Gentle touring the Lucite walls, then the Cabinet scene where Gentle, fresh from a bowl game where he marveled at an unnamed punter with "an outsized leg," confronts the "Democratic Triple Bind" (visionary spending demanded, taxes forbidden, balance required) with Rodney Tine, ad-man P. Tom Veals, and the pulchritudinous Luria P——— at the table. The Chinese-zodiac restaurant placemats and the bowl's new name — the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl — deliver the seminal vision: sell the calendar itself.

What to notice

The Fresno horror is the Entertainment's mechanism in family-sized miniature: one taste of the lethal treat, then everyone who loves the victim enough to put a mouth to his dies in turn, down to the smallest pajama-footed sibling — rescue itself the vector, exactly the casualty pattern the samizdat runs on medical attachés and their would-be saviors. Notice the narrator's mask slip mid-catastrophe — "plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound" — a sudden first person poking through the communal E.T.A. lore-voice, the one moment the scene admits somebody is telling it. Wallace also choreographs the gala's fatigue in real time with the reader's: just as the film goes "brow-clutchingly slow and digressive", hats itch, sugar crashes, and one small kid's crying jag makes "everybody feel jagged" — an audience flagging on cue, eleven pages deep in puppet-Cabinet transcript. And Gentle's tic-word quietly does its own decaying: "seminal, visionary" degrades within a breath to "outstandingly visional and seminary", the visionary President unable to keep even his adjectives intact.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 436: the thesis — certain very talented juniors "just cannot keep the lip stiff and fires stoked" if they actually reach the top; Clipperton the worst case but not unique.
  • pp. 436-437: the Fresno catastrophe in full black-slapstick: the dad-coached winner, the NaCN-laced Quik in the redecorated kitchen, the chain of CPR deaths ("dead as a rivet") down to the pajama-footed siblings with "incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouths"; hence the mandated full-time Ph.D. counselor.
  • p. 437: Dolores Rusk demolished — the cage of hands, the dependent clauses parroted back with interrogative lilt ('Uncontrolled boner during semis at Cleveland?'), the expression of a girl "dancing with you but would really rather be dancing with just about anyone else in the room"; Axford and Shaw's burgled manuscript with 29 self- prefixes in four pages.
  • pp. 437-438: who actually takes up the psychic slack: Lyle, a dewimpled Carmelite on the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario, "and many times Avril herself."
  • p. 438: maybe only the already-bats or the grim machines survive the top — Wayne squeezing a ball without readable expression while Hal's eyes are "fevered and rolling around in his head"; the audience flags; the Tine-Luria love-rumor digression is "brow-clutchingly slow" (n.176: the film at its most derivative of Himself's ONANtiad, whose doomed claymation romance — Gentle and the germ-obsessed wife of a Canadian Minister, the hired Candida albicans specialist, the bullet-train suicide, Gentle's "macrocartographic" revenge — everyone agrees Mario's version improves on); the audience also catches a chronology snag: Subsidized Time was a revenue-response to Reconfiguration, yet the film's end seems to date Tine's Sino-temporal scheme to Orin's first B.U. year, "ended in the Year of the Whopper, pretty obviously a Subsidized year"; a small kid with the adhesive bottle whacks his head and cries with "desolate late-day hysteria" in Avril's lap.
  • pp. 438-439: headline montage — GENTLE AT LARGE whacking champagne bottles against the Lucite walls south of what used to be Syracuse, Concord NH, Salem MA; the demoted headline-writer (now of the Rantoul IL Eagle) on Gentle watching Clemson down Boston U. from an oxygenated portabubble; "CRANIALLY CHALLENGED, ACROMEGALIC INFANTS LOST IN EXPERIALIST SHUFFLE?"; Wall Street angst over Reconfiguration's costs.
  • p. 439: Cabinet scene opens on Szechuan-restaurant zodiac placemats at every place; Gentle, "seminal, visionary," raves not about the football but the punter — "I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air. … What was that cat's name again, R.T.?" — Orin, never named.
  • pp. 439-440: Gentle pronounces Territorial Reconfiguration "a thoroughgoing logistical coup" (n.177: 'Territorial Reconfiguration' is official spin; Great Concavity/Grand Convexité is street argot the media genericized); Tine: "Now it's time to think about how to pay for it" — red-yawning-skull folders, jaws hitting the table, a Motown-girl puppet rigging a tiny noose over a beam.
  • p. 440: introductions — P. Tom Veals of Veals Associates ("Yo.") and "the charming and delightful Ms. Luria P———," at whose eyebrow the conference table "seems to ascend ever so slightly."
  • pp. 440-441: Tine's "infamous Democratic Triple Bind": the electorate demands visionary programs, will "whinge" at cuts, has been promised "no new enhancements" (Gentle: "I pointed at my eyes up there"), while the financial community demands balance; the 'whinge' routine — Luria: "This is a Canadian idiom, cheri"; Veals: "And who is this chick?"
  • pp. 441-442: Gentle's high pitch precedes the seminal insight; "have a gander at these restaurant exhibits of the Sino-epithetic calendrical scheme"; the reveal: the game he attended was the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl — naming-rights revenue as the way out of the Triple Bind: Subsidized Time conceived on-screen.

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: the Fresno case institutionalizes the book's warning about reaching the goal you've been pointed at for years — then the institution's answer (Rusk) is shown to be a parody, the real work falling to Lyle, Mario, and Avril; Wayne embodies the grim-machine survivor type.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the birth of Subsidized Time dramatized — Reconfiguration's unpayable costs, the Triple Bind, and the solution of selling the calendar; n.177 sorts official spin (Territorial Reconfiguration) from street argot (Concavity/Convexity).
  • Film and Optics: Mario's film at its most derivative of Himself (n.176's ONANtiad comparison); the gala's reception dynamics — chortle-momentum, retroactive puzzlement, the audience as restless critics — keep the film a screened object, not transparent history.
  • Irony and Sincerity: gruesome catastrophe narrated as deadpan slapstick; camp puppets staging real statecraft; the audience's irony running dry ("a lot of the eyes... have lost a bit of that festive sparkle") as the film grinds toward the world they actually live in.
  • Family and Hamlet: Avril doing E.T.A.'s real maternal-counseling work — the psychic-slack list and the crying child in her lap — against the Incandenza backdrop of the film's authorship (Mario adapting his dead father's material, improving it).

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Continues scenes 086/089 (Clipperton) — the Fresno case is the saga's stated companion, and Rusk's uselessness explains why Clipperton's crisis went to Himself and Lyle rather than the mandated professional.
  • The placemat genesis confirms the Vienna VA Szechuan-steakhouse legend Hal recalls at p. 410 (scene 087); the renamed bowl is the engine that names every chapter-heading year in the novel, including the current Depend Adult Undergarment.
  • The audience-noticed chronology snag (p. 438) is the novel flagging its own internal-dating wobbles — same species as the JOI-suicide and Joelle-arrival inconsistencies adjudicated in the archive's dating rulings.
  • The headline montage form continues scene 083 (pp. 391-394); the acromegalic-infants header keeps the Concavity's feral-infant lore (scene 086; Marathe/Steeply serial) circulating as news-noise.
  • Veals's presence at the table pays off the displaced 087-tail beat (p. 418, scene 087, n.168): the thriving partnerless Boston agency whose principal took Gentle's fringe PR "out of ennui"; n.168's Schtitt detail — drawn to Gentle's waste-rocketry for its athleto-Wagnerian "business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return" — quietly links experialism, punting, and Schtitt's tennis metaphysics (pp. 79-84, scene 026).

Forward

  • The unnamed punter is Orin: the film puts Gentle, Tine, Veals, and Luria P——— in one room marveling at an Incandenza's leg — proleptic of the political-erotic web that later closes on Orin (Luria's seduction of Tine in the Marathe/Steeply serial, pp. 92-95, scene 029, 031; Helen Steeply's profile pretext; the A.F.R.'s late-novel targeting of Orin as a route to the Master copy).
  • Avril's psychic-slack role foreshadows her quasi-therapeutic entanglements with students (the John Wayne thread, pp. 552ff territory) and her management of the Eschaton fallout (n.147, scene 081).

Notable passages (5)
  • pp. 436-437: the cyanide-Quik chain ("dead as a rivet... incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik") — black-slapstick set piece on success-trauma; anthology candidate for the-body-tennis.
  • p. 437: Rusk's parroted clauses ending "'Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?'" — the helping profession as echo chamber; pairs with Marathe's rage at having his words inserted (p. 428, scene 088).
  • p. 439: "I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air." — Gentle on Orin; hang-time as national spectacle, the punter as proto-Entertainment.
  • p. 441: "I told them on Inauguration Day. I said look into my eyes: no new enhancements." — campaign-promise satire (the 'read my lips' echo).
  • p. 442: "I heard punts, burped redhots, smelled beer-foam and recoiled from public urinals at the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl." — Subsidized Time's conception punchline; the calendar's origin myth.

What links here Timeline events here (20) · Connected from (2) · Passages quoted here (42) · Motifs (5)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs