IJ study archive

Scene 096: p terminals rivers of reward

Scene
96
Pages
470–475
When
night of 30 April / 1 May YDAU (2009) — text header 'PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U. … STILL' (p. 470); one installment of the single mountainside night
Where
mountainside shelf/outcropping northwest of Tucson, Arizona — Sonora Desert (the Marathe/Steeply night-dialogue serial)in: Mountainside outcrop above Tucson
POV
3rd person via Marathe (his Québecois syntax inflecting the narration)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 10)

Summary

In the pre-dawn installment of the mountainside serial, Steeply recounts — with Marathe needling him for slowness — the late-1970s Canadian experiments at the Brandon Psychiatric Center in Manitoba, where epilepsy researchers implanting hair-thin Briggs electrodes stumbled on "p-terminals," brain sites whose stimulation yields pure pleasure. Rats with self-stimulation levers pressed them thousands of times an hour, ignoring food and mates, until they died; when word leaked, psychologically average young Canadians lined up around the block, trampling one another to volunteer for fatal implantation. Both governments shut the program down at gunpoint as a security priority, the C.I.A. wanting it perfected and classified first. Steeply's point is the explicit analogy to the Entertainment — an optical bypass of the electrode, pleasure delivered straight to the lever-hand of any consumer "by free choice, of course" — and his hope that even Fortier might be made to see what he proposes "to let out of the cage." Marathe parries with MK-Ultra, the C.I.A.'s own non-volunteer atrocities, while privately noting Steeply's warming routines and reading the trained blankness of his interviewer's face.

What to notice

The interrogation runs backwards: Steeply hedges and fumbles dates ("I can't remember if I read about it or heard a lecture"), while Marathe — who has just signaled ignorance with what "might be seen as slightly shaking the head" — keeps supplying the hardware unprompted: Briggs electrodes, the Kenbeck circuit, the lobes. Whatever this is, it is not one man informing another, and both know it. Notice the unannounced intrusions: twice, mid-anecdote, the narration drops silently into Marathe's childhood — the boy sent ahead into shops to check for transmitters that could stop his father's pacemaker — his private stake in implanted electronics surfacing at exactly the moments volunteers line up for implantation, while the face he shows Steeply stays bland. The debate's cruelest line arrives as grooming: "By free choice, of course." delivered to a cuticle. And the adversaries build the nightmare as a duet, alternating clauses — Marathe's "Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting." folded into Steeply's drooling millions — until the vision is a joint production: the serial's slyest formal joke, a debate about lethal shared pleasure that is itself a shared, pleasurable performance.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 470: header; Steeply raises the old Canadian epilepsy-implantation program; Marathe supplies "Briggs electrodes" and the Kenbeck circuit unprompted — he knows pacemaker hardware from his father's, with its plutonium-239 pack and its rules (no microwaves, no cremation).
  • pp. 470-471: trial-and-error stimulation in the temporal lobe finds intense pleasure sites — Elder's "Rivers of Reward," the p-terminals ("'P' wishing to mean 'the pleasure'"); the Brandon Psychiatric Center, "the far north of Manitoba… The center of nothing."
  • pp. 471-472: the rat data — auto-stimulation levers pressed thousands of times hourly, food and estrous females ignored, death by dehydration or fatigue; up the scale through cats, swine, primates, a dolphin; even with electrodes removed, subjects pressed anything pressable ("The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think").
  • pp. 472-473: human volunteers needed; legal nightmare; Marathe's counter-jab — Ottawa could have asked the C.I.A. for "Persons of Expendability," cf. MK-Ultra's non-volunteers (n.198 cites the Orlikow class action verbatim); the leak, and hordes of young Canadians literally trampling each other to volunteer in full knowledge of the dead rats.
  • p. 473: the covert psych study ("the hordes were told it was part of the screening"): the would-be implantees test out "fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal" — not deviants; interleaved memory of Marathe's father sending Rémy ahead into shops to check for transmitters.
  • p. 473: Steeply's distillation — "the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable… the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever"; Marathe's bland look; Steeply: "By free choice, of course."
  • p. 473: both governments' horror — Langley "bit their knuckle"; the underground-market projection (electrodes no more exotic than syringes; willing surgeons; Steeply's pointed crack about "off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists"); the nightmare vision of millions of average North Americans home thumbing personal levers — "Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life."
  • p. 474: the joint covert shutdown under Carter — N.S.A. and C7/R.C.M.P. going in guns drawn, labs dismantled, dolphins and goats mercy-killed, Elder disappeared; the C.I.A. had wanted it perfected and Classified for "military use or something."
  • pp. 474-475: the analogy made explicit — is the Entertainment "a somehow optical stimulation of the p-terminals," bypassing the electrode? Steeply: "All I'm saying is analogy. A precedent in your own nation"; Marathe's nationalist correction ("Us, our nation is the Québec nation. Manitoba is—"); Steeply's hope that Fortier could be induced to see "just what it is he's proposing to let out of the cage"; closing tradecraft — the emery board, the trained expressionless down-look, Marathe's discomfort at not knowing what Steeply believes.

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: the scene supplies the book's clearest mechanistic model for the Entertainment — pleasure as pure deliverable current, fatal precisely because chosen; the lever-rat is the Entertainment-viewer in miniature.
  • Addiction and Recovery: the p-terminal is addiction stripped of substance — reward without earning, the cage made literal hardware; the volunteers' "chillingly average" profiles universalize the addict.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the pleasure-weapon's pedigree is Canadian and its suppression a joint U.S.-Canada security operation — exactly the U.S./Québec axis now fighting over its optical descendant; Marathe insists Manitoba is not his nation.
  • Surveillance and Disguise: framing apparatus throughout — Marathe cataloguing Steeply's warming routines for memory, Steeply's emery-board nonchalance and trained blank interviewer's gaze; even the anecdote is an interrogation tactic aimed at Fortier through Marathe.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Direct continuation of the choosing-your-master and Entertainment-test arguments of the serial (scenes 072, 077, 088-orbit pp. 418ff); the cage image here ("let out of the cage") picks up Marathe and Steeply's freedom-from vs. freedom-to debate (pp. 317-321) and Gately's cage idiom in the adjacent scene 095 ("out of this kind of mental cage," p. 468) — deliberate splice by the book.
  • Pat Montesian's epilepsy-adjacent stroke and her epileptic dog in scene 095 sit directly before this scene's epilepsy-research cover story — the book cross-cutting therapeutic and recreational neurology.

Forward

  • "Off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists" (p. 474) is Steeply needling the A.F.R.'s origin in le jeu du prochain train — the train-jumping cult detailed in n.304 and the Wraith/Fortier backstory pages.
  • Marathe's father's pacemaker (p. 470) is loaded foreshadowing within the same night: in scene 098 (pp. 489-490) Marathe recalls the father's death — a videophonic ad pulse stopping the Kenbeck — technology's unsolicited transmission literally killing the parent; it also rhymes with n.190's felony-murder pacemaker hypothetical and with DuPlessis's death-by-burglary (scene 095's "Nuck-VIP issue").
  • The Brandon material is the conceptual scaffold for Fortier's later testing of the Entertainment on A.F.R. volunteers and captives (pp. 722ff Antitoi-shop chapters) and for the U.S. Office's own testing casualties (scene 107, pp. 548-549 — penal-system volunteers "lost in attempts to produce a description"); it also glosses the medical attaché's household, found lever-locked in replay (scene 025, pp. 78-79, and scene 028, p. 87).
  • The "chillingly average, normal" volunteers answer in advance Steeply's recurring question of whether Americans would really choose death-by-pleasure — cf. his father's MAS*H disintegration (pp. 638-648, scene 123), the home-and-hearth version of the lever.

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 471: "quote 'Rivers of Reward'" / "'P' wishing to mean 'the pleasure.'" — the coinage; tag-line for the whole pleasure-circuitry motif.
  • p. 471: the lever-rat description ("over and over, thousands of times an hour," "stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue" — "or else they had to be lobotomized") — the book's core addiction emblem in lab form.
  • p. 473: "the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever" — Steeply's distillation; near-definition of the Entertainment.
  • p. 473: "fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal." — the volunteers' psych profiles; democracy of the cage.
  • pp. 474-475: "your M. Fortier might be induced to see just what it is he's proposing to let out of the cage." — the cage figure binding Marathe/Steeply to the AA chapters.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (8) · Connected from (9) · Passages quoted here (33) · Motifs (2)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs