IJ study archive

Scene 103: odalisque myths

Scene
103
Pages
528–530
When
pre-dawn and dawn, 1 May YDAU (2009) — night of 30 April – 1 May (mountainside serial)
Where
rock outcropping on a mountainside northwest of Tucson AZ; desert floor and Rincon range brightening belowin: Mountainside outcrop above Tucson
POV
Rémy Marathe (3rd person)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 13)

Summary

The dawn installment of the mountainside serial: Steeply argues the Entertainment's lethality isn't uniquely American by reciting multicultural myths of fatal pleasure — the Oriental woman covered in blond down whom young men ravish and die of, and Québec's own Odalisque de Ste. Thérèse, whose beholders turn to opal: "a Medusa in reverse" (n.223 quietly notes that this alludes to the "supposed samizdateur's" hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque film, whose play-within-film fight scene decomposes into Fast Fourier Transforms). Marathe counters that the Greeks feared ugliness, not beauty, and that irony and "contempt for selves" are themselves part of the U.S. temptation. Between exchanges the narration opens the serial's locked drawers: it is their sixth or seventh meeting; the A.F.R. believes Marathe a triple agent memorizing everything; Steeply withholds from his own superiors the fact that Fortier knows he knows; and Marathe's true secret — that he loves his skull-less, heart-defective wife Gertraud more than the Separatist cause, a choice for which Fortier would drive a railroad spike through her eye — is known to no one. False dawn gives way to a sick-pink real one, and Marathe, hand imprinted with his Sterling's grip, says he must soon leave.

What to notice

The paragraph of nested deceptions — triple-agent suspicions, who knows that who knows that who knows — ends on the one secret nobody holds, and then the narration performs a quiet miracle of attribution: "The real Marathe gestured outward" — the adjective arriving exactly when the count of pretended Marathes has become undecidable, and what the real one says is "A false dawn." The horror in the confession is carried by a single adverb: if Fortier learned of the choice "he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye" — understandably: Marathe still concedes the cause's logic at the very point where he has betrayed it for love. The prose stutters where he is unsure — "It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting." — and mangles itself around the amputation: the bioluminescent insects sound like "playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs", legs a marked category no unwounded syntax would need. The skating dream drops into the myth-talk in one sentence, unannounced, and is gone. And the costume keeps working both ways: Steeply smokes left-handed though Marathe "knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed" — disguise sustained down to handedness — yet the installment closes with the disguise yielding real knowledge, Steeply prodding the dust where things might be "crawling up" at a person in a skirt and saying, sadly, "I'd never realized."

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 528: section header PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U.; Steeply's "multicultural" exhibit: the Japanese/Indonesian myth of the woman entirely covered with long blond body-hair, combing and singing by water — irresistible even to young men who know the myth.
  • p. 528: Marathe: passive temptation includes "a felt lack. A perceived deprivation" (Orientals not bodily hairy); mid-exchange, the narration drops into Marathe's recurring dream of skating with his father at St. Remi-d'Amherst, the pacemaker "a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan."
  • p. 528: "Killed outright, usually. The pleasure's too intense. No mortal can stand it... M-o-r-t-s."; Steeply's analogy: even those who know it kills go ahead anyway.
  • p. 528: false-dawn nature writing — bioluminescent insects "very intent... on their way to something urgent" (vs. the two unmoving men), Venus moving east, burrs on the lap-blanket, "the softest light imaginable."
  • pp. 528-529: the meta-frame laid bare: sixth or seventh meeting; both agencies look forward to them though "they accomplished little"; Steeply volunteered despite barely Acceptable Québecois French (n.222 on the dialect's Basque-grade difficulty); the espionage regress — the A.F.R. believes Marathe a triple agent; Steeply's superiors don't know that Fortier knows that Steeply knows he (Fortier) knows Marathe is here, a fact Steeply holds back to satisfy "some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one's superiors."
  • pp. 528-529: the buried confession: Fortier does not know Marathe has "reached the internal choice" that he loves Gertraud more than the cause of Québec — "making Marathe no better than M. Rodney 'the God' Tine"; the price of discovery: a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye, "killing her and Marathe both."
  • p. 529: "The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. 'A false dawn.'" — Steeply pivots to "your own francophone myth," l'Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse, whose sight turns mortal Québecois to gems ("In most versions an opal"); "A Medusa in reverse, one might say" — and "Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed" (n.223: the laugh is at the allusion to JOI's anticonfluential, hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque film, whose play-within-film fight scene breaks down into Fast Fourier Transforms; "ALGOL" remains anybody's guess).
  • p. 529: Marathe on the Greeks — they feared ugliness, not beauty, hence neither was a fatal temptation for "the Greek type"; "pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl"; Steeply's "And haven't we come a long way," ironically — Marathe: "This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type's temptation, I think."
  • p. 530: dawn proper — overtanned-hide desert, reptile-hued saguaro, "coffinous" sleeping bags around the dead bonfire, urine-colored payloaders frozen mid-action; Marathe's physiology (very low resting pulse: "no legs to require blood from the heart"; enormous A.F.R. arms; left-handed) against Steeply's electrolysis wens, puffy and drawn; "The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other."
  • p. 530: Marathe realizes his own pretend-sniffing functions to alert Steeply that a silence is breaking; offers Steeply a seat ("It looks like there might be things"); "I must soon leave" — his hand "imprinted with the texture of the Sterling's pebbled grip"; the installment runs over the page-break: "It has been good to be in the air for a night." (p. 531)

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: the lethal-pleasure myths universalize the Entertainment — cultures have always imagined a beauty that kills and beholders who "go ahead anyway"; the Odalisque/Medusa pair names the samizdat's own internal film.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the serial's U.S.-vs-Québec anthropology sharpened — American temptation includes terror, felt lack, and self-contempt; and the espionage onion (who tells whose superiors what) is O.N.A.N.-era statecraft in miniature.
  • Surveillance and Disguise: triple-agentry, withheld knowledge, Steeply's field-persona physically decaying at dawn (wens, pallor, the cigarette in the wrong hand) — and Marathe's discovery that even his sniffs are signals: nothing on this outcropping is unperformed.
  • Irony and Sincerity: Steeply's reflexive "haven't we come a long way" gets Marathe's most direct diagnosis in the serial — irony and contempt for selves are not defenses against the fatal temptation but ingredients of it.
  • Dreams: mid-argument, one unannounced sentence drops into Marathe's recurring dream of skating with his father at a St. Remi-d'Amherst outdoor rink, the pacemaker "a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan" (p. 528) — the legless assassin's inner life surfacing as a boy with legs, on ice, with a living father; gone as fast as it came.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • "A Medusa in reverse" + n.223: The Medusa v. the Odalisque is JOI's play-within-film spectacle of lethal beholding (filmography n.24) — the auteur rehearsed the Entertainment's mechanism for decades; n.223 calls the film "hologram-intensive" and gives its fight scene an FFT decomposition; the samizdat-side test — Desai hunting "Fourier Equations in the root code's ALGOL, which would signify holo-grammatical activity" — is proposed but never run at p. 491 (scene 098), and n.24 credits the film's "zone-plating laser holography" to JOI himself (p. 988) with the full account at scene 085 (pp. 396-397); together the pieces argue, without proving, the holography theory.
  • The skating dream of M. Marathe père quietly extends these scenes' fathers bracket (JOI's father, scene 099; Tavis-as-quasi-parent, scene 102): even the legless assassin's inner life is a boy with a father on ice.
  • "Each knew the other" (p. 530) — the serial's enemies-as-intimates thesis, the night's only uncoerced human connection in a run of scenes otherwise about failed or forced ones (Erdedy's hug, Hal's family blankness).

Forward

  • Continues scenes 098 and 101 (the same 30 Apr – 1 May night); the dawn imagery here sets up the serial's remaining installments (Steeply's father and MAS*H, pp. 638ff; the digit-priced re-viewings belong to the A.F.R.'s own program later — scene 147, p. 727, gamed at scene 163) and the serial's eventual daylight end.
  • The Odalisque — a beauty that petrifies beholders — converges on Joelle van Dyne, the veiled P.G.O.A.T. who is the Entertainment's on-screen face and whose beauty/deformity ambiguity (U.H.I.D.; Molly Notkin's account, pp. 788-795) the myth allegorizes; "too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist" is the attaché's fate (scene 007) in folklore form.
  • Marathe's secret choice of Gertraud over the cause enacts his own sermon from pp. 107-108, scene 035 ("Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care."): he has chosen a person rather than a flag — by his own stated standard both fanaticism and its betrayal; this live wire runs under his Ennet House infiltration (pp. 729ff, scene 149) and his endgame ambiguity.
  • "No better than M. Rodney 'the God' Tine" — Tine's love for Luria Perec as the parallel case of an operative compromised by love (pp. 92-95 territory; Mario's puppet film, scene 081); the railroad-spike sentence is the A.F.R.'s tenderness-and-atrocity register (cf. n.304's Gertraude material).

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 528: the blond-downed-woman exchange ("Apparently she's simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist... M-o-r-t-s.") — fatal-pleasure myth as comparative anthropology of the Entertainment.
  • pp. 528-529: "M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause..." — the serial's buried confession and its railroad-spike price.
  • p. 529: "'A Medusa in reverse, one might say.' Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed." — with n.223, the key that links the samizdat to JOI's filmography.
  • p. 529: "This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type's temptation, I think." — irony-sincerity anchor, from the outside observer.
  • p. 530: "Rémy Marathe's resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart." — physiology as character; the wheelchair assassin's calm literalized.
  • p. 530: "The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other." — the serial's quiet thesis sentence on intimacy between enemies.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (10) · Connected from (9) · Passages quoted here (18)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here