IJ study archive

Scene 110: hal photosynthesizing

Scene
110
Pages
560–560
When
? Nov YDAU (2009), lunchtime — undated micro-scene spliced between the two halves of the 11 Nov Lenz/Green walk
Where
Hal's room (Hal & Mario's subdorm room), E.T.A.in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories
POV
3rd person, flat and exterior, Hal-adjacent

Characters present

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 4)

Summary

A one-page still life: at lunchtime Hal lies on his bunk in bright sunlight, hands laced on his chest, while three heads appear successively at his door. Troeltsch asks what he's doing and gets "photosynthesizing," then silence until he leaves. Pemulis, 41 breaths later, asks if he's eaten and gets lion-of-the-veldt shtick ("The beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the Baobob tree"). Over 200 breaths after that, John ("N.R.") Wayne puts just his head in and says nothing, and Hal says nothing, and they stay like that for a while before Wayne's head "smoothly withdrew." Hal is counting his own breaths.

What to notice

Both of Hal's jokes tell the same lie: a photosynthesizer needs no food, and a beast that "has killed and gorged" needs none either — two deflections of the one caretaking question on offer, both claiming I need no intake, delivered by a boy lying inert in the sun doing nothing but passively taking things in. Note the clock: the scene gives no hour, only "41 breaths later" and "Over 200 breaths later" — and the count itself loosens between visits, exact for Pemulis, approximate by the time Wayne arrives, as if even Hal's private timekeeping has begun to drift. The real transaction is the wordless one: Pemulis accepts the gorged-lion performance with "I gotcha.", but Wayne — just a head in a door — offers no question to deflect, and so gets the closest thing to honesty on the page, which is nothing.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 560: sunlight, laced hands, corpse-or-sunbather pose; Troeltsch's head; "photosynthesizing" and then nothing until Troeltsch goes.
  • p. 560: "41 breaths later," Pemulis: "Did you eat yet?"; the gorged-beast routine; "Gotcha... I gotcha."
  • p. 560: "Over 200 breaths later," Wayne's whole head in the barely-opened door, the long mutual wordlessness, the smooth withdrawal.

Themes in this scene

  • Communication and Solipsism: three escalating failures of contact — banter that deflects (Troeltsch), code-shtick between intimates (Pemulis), and pure silence (Wayne); Hal measures the gaps in breaths, time privatized into his own body.
  • Depression and Anhedonia: the motionless, sunlit, supine Hal — "photosynthesizing" as a joke about pure passive intake — reads as early anhedonic stasis, the rehearsal for the horizontal Hal of the novel's last hundred pages.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Wayne's silent head, read against scene 108 (Pemulis catches Wayne with Avril on 9 Nov), is charged both ways: Wayne wordlessly inspecting Avril's son, and/or checking what Hal knows; Wayne and Hal's non-conversation is the family-system silence in miniature ("N.R." — the recurring no-relation-to-the-actor gag).

Forward

  • The breath-counting and supine inwardness prefigure Hal's late-book floor-time (pp. 896ff: "I lay on my back on the carpet of Viewing Room 5"; pp. 906-911; pp. 941ff: "From my horizontal position on the bedroom floor") — this is the first fully horizontal Hal scene of the YDAU November slide, before he even loses the Bob Hope (n.321, 12 Nov: "what if I quit everything forever").
  • Pemulis's "Did you eat yet?" continues his minder/feeder role with Hal (the n.321 tutorial, the DMZ plan's timetable) — also dramatic irony: Pemulis is days from expulsion (n.332).
  • The lion-shtick register with Pemulis matches their established private idiom (scene 032 locker-room quiz; n.321's banter) — performance of okay-ness as Hal's default channel.
  • "Photosynthesizing" recurs as Hal's word for inert sunlit lying-around in the late first-person sections — a self-description that began as a deflection and becomes literal.

Notable passages (3)
  • p. 560: "Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn't say anything else until Troeltsch went away." — the whole late-Hal trajectory in one flat sentence.
  • p. 560: "Then, 41 breaths later..." / "Over 200 breaths later..." — Hal's private clock; pointer for communication-solipsism.
  • p. 560: Wayne's visit ("He didn't say anything and Hal didn't say anything, and they stayed like that for a while, and then Wayne's head smoothly withdrew.") — the book's most loaded nothing-happens paragraph this side of the Quebec serial.

What links here Timeline events here (4) · Connected from (1) · Passages quoted here (10) · Motifs (2)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs