IJ study archive

Scene 111: lenz cult lore concavity

Scene
111
Pages
560–562
When
Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009), continuing the post-meeting walk (after 2202h)
Where
Faneuil St. off W. Beacon; a dumpster-lined easement between Faneuil St. and Brighton Ave., Brightonin: Allston-Brighton
POV
3rd person, free-indirect Lenz (coke-monologue continued)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 12)

Summary

The coked monologue's second movement: under a Faneuil St. streetlamp Lenz tilts his head back to show Green "where his septum used to be," then launches into a catalogue of cults — Delaware Virtual-Reality-porn devotees hunting a rumored perfect "kamasupra" diskette though VR porn causes eye-corner bleeding and permanent impotence; "Stelliform Cultism"; and, unknowingly, the A.F.R. itself, as "a suicidal Nuck cult" playing Russian roulette with trains. From there he spirals into Great Concavity folklore: feral pet-packs descended from abandoned animals, researchers who venture past the Lucited ATHSCME walls and drop off the radar, the annulated Shawshine tinting the Charles SteelSak-blue, housepets and property-conscious insects keeping abandoned homes "in model repair and impressive equity," giant keening infants (or reanimated aborted feti, in the "Limbaugh-era" version), and the post-Rasta cultists who trek north each New Year past Checkpoint Pongo to Propitiate The Infant and never return. Green's contributions: he's never once thought about Concavity fauna, and if AA's a brainwashing cult, his brain "needed a good brisk washing" — which Lenz clocks as recycled Gately.

What to notice

The free indirect narration here is total down to the orthography: "reguiles", "purportaged", "repelsive" — misspellings that occur in sentences Lenz never speaks aloud, so the errors belong to the prose itself, which is coked and grinding its teeth right along with him. Notice AA's idiom surfacing where Lenz can't hear it: the septum display is deadpanned as sharing "a vulnerable personal thing" — the program's tenderest verb applied to showing off cocaine damage — and his wilderness nightmare is "the raging Powerlessness", Step One's own capitalized noun, which Lenz can only imagine as a survival fantasy with a knife, never as the condition he's in on this sidewalk. And Green's function is anti-folklore: against the Concavity sentence-monsoon he "literally says he's never given it one thought one way or the other", and his one borrowed truism about brainwashing lands truer than anything Lenz invents — the scene's quiet argument that secondhand plainness beats firsthand mythology.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 560: the streetlamp septum-reveal — Lenz's one "vulnerable personal thing," and it's cocaine damage displayed as intimacy.
  • pp. 560-561: the Delaware VR-porn cult — bleeding eye-corners, "real-world permanent impotence," the bootleg Write-Protect-notched diskette of perfect porn sought in "dim Wilmington-area venues"; Stelliform Cultism Green "isn't even near ready to hear about"; the train-jumping "suicidal Nuck cult" — le Jeu du Prochain Train as street rumor.
  • p. 561: teeth-grinding mistaken for gum; the stepfather's gut and fob; mother's spiteful Greyhound trips; the retail-dealing lament (customers offering their kids at 0300); Green: coke "grabbed you by the throat" — Boston AA's "Express Elevator To AA"; the easement, the human vomit, Lenz's "logical proof" that Geoffrey D. is "a closet poofta"; the male-modeling brag.
  • pp. 561-562: Concavity fauna lore — feral locust-like herds, vanished explorer teams "dropping off the radar"; whole "NNE cults and stelliform subcults" of Concavity metaphysics: annular fusion, "verdant forests with periodic oasises of purportaged desert," the Shawshine/Charles SteelSak-blue tint, pets and oversized insects holding real-estate equity, prehistoric-sized infants leaving "enormous scat-piles and keening for the abortive parents"; the reanimated-feti variant; "due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled" (narration slips into the yrstruly idiom).
  • p. 562: the Bob Hope-worshipping post-Rastas turned Infant-seekers — tie-dyed parkas, cardboard snowshoes, Checkpoint Pongo, "seeking The Infant they called it, as if there were only One," the ritual "Propitiating The Infant," annual disappearances ("(face plum-colored, finally breathing) worse."); Lenz shudders at imagined due-north Powerlessness, "armed just with a Browning blade"; Green's brisk-washing line, "exactly what big blockheaded Don Gately repeats about once a diem."

Themes in this scene

  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the Concavity as folk mythology — the scene shows what O.N.A.N.'s experialist map has become in street consciousness: a feral, fertile, monstrous north that eats explorers, walled off by Lucite and ATHSCME fans, narrated by a coke addict as gospel.
  • Entertainment and the Self: the kamasupra-diskette cult is a low-rent samizdat myth — a rumored perfect entertainment that blinds and unmans its seekers, pursued anyway; Lenz delivers the novel's thesis as Delaware gossip.
  • Annularity: the Concavity lore is all waste-into-life — overfertilization, reanimated barrels, giant infants, the annulated river dyeing the Charles — annular fusion's cycle rendered as creature-feature folklore.
  • Addiction and Recovery: AA-as-cult is the monologue's recurring frame; Green's "brain needed a good brisk washing" is the program's standard counter (and Gately's), here flagged as cliché that nonetheless holds.
  • Disability and Deformity: The Infant again — the Concavity's deformed-birth mythology as cult object, "as if there were only One."

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The Infant continues from scene 109 (p. 559, the orthodontist's party) and resonates with Mme. Marathe (born without a skull, pp. 529, 752ff) and the feral-infant motif (cf. the "feral hamsters" interstitial, scene 030, and JOI's filmography's Concavity shorts, n.24).
  • The VR-porn cult mirrors the Entertainment dossier of scene 107 and the Marathe/Steeply temptation debate (scenes 096/098) — same structure, no U.S.O.U.S. attention.
  • The Shawshine/Charles SteelSak-blue tint is this scene's own coloring of the river — elsewhere the Charles gets a color only in scene 053's narration ("florid-purple" p. 184; "windy and blue" p. 189) — and it connects, mordantly, to Lenz's own SteelSak murder-kit (scene 105).
  • The "yrstruly" slip ties Lenz's register to scene 040's narrator — the novel's street-dialect voices bleeding into each other (flag for POV-mapping).
  • Lenz's "where his septum used to be" pairs with Joelle's veiled ruin/perfection ambiguity (scene 104): two cocaine-shaped faces, one displayed, one hidden.

Forward

  • The "suicidal Nuck cult" of train-jumpers is le Jeu du Prochain Train — the A.F.R.'s origin game, fully documented in n.304 (see scenes/scene n304, digested the same in-novel night, 11 Nov); Lenz retails as urban legend the true origin of the people whose dog he is about to kill (scene 116, pp. 575ff) — the confrontation that follows gets Gately shot while Lenz ends it unhurt, "brushing off his clothes" (pp. 601-619).

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 560: "tilts his head back to show Bruce Green where his septum used to be" — intimacy as damage-display; pointer for addiction-recovery.
  • pp. 560-561: the kamasupra-diskette cult paragraph — the Entertainment's myth-double; extraction candidate for entertainment-self.
  • p. 561: "a suicidal Nuck cult of Nucks that worshipped a form of Russian Roulette that involved jumping in front of trains" — the A.F.R. as rumor; key cross-reference to n.304.
  • pp. 561-562: the Concavity-lore sentence-monsoon (feral pets in "model repair and impressive equity," infants "keening for the abortive parents") — annularity folklore set-piece.
  • p. 562: "(face plum-colored, finally breathing) worse." — the monologue's breathless engine made visible.

What links here Timeline events here (8) · Connected from (6) · Passages quoted here (23) · Motifs (3)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs