IJ study archive

Scene 130: hal stice bleachers etoile doom

Scene
130
Pages
673–682
When
Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009), afternoon — third set of the Hal–Stice exhibition
Where
E.T.A., bleachers behind Show Court #12, cold open airin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. courts & Eschaton grounds
POV
Hugh Steeply (3rd person, 'Helen Steeply' persona), bracketed by Poutrincourt and deLint

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 8)

Summary

While Hal and Stice split sets and play out the third on Show Court #12, "Helen Steeply" sits in the cold bleachers between two opposed commentators: Québecer prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, who (mostly in French) delivers E.T.A.'s whole philosophy of the étoile — the fearless ephebe who bursts from nowhere, learns he is "loved for winning only," and is doomed at the top unless he's been taught to transcend the goal — and Aubrey deLint, who talks stats and "gestalt," ranking Pemulis's self-cancelling strengths, Possalthwaite's lob-built game, Wayne's pure remorseless force, and Hal's game "constructed as much out of what's missing as what's there." Troeltsch sits at the top of the bleachers broadcasting the match into his empty fist. Steeply works both sources while the endnotes reveal the surveillance running under the small talk: he plans to pull U.S.O.U.S. files on Poutrincourt (n.274), and she has almost certainly already made him as neither journalist nor woman (n.276). A Hal passing shot veers inexplicably out "as if some freak gust came out of nowhere," and deLint closes on Hal's one flaw — a susceptible will, the way "some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back."

What to notice

The staging is stereo: deLint's stats arrive in one of Steeply's ears while Poutrincourt's Québecois metaphysics arrives "in the other ear", two commentaries that never once address each other, with the match running underneath as their shared text — and above them Troeltsch, "pretending to be two people", runs a parody two-man booth that exposes what the real pair are: color and play-by-play for an audience of one spy. Troeltsch's interjections are placed like punctuation from another medium — "Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?" asks live suffering for the replay only packaged entertainment can give. Notice the background counterpoint the doom speech gets: at the exact moment Poutrincourt says "you are doomed", Steeply's eye drifts to small boys, "pale and wild-eyed", dragging white bags to the dumpsters — the reader alone knows they have just met Death in a refrigerator, so the comic subplot crosses the lecture on doomed children as a silent omen. And the costume work runs at sentence level: the wig adjusted under cover of the cap; the narrator's aside that "Nor did Steeply quite notice the woman's shifts between dialects" — the professional watcher missing the other costume in play; and, dropped into the dialogue without one word of comment, the scene's quietest sentence: "Steeply's raglan sweater had been his wife's."

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 673: set break; Hal ducks in for Collyrium eyewash; Poutrincourt (long-faced, ex-Satellite pro, clashing violet cap) replaces deLint beside Steeply; Troeltsch IDed as "a strange and unhappy" best left to broadcast to himself.
  • p. 674: why staff were told to be unfriendly — Tavis "quantified" (in a quandary) about publicity for an étoile; Hal trots back out affecting unwatchedness; Steeply's cover-story ("soft profile on his brother") and the flashbulb effect of Tavis's monologue on his brain.
  • p. 675: deLint returns with his charts; Steeply's notebook of ball-strike onomatopoeia (cut, king, ping, pock...); switch to French; Poutrincourt's roll-call of pubescent stars from Lenglen to "this new Argentinean Kleckner."
  • pp. 675-676: what top tennis requires is all achievable by puberty — plus the ephebe's "edge in psyche": no adult fear, abandon, instant étoiles.
  • pp. 676-677: the turn — "you awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only"; the from-noplace winning created you; pressure "such as one could not imagine"; suicides, burnout, the Billboard Who Walks; E.T.A. as oven-tempering against the time after fear comes.
  • pp. 677-678: match texture — Stice's chip lob over Hal; Troeltsch's two-voice fist-broadcast (Hal as "statues of Augustus of Rome," the Bud Match of the Week); deLint threatens Troeltsch into volume regulation; Hal's crunched wide serve and surgical backspin angle; "Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain" (Poutrincourt, in English); Hal aces to lead the third.
  • pp. 678-679: deLint's complete-game seminar: Pemulis's volleys and best-lob-in-East-Coast-juniors cancel each other out (n.275: she renders it s'annuler); Possalthwaite's defensive gestalt ("This deLint is wrong" — Poutrincourt, smiling rictally); Hal's strengths finally fitting together, unlike his brother's.
  • p. 679: Hal's down-the-line pass veers out at the last second "as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out"; Stice looks more surprised than Hal.
  • pp. 679-680: Poutrincourt on doom — even attainment dooms you without "some ability to transcend the goal" (n.276: her transperçant slip betrays that she's made Steeply); in the background small boys drag white trash bags to the dumpsters, pale, anxious, conferring.
  • pp. 680-681: the two dooms of the étoile who attains: (1) the impaling shock that the goal "does not have the meaning when you get it" — the children are versed in the saga of Eric Clipperton; (2) the Syndrome of the Endless Party — celebrity instead of play, "you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering."
  • p. 681: deLint sells Wayne — "got everything," pace Hal can't handle; Poutrincourt: Schtitt's goal is "to map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of the success."
  • pp. 681-682: Steeply fishes about the Founder ("a student of types of sight... this relation between oneself and what one sees"); "The son described his father as quote 'genre-dysphoric'" — Poutrincourt: "This does not sound like Hal Incandenza."
  • p. 682: deLint's verdict: Wayne is pure force, no fear, pity, remorse, or memory; Hal remembers points, senses trends, is "more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally," flits in and out of matches — a susceptible, "female"-coded will; "But the one we see this most in is Hal"; Poutrincourt, quietly, nearly accentless: "So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways."

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: the fullest single statement of E.T.A.'s pedagogy — gestalt vs. strengths, the plateaux of junior development, and Schtitt's program of tempering étoiles against the moment fear arrives.
  • Entertainment and the Self: the étoile as consumed entertainment — loved for winning only, pursued to become "the Billboard Who Walks," doomed by the culture-of-goal's hunger; celebrity vs. play as mutually exclusive masters.
  • Surveillance and Disguise: a double-blind interview — Steeply pumping staff under the Helen persona while planning to pull Poutrincourt's files (n.274), Poutrincourt having already clocked his lighter-elbow and electrolysis rash (n.276); each pretends not to see the other seeing.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Troeltsch broadcasting into his empty fist to no one is the scene's figurant-grade emblem; meanwhile the real conversation happens in a French deLint may or may not secretly follow.
  • Fathers and Sons: JOI surfaces only as refracted hearsay — "the Founder," "the punter's father, who dabbled in films," "genre-dysphoric" — his sons' accounts already curated for an intelligence operative.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

Forward

  • Continues the Hal–Stice exhibition begun in scene 129 (pp. 666-673) and is continued in turn by Hal's post-mortem with deLint in scene 132 (pp. 686ff: "You just never quite occurred out there").
  • The ball that veers out "as if some freak gust" (p. 679) joins the file of physically impossible phenomena around Ortho Stice (his glued forehead, the moving bed) that the late book attributes to the wraith — early kinetic evidence of JOI's posthumous interference (cf. the ghosts-wraiths scenes).
  • deLint's "some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back" reads, after the full novel, as more than metaphor — it anticipates both Hal's dissociative slide (pp. 896ff) and the wraith-haunted texture of late E.T.A. scenes; it also echoes the anhedonia essay's Hal-is-empty diagnosis (scene 135, pp. 693-695).
  • The boys dragging white plastic bags to the dumpsters under anxious glances (p. 680) are scene 129's punitive tunnel-detail crew — per the p. 666 roster: LaMont Chu, Josh Gopnik, Audern Tallat-Kelpsa, Philip Traub, Tim Peterson, Carl Whale, Kieran McKenna, "plus ten-year-old Kent Blott." Neither Possalthwaite (the Eschaton nose casualty; the detail is for the "uninjured," p. 666/n.271) nor Arslanian is named in it. The tunnels' "disturbing" find surfaces at the end of scene 140 (p. 714), where Possalthwaite "and the Id-man" (Arslanian) bring Blott to Hal about "their disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels that P.M." — a crew the text never puts under the Show Court at p. 680.
  • n.274's promised e-mail to Falls Church on "Poutrincourt, Thierry T." — her A.F.R./Québecois affiliation question stays live for the Steeply thread; her Marathe-like shrugs (p. 673) are the text's nudge.

Notable passages (11)
  • pp. 676-677: "For then you awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only.... The from-noplace winning created you." — the étoile's ontology; core entertainment-self/the-body-tennis extraction.
  • p. 680: "you are doomed if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal" — Poutrincourt stating the Schtitt/Incandenza paradox plainly.
  • pp. 680-681: "the children here are versed in what is called the saga of Eric Clipperton" / the Syndrome of the Endless Party — "you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering."
  • p. 679: "at the last possible second it veered out... as if some freak gust came out of nowhere" — first courtside wraith-physics around Stice.
  • p. 682: "Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back." — deLint's unwitting prophecy of Hal's coming dissolution.
  • p. 682: "So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways" — Poutrincourt's quiet, nearly accentless summation.

Endnotes digested here

  • n.273 (p. 1052): glosses étoiles — "Stars, shooting stars, falling stars" (the falling already built into the word).
  • n.274 (p. 1052): Poutrincourt's Nuck idiom is authentic — and "a certain 'journalist'" will be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.'s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files on "Poutrincourt, Thierry T."
  • n.275 (p. 1052): she translates deLint's "cancel each other out" as s'annuler rather than se détruire — the annular verb, in a book where everything cancels in circles.
  • n.276 (pp. 1052-53): her transperçant slip shows she's figured out Steeply is neither civilian profiler nor female — probably since he lit his Flanderfume with the lighter-arm elbow out, "which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do."
  • n.277 (p. 1053): raison de faire — Trois-Rivières idiom, "reason to get out of bed in the morning."

What links here Timeline events here (22) · Connected from (12) · Passages quoted here (39) · Motifs (2)

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