IJ study archive

Scene 132: hal vr6 wave bye bye

Scene
132
Pages
686–689
When
Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009), evening after supper / P.M. Study Period
Where
E.T.A. — Schtitt's room off the Comm.-Ad. lobby, then Viewing Room 6in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. Viewing Rooms · E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. Comm.-Ad. building (also)
POV
Hal Incandenza (3rd person)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

After the Stice exhibition Hal goes looking for Schtitt's read on what went wrong and finds only deLint, prone and shirtless over a huge chart on which Stice's and Wayne's names appear and Hal's doesn't; deLint's verdict — "You just never quite occurred out there, kid" — chills Hal to the root. Skipping mandatory Study Period, Hal holes up alone in V.R. 6, chewing Kodiak, bad ankle propped, cycling through his dead father's cartridges and torturing himself over the unrecallable name of a ubiquitous child actor. He runs the short didactic Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat twice: a chronically late bureaucrat, racing for the last feasible train, collides with a small bow-tied boy, chooses the boy over the train and his own "ontological erasure," and is asked "Mister? Are you Jesus?" — "Don't I wish," walking away. Mario loves it for its unhip earnestness; Hal, who tells Mario it's goo, secretly likes it too. He queues up Blood Sister: One Tough Nun as "weird self-punishment," not knowing it germinated from Himself's brief, alienated pass through Boston AA. Bob-Hopeless and not yet two days off the Pump Room (n.321's 12-Nov count reads "two-and-a-half days without? three days?" the following evening), Hal spits heavily and keeps the wastebasket close in case he throws up; that afternoon he couldn't feel the ball on his stick at all.

What to notice

The scene turns on one repeated word: deLint diagnoses Hal with nonoccurrence, and the film Hal then runs twice is a parable about a man threatened with exactly that — firing as "termination", glossed "as in ontological erasure" — so the evening's double feature is really Hal watching his own diagnosis dramatized, and passing the test vicariously through a man who chooses to occur for a child at the cost of his place in the fluorescent world. Notice what Hal does with it: he "likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat's character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure" — erasure re-imagined as chosen, leisurely, almost restful, which is as close as this scene comes to saying where Hal is headed. The film's last shot is its cruelest craft joke: the camera is "revealed now as mounted on the 0816's rear" — the whole moral test was filmed from aboard the temptation, and the moment the man passes it, the film's eye abandons him, receding with the ontologically secure while a child waves Bye at his back. And listen to the narration protest in Hal's key: "His nausea has nothing to do with watching his father's cartridges." — a sentence that is pharmacologically true and emotionally unverifiable, denial rendered as flat fact.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 686: dateline 11 NOVEMBER YDAU; Schtitt off "on the cycle somewhere after confections"; deLint's spreadsheet chart on the floor — Stice and Wayne at the top, no Hal; the perpetual E.T.A. dread of how the coaches are gauging your stock; the question of what playing The Darkness publicly so close to the WhataBurger "signified."
  • p. 686: "'You just never quite occurred out there, kid,' deLint apprises him. He has regressed certain figures to back this up, this nonoccurrence. His choice of words chills Hal to the root."
  • pp. 686-687: V.R. 6 — "Anyone else looking at him in there tonight would call Hal depressed"; the run of JOI titles (The American Century as Seen Through a Brick, Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed, Death in Scarsdale, Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn, Various Small Flames, Kinds of Pain); Valuable Coupon maddening because its monologist's name won't come (the child actor is glossed in n.279, whose callout lands a page on at p. 688); he ejects the 'Medusa v. Odalisque' when audience members start turning to stone.
  • p. 687: the torture-game of swarthy types threatening loved ones for the kid's name; two cartridges of Himself being interviewed, which Hal declines to watch; the furnace kicking on in the tunnels below — flicker, pressure change, burnt-dust smell.
  • pp. 687-689: Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat in full — the dozen digital alarm clocks defeated by a power failure (blinking 0000); the sprint for the 0816; the collision with the earnest bow-tied kid; the clear internal-conflict moment ("one of Himself's films' very few"); the doors hissing shut mid-package; the straightened bow-tie; "Mister? Are you Jesus?" / "Don't I wish"; the camera revealed as mounted on the departing train.
  • p. 688: Ogilvie once lectured a whole period on the kid as the difference between antagonist and deuteragonist; Hal whacks himself over the eye to dislodge the name.
  • p. 689: Mario's favorite "possibly because of its unhip earnestness"; Hal maintains to Mario it's goo but secretly likes it, and "likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat's character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure."
  • p. 689: queue of self-punishment: Fun with Teeth, Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, then Blood Sister — which the narrator (not Hal) traces to Himself's two and a half months of Boston AA in the B.S. mid-'90s, "turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma"; Hal Bob-Hopeless, spitting more than his norm, nausea expressly "nothing to do with watching his father's cartridges"; zilch kinesthetic sense that afternoon, after a year of the stick being an extension of his mind.

Themes in this scene

  • Fathers and Sons: a son spending the evening with his dead father's work, unable to summon the man — declining the interview cartridges where Himself actually speaks, communing instead with the films' surrogate fathers (the bureaucrat kneeling to the boy).
  • Depression and Anhedonia: "never quite occurred," nonoccurrence, ontological erasure — the scene assembles Hal's vocabulary of self-vanishing; the THC-withdrawal nausea and lost kinesthesia are its somatic track.
  • Irony and Sincerity: Wave Bye-Bye is the test case — Mario loves its unhip earnestness openly, Hal loves it secretly while calling it goo; the gap between the brothers is exactly the gap the anhedonia essay (scene 135) anatomizes.
  • Film and Optics: V.R. 6 as séance chamber — the filmography as the only available father; the camera-on-the-train reveal; Ogilvie's classroom film-theory.
  • Addiction and Recovery: Hal three days into secret-ceasing, wastebasket at hand; and the buried datum that JOI tried AA and drifted away — the help that didn't take, four years before the microwave.
  • Memory and Forgetting: recall block as withdrawal symptom — the ubiquitous child actor's name won't come, and Hal tortures himself with imagined enforcers threatening loved ones for it (p. 687); n.279 supplies the etiology (a habit indulged at least daily — "hasn't gone over twenty-four hours without" — for well over a year, now stopped), and the block lifts only at p. 714's out-of-nowhere "Smothergill" — the eidetic instrument failing for the first time on record.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Direct continuation of the Stice match (scenes 127/130); deLint's "never quite occurred" literalizes his bleacher diagnosis that part of Hal "leaves and hovers" (p. 682).
  • The filmography items are catalogued in n.24 (see scene n024); this scene's p. 687 ejection is the cartridge's only on-page viewing — it is mythologized by Marathe/Steeply at scene 103 (pp. 528-530), described at scene 085 (pp. 396-397), and dissected by Joelle at scene 150 (p. 740); the Man from Glad connects to JOI's commercial past in the memoir (scene 099, p. 492).

Forward

  • The unnameable child actor resolves in scene 140, p. 714: "Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill." n.279 supplies the cause of the block: Hal "hasn't gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year" — the withdrawal thread running to n.321 (see scene n321).
  • Blood Sister's screening occupies scenes 138 and 140 (pp. 701-714); the AA-germ revelation here is deepened by n.289 (the film as "a very sad self-hate-festival," a veiled allegory of sponsorship) — see scene 138.
  • "What the exhibition might have signified" so close to the WhataBurger — feeds the late-book suspicion (Hal's and ours) that staff were showcasing Hal for someone; Steeply's conspicuous presence goes unmentioned by both Hal and deLint, a loud silence.
  • Schtitt "off after confections" pins the simultaneous montage of scene 137 (Schtitt and Mario tear-assing toward Evangeline's Low-Temperature Confections, pp. 700-701) to this same evening.
  • JOI's Wild Turkey year and the spa where he met Lyle (scene 138, p. 706) bracket this scene's mid-'90s AA datum: the father's full addiction chronology assembling across these scenes.
  • Authorial inconsistencies vs. n.24's filmography, both cited as written: (a) Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn (p. 687) appears nowhere in n.24 — though the filmography's headnote itself disclaims definitive completeness (p. 986, scene n024); (b) n.24 lists Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed as "silent" (p. 990) while Hal describes it as "all a monologue" from the kid he can't name (p. 687; the cast list's Phillip T. Smothergill, recalled at p. 714, scene 140).

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 686: "You just never quite occurred out there, kid." — nonoccurrence; the scene's (and arguably late-Hal's) thesis sentence.
  • p. 687: "Hal tortures himself by imagining swarthy leering types threatening to torture various loved ones if Hal can't come up with the name..." — withdrawal cognition rendered as game.
  • pp. 688-689: "'Mister? Are you Jesus?' 'Don't I wish,' the ex-bureaucrat says over his shoulder" — the single-entendre ending; key irony-sincerity extraction.
  • p. 689: "Though to Mario he always maintains it's basically goo, Hal secretly likes it, too" — the secret sincerity Hal can't speak; pairs with scene 135's mask analysis.
  • p. 689: "this piece of entertainment actually germinated out of James O. Incandenza's one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA" — dramatic irony Hal never receives; addiction/fathers-sons anchor.

Endnotes digested here

  • n.279 (p. 1053): the kid is a former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding Hal — who "hasn't gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and doesn't feel very good at all," and finds the elusiveness infuriating.

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