IJ study archive

Scene 150: joelle cleaning incandenza thanksgiving

Scene
150
Pages
736–747
When
night of 14 Nov YDAU (2009), Joelle cleaning the 5-Woman room; long memory-spine reaching back to her B.U. years with Orin and the Incandenzas
Where
Ennet House, 5-Woman room (cleaning frame); memory: the Back Bay brownstone co-op, Legal Seafood ('up in Brookline' p. 741; n.309's Chestnut Hills Shopping Center — as printed both ways), Headmaster's House at E.T.A.in: Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex › Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House · Back Bay / East-Cambridge co-ops (also)
POV
Joelle van Dyne (3rd person limited, memory-saturated)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 13)

Summary

While compulsively cleaning the 5-Woman room ("Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean"), Joelle unspools her whole Incandenza history, "the second-saddest family" she'd ever seen. The cleaning habit began with Orin in the Jim-subsidized Back Bay co-op; Orin's stale midnight account of his family — the Moms as emotional sun, Himself as black hole behind Le Masque — gets corrected by Joelle's own discoveries: studying JOI's "technically gorgeous" but cold Work frame-by-frame, she finds furtive, almost-subliminal flashes of human pain the auteur couldn't help including but sped up to thwart study, and in Pre-Nuptial Agreement's four-minute Bernini shot an oblique, unironic thesis — self-forgetting as the Grail. The memory climaxes in the great Thanksgiving set-piece at the Headmaster's House: Avril gracious, warm, putting everyone at ease while every follicle on Joelle's body puckers; JOI silent behind his shimmering tumbler until a sudden Studio-system monologue, then rising to freshen his drink and never returning; ten-year-old Hal performing definitions; the whole table inclining toward Avril "like heliotropes"; a spotless doggie-dish under the table with no dog and no mention of a dog. The dinner ends "in a kind of explosion of goodwill"; that night Joelle does her first intentional lines of cocaine to stay awake, cleaning behind the refrigerator at 0400 when Orin cries out in the nightmare "she'd somehow felt should have been hers."

What to notice

The scene hands you its own interpretive key partway in — "Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents." — and then performs it: Orin's midnight account of his family is systematically corrected by what Joelle, the outside witness, actually observes. Notice how the Thanksgiving dinner is structured entirely by omission: the spotless doggie-dish under the table with no dog and no mention of a dog, organized sports never once raised in a tennis dynasty, the shimmering tumbler nobody names — the family's silence system rendered as table setting. The great image is botanical: the whole table inclining toward Avril "like heliotropes", Joelle catching herself doing it too — charm as a field of force; and the scene fuses graciousness and menace in one breath, the dinner ending "in a kind of explosion of goodwill" while Joelle's gut certifies that Avril could have cut out her pancreas and patted her mouth without blinking. Notice, too, Joelle's film-criticism as the novel reading itself: the almost-subliminal flashes of human pain JOI sped up "as if they compromised him somehow", and the Bernini shot's covert thesis of self-forgetting as the Grail — the auteur's hidden warmth and the Entertainment's future mechanism in one reading. The cost gets a date: that night, her first intentional lines of cocaine.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 736: the frame — Kleenex-and-stale-water cleaning; the dental nightmare (scene 146) tore her awake, her scream preempted by Nell Gunther's eviscerated-sounding laugh downstairs; "Cleaning is maybe a form of meditation for addicts too new in recovery to sit still"; the earplug ethnography (Treat, Gompert, Cortelyu, "the former Amy Johnson" all refuse the foam).
  • pp. 736-737: cleaning's origin with Orin — high housework as "a preview of the discipline and order with which she could survive alone"; the co-op "provided nearly gratis by Jim"; Orin's nicknames 'Himself' / 'The Mad Stork' "gave Joelle the creeps even then"; Himself "missing the part of the human brain that allowed for being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them."
  • pp. 737-738: Orin's nocturnal family seminar — fatherly dislike no punting success could erase; "his father's face any room's fifth wall"; the Moms told him she loved him "about a hundred times a day"; the Quaker-Oats-box-over-the-special-crib confession (Orin poised to brain infant Mario); Joelle's A- in Developmental Psych. as the deadpan gloss; Orin dividing humanity into open vs. hidden people and feeling himself going hidden as a junior player.
  • p. 739: maxims earned by experience — "Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents"; greebles vs. eye-boogers (her mother's word, her Daddy's hankie); "it's not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their children either"; Orin's neatnik ranking (Joelle third after the Moms and an O.C.D. teammate) whose import missed her then (n.305: "she thought then").
  • pp. 739-740: her Daddy's omnipresence vs. Orin's emptying absences; "she, no one's fool, was erecting fortifications real early into it"; Orin's "developmentally obvious" project — getting to his father through her ("He thought he could somehow get to his father through her... A three-way bond"); her unease at 'Himself'; Charlotte Treat sits up twice saying "Trances in which she did not breathe."
  • pp. 740-741: the Work assessed — "a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication"; Notkin's line about conversing with a prisoner through plastic phones; parody as "camp-followers in ironic masks" (n.306: her and Jim's best arguments were over 'Everybody's a critic'); then the flashes — The Medusa v. the Odalisque's three almost-subliminal cuts to the combatants' tormented faces; the suspicion Jim upped the film-speed "as if they compromised him somehow."
  • pp. 741-742: the lineman flashback (n.307: Joelle and Orin each remember being the approachee) — the Shiny Prize cookout, the drunk All-Kentucky lineman confessing the whole team's "paralyzing horror" of her prettiness, the blue pine snapping; until Orin, with "balls of unrejectable steel," approaches.
  • pp. 742-743: the Bernini reading — the 240-second 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa' shot as escape from the salesman's "tiresome ubiquitous involuted head" (n.308: POV defined); "self-forgetting as the Grail," the film covertly ranking alcohol's self-forgetting below religion/art as the salesman's head swells past the frame.
  • p. 743: Legal Seafood (n.309: the boniface knew Dr. Incandenza and brought a double bonded unasked) — Jim slumps when Orin says she majors in F&C (n.310: Film/Cartridge Studies jargon); Jim later: she was "too conventionally, commercially pretty" for that period's anti-prettiness project; Orin's terrified blather filling all silences.
  • pp. 743-744: Jim on his sons — he "simply didn't know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother's presence and mediation"; ease with Mario born of six mute years and a shared lens-interest with "nothing to do with fathers or needs to please"; Jim calls his films 'entertainments,' "ironically about half the time"; Orin weeping against the cab partition.
  • pp. 744-746: Thanksgiving at the Headmaster's House — "Please do call me Avril, Joelle"; the follicle-pucker; no turkey (politico-familial in-joke); the never-emptying champagne flute vs. the shimmering tumbler; Hal's candela definition and haplology requests; the spotless doggie-dish, no dog; the table inclining "like heliotropes" — Joelle catching herself doing it; Orin's Sagan impression ("Billions and billions"); organized sports never once mentioned; nobody but Joelle looking directly at Dr. Incandenza; JOI's potato-cityscape and Studio-system/Method monologue; the mammarial Lung visible out the window; Mario's fall amid "much hilarity"; JOI "got up to go freshen his drink and never returned."
  • pp. 746-747: the secular hand-holding before flaming dessert; the rind-callused tennis hand; "The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill"; Joelle's guts'-pit certainty that Avril "could have sat there and cut out Joelle's pancreas and thymus... and patted her mouth without batting an eye."
  • p. 747: the cab home (number summoned from Hal's memory); Orin asking twice how she'd liked the Moms; that night, "the first historical time Joelle intentionally did lines of cocaine to keep from sleeping" — cleaning behind the refrigerator at 0400 when Orin cries out "in the nightmare she'd somehow felt should have been hers."

Endnotes

  • n.305 (p. 1062): "(she thought then)" — the callout hangs on her "no one's fool… erecting fortifications real early" sentence (p. 739), the paragraph after the neatnik ranking; either way the Avril-resemblance penny drops only in retrospect.
  • n.306 (p. 1062): her and Jim's best arguments were over the connotations of 'Everybody's a critic,' which Jim repeated "with all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge."
  • n.307 (p. 1062): Joelle and Orin each remember being the approachee; one of only two times Orin has perceived himself approached — the other the 'Swiss hand-model' on whose flank he traces infinity signs (= Luria P., the A.F.R. trap of scene 147).
  • n.308 (p. 1062): "= point of view."
  • n.309 (p. 1062): the Legal Seafood is the Chestnut Hill one the E.T.A. A-squad runs past; the boniface knew JOI by name, "brought him a double bonded without being asked."
  • n.310 (p. 1062): F&C = Film/Cartridge Studies jargon.

Themes in this scene

  • Family and Hamlet: the definitive outside-witness audit of the Incandenza system — Avril's gracious omnipotence (heliotropes, the never-falling champagne level, the sweetbreads intuition) vs. the unmentioned dog, unmentioned tennis, unmentioned drinking; politeness as control; "lousy with secrets" (named in scene 152).
  • Film and Optics: Joelle's auteur-criticism of JOI is the book's own self-reading — coldness, anticonfluence, the hidden human flashes, the St. Teresa thesis that mediated self-transcendence is the Work's secret subject.
  • Fathers and Sons: Orin's arrested, banal, real wound ("basic fatherly dislike"); Jim mute with undamaged sons, easy only with Mario; the Quaker Oats box over the crib as sibling-displacement nightmare.
  • Irony and Sincerity: 'entertainments' said "ironically about half the time"; parodists as "camp-followers in ironic masks"; JOI's leap to "unironic melodrama" praised precisely for risking amateurishness — the scene articulates the novel's aesthetic credo.
  • Addiction and Recovery: cleaning as sobriety's meditation now vs. cleaning as cocaine ritual then; the first intentional lines dated and located; JOI's tumbler quietly running the dinner.
  • Communication and Solipsism: the Work as "a very smart person conversing with himself"; Jim needing Avril's mediation to speak to his sons; Orin needing Joelle as conduit — every Incandenza channel routed through a third party.
  • Dreams: the memory-spine is framed by dreams at both ends — scene 146's dental nightmare tears Joelle awake into the cleaning frame (p. 736), and the remembered Thanksgiving closes at 0400 with Orin crying out "in the nightmare she'd somehow felt should have been hers" (p. 747).
  • Memory and Forgetting: structured compulsive recall — cleaning unspools the whole Incandenza history after she'd "barely thought consciously of any Incandenzas for four years before Don Gately" (p. 737), with the scene's own maxims policing memory's reliability ("Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents," p. 739, and parents no better on their memory of children); remembering staged as an audit of everyone else's remembering.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The doggie-dish with no dog: S. Johnson, dragged to death behind the Volvo (n.269; see scenes/scene n269) — the family's silence at table is the cover-up in domestic miniature; Orin re-runs the hit-and-run lie in n.110 (see scenes/scene n110).
  • Orin's nightmare "she'd somehow felt should have been hers" — cf. the face-in-the-floor nightmare (scene 019, pp. 61-63) and Orin's Moms-head night terrors (scene 012, p. 47; n.2).
  • Hal "maybe ten" at a pre-Subsidized (2001) Thanksgiving squares only roughly with the YDAU-17-year-old Hal chronology — as printed.

Forward

  • The cleaning frame brackets scenes 146 and 152 (one continuous Ennet House night); Gately is the named cause of the Incandenzas "bubbling up" — the Joelle-Gately arc advancing even with Gately hospitalized.
  • n.307's 'Swiss hand-model' ties Orin's present (Phoenix, scenes 012/021ff) to the A.F.R.'s Luria operation (scene 147) — and rhymes with Marathe posing as 'Swiss' across town (scenes 149/151): Swiss-ness as the book's flag of A.F.R. cover identity.
  • The Medusa v. the Odalisque analysis deepens the Marathe/Steeply myth-comparison of scene 103 (pp. 528-530 — Medusa, Circe, the Odalisk as myths; the film itself lives in n.24's filmography, see scenes/scene n024); the Pre-Nuptial reading and "self-forgetting as the Grail" feed the wraith's figurant/loneliness aesthetics and the Entertainment's lethal mechanism — JOI pursuing mediated self-transcendence to its terminus.
  • The cookout/lineman material extends Joelle's Shiny Prize backstory (scene 068, pp. 283-299); "the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies" is her Daddy's warning ahead of Notkin's full (and contested) account of the acid and Thanksgiving-at-the-van-Dynes (pp. 788-795) — note this dinner is a different, earlier Thanksgiving than that one.

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 736: "Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean." — recovery's quiet redemption of compulsion; perfect scene-opening extraction.
  • p. 737: "his father's face any room's fifth wall" — Orin's JOI in one image; pairs with Le Masque.
  • p. 739: "Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents." — the scene's interpretive key, licensing every correction of Orin's account.
  • p. 741: the flashes — "as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive... he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow." — JOI's compromised humanity hidden in the frame-rate; essential for film-optics.
  • pp. 742-743: "self-forgetting as the Grail" / the salesman's head swelling past the frame — the unironic moral thesis of the early Work; must-quote.
  • pp. 744-745: the heliotrope sentence and the doggie-dish sentence — Avril's field of force and the family's structuring silence; both essential family-hamlet anchors.
  • p. 747: "The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill." + the pancreas-and-thymus intuition — graciousness and menace fused; and the dated first intentional cocaine as the cost.

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Timeline events here

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Motifs