IJ study archive

Scene 154: mario bolex avril sadness

Scene
154
Pages
755–769
When
11 Nov YDAU (2009), ~2100h and after
Where
E.T.A., night — Schtitt's room 106 in Comm.-Ad., the dorm stairwells and halls (floors 2-3), the lobby, Avril's Dean of Females officein: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. Comm.-Ad. building · E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories (also)
POV
Mario Incandenza (3rd person, camera-mediated — much of the scene seen through/around the head-mounted Bolex)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

On the night of 11 Nov YDAU Mario, Bolex H64 strapped to his head for his fall-term E.T.A. documentary, makes a slow nocturnal circuit of the Academy: Schtitt asleep in his bare soundproofed room amid deafening Wagner; the girls' and boys' dorm halls during Study Period, where a towel-clad Felicity Zweig stiff-arms the lens and LaMont Chu tries in vain to pump him for hard information about the Eschaton fallout and the urine-test summons while Mario answers only as a delighted filmmaker. Down in the lobby he finds Avril's office lit and stops in; setting his camera aside, he asks her how you can tell for sure whether somebody is sad. Avril delivers a clinically eloquent taxonomy of expressed and suppressed sadness — persons afraid of engulfment by their own feeling, "born imprisoned," illustrated with her own frozen Québecois father and grandfather — but cannot parse Mario's real question: what if the person seems more himself than before the sad thing? She fishes repeatedly — is this about Hal, did Hal leave the grounds sad? — yet when Mario finally lands his real question she reaches only for Charles and for Mario himself, never back to Hal, whose whereabouts she has spent the evening anxiously tracking while insisting she never checks up on her children. The scene closes with Mario's gaze going past her reflection to the lit courts, St. Elizabeth's statue, and the rotating red tip of the WYYY transmitter over the swollen Charles.

What to notice

The scene's rebuttals are all silent. Wallace runs Mario's associative memory as a counter-track under Avril's performance: while she declares herself "right here with my attention completely focused on you", his mind drifts to lunch's menu and the brooms glued to the kitchen wall; while she anatomizes other people's frozen hearts, it produces the diapers — Himself and Hal changing him for years "never once judging", Avril sobbing at a seven-year-old for forgiveness — so the critique of her is assembled entirely out of what her sweetest son happens to remember, with no narrator's finger on the scale. Her own vocabulary testifies against her: in the list of how suppressed sadness reads — "Blank. Distant. Muted." then "Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected." — the word Distant surfaces three separate times, the taxonomy circling back on its author; and her very first response to "How can you tell if somebody's sad?" is to correct the if to whether — grammar attended to before grief. Note also who controls the apparatus: Mario twice announces "This is off" before risking the real question, the family's one sincere member powering down his lens at exactly the moments the others switch theirs on, while Avril converses with his reflection in the window and opens with "Are we On-Air?". And the scene doesn't end so much as escape: Mario's gaze slides past her, out the glass, down the hill to the swollen river — the closing paragraph performing the drift of an attention that has quietly stopped expecting to be answered.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 755: dateline 11 NOVEMBER YDAU; Mario's documentary method (head-mounted Bolex H64, chest treadle); Gretchen Holt and Jolene Criess finishing a frozen marathon challenge on the lit Center Courts; Schtitt's room 106 located.
  • pp. 755-756: Schtitt's room — empty, acoustic-tiled, "built for its stereo," nothing soft; Schtitt asleep in the cane chair, dead pipe at an alarming angle, amid an excruciating German duet; the BMW "Quality-Control-Orientated" Akademie backstory for his REM-peculiarities; Mario falls twice getting out, once on his burnt hip.
  • pp. 756-757: Comm.-Ad. stairwells; second-floor girls' hall at Study Period; the Vaught twins in one towel; Spodek and Abram's study group for Mr. Ogilvie's "Reflections on Refraction" exam; Felicity Zweig's repeated "I'm wearing a towel" and Mario obligingly filming the bare wall; retching from behind Diane Prins's door.
  • pp. 757-758: third floor (boys under 14); crutch-squeak behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn's door; Infirmary marked on the name-cards of Otis Lord and of Penn; LaMont Chu, fresh from a Lyle consult, posed for posterity but mind gone "staticky blank."
  • pp. 758-759: the cross-purpose duet — Chu pressing for Eschaton-debacle intel (Kittenplan and the Big Buds blamed? Lord's head, Penn's leg, the Postman's nose; "What's going to happen to the Incster?"; Van Vleck saw the O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-guy with Pemulis and Hal by the ear, Hal's face "the color of Kaopectate") while Mario responds only with director's encouragement ("I feel like we're getting the totally real LaMont Chu here"); "it's like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes."
  • p. 759: Redondo's rosary through a door; memory of the Clipperton Suite's month of B.P.D. plastic; down to the lobby — Lateral Alice Moore's dark DANGER: THIRD RAIL plaque; lamplight under Tavis's double doors, unexplored because Tavis is "unnerved into such gregarity around Mario" (n.316).
  • pp. 760-761: Avril's blazing-lit office; B&H cigarette in the clay ashtray Mario made her; Introduction to Montague Semantics open on the desk (n.317); she spots his reflection, arms up in a V — "Are we On-Air?"; the head-rig was built by Himself, "the last time I believe he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly"; maple-leaf and 50-star flags flanking her window vs. C.T.'s O.N.A.N. flag and 49-star flag (n.318: Maine lost); "in an extreme corner are fleur-de-lis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks".
  • p. 762: her 0700 breakfast engagement and "final swotting"; dinner offer of "Many Wonders" (n.319: family idiom for leftovers); the Moment person here for Orin's profile, C.T. in conference with her and Thierry since afternoon; Avril probing — Pemulis seen taking the truck, is Hal with him?; Hal's tooth and her two unanswered messages.
  • p. 763: her speech about trusting her children and never trafficking in "third-party hearsay," delivered over Mario's four attempts to get a word in ("Hey Moms?"); tycoon posture, pen clamped like a cigar; other carpet-prints in the shag, some "almost like knuckles."
  • pp. 763-764: Mario's question — "How can you tell if somebody's sad?" (corrected to whether); Avril's escalating taxonomy: weeping and garment-rending; sighing, moping, slumping; distraction, torpor; "unusually subdued, quiet, literally 'low.'"
  • pp. 764-765: Mario presses — what if they act even less low than normal?; Avril asks whether they're discussing a particular person, is it Hal, did Hal leave the grounds sad; interleaved Mario-mind digressions: lunch's menu, and Mrs. Clarke's Sick Morning over the inexplicable X of brooms glued to the kitchen wall.
  • p. 765: the "very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself"; persons afraid that anything truly felt "would become infinite and engulf them"; her grandfather's story — the marvelous harvest, Delaware Punch over the cocaine-rumored fizzy coffee substitute, blight, the lost farm, a man frozen except when drunk four times a year, throwing her father through the living-room window.
  • p. 766: her own father — same story tellable only drunk, ale and newspaper in the chair until the day he fell out of it and died; his inheritance paid for her and Charles's university ("He believed education was a waste for girls"); odd crinkly strips of bright red paper in the normally empty wastebasket; the portrait of Avril at 56, the pretty-but-too-tall self-assessment.
  • p. 767: "suppression" vs. "repression" with finger-quotes; "There may be some persons who are born imprisoned... the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness's expression must itself feel intensely sad"; the Post-It of terms, folded and binned; Mario: "Sometimes I get afraid when you forget you have to talk more simply to me."
  • pp. 767-768: sad-but-frozen persons read as "Blank. Distant. Muted... Wooden. Deadened."; or they drink or take drugs, the drugs allowing "some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression"; Orin's folded football pants and helmet on the file cabinet, "her one memento of Orin, who won't talk to them"; the TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD mug.
  • p. 768: Mario's incontinence into his early teens — Himself and Hal changed him for years without judgment; Avril came to him in tears at seven to explain she just couldn't handle diapers; his real question at last: can someone be sad "even though the person isn't not himself... even more themselves than normal?"
  • pp. 768-769: the little red line between her eyes — she genuinely doesn't follow; "Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?"; "Mario Love-o, are you sad?"; "the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me"; Mario's eyes go out the window — court lights, Enfield Marine below, St. Elizabeth's downcast statue, the WYYY transmitter's spinning red tip reflected in the tumid Charles.

Endnotes (digested)

  • n.316 (p. 1062): why Tavis unnerves around Mario — memory of C.T. and the Moms collecting Mario and Himself at Logan, C.T.'s "Opheliac mad monologue" grinding Himself's teeth so badly he'd vomit in the breakdown lane with "white dental visible grit" in it. A pocket-sized portrait of JOI's misery (pockets clicking with little plastic bottles) and C.T.'s pathological logorrhea.
  • n.317 (pp. 1062-63): the Montague Semantics text — © B.S. 1981, Routledge & Kegan Paul, "wildly expensive hdcover; not on disk."
  • n.318 (p. 1063): the 49-star U.S. flag in C.T.'s office — "Maine having been lost altogether, recall" (the Concavity).
  • n.319 (p. 1063): "Many Wonders" = Incandenza family idiom for leftovers.

Themes in this scene

  • Film and Optics: the whole circuit is lens-mediated — Mario sees Chu fish-eyed through the viewfinder, films walls on request, frames the Moms "unawares" in window-reflection; the rig itself is Himself's last happy piece of craftsmanship.
  • Communication and Solipsism: two virtuoso failed conversations — Chu and Mario talking flatly past each other (asking vs. saying), then Avril answering a question Mario isn't asking, in vocabulary he has to beg her to simplify; Hal is named out loud constantly — Chu pumping, Avril probing — while Mario, whose question is about him, never once confirms who he means.
  • Depression and Anhedonia: Avril's taxonomy of suppressed sadness — disassociation, engulfment, persons "born imprisoned" — is the book's clinical preface to Hal's coming anhedonia; Mario's intuition (sad while more himself than ever) is more accurate than her categories.
  • Family and Hamlet: the Incandenza system on full display — Avril's professed total trust running concurrently with anxious surveillance, the diapers she wept over not changing, the frozen-father lineage (grandfather, father) she narrates as other people's pathology, Orin's memento kept by a son who won't speak to her.
  • Ghosts and Wraiths: the X of brooms glued to the kitchen wall "out of nowhere" (p. 764) — unexplained wraith-grade phenomenon (cf. the moved furniture and Stice's stuck windows in later E.T.A. scenes); also the knuckle-like prints in the office shag and the red paper strips, things in the room that don't add up.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Avril's engulfment lecture ("would become infinite and engulf them," p. 765) rhymes with the novel's title-object: an entertainment that engulfs totally; her line "There may be sad people right here at the Academy" (p. 767) lands squarely on her own son.
  • The Moment lady "aprowl" (Steeply) closeted with C.T. and Poutrincourt connects to the Steeply-at-E.T.A. thread (deLint courtside commentary, scenes 127/130, pp. 655-682) and the surveillance of Hal as JOI's son.
  • The knuckle-prints in the shag and crinkly red paper strips (pp. 763, 766), plus Orin's football gear on the cabinet, sit suggestively near the Avril–John Wayne tryst Pemulis interrupts (p. 552, scene 108: Wayne in football gear, Avril cheerleader-costumed) — staging detail, never stated.
  • n.316's vomiting-JOI memory pairs with scene 099's tomato-juice-vomiting Man from Glad (pp. 500-501): fathers taken ill in front of sons, three generations.

Forward

  • Direct fallout of the I-Day Eschaton debacle (scene 073, pp. 321-342) and of the urine-test summons whose inside account Hal gives Mario in scenes 155/157 (pp. 769-774, 782-785): Chu's rumor-mill questions here are answered for the reader two scenes later.
  • Mario's unanswerable question about a sadness that makes someone "even more themselves" is about Hal — it names precisely the eerily-himself Hal of pp. 774ff withdrawal and anticipates terminal Hal of scene 001, expressive inside, blank outside.
  • Avril's Québec family history (St. Pamphile, L'Islet) matches Notkin's testimony that JOI's interment was in "the L'Islet Province of Nouveau Québec," the widow's birth-province (scene 159, p. 789) — i.e., the Master-copy/grave thread; cf. the adopted n.234 ruling on JOI's burial.
  • The brooms in an X (p. 764) belong to the escalating poltergeist/wraith series culminating in Ortho Stice's bed and window phenomena and the Gately-wraith scenes (pp. 829, scene 162ff, 934ff).

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 756: "Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly loud European opera" — the soundproofed room built for its stereo; discipline-as-character rendered in furniture.
  • p. 758: "'I can't think what to say.' / 'That happens to me all the time.'" — the Chu-Mario exchange; pure cross-purpose comedy that is also a figurant's tragedy.
  • p. 763: "I determined years ago that my position needs to be that I trust my children..." — Avril's politeness-roulette credo, recited while she tracks Hal's movements; key family-hamlet extraction.
  • p. 765: "As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them." — engulfment; the book's depression-vocabulary keystone, spoken by the mother of its engulfed son.
  • p. 767: "There may be some persons who are born imprisoned... the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness's expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful." — cage imagery linking Avril's lecture to Marathe's chains/cage speech two scenes later (pp. 777-781).
  • p. 768: the diapers paragraph ("She'd sobbed and asked him to forgive her...") — Avril's love as performance of apology; Himself and Hal silently changing Mario for years.
  • p. 769: the closing vista ("the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin's ring of red reflected in the visible Charles") — Madame Psychosis's tower over the annular river; scenery anchor.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (37) · Connected from (6) · Passages quoted here (51) · Motifs (6)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs