IJ study archive

Scene 162: gately wraith figurants

Scene
162
Pages
827–845
When
night 16/17 Nov YDAU (2009), through dawn Tue 17 Nov — days after the 11/12 Nov shooting (scene 120); pinned by scene 166's 'last night's St. Columbkill's' (Tue 17 per p. 546), which puts this wraith night at 16/17 and scene 175's 'yesterday' at the 17th
Where
St. Elizabeth's Hospital Trauma Wing, Brighton — Gately's bed, at night and through dawnin: St. Elizabeth's Hospital (Trauma Wing)
POV
Don Gately (3rd-person limited; feverish, intubated, mute — much of the scene framed as pain-and-fever dream)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 16)

Summary

Over one or more Trauma Wing nights, the mute, intubated Gately — pain now "cold dead deep tight" with "a queer flavor of emotional loss," refusing narcotics — is talked at by Geoffrey Day (the leaf-phobic little brother he abused) and then, in a dream he knows is a dream, by the ghostish figure that has been flickering at his vision's periphery: a tall, sunken-chested, Highwater-chinoed "garden-variety wraith" who turns out to be James O. Incandenza. The wraith explains wraith-physics (no voice of its own; it must use Gately's brain-voice, which is why it floods his head with lexical terms he can't know — PIROUETTE, LATRODECTUS MACTANS, POOR YORICK, LAERTES — a "lexical rape"), then delivers the novel's central confession: he watched his marvelous youngest son become a figurant, mute human furniture at the periphery of his own family's eyes, and spent his last ninety sober days making one final entertainment compelling enough to "reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism" — a way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. Between wraith-visits, sobriety forces on Gately unbidden memories of his mother's live-in ex-Navy M.P. — the Heineken notebooks, the daily precise beatings Gately never intervened in, the maimed flies whose inaudible screams the little boy knelt listening for. He wakes to a hallucinated preview of Ferocious Francis and then to three real White Flaggers telling Al-Anon jokes, who confirm his dread: the shadow in the hall is a man in a hat with brown shoes and Third World takeout — the remorseless Revere A.D.A.

What to notice

The rules laid down here re-infect the entire novel: a wraith has no voice and must use your brain-voice, so wraith-thoughts "always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head" — after this page you can never again be fully sure whose inner voice any character (or narrator) has been. The lexical flood is a signature: PIROUETTE, LATRODECTUS MACTANS, POOR YORICK, LAERTES — the intruder's C.V. written in the host's head, and the wraith's vocabulary keeps surfacing in Gately's waking narration afterward. Notice the scene's central coinage, the figurant — the background patron whose mouth moves without sound, the camera's "perceptual corner" deciding who is heard versus merely seen — and the confession it exists to carry: "No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out." The Entertainment's purpose arrives from the auteur himself, as apology and lure at once: "A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard." Notice too that the book keeps its deniability — the whole interface is framed as fever-dream, with Gately considering the dream-quality of the dream — and that sobriety's price runs in parallel underneath: the unbidden memories of the M.P.'s beatings and the maimed flies little Gately knelt listening to, cruelty and listening-paralysis surfacing precisely while a dead father talks about going unheard.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 827: Day at the bedside eating a free cream-cheese brownie, theorizing Johnette F.'s Spam kickbacks; Gately's sounds have evolved feline to bovine; the right side's pain laughs "from deep inside" at 90 mg. of Toradol-IM.
  • p. 828: Day's sucker-punch sober memory: emotionally abusing his developmentally challenged little brother by threatening to touch him with a leaf; Gately notices he's gotten way more popular as a confessor now that he's paralyzed and mute; the ghostish figure haunts the periphery.
  • pp. 828-829: the recurring dream of the tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman looking down at him, the rigid toylike dog in the distance; the nightmare of his bed moved flush against the other patient's; the narcotized roommate crying.
  • p. 829: the wraith comes into focus — tall, sunken-chested, black-frame glasses, stained chinos too short ("Highwaters"); Bimmy's savage pals laying out violin kids on the playground; Gately's adrenal remorse-flash; "it was nothing of the sort... just a plain old wraith."
  • p. 830: dream-within-dream vertigo (Gately considering that he's considering the dream-quality of the dream); the wraith says just capitalize: no need to speak aloud to interface; staying visible takes the wraith months of fortitude.
  • p. 831: wraith-physics: moves at the speed of quanta, hears "in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men," has no out-loud voice — must use your own brain-voice, which is why wraith-thoughts "always just sound like your own thoughts" (intuition, the 'little voice'); animate men move like an hour-hand; Gately as "huge empty confessional booth"; the wraith blinks around the room 'Bewitched'-style, produces Gately's taped-up Johnny Gentle crooner photo.
  • p. 832: the Oriental-script Coke can ("maybe the whole dream's worst moment"); upside-down ceiling pirouettes blurring into a stalk of light; the lexical rape — PIROUETTE in caps with roaring unwilled force, then ACCIACCATURA, ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS, NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO, ANNULATE, SCOPOPHILIA, LAERTES, POOR YORICK, DE SICA NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY, then "CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE" run together as the flood accelerates to "a mosquito on speed".
  • p. 833: the orderly's flashlight and orange gum-bubble (the wraith simply vanishing while lit); Gately's theology: epiphanyish Higher Power visitation (Bill W.'s Pulsing Blue Light) vs. the Sergeant at Arms, the Disease, softening him up to accept "Demerol just once"; imagining wraith-life — "real free-seeming, but incredibly lonely."
  • p. 834: muteness as "some combination of invisibility and being buried alive... strangled somewhere deeper inside you than your neck"; the piratical-hook AA-life fantasy; the wraith Identifies with "communicative impotence" (Gately: he never said a fucking thing about impotence); Gately's special relationship with 'Cheers!' and his childhood resemblance to the huge neckless accountant Nom [sic — see anomalies]; Sir Osis of Thuliver.
  • pp. 834-835: figurants — the silent background patrons whose mouths move without sound; the camera "like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who's important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen"; the wraith spent his animate life "pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him"; the thought-experiment of a figurant's bid for attention ending in the Heineken Maneuver — "No way for a figurant to win."
  • pp. 835-836: the wraith's own cartridges made sure every performer was audible — not Altman's "crafted imitation of aural chaos" but "real life's real egalitarian babble [n.342] of figurantless crowds"; critics took radical realism for viewer-hostile pose; Gately meanwhile drifts to pretending Nom was his organic father, vs. the real memory: the M.P. hunched drunk over his Heineken notebook while Gately's mother crawls toward the lockable bathroom.
  • pp. 836-837: the wraith has sat "still as a root" for the wraith-equivalent of three weeks; Gately realizes nobody's told him how long he's been here or how many days without a meeting; the seated hat-shadow in the hall; the wraith reports a quantumish call on Ferocious Francis's Brighton two-decker — F.F. is shaving and will visit.
  • pp. 837-838: the confession proper — the wraith's youngest son, "the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening," becoming a figurant "toward the end. His end"; "No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out"; he'd once blamed the boy's mother; the family "looked but did not see his invisibility," thought him unstable, confusing the boy with his own boyhood self or with his father's father, "the blank wooden man" who drove the wraith's father to the bottle; his private fear the son was experimenting with Substances.
  • p. 839: when he stood and waved his arms about the disappearing boy they thought it was Wild Turkey bats — get sober, again; Gately snaps alert: 'You tried to get sober?' … 'More than once, you tried? Was it White-Knuckle? [n.343] Did you ever Surrender and Come In?'; the last 90 days spent contriving "a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse"... "so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life"; "A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard"; "his most serious wish was: to entertain"; Gately diagnoses gross self-pity ('Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink'); sober "as a Mennonite quilter" for 89 days but Boston AA was "a poker game in hell."
  • pp. 839-840: the wraith bends upside-down cm from Gately's face: No! "the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side"; Gately wonders why the wraith doesn't just quantum over to the son himself; the M.P. dossier — 'rug-rats,' bottle-deposit runs timed with a U.S.N. chronometer, daily beatings between Heinekens eight and ten ("like a lobsterman pulling at his outboard's rope"), free-weight instruction, the two little notebooks, "by nature a turd-counter."
  • p. 841: the M.P.'s name never once mentioned in the house when he was out; Gately never stepped in even after out-benching him — "none of Bimmy's beeswax," volume up on 'Cheers!' during the beatings; the troubling similarity of her hurt-sounds and her sex-sounds through the fiberboard wall.
  • p. 842: the fly-maiming ritual in minute dreamed detail — the controlled whack, the deliberate removal of a wing or leg into the pedal-bin, the green generic dishwashing liquid; "a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear" that keep the other flies away; little Gately hunched ear-down over the scuttling maimed, listening intently.
  • p. 843: he cannot remember ever once putting the flies out of their misery; the memory bleeds into a fictional dream — Gately in Lenz's topcoat, ear to the maimed Nuck's bleeding face, listening: "The head opens its red mouth."; waking jolt; the Malden loft anecdote (a year of head-thwacks leaving "a permanent concavity in the ceiling"); the hallucinated Ferocious Francis ("Well kid at least you're still on this side of the fuckin' sod... And are you as yet sober, then?") who fails to reappear.
  • pp. 843-845: three real White Flaggers — Bud O., Glenn K. (refrigeration-tech jumpsuit), Jack J. (facial tic) — visit before work; Glenn K. describes the man in the hall: "Tall, well-dressed, grumpy, cocky-looking, piggy-eyed... Black socks and brown shoes"; Bud O. adds that he's "Looking settled in for a stay, surrounded with sports pages and the takeout foods of many cultures, Laddie"; Gately's bowels go watery — the remorseless Revere A.D.A.; Bud O.'s bent-nose-wife backstory; 'Church of Perpetual Revenge' Al-Anon jokes; Gately's chest-pumping dumbshow of laughter so they'll "think they've cheered him up and screw"; the closing image of a big wooden spoon pushing him under the surface of sleep "for something huge to taste him, again and again."

Endnotes digested here

  • n.342 (p. 1076): "Or possibly Babel." — the narrator's pun on the wraith's "babble" of figurantless crowds; egalitarian aural realism as Babel.
  • n.343 (p. 1076): defines White-Knuckle — Boston AA slogan for trying to quit Substances without working any Recovery program.

Themes in this scene

  • Ghosts and Wraiths: the novel's only sustained ghost scene — JOI as self-described "garden-variety wraith," with rules (quanta-speed, brain-voice interface, months of stillness to be seen) that retroactively explain the book's hauntings.
  • Communication and Solipsism: a triple study in voicelessness — Gately mute and "buried alive"; the figurant whose mouth moves without sound; Hal, the son with "nothing come out" — and the wraith's whole visit is communication achieved only through someone else's inner voice.
  • Fathers and Sons: three stacked generations of failure — the wraith's "blank wooden" grandfather, his own boyhood "gesturing wildly through the distilled haze" at an unhearing father, and Hal disappearing before his eyes; counterpointed by Gately's anti-father the M.P. and his fantasy of sitcom-Nom as "organic father."
  • Entertainment and the Self: the Entertainment's origin and purpose stated plainly — not lethal pleasure but a desperate lure "to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open... To bring him 'out of himself'"; the womb of solipsism "could be used both ways."
  • Addiction and Recovery: Gately white-knuckling legitimate medical pain against the Disease's Demerol logic; the wraith's spotty 89-day sobriety and contempt for AA cliché as the cautionary opposite; sobriety's price = unbidden memory (the M.P., the flies).
  • Film and Optics: figurant as cinematic concept — the camera's "perceptual corner"; the wraith's anti-Altman radical aural realism explains the criticized "incredibly dull" crowd scenes in JOI's actual filmography (n.24).
  • Family and Hamlet: the ghost-father visiting at night to charge the living with the truth about his son; POOR YORICK and LAERTES surface verbatim in the lexical flood; "they looked but did not see" is Gertrude-blindness restated.
  • Dreams: the novel's central dream-frame — the whole wraith interface is a dream Gately knows is a dream, complete with vertigo at considering the dream-quality of the dream (p. 830), with satellite dreams orbiting it (the tiny Oriental woman, the bed flush against the roommate's, the maimed-Nuck splice, the closing wooden spoon); the book houses its biggest disclosures in fever-sleep and keeps its deniability.
  • Memory and Forgetting: between wraith-visits sobriety forces unbidden memories of the M.P. — the Heineken notebooks, the timed beatings, the maimed flies little Gately knelt listening to (pp. 840-843) — cruelty and listening-paralysis surfacing precisely while a dead father talks about going unheard; and the lexical flood is memory invaded from outside, words in Gately's head he has no way of knowing.
  • Time and Perception: wraith-time against bed-time — the wraith has sat "still as a root" for "the wraith-equivalent of three weeks" while animate men move like an hour-hand (pp. 831, 836-837), and the exchange jolts Gately into realizing nobody has told him how long he's been in the bed or how many days without a meeting; two incommensurable clocks in one room.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The lexical-rape vocabulary is JOI's own C.V.: LATRODECTUS MACTANS and POOR YORICK (his production companies), FOUND DRAMA and DE SICA NEO-REAL (his hoax genre and influences), ANNULATE (his physics), CHIAROSCURO/SCOPOPHILIA (his optics) — full catalog in scenes/scene n024.
  • "Experimenting with Substances": the wraith's unheeded warning predicts Hal's secret Bob Hope regime (scenes 049ff) and the Pemulis-DMZ thread (see scenes/scene n321); JOI's "professionals hadn't done it, impersonation of professionals hadn't done it" points back to the professional-conversationalist charade.
  • The fly-maiming M.P. is the genetic template for Randy Lenz's animal tortures (scenes 130ff) — the dream splices them directly (Gately in Lenz's topcoat over the maimed Nuck, p. 843) and ties Gately's listening-paralysis to his never pulling the M.P. off his mother.
  • The wraith's father and grandfather material reprises scenes 049 (pp. 157-169, the garage monologue) and 099 (pp. 491-503, the mattress/annulation memoir) — same "distilled haze," same unseen son now become the unseeing father.

Forward

  • The wraith is JOI; the mute "youngest son" is Hal — whose first-person anhedonia ("I'd felt for almost a week as if I needed to cry... tears stopping just millimeters behind my eyes") begins three scenes later, scene 165 (pp. 851-854), confirming everything the wraith says; terminal confirmation is voiceless Hal in YG (scene 001, pp. 3-10).
  • The wraith's account of the Entertainment's intent squares with and deepens Molly Notkin's secondhand version (scene 159, pp. 788-795: the lethal cartridge as apology/lure, Madame Psychosis as figure of Death); Gately's very next dream-cycle (scene 164) reproduces the Entertainment's reported content (Death as next life's mother) without Gately ever having seen it — wraith leakage.
  • Seeds of the book's frame: Gately's grave-digging dream and Hal's YG memory of digging up Himself's head with Gately and John Wayne (scenes 001/003, pp. 16-17) are set up by this interface; the head-shaped "concavity in the ceiling" of the Malden loft (p. 843) is a sly annular echo. JOI's Concavity burial: see scenes/scene n234.
  • Day's bedside monologue continues the visitor parade begun with Ewell and Thrust (scene 161, pp. 809-827); Thrust's warning there about the Finest crawling over Ennet House pays off here as the hat-shadow resolves into the Revere A.D.A. — whose grudge (the toothbrush-photo revenge burglary, scene 016, pp. 55-56) Gately knows all too well; the A.D.A. vigil continues through scenes 166ff.
  • Ferocious Francis's predicted visit (p. 837) is kept in scene 168 (pp. 876-883).
  • The tiny-Oriental-woman dream: Gately looked up at by a tiny woman + rigid dog reads as dim prefiguration/inversion of the Joelle-as-Death dream (scene 164) and resonates with the wraith-era casting of tiny Mmes. in JOI's work; left explicitly unexplained in-text.

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 831: "thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head" — the mechanism that retro-infects the whole novel (whose inner voices were ever only ours?); anchor passage for ghosts-wraiths.
  • p. 832: the lexical-rape catalog ("PIROUETTE... ACCIACCATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS...") — JOI's signature in Gately's head; also the source-marker for every over-lexical moment in Gately's narration elsewhere.
  • pp. 834-835: "the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who's important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen" — the figurant doctrine; master statement of communication-solipsism in cinematic terms.
  • p. 837: "No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out." — the book's paternal thesis-sentence; essential anthology passage.
  • p. 839: "Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life... A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain." — the Entertainment's apologia, from the auteur himself.
  • p. 842: the maimed-fly paragraph ("a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear") — cruelty-as-control; pairs with the Lenz material on addiction and cruelty.
  • p. 845: "It's like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface of sleep and then spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again." — pain as being cooked/tasted; foreshadows the Mt. Dilaudid surrender stakes of scenes 169ff.

What links here Timeline events here (21) · Connected from (19) · Passages quoted here (135) · Motifs (6)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs