IJ study archive

Scene 165: hal blizzard anhedonia

Scene
165
Pages
851–854
When
20 Nov YDAU (2009), before 0500h — dateline '20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT / GAUDEAMUS IGITUR'
Where
E.T.A., Hal and Mario's subdorm room — Hal at the window in the dark, standing on one foot in a blizzard's purple half-lightin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories
POV
Hal Incandenza (1st person — first installment of the novel's closing first-person Hal sequence)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 16)

Summary

The "GAUDEAMUS IGITUR" dateline opens the novel's terminal movement: Hal, narrating in the first person now, wakes before 0500h on 20 November from a zoo dream with no animals or cages, excess saliva on his pillow, and "a sort of nausea of the head" — for almost a week he's needed to cry but the tears stop "just millimeters behind" his eyes. Standing his prescribed fifteen therapeutic minutes on the bad ankle, he watches a heavy blizzard bury the West Courts and feels a cold hope flare that today's Fundraiser exhibition meet — against the Québec Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup squads C.T. has flown in — might be cancelled, then registers with worse dread that he's never actively hoped not to play before. He sketches C.T.'s whole gala apparatus (patrons checking players' teeth, gentle fictions about touring foreign squads), notes that Pemulis — suspiciously generous with two weeks of pre-Boards math tutoring — has gone scarce since "the Wayne debacle," and confronts the withdrawal question straight: without one-hitters in the tunnel to look forward to, was the Bob Hope not just the day's high-point but "its actual meaning"? The scene closes on the brothers' answering-machine art: Hal's honesty-week "disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able…" and Pemulis's infinitely recursive second-order machine message.

What to notice

The first person the book has been withholding arrives mid-collapse, and its opening sentences are a self-diagnosis in dream grammar: "I was in a zoo. There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo" — the category persisting after its contents have drained away, which is this narrator's exact condition, and not a bad description of life as an exhibited Incandenza either. Notice how the scene keeps translating feeling into pattern: Hal cannot tell whether he wants to play today, but he can resolve two unsynced blinking lights into "the algebraic formula for an ellipse"; the blizzard reaches him as optics — the campus "a briskly shaken paperweight", everything "toylike and miniaturized" — a boy inside the snow-globe describing it from outside. The withdrawal body of the Ennet House doorstep recurs here from within: the "excess saliva" Johnette watched him fight to swallow three days earlier is now quietly soaking his pillow, deliberately uninvestigated. Habits are shedding without witnesses — the Penn 4 hand-ball untouched for days, closed out with the flattest sentence in the scene: "No one seemed to have noticed." And track the phrase "and so on" through the pages: it clips the confession about the dammed-up tears, then his own outgoing message, then Pemulis's recursion joke — one elision trimming grief and comedy alike, a voice already fading things out rather than finishing them.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 851: the zoo dream ("There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo"); Mario asleep, hands folded "as if awaiting a lily"; a plug of Kodiak; the moist pillow he doesn't want to investigate; "a sort of nausea of the head" worst in the morning, the tears stopped millimeters behind the eyes "And so on."; the one-foot ankle therapy per deLint and Loach ("I always felt sort of dickish, standing on one foot in the dark"); heavy snow overnight, purple cast; Boards and A.P.s [n.344] three weeks from tomorrow at B.U.'s C.B.S. [n.345]; first A.M. without dawn drills since I-Day; "I'd kept seeing Kevin Bain crawling my way in my sleep."
  • p. 852: 50 cm. and coming down, half-buried nets, doors rattling, the view "a briskly shaken paperweight"; the cancellation-hope and its backlash ("I couldn't remember feeling strongly one way or the other about playing for quite a long time"); the phone console's message-light vs. smoke-detector light as an interference pattern resolving into the formula for an ellipse; Pemulis's two suspiciously generous weeks of pre-Boards math, then scarcity since the Wayne debacle — missed meals, the truck taken without consulting anyone's truck-needs.
  • pp. 852-853: the November Fundraiser anatomized — semipublic exhibition then semiformal gala where players must be "available for social intercourse with patrons" ("Some of them all but check our teeth"); Heath Pearson's red-vested organ-grinder-monkey protest last year; "C.T. is far better at public relations and pump-priming than was Himself"; the fiscal logic (proceeds fund the spring Southeast tour and June-July terre-batu-fest); past patsy opponents (Wales, Belize, the Sudan, Mozambique — the 70-2 "turkey-shoot" and the patrons' ugly xeno-racist Mussolini comparisons); this year's opponents: the Québec Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup teams from M.I.A.-D'Orval [n.346], keenly anticipated by Struck and Freer for "broadening intercultural relations"; "It was improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan in this kind of snow, though."
  • pp. 853-854: ducts moaning; Mario's drawn-out 'key'/'ski' un-snore; the withdrawal ledger — "without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to... nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning. ... whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling."; the November Penn 4 hand-ball unsqueezed for days, unnoticed; answering-machine culture — Mario cedes the phone, no music or entertainment-bits behind messages, no video phones under C.T. (the honor-code manual tripled in length); Stice's deadly 80-second C.T. impression; honesty-and-abstinence week's outgoing message, "This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able…"; Pemulis's recursive "answering machine's answering machine" message, worn so thin no relevant caller will leave a name — "congenial" to Pemulis.

Endnotes digested here

  • n.344 (p. 1076): the Boards are E.T.S.'s Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests; Hal's signed up for English and (Parisian) French; sub-note identifies Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.
  • n.345 (p. 1076): the College of Basic Studies Bldg., Commonwealth and Granby, ~3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A.
  • n.346 (pp. 1076-1077): Montréal International Airport-D'Orval; Cartierville now restricted to intra-Québec flights.

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: clinical onset narrated from inside — head-nausea, dammed tears, the unprecedented hope not to play, "nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning"; Hal's flat "And so on." is anhedonia's own punctuation.
  • Addiction and Recovery: cold-turkey Bob Hope withdrawal a week-plus in (cf. the abrupt quit ~10 Nov); Hal's appalled self-audit — was the substance the day's meaning? — is Ennet House's first lesson arriving without a program (cf. n.343's White-Knuckle, scene 162).
  • Communication and Solipsism: the disembodied-voice outgoing message is literal truth dressed as honesty-week wit; Pemulis's recursion machine filters out all real contact by design — the Incandenza/Pemulis answering machines as solipsism appliances.
  • The Body and Tennis: the ankle standing-therapy, the unsqueezed Penn 4, the gala's body-inspection ("check our teeth"), and the body now declining the game itself — the machine refusing its function for the first time.
  • Dreams: the terminal movement opens on dreamt self-diagnosis — "I was in a zoo. There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo" (p. 851), the category outliving its contents, which is precisely the narrator's condition; and Kevin Bain keeps crawling Hal's way in his sleep, the Inner-Infant residue stalking the week's dreams.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • "GAUDEAMUS IGITUR" ("so let us rejoice, while we are young" — the medieval student drinking-song) headlines the book's final movement (pp. 851-981) with maximum irony: nothing rejoices from here to the end.
  • First sustained first-person Hal: the narration that scene 001 (YG) speaks from has begun; the marker dates Hal's interior change to the Bob Hope quitting — and arrives the morning after the wraith tells Gately his son was disappearing into figuranthood (scene 162, pp. 837-839); the dammed tears literalize "nothing come out."
  • The Québec squads' expected arrival is the bus the A.F.R. is ambushing in scene 163 (pp. 845-846): Hal's "improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan" is dramatic irony — the substitutes will arrive by road, bearded, in wheelchairs; the blizzard is the same storm Balbalis drives north through.
  • "The Wayne debacle" and Pemulis's scarcity: see scenes/scene n324 and scenes/scene n332 (Wayne's Tenuate-dosed WETA meltdown and Pemulis's 17 Nov expulsion — which Hal doesn't yet know the terms of); the "suspiciously generous" tutoring reads as Pemulis settling accounts; cf. also scenes/scene n321 for the DMZ still in play.
  • Kevin Bain crawling: residue of the Inner-Infant meeting Hal crashed (scene 160, pp. 795-808) — the regressed-infant image stalking Hal's sleep pairs with scene 164's crib-blur Death-mother doctrine in the adjacent Gately dream.
  • Mario "awaiting a lily" and the phone-console détente extend the brothers' room-scenes (scenes 085, n.110's call setting); the no-video-phones decision glances back at the videophony-collapse history (pp. 144-151) and scene 087's InterLace material (pp. 410-418).

Forward

  • The weekend now arriving IS the DMZ "window of opportunity" Pemulis computed at p. 217 (scene 057): "11/20-21 — the weekend right after the big End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition," chosen for the 30 urine-clear days after — the long-planned condition quietly comes due as Hal sits anhedonic and freshly abstinent.
  • The ellipse Hal sees in the unsynced lights and the conic-sections ceiling-math anticipate his pre-Boards interior of scenes 170ff (the viewing-room sessions, Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms...).
  • C.T. vs. Himself on pump-priming continues the Tavis portrait of scene 102 (pp. 508-527); the storm-struck Fundraiser morning continues in scene 167 (Hal frees Stice from the frozen window, pp. 864ff), and the locker-room run-up to the exhibition is scene 183 (pp. 964ff) — the meet itself never arrives on-page.

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 851: "I'd felt for almost a week as if I needed to cry for some reason but the tears were somehow stopping just millimeters behind my eyes and staying there. And so on." — anhedonia's onset in Hal's own voice; essential anthology passage for depression-anhedonia.
  • p. 852: "A kind of cold hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even worse feeling than before" — the athlete's first hope-not-to-play; the-body-tennis hinge.
  • p. 853: "the implied question, then, would be whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling." — addiction's definition arrived at independently; pairs with Gately's Substance-as-meaning material.
  • p. 854: "This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able…" — honesty-week joke as prophecy of YG's voiceless Hal.
  • p. 854: Pemulis's recursive answering-machine message ("…leave a second-order message at the sound of the clapping hand…") — the one-hand-clapping koan buried in screening technology; Pemulis's paranoia as comedy.

What links here Timeline events here (13) · Connected from (5) · Passages quoted here (29) · Motifs (2)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs