IJ study archive

Scene 170: hal horizontal vr5

Scene
170
Pages
896–902
When
20 Nov YDAU (2009), early morning — continuous with scene 167 (Hal leaving the Stice rescue as the blizzard continues)
Where
E.T.A. second-floor hallway, then the floor of Viewing Room 5, Enfield MAin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. Viewing Rooms · E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories (also)
POV
Hal Incandenza (1st person)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 13)

Summary

Walking back to check on Stice's "defenestration," Hal is hit by an off-court variant of telescopic panic — the world goes unbearably vivid and lucid while a shadow of crushing repetition flanks it: he pre-experiences every stair-climb, breath, and meal of his remaining life, including a room stacked floor-to-ceiling with the breaded chicken fillets he will consume and a second room of the resulting excrement. He lies down flat on the carpet of Viewing Room 5, and the narration becomes a strange anhedonic shuffle of unranked facts — blizzard definitions from competing dictionaries, his own name and height, E.T.A.'s lighting system, the Mondragon/Tavis genealogy (Avril's dwarf stepmother Elizabeth Tavis, C.T.'s darts-killed father, all sourced to unreliable seven-year-old Orin), Wayne's WETA meltdown and Avril's all-night bedside vigil, and the realization that choosing between competitive tennis and getting high would be "a nearly impossible choice." He diagnoses the institutional kindness of starting players young — "to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws" — and notes that Hamlet never doubts the ghost, only perhaps feigns feigning. The panic's last spasm converts into a revelation of horizontality: flat on the floor among the room's stacked horizontal lines, Hal feels denser, "the meat in the room's sandwich," and impossible to knock down.

What to notice

The novel's clearest interior view of Hal mid-collapse, dense with mechanism evidence. He has kept to his room since Tuesday's Natick trip; the Shell-station woman "recoiled as I approached" — the first outside witness that Hal's face no longer transmits what he thinks it does, the opening interview's horror in embryo. The buried lede arrives deadpan: choosing between tennis and getting high "would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me." The archive's ruling on the collapse holds the no-dose/withdrawal reading favored, the wraith-dosed-toothbrush theory strained, and pure Hamlet-feigning contradicted as the sole mechanism at Year of Glad, carried instead as an inflection inside the withdrawal verdict — and the Hamlet passage here is why that inflection exists at all: Hal himself raises "whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning", the novel handing the reader its own exegesis. (The Hamlet frame is strongly-supported; organizing-key depth stays open, with this passage its best exhibit.) Notice the form after the panic: unranked facts filed side by side — his own name and height next to dictionary definitions of blizzard — anhedonia as syntax. And the addiction etymology — "being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually" — licenses the scene's great diagnosis, "A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.", before the closing horizontality reads as both surrender and Hal's first honest rest: "I was impossible to knock down."

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 896: errands deferred (Stice, socks, mirror-check "for unintentional hilarity," Orin's phone-messages, the Tosca death-aria — "There is no music for free-floating misery like Tosca"); the panic hits in the damp hall, "telescopically self-conscious," senses sharpened almost past enduring; Lyle's on-court counsel recalled but unusable off-court.
  • pp. 896-897: the cognitive dark side — Academy routine's "crushing cumulative aspect": the total of steps, breaths, pulses already taken and still owed; the room of lifetime chicken fillets and the dimmer room of excrement, "the room's double-locked steel door gradually bowing outward"; Hal hunched against the wall watching the floor dry; Kenkle's unmopped spit-glob by V.R.5's door.
  • pp. 897-898: supine in V.R.5 — "fighting the sense that I'd either never been here before or had spent lifetimes just here"; the NASA glass riding his chest; Sleepy T.P. Peterson relays LaMont Chu's question whether this qualifies as a blizzard; it takes a minute of silence to make him go away.
  • pp. 898-899: the fact-fugue begins — Moms's Québecois mother and binge-drinker father; "My full name is Harold James Incandenza, and I am 183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet"; Himself's full-spectrum lighting as a labor of love Avril's lumiphobia never used; Lyle on Vipassana — "fully awakened contemplation of one's own death"; dictionary definitions of blizzard (Collegiate, O.E.D.'s "man and beast frequently perish," Sitney & Schneewind's hard-ass specs); Petropolis Kahn asks about the upstairs brooha and breakfast.
  • p. 898: the buried lede, deadpan: "It had begun to occur to me, driving back from Natick on Tuesday, that if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me."
  • pp. 898-899: Pemulis "avoiding me ever since I returned from Natick on Tuesday — as if he sensed something"; the ceased math-tutorials read, hopefully, as an oblique "You Are Ready"; the Shell-station cashier recoiling from Hal's face.
  • p. 899: Himself's two-year delusion that Hal wasn't speaking; the Moms approachable on everything except Himself; Orin's Y.T.M.P. claim of "smeared prints of nude human feet on the inside of the wind-shield" of the Moms's car.
  • pp. 899-900: the Wayne incident retailed secondhand — violent allergic reaction to a decongestant, commandeered WETA mike on Troeltsch's Tuesday broadcast, "unkind things about various E.T.A. staff and administration," overnight at St. E.'s; "the Moms herself had apparently stayed by Wayne's side late into the night," which Booboo found estimable and just like the Moms.
  • p. 900: the meditation on dedication — "a kind of black miracle… that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit"; "We are all dying to give our lives away to something… A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into"; the etymology of addiction — "being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this."
  • p. 900: Hamlet — "for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned… whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning"; Himself's unfinished Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms… and the Moms's taking its academia-parody personally.
  • pp. 900-902: the Tavis genealogy — Avril's mother dead when she was eight; her binge-drinking father's disappearance and return with a new bride, the almost certainly dwarf widow Elizabeth Tavis (huge square head, phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon's thigh, homodontic smile); C.T.'s father killed adjusting obstetric stirrups during a Brattleboro tavern darts match; the dental dispute (Mrs. T. not a "true homodont" the way Mario — every tooth a second bicuspid — is); all of it decocted by seven-year-old Orin from a distraught C.T. during Mario's touch-and-go premature delivery, hence shrouded in ambiguity; "the Moms and C.T. have never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close."
  • p. 902: the final spasm becomes horizontality — every horizontal line in the room piling up around his "tight little sarcophagus of space"; "I was the meat in the room's sandwich… I felt denser now… I was impossible to knock down."

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: the panic attack's aftermath is rendered formally — affectless facts filed beside catastrophes without ranking (his own name next to a dictionary entry) — anhedonia as syntax; "free-floating misery," the appalledness at his own distance, and the sarcophagus image.
  • Addiction and Recovery: Hal in withdrawal names the choice (tennis vs. getting high) and excavates addiction's etymology — being bound over, given away — folding his drug problem and his sport into one structure of self-donation.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Peterson and Kahn talk into a silence Hal doesn't fill; Himself's delusion of Hal's muteness resurfaces; the Shell cashier recoils from an expression Hal didn't know he wore — the inside/outside rupture of scenes 167 and 001 restated.
  • Family and Hamlet: the densest Hamlet node in the main text — the ghost never doubted, madness possibly unfeigned, "feigning feigning" — braided directly into the Tavis/Mondragon family archaeology and the C.T.-Avril question.
  • Entertainment and the Self: "We are all dying to give our lives away to something… God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately… To games or needles, to some other person" — the master statement of the book's choose-your-master argument, delivered on a Viewing Room floor among shelved cartridges.
  • The Body and Tennis: the body totalized — megagrams of meat, the breaths and pulses of a tennis lifetime, vertical court-movement renounced for horizontality; E.T.A.'s kindness in capturing players "before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws."

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The Wayne WETA meltdown and its fallout (pp. 899-900) are narrated in full in n.332 — see scene n332 (Pemulis expelled the same day, 17 Nov per the archive's adopted dating); Hal's sanitized secondhand version ("none of which anyone… had taken seriously"; relief-dominated accounts; Avril's vigil) is notable for what the community refuses to register. No n.332 superscript appears in this scene's text.
  • Pemulis "avoiding me… as if he sensed something" and the ceased math-tutorials (pp. 898-899) gesture at the DMZ-and-quitting confrontation of n.321 — see scene n321 — and the urine-test "trust math" stakes of n.324 (scene n324); again, no superscript here, but this scene is the thread's main-text seam.
  • Hal's Natick Tuesday (pp. 898-899) = the drive back from the NA/Inner-Infant meeting misadventure (scene 160, pp. 795-808 region) — the recoiling Shell cashier is that day's coda.
  • Orin's windshield footprints (p. 899) and Avril's night at Wayne's bedside (p. 900) quietly converge on the Avril-Wayne liaison the book elsewhere implies (the cheerleader-and-football-gear tableau of scene 108, p. 552ff region); C.T.'s contested non-blood relation to Avril revisits the C.T.-as-possible-Mario's-father ambiguity (scene 020 and pp. 312-317 region).
  • Lyle's death-contemplation Vipassana (p. 898) and on-court fear-counsel (p. 896) — the weight-room guru thread (scenes 039, 055); Stice "asked whether I believed in ghosts" splices Lyle to the wraith material.
  • The chicken-fillet/excrement rooms (p. 897) rhyme with Tine Jr.'s starved-spectator nightmare (scene 168, p. 878) and the book's waste-cosmology (annular O.N.A.N. waste-displacement) — consumption visualized in toto.
  • NASA-glass continuity, flagged as written: at p. 873 (scene 167) Hal both "grabbed my toothbrush and NASA glass from the vent's protrusion" and tells Troeltsch "Keep an eye on Stice and my NASA glass right there, Jim"; at p. 898 the glass is "balanced on my chest" in V.R.5 with no retrieval narrated in the continuous 20-Nov sequence — both placements cited as written.
  • Grandfather-name contradiction, flagged as written: "Himself's middle name had been Orin, his father's own father's name" (p. 898) vs. scene 071's "Mario had been given the name of Dr. James Incandenza's father's father," the oculist "Mario Sr." (p. 313) — JOI's paternal grandfather is named Orin in one place and Mario in the other; both cited as written (arguably in-character for this scene's anhedonic fact-shuffle, but the p. 313 narration is impersonal, so it stands as an authorial inconsistency).

Forward

  • Continuous with scene 167 (Stice's GYAAAAA = the "scuffles and thumps from upstairs," p. 897; Kahn's "brooha," p. 898); the promised mirror-check for "unintentional hilarity" (p. 896) answers Kenkle's verdict; Stice's ghost question and promised "something boggling" (p. 900) point to the ceiling-bolted bed, reported secondhand in Hal's talk with Mario and Coyle ("The Darkness thinks ghosts,", pp. 942-943, scene 179).
  • Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms… (p. 900): see the filmography, scene n024; the title recurs around Hal throughout the late chapters.

Notable passages (6)
  • pp. 896-897: "The familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect… the incredible volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life" — the panic's content; anchor passage for depression-anhedonia.
  • p. 898: "if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high… The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me." — the addiction admission, double-distanced.
  • p. 900: "We are all dying to give our lives away to something… A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into." — the novel's thesis sentence on worship and addiction; essential extraction.
  • p. 900: "to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way." — E.T.A.'s pedagogy diagnosed.
  • p. 900: "whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning" — the Hamlet crux applied to Hal's own possibly-unfeigned madness.
  • p. 902: "I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down." — the horizontal man; terminal image of Hal's descent-as-stability (cf. p. 3's "I am in here").

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (35) · Connected from (8) · Passages quoted here (49) · Motifs (7)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs