IJ study archive

Scene 172: hal supine pemulis interface

Scene
172
Pages
906–911
When
20 Nov YDAU (2009), A.M. — three days after Pemulis's 17 Nov expulsion (n.332), which Hal does not yet know about
Where
E.T.A., Viewing Room 5 — Hal supine on the shag, the entertainment-case of Himself's cartridges at handin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. Viewing Rooms
POV
Hal Incandenza (1st person, the late-November first-person stretch)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 12)

Summary

Hal, flat on the Viewing Room 5 floor in withdrawal and creeping anhedonia (he realizes almost as a revelation that he doesn't have to eat if he isn't hungry), is finally visited by Pemulis — twitchy-eyed, unshaved, absent all week — who urgently wants to go "someplace discreet and really interface." Hal, paralyzed by response-trees too enormous to run, deflects everything: he declares the DMZ "synthetic bacchanal" off, invokes their thirty-day clean-urine pact ("Blarney wasn't why we got it, Inc, is the thing," Pemulis starts to say, and is cut off), and refuses to move. Freer and McKenna interrupt with grotesque news of Stice's forehead left on the upstairs window. Pemulis gives up for now and, at Hal's request, cues up the last five minutes of Himself's Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms…: Paul Anthony Heaven reading a stupefying academic lecture in a deadening monotone to dead-eyed students — while weeping steadily the whole time. Interleaved through it all is Hal's memory of JOI's funeral near the Great Concavity: the gull's direct hit on C.T.'s blazer, the fly into his open mouth, and the Moms laughing hardest of anyone. Last line: "Then this too began to seem familiar."

What to notice

The scene's geometry is the diagnosis: Hal narrates from the floor, and everyone else exists as heads in doorways, knee-creaks, a zipper being worried somewhere behind him — Pemulis, entering, "became the only thing in the room that understood itself as basically vertical." Hal has turned himself into receiving equipment — a "highly tuned horizontal antenna" by his own joke, making "a cage of my hands" and rotating it against the light like a viewfinder: the auteur's son composing shots he will never film, becoming a screen while declining every human transmission actually aimed at him. Count the cutoffs: three times Pemulis edges toward the thing he came to say and three times Hal's wit closes the gate ("This isn't—"; "Don't even start, M.M.") — the repartee that was once the friendship's whole play now functioning purely as firewall, with the scene's quietest and largest sentence underneath it: "I couldn't remember a time when Pemulis had bored me." Notice the one stimulus that still lands: Hal half sits up only at "Flesh?" — the news that another boy's face has come off on a window, registering on a narrator whose own face has gone unreadable. And notice what he asks the machine for: not a film but its tail end (the cue set to 2350) — Hal cueing straight to endings, reviewing his father's work the way a player reviews game film after a loss.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 906: Hal dozing on the floor as heads come and go; the non-hunger revelation; Pemulis's head appears, twin-towered cowlick, right eye twitchy or swollen; "Mmyellow." Pemulis's regal lack of insecurity reminds Hal of Mario.
  • p. 907: Hal too enervated to even ask where Pemulis has been ("so many different possible responses… almost overwhelming"); "Thought-prophylaxis"; "The Petropulator mentioned hysterics" (Kahn has reported Hal's state); Pemulis takes his wall-seam squat; Hal's mind drifts to the Good-Looking Men final lecture and C.T.'s misadventure at Himself's funeral — the Moms had Himself interred in her family's traditional plot in L'Islet Province; the freshly-filled grave-mound "airy and risen and plump, like dough"; "We've got some really important interfacing to do, brother."
  • p. 908: Hal's Jewish-mother routine ("All week: not a call, not a card"); Pemulis: "Seen your Mums around lately?" — Hal hasn't seen Avril or C.T. all week; Eschaton's a no-go, "The map's a mess out there"; "About the tu-savez-quoi—" / Hal: "The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That's definitely off, Mike"; the thirty-day Shi'ite hiatus, "urine like a mullah's babe"; Pemulis tries "Blarney wasn't why we got it, Inc, is the thing" — Hal forbids "temptation-rhetoric."
  • pp. 908-909: Freer in his sleeping-unitard at the jamb: human forehead-flesh, two eyebrows, and bits of nose on the upstairs hall window; Stice out of the infirmary "wearing something out of Zorro"; Hal explains Kenkle and Brandt's warm-water detachment plan; McKenna's snout under Freer's arm: Gopnik says Stice "looks like a piece of cheese pizza where somebody tore the cheese off"; Troeltsch charging two bucks a look.
  • p. 909: Pemulis's eye definitely twitching: "When have I ever urgently asked you to dialogue before, Inc?"; Hal makes a cage of his hands against the light; the deal to maybe talk later ("We can tell Mario we need to mano-à-tête"); Hal asks for Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, cued to the last five minutes.
  • p. 910: the third-shelf browse of Himself's œuvre — Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, Fun with Teeth, Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend ("It's Friend, not Fiend. Either it's mislabeled or the label's peeling"); "And me using the poor guy's lab," Pemulis says; the viewer warms "like the eye of a dead bird." (The "Fiend" mislabel is the book's own, as printed.)
  • p. 910: the funeral memory in full: 5 or 6 April, St. Adalbert, spud-storage town fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity; flying via Newfoundland around the waste-displacement launches and unknown high-altitude Dioxin; the gull's direct white hit on C.T.'s blue blazer, the large blue-bodied fly into his shocked mouth, "hard to extract"; "The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone."
  • pp. 910-911: Paul Anthony Heaven — 50 kilos, thumbless, comb-over, data-entry drone for Ocean Spray — Himself's stock "deadening institutional presence" (also Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat, Safe Boating Is No Accident, Low-Temperature Civics); the climactic lecture on the Flood and desiccation, Peterson's The Cage running behind the lectern; the in-film audience scans mail and picks at faces; the academics' arguments on JOI's hostility toward audiences seem "sound as far as they go" but can't explain "the incredible pathos" of Heaven reading turgid Bloomian shit [n.366] "in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave — and yet all the time weeping… very steadily"; "Then this too began to seem familiar."

Endnotes

  • n.366 (p. 1077): the lecture's jargon (clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis), "Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic influenza" — i.e. a parody of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence revisionary ratios, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead ancestor; the note concedes no clear connection to Peterson's The Cage ("mostly about a peripatetic eyeball") except that JOI stuck snippets of it everywhere — "maybe the 'disjunction'… is part of the point," with sub-footnote a: "(Which of course assumes there's a point.)"

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: Hal's flat horizontal inventory — no hunger for a week, "Thought-prophylaxis," boredom even at Pemulis — is anhedonia clinically observed from inside; the closing "this too began to seem familiar" is the gray sameness closing over him.
  • Communication and Solipsism: every utterance requires running a paralyzing response-tree ("I finally had to choose almost at random"); the scene's pathos-image is Heaven screaming for help in the only register he has — a monotone nobody in the hall receives — Hal's Ethel-Merman dream (n.321) made celluloid.
  • Addiction and Recovery: day ~10 of white-knuckle abstinence; Hal polices "temptation-rhetoric," cancels the DMZ bacchanal, and clings to the mullah's-babe urine pact — while exhibiting exactly the inner deadness Pemulis prophesied for cold quitters.
  • Film and Optics: Hal begins systematically reviewing Himself's filmography from the inside — auteur criticism conducted by the son, defending the father's "pathos" against the academics; the dead-bird-eye screen and the mislabeled Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend case.
  • Fathers and Sons: seeking the dead father through his work and his grave — the dough-plump mound, the Bloom parody about battling "the loved dead" ancestor playing while the orphan watches; Pemulis "using the poor guy's lab" to make urine-spoofing chemistry.
  • Entertainment and the Self: JOI's films-with-audiences-inside — bored, mail-scanning spectators vs. the weeping entertainer — are the anti-Entertainment: art that fails to compel, made by the man who then (per Joelle, scene 178) joked about making one "too perfect."

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The "tu-savez-quoi"/DMZ and the quitting argument continue n.321 verbatim — see scene n321; Hal here delivers the decision n.321 left hanging ("That's definitely off, Mike").
  • "Seen your Mums around lately?" — Avril's post-broadcast seclusion (n.332's relayed-regards machinery); Hal's offhand "Doubtless she's over helping C.T. arrange a weather-venue" = the WhataBurger Tucson move after the Québec junior squad announcement ("We're going to get an announcement about the Québec kids very soon," p. 908).
  • Paul Anthony Heaven and the in-film audiences: see n.24 filmography (scene n024) for Good-Looking Men…, Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat, and the Heaven C.V.; the pegging this scene rebuts — an "'auteur' pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough" — is the scene's own narration (p. 911).
  • Direct continuation of Hal's supine V.R.5 stretch (scene 170, pp. 896-902; scenes 169/171 are the interleaved Gately-hospital installments): the parade of heads, Stice's window accident (Hal left Stice stuck to the window in the ~pp. 864-876 scene); Freer's report is the gruesome payoff.
  • The weeping-monotone lecturer foreshadows scene 001: articulate grief production received as noise — the figurant condition Hal is entering.

Forward

  • Pemulis's cut-off "Blarney wasn't why we got it" points at the Avril/Wayne blackmail behind the urinalysis reprieve revealed in n.324 — see scene n324; his weeklong absence, twitchy eye, and urgent need for "someplace discreet" follow from his 17 Nov expulsion — see scene n332. Hal never lets him say any of it; arguably the novel's last chance for Hal to learn the truth dies in this room.
  • The funeral/burial memory triangulates with n.234's ruling (JOI in Avril's family plot, "Heart of the Concavity") and with Joelle's bet in scene 178 (pp. 940-941) that the Master is "in there with him… in your annulation-zone" — and with Gately's grave-digging dream (scene 175, p. 934) and Hal's Year-of-Glad flash of digging up Himself's head with Gately (scene 003, p. 17).

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 906: "It occurred to me that I didn't have to eat if I was not hungry. This presented itself as almost a revelation." — anhedonia's quiet onset; anchor passage for depression-anhedonia.
  • p. 907: "the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave seems airy and risen and plump, like dough" — the burial image that underwrites the whole dig-the-head endgame.
  • p. 908: "I could see my asking him… leading to so many different possible responses… so enervating I could barely get out that I'd just been lying here" — the response-tree paralysis; inner-Hal vs. spoken-Hal.
  • p. 910: the gull-and-fly funeral paragraph ("The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone.") — Incandenza grief as deadpan slapstick; Avril's terrifying mirth.
  • p. 911: "and yet all the time weeping, Paul Anthony Heaven… silently weeping, very steadily" — the whole JOI aesthetic (and the novel's) in one image: maximum sincerity inside a form that reads as unwatchable; essential anthology passage.
  • p. 911: "Then this too began to seem familiar." — closing line; déjà vu as symptom.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (20) · Connected from (6) · Passages quoted here (38) · Motifs (5)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs