IJ study archive

Scene 179: hal accomplice blizzard weston

Scene
179
Pages
941–958
When
20 Nov YDAU (2009), morning of the blizzard / Gaudeamus Igitur fundraiser day
Where
Hal & Mario's E.T.A. subdorm room, second floor, during the blizzardin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories
POV
Hal Incandenza (1st person — the late-book first-person serial begun p. 851)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 16)

Summary

The morning of the blizzard, Hal comes up to his room to find Mario and a traumatized Coyle watching Himself's Accomplice! — and learns that Stice's troubles have escalated: Troeltsch tore skin off Stice's frozen-to-the-window face, his whole face is now mummified in stuck toilet tissue, and his bed has been found bolted to the ceiling of his room; Stice himself believes a guardian ghost is haunting him to raise his game. Alone on the floor for most of the scene, Hal lies supine on the Lindisfarne carpet and free-associates through a long interior monologue: a full recounting and critique of Accomplice! and Cosgrove Watt's career; InterLace's saturation blizzard coverage; the '98 blizzard and Himself's chain of obsessions; a tableau-like reconstruction of the Weston house and early childhood; a fantasy of deliberately destroying his ankle so he'd "never have to, never get to" play; and the one genuinely open, moving conversation Himself ever had — wasted, Hal feels, on Orin, about why he'd rather Orin not watch hard porn yet. The scene's quiet bombshell arrives when John Wayne's head appears silently in the doorway and Hal flatly discloses that Wayne has been sexually involved with the Moms since roughly his second month at E.T.A. It ends with Hal deciding to get up and then not getting up.

What to notice

Mario asks Hal three separate times, three different ways, whether he is sad; Hal never answers once — that unanswered question idles under seventeen pages of brilliant deflection, and it is the scene's real engine. Notice what has happened to the prodigy's retrieval system: the term for optical perspective is one he "again could not quite make resolve", and specular surfaces only "after I stopped trying to recall it"; the right word for the glass's slotty mouth is only "probably foreshortened"; the moving thing Himself said returns "out of nowhere" only once Hal accepts he cannot remember. He states the loss plainly — "There had been a time when data like these were instantly available." — and the pattern underneath is that nothing in his head answers to will anymore, only to surrender: a recovery truth arriving in the wrong building. Watch him also commit the paternal crime while diagnosing it — he indicts Accomplice! for 500 seconds of "Murderer!", then subjects the reader to a blizzard litany so exhaustive that "All synonyms for snowstorm were rapidly exhausted." And memory here has the father's format: Weston returns as "tableaux", "more like snapshots than films", and even Hal's imagining runs on stills — the closing Wayne/Avril image "complete and sharply focused but seemed stilted, as if composed", a freeze-frame to match a narrator who decides to get up and then does not.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 941: "By a rather creepy coincidence" Mario and Coyle are watching another of Himself's cartridges; blizzard burying the net-posts; Mario's zipper tool and drum-tight bed; Coyle trembling like "something hanging from the tip of a pipette"; Mario: "You look sad."
  • pp. 941-942: the Stice report — Troeltsch tore part of Ortho's face off the window; a whole roll of toilet tissue now stuck to it; deLint yelled at him at breakfast; and Stice's bed found up at the ceiling ("presumably bolted") after a "discharge" woke Coyle; Coyle wants a room switch from Lateral Alice.
  • p. 942: Hal's dread that a midterm Troeltsch/Axford room-switch happened without his knowing — "a few glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack again."
  • pp. 942-943: Stice's sworn-secret explanation: a "beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects," teaching him not to underestimate objects and raising his game; Coyle: "Stice is mentally buckling" — the 20-bean chair-levitation bet, temple-veins flexing.
  • p. 944: Coyle's quandary (Schtitt, Rusk, or Lateral Alice? "What if they haul him off somewhere?"); "What if it's the mental buckling that's raised his game? Does it still count as buckling?"; Mario and Coyle leave to find a master key.
  • pp. 944-945: the Cosgrove Watt / amateurs digression: JOI's Bresson-vs.-Brecht anti-illusion casting; his late desperation to make something "entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting" (n.378: "As opposed to self-confronting, presumably"); Watt as the Dancing Gland; his temporal-lobe problem; the Moms forbidding the boys to be alone with him.
  • pp. 944-946: Accomplice! recounted in full — bus-station prostitute, Safe Sex stipulation, the palmed razor blade, the sliced condom, the Kaposi's Sarcoma blotch, and the boy shrieking "Murderer!" for nearly a third of the cartridge's length; Hal's verdict: its project stays abstract and self-reflexive — "we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself"; the real tension: theoretical-aesthetic end "or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?"; the U.Cal-Irvine tenure essay on the reason-versus-no-reason debate (n.379 → n.144: Ursula Emrich-Levine).
  • pp. 946-948: horizontal on the floor, Hal channel-surfs InterLace's Spontaneous Disseminations — the litany of blizzard coverage (the windshield-brusher's "creepy businesslike face," snowmobile gangs, the swallowed reporter, "this was not a Nor'easter"); Lord's monitor removed Thursday; Hal has never ridden a snowmobile, skied, or skated.
  • pp. 948-949: the '98 blizzard — players roped together to the Lung behind Schtitt's highway flare; Himself at the window all storm with cameras and a lens-striated case (n.380: rasters; InterLace's name as in-joke); his serial obsessions: "From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film."
  • pp. 949-953: the Weston reconstruction — "trying to align myself along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped"; Hal can't distinguish his own memories from Mario's reports; S. Johnson's psychotic orbits in the pen; Himself teaching Orin to shave (Noxzema); BLOCK MOTHER; the Metropolis print (n.381: Avril always loathed it, yet it's still up four years after the suicide); the surreal steamed-mirror-with-knife memory; the church sign LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN; the room's guilloche (811 circles); the grandmothers' deaths; Mrs. Tavis alive in Alberta, the L'Islet farm "now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost."
  • p. 953: the mold-eating memory is not Hal's own — "this memory was of Orin's telling the story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus."
  • pp. 953-954: Avril's climacteric aging since confining herself to HmH after the funeral; the grief-therapist koan — "The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie."
  • pp. 954-955: Hal realizes he doesn't want to play this afternoon; the detailed fantasy of contriving a fall to take out the ankle's ligaments — "Never have to, never get to"; "the faultless victim of a freak accident... object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow"; he can't parse whose disappointment he'd cripple himself to avoid.
  • pp. 955-956: the recovered memory — Himself's office talk with fifteen-year-old Orin over the contraband porn video: no discipline, just reticent earnestness; he'd rather Orin wait until he'd known sex with someone he loved before watching "organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely" — afraid of giving Orin "an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality."
  • p. 956: Orin was moved only by Himself's assuming he was still cherry; Hal is moved that the openest moment of Himself's life was "wasted... on Orin"; Hal's own most intimate memory: the scratch of jaw and smell of neck, carried up to bed.
  • pp. 956-957: John Wayne's head silently inside the open door; the felt, almost painful attention; "No waste, complete utilization of each breath" (n.382: on-court Hal feels Wayne controls even his own involuntary CNS); the disclosure: Wayne and the Moms, expatriates both, sexually involved since his second month — Hal can't identify a feeling about it.
  • p. 957: Hal's catalog of the Moms's imagined infidelities (Bain, grad students, the Islamic M.D., C.T. "never once shutting up") — all generic, her eyes on the ceiling; the wondered link between her passion for hiddenness, Himself's Cage films, and "the veiled girl, Orin's love"; the stilted, composed Wayne/Avril tableau ("his thin tongue outthrust like a stunned lizard's. They stay just like that."); "I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up."

Themes in this scene

  • Film and Optics: a full embedded filmography lecture — JOI's casting theory, Accomplice! shot-for-shot, the lens case, rasters (n.380), the Metropolis still — narrated by a son who can read every formal choice but can't locate the father in any of them.
  • Fathers and Sons: the scene's emotional core is triangulated paternity — Himself's one open fatherly talk went to Orin; Hal got only a carried-to-bed smell; "it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he'd wasted it on Orin."
  • Family and Hamlet: ghost-father, adulterous mother, paralyzed son — Hal supine, deciding to get up and not getting up, while Avril's liaison with a surrogate-son (Wayne) is disclosed in a single Hamlet-shaped flat sentence.
  • Entertainment and the Self: n.378's "self-forgetting" names the Entertainment's whole mechanism; Accomplice!'s 500 seconds of "Murderer!" is JOI testing exactly where diversion curdles into excruciation; the blizzard coverage is spectation-as-weather.
  • Ghosts and Wraiths: Stice's bed bolted to the ceiling and his "guardian ghost" theory move the wraith from Gately's fever (pp. 829-840) into E.T.A.'s daylight; "manifests in ordinary physical objects" matches the wraith's object-moving M.O. exactly.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Hal cannot distinguish his memories from Mario's reports of memories; the brutal questions force lies; Wayne and Hal share a doorway and say nothing.
  • The Body and Tennis: the self-injury fantasy — destroying the ankle to exit the game blamelessly — is the book's starkest statement of the plateau-trapped player's "never have to, never get to."
  • Memory and Forgetting: the strongest late case — Hal can no longer distinguish his own memories from Mario's reports of memories, the famous mold memory turns out to be "of Orin's telling the story" (p. 953), and retrieval now answers only to surrender ("There had been a time when data like these were instantly available"; the Himself-and-Orin talk returns only once he stops trying, pp. 955-956); scene 032's eidetic instrument dismantling itself on the page.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Continues Hal's 1st-person serial (from scene 165, p. 851, waking before 0500h; scene 167's Stice-window rescue, pp. 864-876, is the event Coyle's gossip garbles; scene 172's V.R.5 wallowing, pp. 906-911, precedes this directly).
  • "Since Pemulis and I stopped" (p. 950) — the abstinence pact and DMZ context are in n.321; see scene n321. Mario's "Mike Pemulis came by and asked if you were up" (p. 941) is Pemulis's last, failed attempt to reach Hal before expulsion (cf. scene 172, where Hal ignores him; expulsion digest at scene n332).
  • Stice's bed on the ceiling and "guardian ghost... to help his game" → the wraith's interview with Gately (pp. 829-840), where the wraith describes moving objects and an interest in the players; also Lyle's earlier counsel to Stice (scene 084, pp. 394-395).
  • Accomplice! joins the filmography (n.24 catalog: scene n024); the Watt material extends scene 085's Hal-as-JOI's-audience meditation (pp. 395-398). The co-op set "Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T." ties the film physically to Orin and Joelle.
  • The mold-eating non-memory (p. 953) → scene 002, which is itself narrated as Orin's memory — the archive's two tellings agree Hal owns no copy of his own famous origin story.
  • The grief-therapist callback (p. 954) → Hal's grief-therapy saga after finding the body (scene 064, pp. 242-258); "the brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie" restates the professional-conversationalist failure (scene 005).
  • The L'Islet potato farm lost to the Concavity (p. 953) → Avril's Québec roots and JOI's Concavity burial (n.234 ruling; scene n234).
  • The squeak/dread inheritance and serial-obsession portrait of JOI here pair with scene 099 — "From military optics to annular optics... to film" is the adult C.V. of the boy with the amputated doorknob.
  • Hal's never-skied/never-skated aside and the self-injury fantasy prefigure nothing he does — but rhyme with Clipperton (scene 089) and with the YG Hal who cannot make himself understood (scene 001): exiting the performing self by damage.

Forward

  • The Wayne/Avril liaison confirms what Pemulis walked in on in Avril's office (~pp. 552-553, the football-drag tableau) and glosses Wayne's presence at HmH dinners; Wayne's "control of his voluntary CNS" (n.382) sharpens the horror of his later WETA meltdown (n.324/n.332 digests).

Notable passages (8)
  • p. 943: "selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects" — the wraith thesis stated by a player; anchor passage for ghosts-wraiths.
  • p. 944: "the pernicious illusion of realism... watching actors acting and not people behaving" — JOI's aesthetic credo, with n.378's "self-forgetting" hinged to it.
  • p. 946: "Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry 'Murderer!' for some reason... or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?" — the novel winking at its own method.
  • p. 950: "trying to align myself along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped" — withdrawal as lost orientation; key late-Hal interiority.
  • p. 954: "Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All... The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie." — anhedonia and the therapeutic model; pairs with Kate Gompert's It.
  • pp. 954-955: "Never have to, never get to... the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow" — the injury fantasy; essential anthology passage for the-body-tennis.
  • p. 956: "an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality" — Himself's one open fatherly speech; pairs with the wraith's figurant grief.
  • p. 957: "John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival." — the flattest-delivered revelation in the book; the stilted tableau that follows ("They stay just like that.") composed like one of Himself's stills.

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