IJ study archive

Scene n304: struck plagiarizes afr train cult

Pages
1055–1062
When
frame: 2030h, 11 Nov YDAU (2009); plagiarized article written/published ~YWQMD (2006, its own 'vulgate perspective'); le Jeu du Prochain Train originates 'B.S.' (pre-Subsidized, a decade+ before Reconfiguration)
Where
Room 308, Subdorm B, E.T.A., Enfield MA (the article's subject matter: Papineau region, pre-Reconfiguration southwest Quebec)in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories · Quebec / A.F.R. territory (also)
POV
3rd person over Jim Struck at his TP, interleaved with long verbatim stretches of the article he is plagiarizing; one paragraph slips into Hal Incandenza's 'take' on plagiarists (p. 1060)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 9)

Summary

Endnote 304, a self-contained narrative note hung from p. 732 (Marathe, veiled in the Ennet House waiting room, remembering his "four-limbed childhood... before Le Culte du Prochain Train"). At 2030h on 11 Nov YDAU, E.T.A. 18's A-squad player Jim Struck sits in 308 Subdorm B laundering a term paper for Poutrincourt's History of Canadian Unpleasantness out of an essay on the Wheelchair Assassins he judges too obscure to get caught ripping off — an essay in Wild Conceits, a marginal desktop-published journal out of Bayside Community College, Medford, by one "G. T. Day, M.S.": Geoffrey Day, the Ennet House resident, audibly getting drunker as his article proceeds. The article (quoted at length) is the novel's fullest account of A.F.R. origins: the cell's operations and maximalist demands, and its Root Cult, La Culte du Prochain Train — miners' sons in the Papineau region competing to be the last of six to leap across the tracks before an oncoming train — legs lost not by losing but by being struck mid-leap ("The fifth through the second to leap have lost, but acquitted themselves") — the struck veterans becoming wheelchair-bound directeurs and, eventually, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. A companion cult, the Endless Kiss (Baiser Sans Fin), seeds the gentler Fils de Montcalm. Around the quotations runs a comedy of plagiarism: Struck's "sanitizing" of Day's foam-flecked Academese, his disastrous verbatim lapses, and Hal's embedded observation that plagiarists are not lazy but "navigationally insecure."

What to notice

The novel's fullest A.F.R. history is delivered through the least credible channel it could construct: a desktop-published journal out of a Bayside Community College "nowhere near any bays"; an author who audibly deteriorates as he writes, until sentences quit "without even a close to the parenthesis"; crossing-side detail no scholar could have witnessed, which even the plagiarist clocks — the writer "seemed to get more and more tipsy as the thing went on" — and all of it reaching the reader only because a boy with a sinus headache judged it safe to steal. The apparatus performs its own unreliability, and the book then quietly ratifies the content anyway: Marathe's memories, and the cult term he later reaches for at his own moment of contemplated defection, confirm the lore from inside. The deep history arrives dressed as exactly the source you shouldn't trust, and turns out true. Frame and article are the same test run twice: le Jeu is a contest of who dares jump last, its virtuosi closing their eyes on the jut, while Struck — who cannot move without proof that somebody has crossed before him — is the boy who can't jump at all; and the text keeps striking him with his own name ("It is not rare for several of the le Jeu's finalists to be struck.") while he wonders "would a man with anything to camouflage use his own name as a verb?" There's a diagnosis-loop under the comedy, too: Struck pegs the essay's grandiosity as "Quaaludes and red wine" prose because his own "historical dad" was a "red-wine-with-heavy-tranqs-on-the-side drinker" who dove into a drained pool — the sanitizer of drunk academese learned the dialect at home. And the exposed seams — "hurl himself athwart", the complementless "pitted", "Reason for all-out war" pasted in untranslated — train the reader in the article's real subject: how to tell when language has been somewhere its speaker hasn't.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 1055: Frame established — Struck slumped at his TP, forehead slathered in (C2H5CO)2O2 (sub-footnote a: "Pimple cream."), sinus headache, hunting the research pile for something "obscure and amateurish enough" to semi-plagiarize; a B.P.L. ArchFax search on A.F.R./wheelchair/Separatism terms returned 400+ items; he settles on the Wild Conceits essay, whose opening sentence yokes the A.F.R. to the "Feral Infants" of the eastern Reconfiguration as the two great under-documented legends.
  • pp. 1055-1056: Article on the Feral Infants — huge, anomalous, "grow but do not develop," feeding on "annularly available edibles," depositing "titanically outsized scat"; Struck's real labor is bringing Day's verbs "down out of the like total ozone" (prose he associates with Quaaludes-and-red-wine megalograndiosity).
  • p. 1056: A.F.R. operations catalog: large reflective devices across odd-numbered U.S. highways to disorient northbound drivers; disruption of annular-fusion pipelines; attempted damage to Empire Waste Displacement launch/receiving facilities; and the signature assassinations of Canadian officials who tolerate the "Sudetenlandization" of Canada by O.N.A.N. Mid-quote the author is named: "this diarrheatic G. T. Day, M.S. guy." Night attacks, the sinuous double S of wheel-tracks across the fleur-de-lis as escutcheon; "To hear the squeak" as official euphemism for violent death; example: newly elected Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe and an aide "heard the squeak" at Pointe Claré despite a dozen mounted Cuirassiers (sub-footnote cites the CBC/PATHÉ cartridge, 4 May Y.P.Wc.).
  • p. 1057: A.F.R. vs. conventional Separatism: the F.L.Q., Fils de Montcalm, and Bloc want secession and de-anglicization; the A.F.R. demand the return of Reconfigured territory to U.S. administration, cessation of all E.W.D. and ATHSCME activity within 175 km of Canadian soil, removal of all fission/waste/fusion annulars north of the 42nd parallel, and Canada's secession from O.N.A.N. in toto. The affiliation theory is further contradicted by the A.F.R.'s having assassinated prominent Separatists themselves (Schnede, Charest, Remillard, both Bouchards) in the bloody autumn of YTSDB. Pre-Y.P.W.c.-Freedom-of-Speculation-Act historiography was hearsay. Struck pictures Poutrincourt's red triple-underlined QUOI? and her little annoyed-confusion wrinkle; he'd "kill relatives for a quick DuBois."
  • pp. 1057-1058: The cult thesis: the A.F.R. are cultists of les jeux pour-mêmes — game as "metaphysical environment and psychohistorical locus and gestalt"; Canadian Root Cults, per Phelps and Phelps (sub-footnote: The Cults of the Unwavering I, a field guide whose title lists ~40 cults from Currency Speculation to Telentertainment, pp. 1061-1062), direct "reverent fealty" toward principles "activally opposed to the cultists' own individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment," beyond the ken of predictive psychosocial science.
  • p. 1058: Struck's own paternal digression: his "historical dad" in Rancho Mirage, a red-wine-with-heavy-tranqs drinker of late-night retractable phone calls, attempted a one-and-a-half tuck into the drained family pool — neck brace for life, end of a low-80s golf career, "incredible bitterness and family trauma," J.A.L.S. Jr. shipped off to Rolling Hills Academy. Also: topic-shopping context — Inc took the mirror-across-highway terrorism angle, Schacht the anti-fluoridation riots under Mulroney; Struck holds his train-cult angle with the same tenacity that keeps him on the 18's A despite a serve deLint says resembles "a debutante's curtsy."
  • pp. 1058-1059: Le Jeu du Prochain Train described: originated among sons of asbestos/nickel/zinc miners in the Papineau region a decade-plus before Reconfiguration, spreading along the pre-Interdependence ore lines; played after sunset at rural rail crossings; 216 boys per night ("never either more nor less") in groups of six on consecutive tie-juts; train schedules known only to the directeurs de jeu — older veterans, "many of them legless and in wheelchairs or... on crude rolling boards"; no timepieces; silence.
  • pp. 1059-1060: The game itself: be the last of your six to leap across the tracks before the train passes; the train is never the opponent but "le jeu's boundary, arena, and reason"; the true variable is the wills of the other five — "more radical by far" than American Chicken. The virtuosi ignore the other five entirely, eyes closed, trusting tie-vibration, whistle-pitch, intuition, fate, "and whatever numinous influences lie just beyond fate." Struck bogs down in Day's hallucinated detail, blue-delete-looping, and disastrously copies "hurl himself athwart" verbatim.
  • p. 1060: Outcomes and codes: last-to-jump-and-land-intact wins; first to quail "walks home from there, alone under the moon, disgraced"; but even the first to jump has jumped — not jumping at all, "perdre son coeur," is outside the game's limit, unthinkable, recorded exactly once: "Faire un Bernard Wayne," after the lone non-jumper, who later drowned in the Baskatong Reservoir. The carnage menu: struck head-on = "shot as from a cannon, knocked out of his shoes," home in a burlap sack; run over = spread along a hundred red meters, home in ceremonial mining shovels; the half-way-across lose legs on the spot or under orthopedic saws.
  • p. 1060: POV flicker to Hal: what interests Hal about Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Ingersoll et al. is that congenital plagiarists work harder camouflaging than writing from scratch would cost — "navigationally insecure... trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them."
  • p. 1061: Tournament architecture: winners survive into "Les Trente-Six," then six finalists — "attendants longtemps ses tours," some bleeding or gray with shock, eyes closed — await the 2359 ultra-ionized Express "Le Train de la Foudre," Mont-Tremblant to Ottawa; several finalists are not rarely struck. That Prochain Train survivors and directeurs founded the A.F.R. is "beyond sociohistorical dispute." Struck wonders whether a man with something to camouflage would keep using his own name as a verb.
  • p. 1061: The parallel northern cult: La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin (Endless Kiss) of the Gulf of St. Lawrence iron ranges, ancestor of the media-savvy Fils de Montcalm (credited with helicopter-dropping a 12-meter human-waste-filled pie shell onto the rostrum of Gentle's second Inaugural): 64 adolescents, 32 male-female couples, mouths taped together, nostrils pinched, one lungful traded back and forth until one combatant is declared "evanoui." Phelps and Phelps read it as a stoic ethic of "using what one is given... before excreting it back whence it came" — illuminating the Montcalmistes' indifference to the Reconfiguration that is the A.F.R.'s whole "raison de la guerre outrance." Struck tries to phone Hal, gets the machine, and inserts the complementless "pitted" anyway.
  • pp. 1061-1062: Lettered sub-footnotes close the note: pimple cream; the CBC/PATHÉ cartridge citation; the full Phelps & Phelps title; "Except in certain very esoteric variations on the game" (on the Endless Kiss's mixed-sex pairings); and "Reason for all-out war," which Struck inserts without checking the French Day was "too befogged to give" — near-suicidal, since Poutrincourt knows exactly how much French Struck hasn't got.

Themes in this scene

  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the densest single exposition of A.F.R. ideology — anti-Reconfiguration maximalism, "Sudetenlandization," the squeak, the cell's escutcheon — plus the taxonomy of rival Separatist organs.
  • Disability and Deformity: leglessness as election, not affliction: the wheelchair is earned at the crossing, and the dismembered directeurs administer the rite that makes more of themselves; the Feral Infants are the Concavity's other deformed legend.
  • Annularity: feral infants "sustained by annulation"; the A.F.R. target the annular-fusion grid and E.W.D. loop; the Endless Kiss is literally breath recycled until exhaustion — waste-utilization as cult theology, per Phelps.
  • Maps and Territory: Hal's diagnosis of plagiarism as navigational insecurity — needing "a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before" — restates the map/territory problem at the level of prose.
  • Entertainment and the Self: Phelps's thesis that Canadian cults serve principles "activally opposed to... individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment" is the scholarly statement of Marathe's mountainside argument and the precise inverse of the U.S. spectation-cult the Entertainment exploits.
  • Fathers and Sons: Struck's drained-pool dad (red wine and tranqs, bitterness, the son shipped off) is a miniature of the book's wrecked-father pattern — and quietly rhymes with Day's red-wine prose Struck is sanitizing.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Feral Infants: companion legend to the "herd of feral hamsters" and Concavity lore (scene 030, p. 93; Mario's ONANtiad pageant, pp. 380-418); Gentle's second-Inaugural pie-shell extends the ONANtiad's Inaugural set-pieces.

Forward

  • Main-text anchor: superscript 304 hangs at p. 732 (scene 149, pp. 729-735): Marathe, veiled in the Ennet House waiting room as "Henri the Swiss," recalls overturning a log in the Lac de Deux Montaignes forests "of his four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train" — the note is the reader's full briefing on the cult Marathe came up through, deliberately withheld until he is sitting legless inside Ennet House.
  • "Perdre son coeur" pays off in the main text at p. 753 (scene 153): Marathe weighs quadruple-agency knowing "Fortier's wrath would be implacable at Marathe's 'perdant son coeur'" — the train-cult's one unthinkable act becomes the exact term for Marathe's contemplated defection (and the lone historical non-jumper "later drowned"; Marathe's whole betrayal is for love of Gertraude — see scenes 103, pp. 528-530, and 156, pp. 774-782).
  • "Faire un Bernard Wayne": the disgraced non-jumper shares a surname with E.T.A. #1 John Wayne, himself a Québécois miner's son; the text never states a kinship, but the implication shadows the Wayne/A.F.R. material — Steeply quizzing Poutrincourt about Wayne and the A.F.R. during the Stice match (scene 130, pp. 673-682) and the late-book A.F.R.-at-E.T.A. developments.
  • Marathe/Steeply mountainside serial (night of 30 Apr-1 May YDAU; installments 029, 031, 033, 035, 038, 072, 077, 088, 096, 098, 101, 103, with 123 later): the Phelps "fealty toward principles opposed to one's own pleasure" passage is the academic mirror of Marathe's temple/choose-your-master argument (scene 035, pp. 105-109); the A.F.R. operations list (mirrors, train-cult fanaticism) matches what Steeply and Marathe discuss obliquely throughout.
  • A.F.R. occupation of Antitoi Entertainment, scene 097 (pp. 481-489): Lucien Antitoi's death by broomstick is "hearing the squeak" dramatized from the victim's side — and Marathe's nausea at that "technical interview" (p. 753, scene 153) marks how far he's fallen from the eyes-closed virtuosi described here.
  • Geoffrey Day, "G. T. Day, M.S.": it's the same Day — "this diarrheatic G. T. Day, M.S." of Wild Conceits is the Ennet House rhetorician; his Ennet House residency debuts in the living-room colloquy, six days off his red-wine-and-Quaalude bottom (scene 066, pp. 270-281). The comedy is double: the novel's most-cited A.F.R. scholar is a junior-college blowhard who got progressively drunk while writing, and is now in the same demi-maison the A.F.R. (via Marathe, scenes 149/151/153) are infiltrating.
  • Thierry Poutrincourt: the Québécoise prorector whose course occasions the paper; her long walk-and-talk with Steeply about Wayne, Separatism, and the A.F.R. runs through the Stice match (scene 130, pp. 673-682) — Struck is unknowingly plagiarizing an A.F.R. exposé for a reader far closer to the subject than he can imagine.
  • E.T.A. texture: Struck's TP-and-cartridge-viewer rig, Rader/Wagenknecht's hall noises, deLint's "debutante's curtsy," and Hal's unreachable phone machine all date the frame to the post-I-Day week (11 Nov YDAU) and the scenes that run through it.

Notable passages (9)
  • p. 1055: "Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known..." — Day's opening sentence, the A.F.R. and Feral Infants paired as the Reconfiguration's twin legends; prime nationalism-onan quarry.
  • p. 1056: " 'To hear the squeak'... is now an understood euphemismic locution... for instant, terrifying, and violent death" — the cell's signature, with the Duceppe example.
  • p. 1057: the A.F.R.'s four stated aims (return of Reconfigured territories; E.W.D./ATHSCME cessation within 175 km; annulars out above 42°N; Canadian secession from O.N.A.N.) — the platform every Marathe/Steeply scene presumes.
  • pp. 1057-1058: Phelps and Phelps on fealty "activally opposed to the cultists' own individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment" — thesis-grade for entertainment-self; pairs with Marathe's temple speech (scene 035).
  • p. 1059: "awaiting the procession of a fearsome bride, indeed" — six boys on the tie-juts; the note's tonal hinge from satire into genuine dread.
  • p. 1060: "the game's finest players frequently close their eyes entirely as they wait... and whatever numinous influences lie just beyond fate" — the A.F.R. virtuoso ethic; Marathe's lost belly for the work measures against this.
  • p. 1060: "perdre son coeur... 'Faire un Bernard Wayne'... about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known" — the Wayne-surname grenade and the term Marathe later applies to himself (p. 753).
  • p. 1060: "plagiarists aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure... a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them" — Hal's embedded aside; maps-territory in one sentence.
  • p. 1061: the Endless Kiss mechanics and Phelps's waste-utilization reading — annularity rendered as adolescent contest.

What links here Timeline events here (22) · Connected from (19) · Endnote digest of (1) · Passages quoted here (36) · Motifs (1)

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