The other ONANtiad: Himself's doomed Gentle romance

texture · UNDATED (alleged, Gentle-Era); fiction-within-fiction

• When: UNDATED — the affair is alleged only inside J. O. Incandenza's adult ONANtiad (made before his death, 1 April YTSDB); no date in the story is ever attached
• What: The book's other portrait of Gentle is a love story. Where Mario's film centers political parody, his late father's original ONANtiad "was more centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation romance" — "an alleged doomed and unconsummated affair between President J. Gentle and the equally hygiene-and-germ-obsessed wife of Canada's 'Minister of Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises,'" doomed because the Minister hires a Candida albicans specialist to give his wife a permanent yeast infection, driving both lovers to "ardent-desire-v.-hygienic-neurosis breakdowns" — the wife under a Québecois bullet-train, and Gentle to "exact his revenge on a macrocartographic scale." In Himself's telling, that is, the Reconfiguration itself is a jilted crooner's revenge — a third theory of the era's authorship (against the mad-pout and the Tine-as-dark-force readings), offered only as claymation and never as fact. The same note records that Himself's film was "considerably more restrained and ambiguous on the whole Tine-as-dark-force issue" than Mario's (n.156). Recorded as attested fiction-within-fiction; resolves nothing.