(Note: I’m going to bend the spoiler line in minor ways with this post, but we’re on the steep downhill to the end and I think most of us are either ahead of the calendar or so far behind it the spoiler line is almost meaningless.)
When I was young–at whatever age it was when I first had an awareness of sex, albeit one poorly informed by nascent hormones and edited-for-TV James Bond films–I can remember being very concerned that when I became old enough to have sex I wouldn’t want to do anything else. I was years and years from having the means, motive, and opportunity to have sex with anyone, but I had this idea of sex as being pleasurable to the exclusion of everything else. And it scared me a little bit because I wanted to be a professional baseball player, which presumably involved a lot of practice time.
Kids are incredibly efficient pleasure seekers who spend every minute of the day trying to evade boredom, so it’s probably not surprising or unusual that a child could conceive of a concept that so mirrors The Entertainment. It’s far more surprising that Wallace had the empathy to conceive of it as an adult.103
As ETA custodian Kenkle says to custodian Brandt on p. 874:
‘And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas morning — What is the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface, for a child? — A present, Brandt — Something you have not earned and which formerly was out of your possession is now in your po-ssession — Can you sit there and try to say there is no symbolic rela-tion between unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing a young lady?’
Kids have this incredible capacity for happiness. They can give themselves an endorphin rush the likes of which you and I haven’t experienced in decades from just the sight of a new stuffed animal or the mention of chicken nuggets. And although they get sad, for most kids sadness is fleeting. When one of my kids cries because he doesn’t want to go to bed, all I have to do is remind him of some small thing that makes him happy to start him trembling with joy. (“Guess what? We’re going to the dry cleaners tomorrow and you know what they have at the dry cleaners? Lollipops!”) Most kids can choose to be glad almost whenever they want.
To adults this ability to choose happiness seems like a superpower, as enviable as the ability to fly.
Because when you become an adult, the whole happy-sad axis gets inverted. Adults have a limited capacity for happiness and that happiness is always fleeting. On the other hand, it seems like our capacity for sadness is almost bottomless.
This (a little bit spoilery) is from a discussion on page 880 Show Spoiler▼
References to adult longing for the childhood capacity for happiness are everywhere in this book. Mute in his hospital bed, in terrible pain, Gately alternates between feverish adult dreams conflating pleasure and death, and persistent memories of childhood, where he watches TV and trades small kindnesses with a neighbor who, feared by all the grown-ups, eventually hangs herself; Hal stumbles into what he hopes is an NA meeting only to find a group of burly, hairy, sobbing men holding teddy bears and trying to coax out their “inner infant”; Mario, who has managed to prolong childhood into adulthood is worshipped by his mother (who is having sex with a student 40 years her junior) and envied by his brother (who gave up his childhood to pursue greatness in tennis, a profession where you retire when you’re still in your twenties), wonders how you can even confirm when someone is sad.
And of course there is Joelle:
(T)hings had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered puberty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis’s toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis’s father interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Barn-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified.
Of course, it was her father’s attempts to regress her to childhood that eventually led to her disfiguring.
I don’t have anything to add on the subject that Wallace doesn’t say more eloquently. But one of the real wonders of Infinite Jest is that DFW provides the reader with so many prisms through which to read it–I won’t even pretend to believe I’ve discovered them all–and while the core themes of happiness and sadness remain constant throughout, the experience of the book changes depending on the glass you pick up.
So wait… Joelle v.D. is actually disfigured? I thought that that was just the story she told to Molly Notkin to explain the veil thing. Have I missed something here?
Yes, she is disfigured—the question is whether by acid or by unspeakable beauty.
And that is one of the Great Unresolved Mysteries. Much ink has been spilt trying to resolve that unresolvable.
You pays your money and yer takes your choice.
I think it is never clarified if Joelle is indeed disfigured or not, but the veil may be a consequence of her upbringing, nevertheless.
I understood the acid story to be true because of this on p. 223:
…which seems to be part of omniscient narration, although that narrator has admitted to being not entirely omniscient. Maybe there’s another reason to doubt it that I’ve missed.
It’s possible that Orin did dodge some acid, but that doesn’t necessarily prove that said acid hit Joelle once it passed Orin.
Though I say this because I prefer the idea that Joelle is disfigured by unspeakable beauty rather than unspeakably disfigured by acid.
It seems pretty clear on page 795 that the acid hits Joelle: “. . . the mother had hurled the low-PH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis – . . . – open for a direct hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity.”
Connie, I think the others are pointing out that the account on p. 795 is second-hand, and therefore possibly unreliable. We also have Joelle at another time telling Gately (right? Gately?) that her deformity is actually beauty. So it’s not 100% clear whether Joelle told the truth to Molly or to Gately.
I think the ambiguity is intentional, and so while we all might have an opinion, there can be legitimate differences from one reading and another. I agree with Jon the book is more interesting if both possibilities are open.
There is a really great post over at Infinite Detox about Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa which is mentioned in IJ a few times.
In the sculpture, Bernini is portraying St. Teresa being stabbed by an angel. According to her account, the experience is indistinguishable from pleasure or pain. The Ecstasy she feels from God’s spear tip is both pain and orgasmic ecstasy at the same time.
In this way, JvD could be disfigured and hideously beautiful at the same time. By making it indeterminate, I think DFW is drawing a comparison between St. Teresa’s Ecstasy, JvD’s “disfigurement,” and entertainment itself, which is both pleasurable and destructive at the same time.
// Jason
Right, but these are conflicting stories. Joelle may either be telling the truth or covering for an acid-related deformity when she says she’s so beautiful it’s debilitating. By that same token, when Madame Psychosis’ history is recounted by Molly Notkin, it is according to her sources, which may or may not be unreliable. And, considering how poorly-conceived-of President Gentle’s administration appears to be, it’s possible that this intel isn’t true.
Point being, it’s never explicitly said which side of the coin Joelle is on, and as earlier comments point out, it seems DFW’s left it up to the reader’s discretion.
I’m completely in favor of preserving the ambiguity of this issue, but just for my own clarity, isn’t Molly’s source Joelle herself? My impression is that Joelle has told different stories to different people. Did Molly get that info from someone else?
SELF-SERVING ASIDE: There is a looming, unresolved question at the end of my novel, Cast of Shadows. When people ask what the truth is, I tell them if it isn’t in the text, I don’t know. If pressed I confess that I actually inserted my opinion very subtly into the book and I’ll show them where that is, but I’ll also insist that it’s only my opinion. The reader is free to come to whatever conclusion they like,
I’d say about a third of readers I’ve met really dig that. It drives the other 67% bat-piss crazy.
It seems to me that Medusa vs the Odalisque is a parallel for Joelle…it doesnt matter whether she is hideously deformed or beautiful beyond comprehension doesn’t matter. The result is the same.
Reading on, I actually think there’s a pretty definite answer to this question on p. 940, or at least something approaching a preponderance of the evidence. Maybe not everyone would find it completely conclusive, but I’m convinced, barring some other revelation.
Beautiful analysis. You’ve really pulled together some neat threads here and have enriched my reading of the book. Many thanks.
Keven: This is a damn excellent post. After I read the above excerpt, the observation suddenly struck me as entirely self-evident yet nevertheless still profoundly insightful. At what point does the axis tip, and for what reasons? Does the creeping nature of the inversion mean that many — perhaps most — people may never really realize what’s happened? The implications of your observation cut to the core of what it means to contemplate the human condition.
After I read the above excerpt, the observation suddenly struck me as entirely self-evident yet nevertheless still profoundly insightful.
Todeswalzer: This observation really gets to the essence of what I’ve felt in reading Wallace’s works. The feeling as I read that his observations are something I’ve known all along but never have been able to fully bring to the surface or articulate.
“At what point does the axis tip, and for what reasons?”
I would guess around about puberty, accompanied by such realizations that your parents are flawed, you’re eventually going to die, you want to sleep with people but can’t, and you will eventually have to get a job and work for a living, with very little recess time.
Wow, pretty disappointing that after all this time I have to skip a commentary because the ‘guide’ unilaterally decides that ‘most of us are ahead of the spoiler line’. Thanks for nothing, dude.
Yipes, I’m sorry, Mike. I didn’t mean to foul up your IS day. I embedded a spoiler tag to hide the quote that reveals a plot point. Another quote is also beyond the spoiler line (and might be courtesy of a character you don’t know yet) but it won’t ruin anything for you. Nothing about the commentary is spoilery.
But if you still don’t want to read this post, that’s cool, man. I put a warning right up there at the top just so folks could skip it if they wanted. I really don’t think anyone’s enjoyment of the book will be seriously affected. People have been reading Infinite Jest without asking my opinion for going on 14 years.
Keep coming back!
No biggie Kevin – I didn’t mean to come across so harsh. Keeping my IJ reading on schedule has been motivating and rewarding, with a good part of that reward having been to visit here every single day to check the forums and commentary, spoiler-free. To have that go off the rails with two weeks to go bummed me out. I guess I’m one of the quiet minority who hasn’t posted much but has thoroughly enjoyed this project. My apologies again for my tone.
GNR ruleth the land.
Beautiful post. One of the best of the summer. And great and very appropriate post title (And Matt Evans, thank you for giving props where props are due — a real strange world it would be where everybody instantly recognizes the Berryman references but lets the GNR reference pass in silence — I mean, its not the like author of the book shared a penchant for long hair held back by bandanas with Axl Rose or anything)
Kevin, I really must thank you for your contributions to IS. This post is an enlightening looking glass for IJ. The happy-sad axis of childhood/ adulthood indeed: Alice’s “eat me,” “drink this;” bigger, smaller, falling down the rabbit hole inversions.
I happen to have been reading “Afternoon of the Sex Children” in 2007 Best American Essays (“deciderized” by guest Editor, DFW) when the above was first posted. You may appreciate reading it. Pure serendipity. Thanks again.
[...] lays it all out pretty explicitly in his discussion111 with 11-year-old LaMont Chu, who still might be young enough to have never questioned his own personal right to happiness ever-af…: ‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ [...]
Whether or not Joelle is disfigured is one of my favorite IJ discussions. My personal opinion has always been that she isn’t. I’m on my second time through, around page 315, and I was nearly positive of it! But now I just read Kevin’s page 940 and I feel certain, for the first time since I started rereading, that DFW left this up in the air. Thanks for the great discussion, all.