levingard wrote:
I'm of the camp that Molly Notkin isn't trustworthy (and also of the camp that Joelle wasn't hit by acid, but the two don't necessarily go together). The only parts of her interview that rang true seemed to be the ones that were corroborated by other parts of the book. I felt a bit like that was an underlying message of the scene being presented as an interrogation, and with the end note that precedes the start of the interview. For example, we know that Joelle was in IJ, but no one else has yet mentioned her being either nude or pregnant in it. Also, Notkin says that her face was blocked out, but again that's not something that anyone else has said, and not something (I think) that anyone could even know, certainly Joelle wouldn't know if that was true or not.
I think that Molly is being as truthful as she can (I agree that Joelle probably lied a great deal to her), but I do agree that Joelle isn't acid-scarred under that veil. Plenty of what she (Molly) described about Infinite Jest seemed to be confirmed by Don Gately's dream of Madame Psychosis-as-mother-as-death, which implies that there are ways for us to know things that we shouldn't know, or at least things that only J.O.I. should know. (Mind-rape, say.)
My personal stance is that the acid *was* flung in her face (which explains Orin's acid-dodging experience), but that the acid somehow enhanced her beauty, disfiguring her in that fatally pulchritudinous way. (After all, she is "improbably" deformed.)
However, I think Wallace is pulling off a sort of Schroedinger double-standard here: that is, she is both the Medusa *AND* the Odalesque, so long as that veil remains on. Given the lack of facts, it is possible to have multiple accurate interpretations, a perceptual trick that actually allows Wallace to expand the limits of his novel in a far more infinite manner (that is, who is to say that there are only two sides to the coin, and not three? or four?).
Loving it!