This is the second of a four-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: What do you think happened to Hal?
Avery Edison: I think it was the withdrawal from Bob Hope that did him in — all that mold stuff has to be a red herring, since we never got a 14-page footnote on the history of mold or something. I must confess that I’m actually quite happy for Hal. We left him as we was beginning to experience actual human emotion, and I think that’s great progress for him.
Eden M. Kennedy: I want to think Hal viewed the Entertainment but got pried away from it before he’d lost all sentience. If that’s the case, then I don’t exactly know what the point of trying to get him into college would be, but I imagine CT would have some desperate ideas about rehabilitation.
Which also makes me wonder about that early scene where Himself thinks that Hal can’t speak, but Hal insists later in a conversation with Mario, I believe, that he could and did speak to his father — that’s still a dangler for me. Was JOI occasionally so immersed in himself that he’d lost all connection with what was happening right in front of him? I think that’s definitely possible, but that scene could also just stand for a father and son’s inability to connect on a basic level. Who knows.
Kevin Guilfoile: I’ve only read this book once, obviously, but I think we’re initially supposed to consider a number of possibilities involving drugs and John Wayne and Gately and the search for the entertainment. Maybe further readings might help you hone in on the answer, and struggling with what happened between the last page and the first is part of the intended experience. I certainly enjoyed this thorough attempt to explain it.
EMK: That link is amazing, Kevin. I have a lot of catching up to do with the bloggers who were posting on their own sites all summer.
Matthew Baldwin: I’ve always been comfortable with non-resolutions; for instance, I loved the ending of that television show with no ending. (I can’t mention it by name because then people who haven’t seen the finale will know that there’s no ending, but people who have seen the non-ending-ending know the show of which I speak.)
And so while I enjoy reading and pondering the theories, I am content to not know what happened to Hal. In fact, were someone to make an ironclad argument for a specific hypothesis (and that article Kevin linked to comes close), my reaction would likely be disappointment. It would be like opening the box and finding the cat dead.
IS: Do you feel bad about Orin’s fate?
AE: Orin certainly isn’t the nicest character in the book but he’s far from the nastiest, either, and so I think the jar of bugs was far too cruel a punishment for him. Especially given the knowledge that the A.F.R aren’t the kind of people who just let a victim live.
KG: You have to be cruel to your darlings, man. That’s the literary biz.
EMK: I’m not sure the punishment fit the crime, no. But again, wheelchair assassins are creative and they seem to have a lot of grudges, so you could see how a bunch of legless men might have issues with a man with a really talented foot.
MB: I was just thrilled to make the “Do it to her!” / 1984 connection. It felt like a small mercy on the part of Wallace. I can picture him sitting at his typewriter, six pages from the end of his three-ream manuscript and thinking “ah what the hell, I’ll stick an easy literary allusion here in case some poor sap missed the other 47,000.”
IS: What about the other unanswered questions. Was Joelle truly disfigured? Was the wraith real?
AE: I’ve spoken way too much about how annoyed I was at the wraith’s appearance toward the end of the book, but as much as it irritates me that DFW felt it necessary to put ghosts in his book, I do believe that there’s no other likely way that Gately could have received those words and had those conversations with himself. I hope that a second reading of IJ will maybe illuminate some precedent for the wraith that I didn’t see before, and maybe calm my temper about the whole thing.
MB: By the way Avery, I am 100% behind you on the ghost-annoyance. I felt exactly the same way, that the sudden injection of the supernatural was an abuse of my willingness to suspend disbelief. I didn’t leap to your defense earlier because I thought that Wallace would leave open the possibility that it was all in Gately’s head, but “bed on the ceiling” ended that hope.
EMK: I thought the wraith was real, yes. I loved that part not just because I’m not too prickly about the supernatural, but because I trust that DFW wasn’t a kook, and he explored Gately’s existence in a realm somewhere between life and death using a sort of quantum view (as I understand it, in that on the subatomic level things behave in wonderfully inexplicable ways). A wraith also provides an explanation for beds adhering to the ceiling and whatnot.
KG: Yeah, once again you have to go through a lot of machinations to try to come with a scenario in which the wraith isn’t real. But we talked a little bit about the tonal imbalances that are almost inevitable in a project of this size. I think that’s what throws some people–that the wraith clashes with the incredibly realist sections of the book. Still it’s entirely consistent with the more absurdist parts.
AE: I’m torn on Joelle’s disfigurement. The description of the lead-up to the acid-throwing seemed very lucid and convincing, but I love the idea of her being “deformed by beauty”. It’s tough to choose.
KG: I’m convinced of her actual disfigurement.
MB: As am I.
KG: I think it’s purposely a little bit vague–Wallace wants you to contemplate both possibilities–but in the end it seems pretty clear where the balance of the evidence is. To Avery’s point, though, the idea of Joelle’s being “deformed by beauty” does exist, even if she’s actually deformed. You don’t have to choose. The possibility exists.
EMK: Kevin’s described my dilemma exactly: I was enthralled with the idea of physical perfection being not a gift but instead a hideous deformity, and that Joelle had the self-awareness to want not only to protect herself from the self-consciousness other people’s reaction to her face forced her into, but to protect other people from having their minds blown by looking at her. Then you can see that her mother throwing acid on her face just gave her a different deformity — not necessarily any better or worse, just a deformity that her mother was more comfortable with. Gah.
Well, here’s my minor annoyance: a wraith is different than ghost. A ghost is a dead person’s disembodied spirit, but a wraith is an apparition of a living person seen just before death. Does that mean JOI is still alive? Maybe, but I think DFW was more interested in the root of the word – an old Norse word meaning to guard (or ward), like a guardian angel. The deeper question is why JOI would be drawn to Gately? One addict recognizing the other? Enough so to act as his guardian angel?
Matt, although really wouldn’t it be Gately who would do better as a Guardian than JOI? Maybe JOI knew he himself would be a terrible Guardian for Hal and so he sought out Gately to take his place?
I thought that was a weird word choice, as well, especially because it’s not one that would have occurred to Gately. But I think the original meaning (like in Shakespeare’s time, maybe) might have been closer to ghost. I think the concept of a wraith as an apparition of someone who is about to die is something that might have evolved. But I’m not sure why I have that impression.
First OED citation using that sense is from a 1513 Virgil translation, another citation from 1585. A 1597 book on Daemonology specifically says “These kindes of spirites, when they appeare in the shaddow of a person..to die, to his friendes,..are called Wraithes in our language.” Lots of great synonyms for the concept, too: a shadow, a fetch, “the Irish Taibhshe or Death’s Messenger”, doppelganger, “In Ireland, ‘a fetch’ is the supernatural facsimile of some individual, which comes to ensure to its original a happy longevity, or immediate dissolution; if seen in the morning, the one event is predicted; if in the evening, the other.”
Interesting. According to this “wraith” appears twice in that 1513 Virgil translation, once to mean a regular ghost and once to mean a portent of death.
I wonder if Wallace was simply uncomfortable with using the word ghost. When I think about replacing “wraith” with “ghost” in the text, it doesn’t seem to fit, tonally. It just feels a bit Scooby-Doo.
Well, it’s an important issue for the text. In the Hamlet parallel, the ghost of King Hamlet is one of the most famous of all Shakespearean characters – supposedly the only acting role Shakespeare himself took in one of his plays. There are weird things going on in the narration of the novel Infinite Jest. At times, it’s unclear who the narrator is, or if the narrator is present, but removed. Is Wallace himself inhabiting the wraith to narrate portions of the novel? Does the wraith portend Gately’s death? Hamlet himself doubts the Ghost’s honesty/authenticity. He initially tells Horatio that the Ghost really is his father, but then equivocates and blames some of his inaction on his inability to determine whether or not he should trust the Ghost. So here you have the hero of inaction (Hal) wanting to avenge the death of his father (JOI), but Hal’s father’s enemy was Himself. Who does Hal kill in return? Orin, I believe, tries to avenge his mother’s infidelity against his father through his own affairs and also by sending his father’s lethal entertainment to the Medical Attache (likely Hal’s biological father). Anyway, it’s all intertwined in the writhing weave.
I’m down with all that Matt (although I’m not sure about the idea that the wraith portends Gately’s death), and clearly having chosen Hamlet as an inspiration, a ghost had to be in the offing. But where I once thought the choice of the word “wraith” was significant, I’m now inclined to think the only significance might be that when you look up “ghost” in the thesaurus, “wraith” is like your third option.
It could simply be that he meant its appearance to be portentous of events, not necessarily death. It’s interesting to think on, though.
Agreeing with Matt’s points, but netting out with Kevin and appreciating how clear the difference is when you reference Greek lit against a stoned crime-fighting cartoon dog. I mean, Avery’s still ticked off at ‘wraith’; how many more people would’ve thrown down the book in disgust if he’d used ‘ghost’?
As erudite as Wallace was, he was also a bit of a “search for the most obscure synonym even if the second-longest word will do” kind of guy.
Plus, if my character is being visited in my hospital bed by a supernatural apparition, plagued by pain and general distrust in his own brain, I’d rather the spirit call itself a wraith than a ghost, too. Call it JOI’s disguise for Gately. A Greek chorus mask. An oracle’s cloak. Whatever it takes to get Gately and the reader to suspend a little more disbelief.
I think naptime writing and others who point to the different impression “wraith” leaves on the average reader vs “ghost” are on the right track. While I’m sure Hal could enlighten us by listing all the differing connotations of the word in different scholarly sources, and the wraith here would resonate with many of these, it (the word “wraith”) ultimately falls into the same category as so many other mythic/fantasy creatures (elf, gnome, troll, etc) that I long ago lost track of the “right” definition of (are elves tall Tolkein creatures or impish Rowling creatures? and god forbid you get trapped in a conversation with someone who really really cares one way or the other! Just wait until the group is half way through Dracula next month and partisans of Anne Rice or Twilight or whatever start in with the sniping about garlic or sparkling in the sun or whatever!)
And still kinda befuddled by the anger at the wraith at all, considering the whole quantum thing that, as Eden mentions, DFW laid out as a perfectly reasonable way out for those who really want to avoid granting any quarter to the supernatural as a part of the IJ equation in favor of a more “sci-fi” or “speculative” vein in the book.
Why would JOI be drawn to Gately?
I postulate that Himself was probably following Joelle. The wraith appears to Gately after Joelle’s thoughts have been on Don for awhile. If the Wraith had read those thoughts, having trusted Joelle in life, he might trust her judgment on men enough to enlist Gately as a strong man.
Based on that link (which I do like, by the way), I have to wonder how Orin knew what the Entertainment was and what it would do to people. It seems most likely that Orin is the mailer, but there’s no evidence of him “testing” people with it or anything like that. So why would he send it out? Any thoughts?
That link was so satisfying. I’m sure it has sparked and will spark hundreds of arguments, but I’m in law school, and I don’t have time to read this book again from the beginning, so I love that someone did all that work for me. Does this make me lazy? Yes. Would it be even more gratifying if I had figured some it out on my own? Sure. But I’ll take this. 🙂
” Was JOI occasionally so immersed in himself that he’d lost all connection with what was happening right in front of him? ” But I don’t think that it’s binary … the disconnect could have been literal or figurative and still work.
That’s my reading, at least. And it would be consistent with the model of addiction that counts “Self-Will Run Riot” as a key symptom of the Disease.
I had a problem with the Wraith until I thought back on some of my own fever dreams where size and proportion would flip-flip Alice In Wonderland-style. I read the Wraith as the manifestation of some inner dialogue Gately was having and while it is a little deus ex machina, I kind of felt like the non-Gately vocabulary in the early part of his convalescence was probably recordings of JvD and the Madam Psychosis show. Several references were made throughout the book to various characters making recordings, so it wouldn’t be completely out of the realm of possibilities.
Am I the only one who thinks that nothing happened to Hal and it is just everyone else who can’t understand him?
NewHavenJester: I was beginning to wonder the same thing! The suggestion that Hal is finally in touch with himself, and for that reason is seen as incomprehensible to everyone else, strikes me as the most logical explanation of the opening scene.
I had this weird thought that Joelle had been disfigured by the acid, but in some crazy fluke she was disfigured more beautiful than she already was. Probably a long shot; I loved the wraith scenes, etymology aside, and for a moment thought there was some sort of character conjoining happening, that like Gately was becoming Hal and vice versa (Gately being visited by the wraith-JOI, Hal going into recovery) which led me down a decidedly Lynchian path, esp. Lynch’s late nineties output that featured a lot of strange character transmutations. Also was reading a lot of Hamlet into the Wraith-visitation scenes; is it safe to assume that JOI was not a suicide? That C.T., DFW’s Claudius, murdered him?
I tend to agree that withdrawal from Bob Hope was the trigger for Hal’s problems, like the Bob Hope was preventing Hal from dealing with a lot of PTSD like post-JOI suicide symptoms. I like this theory because it has a certain symmetry with what happened to JOI after he stopped drinking. “Sins” of the father get passed down to the son, etc.
The other reason I like this theory is that I dislike all DMZ theories. I always felt that when DFW was exploring core emotional truths, he tended to do so in realist ways, even while embedded in a world full of the fantastic and the absurd.
Nicely said. I agree.
not sure how the DMZ and/or mold-eaten-as-child theories are incompatible with the realistic portrayal of “core emotional truths” of Hal’s overall situation, his Bob withdrawl, his anhedonia, or other things. I mean, Mario’s physical nature, which strains even if it doesn’t break realist parameters, doesn’t undercut the core emotional truths that people find in his approach to the world, Marathe’s love for his wife is touching even as her skullless feral-baby history is absurd, and even smaller anecdotes –like Barry Loach’s story or that of the woman with the stillborn baby, among others — seem to have quite strong emotional resonance and empathetic response by most readers despite their essentially over-the-top shaggy-dog-story nature as narratives. I don’t see an either/or here, when it comes to the good ol’ A.A. “Identification.”
Hal puts his head out the bathroom window on page 864, and one page later he says “I brought my head back in when I could no longer feel my face.” His odd symptoms begin immediately after this. Still on p. 865, he begins his conversation with Stice, who says, “Your voice. Shoot, are you crying? What’s the matter?” and Hal is confused because he thinks his voice had been “neutral.” From this point on, Hal is clearly having trouble controlling his face and voice.
I don’t think Hal took (or was given) the DMZ. I think the missing drugs from the ceiling panel was part of the evidence found to expel Pemulis. I think the pot withdrawal is mainly at fault, but there seems to be some kind of suggestion that he also froze his face! Crazy, I know, but it goes along with the idea that at the same time that he is physically frozen, he is emotionally unfrozen.
A whole bunch of thoughts…
1) Orin is alive in The Year of Glad – he isn’t killed by the AFR. It’s mentioned in the first section.
2) I’m confused about a few points in the comments but can’t respond directly to them, for some reason. What evidence is there that Hal is likely the medical attache’s son? I missed this. Also, when does Hal feel like he wants to avenge his father’s death?
3) I’m always confused when people want to stick to rigid guidelines for a book. Like, why can’t the book be both absurdist and realistic? Isn’t life that way? I just feel like if you have a set idea in mind of how a book “should” be, in terms of form, style, etc, you’re usually going to be disappointed… and you’ll miss out on a lot of meaningful work.
4) I’m struggling to figure out if Hal is better off in the beginning of the book or not. My gut says yes (he’s in touch with his emotions!) but I can’t decide – JOI’s wraith says it’s worse to be unable to communicate (like the people who watched IJ) than to have faulty communication.
2) Hal has a dark complexion (like the Near Eastern Medical Attache’s) and early on JOI (disguised as a professional conversationalist tells Hall: “that your blithe inattention to your own dear grammatical mother’s cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attaches” and on p. 957: “the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing.” The Attaché receives the lethal cartridge on the anniversary of Himself’s death and the return address on the package says HAPPY ANNIVERSARY! I think all the connections are there for the making.
These incorrect “close” readings have gone too far. I don’t know how one can derive that conclusion from the evidence you provided.
On pg 33, YDAU, it mentions that the medical attache is 37 and that this was his first trip back to the U.S.A. since completing his residency eight years ago. We learn later on pg 91, that the Moms cavorted with this dude when she was at Brandeis and he was doing his residency, so since Hal is age 17 in the YDAU, it’s impossible that this attache fellow is his father unless he did a residency that was abnormally long and he started said residency around the age of 20.
Btw, what coloration do you think an Incandenza would have?
And, your strange conjecture would also make nonsensical one of the most sublime statements in IJ, from pg 32: “Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.”
He has a dark complexion, the only son that does. I thought that made him the only one that looked like JOI.
Huh, interesting. I definitely thought the attache had been with Avril and the “Happy Anniversary” was Orin’s way of saying “Fuck you” but I didn’t come to the same conclusions about Hal’s real father. I see Hal and JOI has being similar in so many ways – I can’t imagine them NOT being related. I don’t think the examples you cited are enough to change my mind.
But I’ll disagree with the comment below this and say that I don’t think there can be an “incorrect” reading of the book. It is what you make of it. That’s the beauty of it. All interpretations are correct.
As a practicing militant prescriptive: if there are no incorrect readings, that would make MEANING very difficult indeed. Maybe there is a private language after all.
Yeah, I’m not sure I buy the attache as Hal’s father. It had never occurred to me. At one point, the book does say that Hal’s the only person in his family who looks vaguely ethnic. But then it also says that he’s got Pima Indian blood on (I think) his dad’s side. Traits jump generations sometimes.
I took JOI’s mention of the many medical attaches to be a function of his own mania at the time, an exaggeration at best and paranoia at worst (though to be fair, it’s not like Avril’s beyond reproach or suspicion). Still, if she did cavort with 30 or more attaches, that kind of narrows down the odds of the one being Hal’s dad.
The Happy Anniversary thing I always took to be a mistranslation perpetrated by someone whose French to English was poor. Anniversaire = birthday and not anniversary. I’ve assumed that the tagline was affixed to the package to arouse interest and make it seem innocuous (a la the I Love You email virus of a few years ago). I could see the Antitois making such a mistake, for example. That it arrives on the anniversary of Himself’s death seems awfully convenient, though, and more supportive of your theory.
Anyway, though the attache as Hal’s father had oddly never occurred to me, I think it’s defensible, if not necessarily quite as clear cut as you suggest.
Another interesting theory is that Hal somehow synthesized DMZ internally, from the original mold he ingested as a child: http://dfan.org/jest.txt
My thoughts on Joelle: I find that I can’t think of her as disfigured. Because DFW already named her PGOAT (could there be a less flattering acronym?) and had her free basing cocaine. She’s gotta be hit by acid too? I think it’s not very interesting if she joined that group for a “normal”, “real” deformity. And what was with her spot-on criticism of Orin’s family, yet she was still calling her father ‘my own personal daddy’. That sounded creepy. Unless it’s a southern thing I have never heard of. Except for that weird touch, she was the most intelligent aware person in the book.
I’m not accusing DFW of misogyny, but I don’t like the way he wrote women in this book. It’s okay to have a book only about men, and I’ll still read it. I’m just saying this book was not woman-friendly.
The theory in the link I do like, and it does mostly make sense, but the idea that the Gentle admin. eventually is toppled as a direct result of collab. between Orin and the A.F.R seems only to be supported by the sentence “[Y.G. is] the very last year of Subsidized Time”).
Now I’m not sure (and have not enough time to go leafing through all 1k+ to confirm), but I have an inkling that somewhere DFW mentions (maybe in the Interdependence Day puppet-show segment?) that there was only ever going to be n years of Subsidised Time, and that Year of Glad was always going to be the last Subsidised Year. And if that is the case then it leaves a big issue -what actually happens once the A.F.R get their mitts on the master Entertainment?- which I as yet haven’t seen any plausible speculation about.
Society continues to function (there are clearly still emergency services and universities and tennis matches in the Y.G.), so the impact of Entertainment dissemination obviously has not had catastrophically huge affects on large portions of the population. The O.N.A.N.C.A.A is mentioned more than once in the Y.G, and so logically O.N.A.N. also still exists and has not been brought down by the A.F.R or any other Quebecois groups (my grasp on the whole mind-bogglingly intricate Quebecois Seperatist/Canadian fringe politics situation is admittedly a little shaky after only one reading and a mind-boggled one at that; but I am 65% certain that I’m right in thinking that the A.F.R and others aim to destroy O.N.A.N and Gentle etc.) So… What happens? What is the actual impact of the Entertainment, since the master clearly has been liberated by someone, even if we don’t go along with the link author’s Orin theory? Any ideas, anyone?
My feeling was that the Entertainment was never widely distributed, but that it was used as a bargaining tool to end Subsidized Time and allow Quebec to secede from Canada. I don’t think the AFR aimed to destroy ONAN/Gentle/etc. I think they were working solely for their own self interest: to win independence for Quebec.
Some of the other Canadian terrorist groups had different aims, but the AFR in particular seems to have orchestrated ONAN (through Tine/Luria) to eventually reach their goal… which makes it all the stranger when Marathe talks about American actions in self interest. I mean, they totally screwed over everyone in the Great Concavity/Convexity for their own purposes, right? I still love Marathe though. And kind of hate him.
Orin’s fate is certainly not out of context. Read pages 45-46 again. It says he trapped roaches(his single greatest fear) in “foggy inverted tumblers on the bathroom floor.” Sound familar? Glass cage? Hopefully, I’m not the only one seeing the irony.
Oh yeah, that was the first thing I thought of – I can’t imagine it wasn’t deliberate.
I’m convinced Joelle is truly malformed. A thing that totally gave it away for me — and I recommend that you, on rereading, read the filmography every 150 pages — was the filmography. “Madame Psychosis” features in many of JOI’s productions, and at a sudden point, MP appears in a film (Safe Boating Is No Accident, YTMP; unreleased: “(‘Psychosis”s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller” (see also ‘enigmatic fitness guru’ in that description)) as mangled and archivists quarrel about the year of completion, implying, perhaps, production issues following a change in script — a suddenly malformed beauty does that. After YTMP, every MP-appearance is veiled. Another thing you should read in the filmography is the frequent appearances of many side characters, including the medical attaché, if I’m not mistaken.
[…] which connects page 981 and page 1, comprises about a year in the life of Hal and others; speculation about the contents of this semiotically complex space has been a mini-phenomenon in recent IS […]
My views on each of these questions are included in my last three posts:
Orin’s Fate: Endings I: Orin’s Dread Concluded in which I suggest that Orin’s fate is much like Winston Smith’s;
The Reality of the Wraith: Ghostwords and Lyle the Semi-Wraith, in which I claim that not believing in the wraith is like not believing in the airborne toxic event of White Noise.
What Happens to Hal: Endings II: The Annulation-Text in which I describe the difference between IJ and Harry Potter. I do, really. Among other things.
DMZ is grown on the mold fitviavi (footnote 321), which google suggests you search as fit via vi, which can be translated ‘the way is forged by labor’. This less obvious than the fact that they also call it Madame Psychosis, but it still shows that DMZ is either basically the same thing as the entertainment (in which the way is forged by labor because the woman who gives birth to you is also the one who killed you), or it may be the anti entertainment (for instance, MP in the entertainment kills you, but MP the drug gives birth to you).
So, I think both things happened to Hal, and the DMZ was partially protective against the entertainment (because he is not dead).
As an interesting side note, the phrase fit via vi is from The Aenead, in a scene where Pyrrhus kills Priam, which is a scene performed at Hamlet’s request when he first talks to the players. No idea what that means, though.
I’ve decided that Joelle is not disfigured, mostly because she doesn’t seem like the type of person who would cover her face because of a disfigurement — but she does seem like the type who would want to hide her extreme beauty. I think she got the idea of the veil from JOI.
I was convinced that Joelle was not disfigured for almost the entirety of the book. It wasn’t until she was interrogated on p940 that I started to think otherwise, when she says “When he talked about the thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling – it was always ironic – he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying that the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand … That even in U.H.I.D I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release – it’d paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.”
What convinced me was the passage on page 958, when Joelle is walking back to Ennet House in the snow storm after being questioned, the thinks “She’d been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker of a federal lady anyway.”
I could see the logic of her having this thought only if she was actually horribly disfigured. If she was not disfigured, taking off the veil for Steeply would have undercut her assertion that she believed that the claimed perfection of The Entertainment was an ironic joke by JOI.
And again, as I wrote here earlier, :
The filmography might not be the final word on JvD, but with your latest bit of logic — the thought about unveiling, which also occurred to me as pretty clear — it seems solid evidence that Joelle was well and truly disfigured.
Indeed – very astute observations.
I am doing a 2nd readthrough of the entire book (albeit, at a more
leisurly pace) and I am looking forward to the filmography endnote, which I expect to be even more interesting than on the first passthrough, now that I have better context for it. I’m wondering how much changed all of the MP parts will seem to me, now that my conviction of her disfigurement has flipped.
Weighing in late and don’t know if anyone’s still reading here but I just finished the book (did not start till the beginning of August). So here is my theory, or fantasy if you will, about Joelle’s disfigurement. I think only half of her face was disfigured by the acid leaving a Joker-like effect of half her face being grotesquely beautiful and the other half grotesquely disfigured. There were so many parallel characters and events in the book and this would parallel Pat M. who was half-disfigured as a result of a stroke and whom Gately also finds quite attractive.
Another thing that occurred to me after rereading the first chapter – which I’m now coming to recognize as the real ending of the book – is the mention of Hal, John Wayne and Gately digging up JOI’s head. I’m thinking Gately is there because he’s the only one who can understand Hal -– I agree it seems likely they wind up roommates in the hospital and because of the JOI wraith, Gately is able to understand Hal. I sure wish DFW was still around to ask – not that he would tell us . . . but I can’t help wondering what he intended.
Re Avril’s sexual affairs mentioned by Daryl:
In the book’s first meeting of Marathe and Steeply (bottom of 91 and top of 92), Steeply notes that “different agencies’ background checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse. Particularly a Canadian pulse.”