Madame Psychosis (IJ post #1)

[zenithblue]

This is my 5th time reading Infinite Jest straight through, and I still don't quite know what to do with Joelle van Dyne. Joelle is the single character that signifies the most to the most different characters. She's Orin's PGOAT, Jim's muse, Mario's nightly lullabye. She's a possible romantic object to Don Gately. She's Actaonizingly pretty, a figure that is prevented from being fully humanized in the eye of most others because she's too disturbingly beautiful (and, later, possibly too disturbingly disfigured, though that's surely up for debate).

In spite of all this objectification, Wallace opts to give her some POV sections, to write her as a fully human character. This in and of itself is not so unusual. Carson McCullers does this very thing in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter--the deaf man who is symbolic of different hopes and dreams to the other characters has his own hopes and dreams, necessarily isolated from all the needy humanity around him. But what I find so odd about Wallace's humanized/objectified Joelle is that she is a symbol within the narrative itself--not just to the other characters within the narrative. Her on-air persona's very name, Madame Psychosis, is the street name of the possibly transcendently destructive drug that I at least have always assumed is Hal's downfall. Joelle wears a veil that allows her to "hide openly," that makes an obvious symbol of her very body. Wallace's unwillingness to reveal, truly and argument-endingly, whether Joelle is really disfigured or spectacularly beautiful beneath the veil makes her into a walking emblem of the book's wrangling with self-consciousness and secrecy. Then, too, in the eponymous "Entertainment" Joelle plays death-as-maternal-figure, some intense pseudo-Freudian archetype--and we're left to wonder if it's Jim's fancy lenswork or Joelle's obliterating beauty or some combination thereof that has the brain-curdling effect upon the viewer. 

The point is, I find Wallace's construction of Joelle as both object, character, and symbol a terribly complex thing. If she is a signifier, she's an endlessly slippery one. It leaves me picking at her scenes trying to figure out what she is, how I should read her. This is not a bad thing, just a complicated thing, and one I've fumbled with for years. Any insights, IJ fans?

Comments

[dorothy-parka.livejournal.com]

and then she possibly had that incestuous relationship with her own personal daddy that maybe caused her mother to hurl the acid at her. AND THEN there is the additional symbolism of "taking the veil" when one becomes a nun, which she does, basically, when she takes the veil. she becomes celibate, so it seems.

Sometimes i wonder if the book infinite jest is also the film--we have a kind of replay of the mother-as-death scene at the end with Joelle and Gately when she's leaning over him, altho she is wearing the veil at that point.

Overall, tho, except for the suicide scene I've always found Joelle (and all the women of IJ, except the faux-woman Helen Steeply) to be maddeningly 2D. They are very little beyond their symbolisms or stereotypes. For example, Avril and Kate Gompert both had potential to be amazingly complex and interesting characters, but they never get the chance.

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree about Avril, but I've always thought poor old K. Gompert is rendered 2D by her own depression, which always felt sadly accurate to me. As for Joelle, I always wanted a few more POV scenes from her than we get...but I find the attempted suicide so compelling it complicates her character quite a bit for me.

But yeah...definitely a book about maleness, in a lot of ways.

[valrus.livejournal.com]

I'm super glad you had the "#1" in this post's title. The connections you pointed out here are the kind that I never notice myself and then have to just goggle at in slack-jawed amazement about the author's brilliance when they're pointed out.

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

To be fair it doesn't help that IJ is so fucking dense and mysterious. There has been plenty that I haven't noticed until a repeat reading.

[te-amo-azul.livejournal.com]

I own a copy and have begun to read. How lovely to have this elegant signpost showing me a promising direction, trustworthy and dear guide.

Hi!

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

I'll be excited to hear what you think!

Talk to you soon--xoxo

[punkybrister69.livejournal.com]

I've been off the grid for a bit, so forgive me for being tardy to the party.
Ah, our Joelle. She is a sneaky little minx indeed... and yet, I'm still inclined to take pretty much everything she says at face value (no pun intended). I really like Joelle, and I wonder if that's part of the trick of her: that Wallace lures me in with her likability just so she can lie to my face and I'll believe her.
Something that's sparking in my mind and by no means fully-developed yet is the idea that Joelle is a collection of different female stereotypes that comes together in some kind of intangible whole. I mean: she's the archetypal mother, she's daddy's little girl, she's the PGOAT, she's the cheerleader, she's Holly Golightly, she's the nun (something I never picked up on--silly me--thanks Marie!), she's the victim... and despite all these things we know about her, we still can't grasp who she REALLY is. Kind of reminds me of that old Berlin song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXc8lxXP59c

So... again--not fully formed here--what if DFW is playing with the idea of bringing the quintessential stereotyped female to life? She's a mirror in the sense that we view her through the eyes of others as a projection of what they want to see (Orin and the PGOAT, JOI's death mother vision), but that's not to say she's without substance... We could say she is the great "signifying nothing," of course, and functions solely as a mirror, but I want to believe about Joelle that it's just no one has gotten to the real her yet. Gately seems to try, and I happen to think that Joelle does tell him the truth (the revelation of her hideous beauty) but Gately's not ready to believe that.
Anyhow: I ramble. More to think about.