Madame Psychosis (IJ post #1)
Oct. 20th, 2008 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zenithblueThis 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?
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?
