what the veil covers (deformity / beauty / nothing / undecidable)
undecidable-by-design
This asks what lies behind the veil Joelle wears: hideous acid-scarring, a beauty too great to look at, or nothing the reader is ever allowed to settle. It is the novel's most evenly divided face-off, because the text supplies evidence for disfigurement and for unmarred beauty and then, many readers argue, engineers the answer out of reach on purpose.
Scenes
- Scene 053: madame psychosis show
- Scene 058: joelle last walk
- Scene 060: joelle walk uhid
- Scene 062: notkin party joelle overdose
- Scene 120: gately shot nucks
- Scene 150: joelle cleaning incandenza thanksgiving
- Scene 159: notkin spills
- Scene 161: gately hospital visitors
- Scene 166: joelle visits gately abiding
- Scene 178: joelle q interview master
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: Joelle's Veil and Face. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Theories on this crux
| Reading | Verdict |
|---|---|
| The veil question — deformed, too beautiful, both in sequence, or deliberately undecidable | favored |
Discussed in
- Community book club 2
- Community book club 4
- Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- Hardcore Literature IJ Lecture II: In the Zone (pp. 233–489) — the Entertainment as womb-return, Joelle's veil and overdose, flow states, AA clichés, the freedom debate, Eschaton
- Hardcore Literature IJ lecture III: The Map is Not the Territory (pages 489–795)
- I Hate Infinite Jest ep. XXXII (pp. 938–981, the end) — guest Tim Eastwood: the ending-theories finale — the Lyle-toothbrush DMZ walkthrough, the single-quote narrator argument, and the Marathe ER identification
- IJ Book Club Ep. 12: Cattle Ranching East of Atlantic City — the Ennet House introduction worked (pp. ~270–283): narrator fingerprints, the ETA/AA training-wheels mirror, the Lenz/Fackelmann rhyme
- IJ Book Club Ep. 16: You can't get drunk and you can't get sober — the White Flag / Boston AA chapter (pp. ~343–379)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 28 (S2 Ep 8): Ever felt like PT Krause, but looked like PT Krause? — Poor Tony resurrected, the anhedonia core, and the wraith learns where the DMZ is (pp. ~689–706)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 33 (S2 Ep 13): Hey Hal? — the bedside confession, the meetings hunt, footnote country (the fake equation, the Tenuate swap), and the Molly Notkin technical interview (pp. ~782–808)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 46 (S3 Ep 12): You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Wanna Know — endnote-24 filmography walkthrough + Hal on the floor (pp. ~948–951)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 47 (S3 Ep 14 by feed position; untitled beyond the numbering — feed blurb: Does anyone know?): The ER woman is Marathe argued in full, the left/right handedness code, Hal's secondhand childhood on the viewing-room floor, Mikey as the last addict interlude, and the A.D.A.'s ninth step (pp. ~954–964)
- IJ Book Club S2 Ep. 10: The Way We Construct Meaning from Reality — the Poor Tony chase, the AFR provenance chain, Joelle's teeth dream, the finger-saw matrix (pp. ~719–736)
- IJ Book Club S2 Ep. 5: Tragedy Narrowly Averted — the Christ-typology email for the Gately fight, the cafeteria scene, Steeply's father and M*A*S*H, Day's billowing shape (pp. ~627–651)
- IJ Book Club S2 Ep. 9: That Man with the Rubber Fist — Tim E.'s system session: the toothbrush dosing theory, the Lyle/JOI reading, Joelle's CA meeting, Lenz and the scuttle chain (pp. ~706–~720)
- Infinite Cast Part 67: Marathe & Steeply, Joelle & Don (pp. 528–538) — commentary segment (~21 min): believing I-am-deformed-with-beauty, the veil as filter, UHID vs AA
- Infinite Jest Extraction
- Infinite Notes — co-(re)-reading notes for Infinite Jest
- Overdue Ep. 200: Infinite Jest — Andrew's deadline read, the Swartz architecture arriving secondhand via chronology blog posts, and a pre-election Gentle/Trump reading (recorded September 2016)
- The Fact of the Cage: Reading and Redemption in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- The Great Concavity Ep. 19: first-time Infinite Jest readers — Rachel Laird & Amy Peltier on finishing the book (recorded ~late summer 2016)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 32: Shazia Ramji — guiding three IJ group reads (Poor Yorick Summer, Sacred Jest, Ennet House), poetry and Wallace, and Gravity's Rainbow parallels (recorded ~fall 2017)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 40: Greg Carlisle — Elegant Complexity, the shadowed-circle structure, and answering IJ's big questions with Occam's razor (recorded ~mid-September 2018)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 46: Marshall Boswell — The Wallace Effect, the anxiety of Wallace's influence, and the anti-Wallace backlash (recorded ~February 2019)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 58: Chris Via (Leaf by Leaf) — an IJ reread ten years on: purge-not-preen, the p. 31 head clue, and the big-book long game (recorded ~early 2021)
- Three Guardian DFW pieces: Leith's 'IJ at 20' explainer, D.T. Max contra St. Dave, Colin Barrett's 'My Hero'
- What Happens in Infinite Jest — My Own Personal Theory, Parts One–Four (an online forum)
- an online forum — full-history archive digest