IJ study archive

Under the Veil: The Two-Way Question of Joelle's Face

essay

A fellowship of the hidden

Joelle van Dyne arrives at Ennet House already covered. The veil is the first thing the book tells you about her and the last thing it will let you past: a linen screen worn in front of a face the novel spends a thousand pages declining to certify. She belongs to the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, an organization built on the single counterintuitive discipline of learning to "hide openly" (scene 104, p. 535). The veil is not a disguise so much as a uniform, "a Type and a Symbol" (scene 104, p. 534) donned in a ceremony that admits powerlessness not over a Substance but over the need to be unseen; what it offers Joelle, in her own words, is the condition of "a voice among other voices, invisible, equal, no different, hidden" (scene 104, p. 535).

The crucial fact about the Union sits in its own founding circular, which Joelle reads over the air in the last days of her broadcasting life. It welcomes "The fatally pulchritudinous: Welcome." in the same breath as the maimed, calling out to "Medusas and odalisques both: Come find common ground." and inviting all of them to "Come don the veil of the type and token" (scene 053, p. 190). Read that charter carefully and you notice what it refuses to do: it promises nothing about any member's face. The monster and the beauty are issued the same cloth. The book has, in other words, engineered the very institution that hides Joelle so that membership can never tell you which kind of hidden she is. What most readers remember is that Joelle is disfigured. What the text actually states, at the level of its own machinery, is that she is covered, and that the covering was designed to work the same way whether there is horror underneath it or radiance.

Account one: the acid

There is one thing the book does settle, and it settles it early and outside of anyone's testimony. Inside Joelle's own remembering, Orin Incandenza is "dodger of flung acid extraordinaire" (scene 060, p. 223), and her biography is dated, by her own focalized narration, to the epoch "after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene" (scene 060, p. 225). An acid throw heavy enough to become the definite article of her own life story, followed at once by the boyfriend's exit and by the taking of the veil, with no page anywhere hinting the flask missed. The acid was real, and it did not miss. It harmed her.

What it did to her face is a different sentence, and it rests almost entirely on a single, compromised witness. The complete story, the one with the mechanism in it, is delivered nowhere in Joelle's own three long scenes of interiority; it is delivered by Molly Notkin, under interrogation, nearly two hundred pages from the end, as comic bullet-point hearsay. It was, Notkin deposes, "on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed herself with a kitchen-appliance" (scene 159, p. 791) that "the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who'd reflexively ducked" (scene 159, p. 795), and Orin, "right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes," ducked too, leaving Joelle "open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity" (scene 159, p. 795). Notkin's deposition asserts flatly that Joelle was left "hideously and improbably deformed" and that her Union membership was "no kind of metaphor or ruse" (scene 159, p. 791). It is a vivid, internally coherent account. It is also the only complete one, and its teller has problems.

The two halves of the account hold at different strengths, and this essay keeps them apart. That the acid harmed Joelle is settled as plain reading. That the harm was a ruined face is not settled: it comes through Notkin alone, and Notkin is a witness too compromised to carry it by herself. Inside the engineered gap the book then opens over the face, the disfigurement reading is the one under the least strain: both the plain acid-disfigured account and the composite reading, in which Joelle was beautiful and then genuinely deformed, fit the pages best, while the face itself stays something the text refuses to confirm.

Account two: the beauty, and the witness

The rival reading is that there is no ruin under the linen at all, only a face so beautiful it disables the people who look at it. This is the too-lethally-beautiful Joelle, the "P.G.O.A.T." of Academy legend, and it is worth being precise about who carries it, because the book is.

Its loudest carrier is Joelle herself, and she carries it as a performance she later disowns. To Gately, in the founding night-office conversation, she gives the formula straight: "I am so beautiful I am deformed" (scene 104, p. 538), "deformed with beauty" (scene 104, p. 538). But in her final interrogation she takes the same line back, naming it as a borrowed joke: "I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand" (scene 178, p. 941), a bit she got from one of Jim's films: "It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing" (scene 178, p. 941). The too-beautiful story, in the only place its own author speaks about it, is confessed to be a pose. The too-beautiful-unmarred reading strains for exactly this reason: its star witness is on record inventing it.

Its other carrier is Molly Notkin, and Notkin does not so much argue the beauty as leave it hanging beside the horror. Her deposition marks the beauty half as hearsay from the start, "the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis" (scene 159, p. 791), and her account of Joelle's girlhood makes her, before the acid, "almost freakishly beautiful" (scene 159, p. 792). Notkin's own maximal description of the face ends up disposing of it by disjunction rather than settling it. And here the archive's caution about Notkin becomes the point rather than a footnote. She is the sole source for the whole mechanism, and she is a witness who "was not there, may never have seen" the face at all, in the book-length study's phrase (Plank, pp. 107-108); by her own admission she has seen Joelle naked but never unveiled, "the real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had seen her naked" (scene 159, p. 788); and, deposing about her closest friend, she gets the friend's legal name wrong, insisting it is "Lucille Duquette" (scene 159, p. 795) when the reader has every reason to think otherwise. Her testimony has to be weighed accordingly, and her reliability stays an open question: she is neither convicted nor cleared. She is the hinge on which the entire two-way question turns, and she is precisely the witness the book made least able to bear the weight.

The symmetry

Here is the essay's spine, and the reason the veil is the novel's most elegant trap rather than merely its most withheld fact: the veil works identically under both readings. A face too ruined to look at and a face too beautiful to look at produce the same linen, the same fellowship, the same "hide openly," the same voice on the radio. Whichever is true, Joelle's engineered invisibility is unchanged. The book has built a device whose function is independent of the fact it conceals, which is another way of saying it has made your uncertainty structural rather than accidental.

And it works to keep that uncertainty exactly where it is. The narration walks up to the unveiled face repeatedly and looks away every time. At the mirror before her overdose it returns not a face-state but a quality of attention: "Her unveiled face in the dirty lit mirror is shocking in the intensity of its absorption" (scene 062, p. 238). A moment later, veil off and glass faced, it returns only a hedged, legend-fused superlative, "deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time" (scene 062, p. 239), the "maybe" doing all the work. At Gately's bedside the veil hangs as "a smooth white screen with nothing behind it" (scene 166, p. 857). During the shooting the one glimpse under the hem is aggressively ordinary, "what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip" (scene 120, p. 617), in the same stretch that gives you both a "spectacularly undeformed thigh" and Erdedy's belief that he is looking at "this deformed veiled girl" (scene 120, p. 614), the two verdicts cohabiting one paragraph. Even Gately's fever-dreams are dealt one face per camp: in one the dream-woman lifts the veil onto "the unveiled historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl" (scene 164, p. 847), and in another onto an angel of total female radiance. One sleeper, one dream apiece. Asked the question directly and in private, late in his life, Wallace declined to answer it.

None of this is omission; it is performance. A narration that itemizes deformity clinically everywhere else, and that lives inside Joelle's head for scene after scene, demonstrates over and over that it could look, and declines. This is why the face reads as undecidable by design, and the undecidability has a precise scope: it covers the post-acid face-state alone, not the acid event, which stays settled and harmful. Inside that gap the deformed-endpoint reading carries the least strain; the too-beautiful-unmarred reading strains against its own inventor's confession; and the most radical reading, that nothing happened and Notkin invented the acid, collides with the pages outside her channel. The book supplies the miracle of a real event and the erasure of its result on the same pages, and settles the result nowhere, on purpose.

A face for radio

Before Ennet House and the veil there was another cover, worn nightly and voluntarily: Madame Psychosis, the persona Joelle broadcasts into the midnight hour, a face for radio in the most literal sense. The audio veil does exactly what the linen one does, subtracts the face and leaves the voice, and Joelle names the wish it serves in the same words as the Union's, the longing to be "a voice among other voices, invisible, equal, no different, hidden" (scene 104, p. 535). Her broadcast opens on a mock-Genesis, "And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void" (scene 053, p. 184), a voice conjuring a world it need not appear in.

The novel's darkest joke on all of this is that the lethal Entertainment is built out of the same subtraction. In the one deposition anyone gives of the film's contents, Joelle is its star, "her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color" (scene 159, p. 788) or dissolved by a strange lens into unrecognizability as any kind of face. The face that could kill you is the face you never see; the cartridge weaponizes the exact withholding the veil performs. That is another essay's dossier; here it is enough that the book's most dangerous object and its most sympathetic woman are hidden by the same means.

The face as demand

Why put a veil at the center of a novel and then refuse, across a thousand pages, to lift it? The fullest answer the archive holds comes from Karl Plank's book-length study, which reads Joelle's veil through Emmanuel Levinas and the ethics of the face. For Levinas the face is the thing that cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge, "present in its refusal to be contained" (Plank, pp. 103-104); to meet a face is to be put under an obligation you did not choose. On that reading the veil is not a puzzle about dermatology but a dramatization of what it costs to be seen and to see: the risk of unmasking, the demand a face makes simply by appearing. Plank declines to decide which account of the deformity is true, and foregrounds precisely the archive's own caution, that the acid story rests on the unreliable Notkin; his interest is that the book keeps the face veiled because the face, veiled, is a question about encounter rather than about damage.

Which returns the question to the reader, where the book has been aiming it all along. This is a novel whose erotic and moral disasters are nearly all disasters of looking, and it builds its one tender plot so that looking never happens. You are put in exactly Joelle's position and exactly Gately's: you are asked to attend to someone whose face you are never shown, and to decide whether attention requires the face at all. Late in her last broadcast a caller tells Madame Psychosis that the reason he loves the moon is "That it never turns its face away" (scene 053, p. 192). The novel's ideal, held up once and never again, is a face that does not look away. Joelle is the face the book never lets you look at, and the veil, which works the same whether it hides a wound or a radiance, hangs there at the center of the book to make sure you feel the difference between wanting to see and being willing to attend. You never see her face. That was the design.

Sources

This essay takes the archive's settled readings of the veil as given rather than re-arguing them, and anchors its novel quotations inline by scene and page. What it draws on:

The novel's own words on the veil, the face, and the deformity are gathered on the disability and deformity and film and optics quotation pages.

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