Joelle's Q-interview about the Master (p. 941)
‘When he talked about this 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 the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I’d gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. 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.
Context
Joelle's clearest self-reading anywhere in the novel: the lethal-beauty pose was her own entertainment-myth, cribbed from JOI's Medusa-Odalisk film — and even inside the fellowship built on open hiding she used the veil to hide from the question, "in denial about the deformity itself." Hiding by hiddenness is U.H.I.D.'s official doctrine turned symptom; and the Entertainment's whole "too perfect to release" legend, she says, was Jim riffing on her joke — the samizdat's lethality and her veil have the same private genealogy.