Hal supine in V.R.5; Pemulis and the lab (pp. 910–911)
‘For while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead’
Context
The film Hal chooses to seek his father in turns out to be about seeking a dead father. Paul Anthony Heaven, thumbless, reading in the "deadening academic monotone that Himself so loved," recites what is plainly Bloom's map of the artist's agon with the ancestor — "the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead" — to a hall of dead-eyed kids who aren't listening, and weeps silently the entire time, tears gathering on his chin. The mise en abyme is exact: Himself made a film in which a man drones out the theory of a son's doomed contest with a beloved dead forebear while grieving uncontrollably, and now the actual grieving son watches it, reaching for the father through a work that stages the reaching's futility. Then "this too began to seem familiar" — Hal half-recognizing his own situation in the father's film without quite letting it land, the reception the wraith wanted forever arriving and not arriving.