Joelle's Q-interview on the master — "There wasn’t anything unendurable or enslaving…"
There wasn’t anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes. Nothing like these actual-perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making something quote too perfect. But as a joke. […] Even in jokes [p. 941] he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for God’s sake. He’d never carry it that far. A joke.’ […] ‘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. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.’
Context
The star's deflationary counter-theory, cited-as-written against the book's whole samizdat mythology: nothing in her scenes was "unendurable or enslaving," the perfection talk was "a sly little jab" riffing on her own veil-as-lethal-beauty joke, itself lifted from The Medusa v. the Odalisque (085's lethal-sight apparatus — perfection-that-paralyzes was already a JOI premise before it was a rumor). And she flatly denies the anti-Entertainment: "he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for God’s sake" — head-on against the antidote rumor the marrieds discuss at 038 [p. 126]. Either Joelle is right and the mythology is academic rumor-cascade, or the auteur kept his star outside the joke's final ring; the raw decides nothing, and the interview's whole force is that it can't.