Hal supine; Pemulis wants to interface — "The art-cartridge critics and scholars who…"
The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘auteur’ pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough—these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitaliadoodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit [n.366] —‘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’—in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave—and yet all the time weeping, Paul Anthony Heaven, as an upward hall full of kids all scan their mail, the film-teacher not sobbing or wiping his nose on his tweed sleeve but silently weeping, very steadily, so that tears run down Heaven’s gaunt face and gather on his underslung chin and fall from view, glistening slightly, below the lectern’s frame of sight.
Context
Hal reviewing Himself's filmography from inside — the plan's one-liner delivered whole. The passage stages the entire critical apparatus around JOI (audiences-inside-the-films, the hostility reading, "technically gifted but narratively dull") and then Hal, the ideal viewer, overrules it: the academics' arguments "do not explain the incredible pathos." The lecture Heaven reads is Bloom's anxiety-of-influence vocabulary verbatim (clinamen, tessera, kenosis, askesis) — "the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead" — delivered "in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave" while the film-teacher silently weeps, tears falling "below the lectern’s frame of sight." The frame-line is named as such: the film knows exactly where its own composition ends, and puts the grief just inside it. A dead father's film about battling loved dead ancestors, watched by the son on the floor: the filmography as the only séance available (this last framing inferred; the raw gives the viewing, the lecture text, and Hal's "Then this too began to seem familiar"). Peterson's The Cage runs on a screen behind the lectern — the film-within-the-film-within-the-scene; its JOI-connection gloss is n.366.