anhedonia essay: despising what you're lonely for
One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.
Context
The mask's cost, localized in Hal. What the ironic mask conceals is not nothing but a "hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need" — and the specifically American cruelty is to despise that self, to be lonely for exactly the sentimentality one has been trained to find contemptible. Hal's anhedonia is the mask fused to the face: underneath it is a pulling, puling, needy human he cannot allow himself to be, so the loneliness has no exit. Irony's endpoint, here, is self-hatred aimed with precision at one's own capacity to feel — the ironist starving for a food he has taught himself to gag on. (The clinical anhedonia/It material is depression-anhedonia's; landed here is the mask-of-ennui register that despises its own hidden sincerity.)