Joelle on the Work: the courage to appear amateurish
he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had)
Context
The credo's positive pole, and the novel's clearest aesthetic thesis: sincerity is the courage to be bad. JOI's leap to "narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama" required giving up the ironic competence that guarantees you can never be embarrassed, and risking the amateurishness that real feeling demands — "which he had," Joelle notes, the failure part of the point. Irony is safe because it can't be caught out; unironic melodrama is dangerous because it can fail, and choosing it anyway — abandoning "everything he did well" — is the whole definition of the sincere move. Not competence, but the willingness to appear a fool in the service of something felt.