Anhedonia and It (ii)
Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.
Context
The novel's depression essay, and the theme's clinical center: anhedonia defined as living inside the representation instead of the thing. Where Eschaton's disaster was the map collapsing into the world, here the current runs the other way — the world thins into its own map, navigable but unlocatable, denotation with no connotation. Carlisle sets the two against each other explicitly, map-becomes-world vs. world-becomes-map as the book's twin cartographic disasters — his contrast, recorded not adopted (the sighting itself is catalogued by both).