IJ study archive

Scene 135: anhedonia and it

Scene
135
Pages
692–698
When
narratorial essay, YDAU (2009); Kate Gompert's Newton-Wellesley ward stay 'two years ago' ≈ YYTMRCYTPC (2007)
Where
essayistic/no single setting — Ennet House, E.T.A., and the Newton-Wellesley psych ward as referentsin: No fixed setting · Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex › Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House (also)
POV
narrator (encyclopedic 3rd person essay), moving through Kate Gompert's and Hal's interiors

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

The novel's central essay on depression distinguishes two species. Anhedonia — "a kind of emotional novocaine" — strips happiness, love, and meaning to denotation without connotation: "Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world." Younger E.T.A.s attribute JOI's suicide to this attainment-crisis anhedonia, which the narrator says is wrong and reveals more about carrot-worshipping children than about Himself; Hal, meanwhile, is diagnosed as genuinely anhedonic — empty inside his own hull, lonely above all, and despising the sentimental infant self he's lonely for, in a U.S. culture whose arts teach the young to wear masks of jaded irony against the great transcendent horror of being alone. But anhedonia is "but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain": It, predator-grade clinical/psychotic depression as Kate Gompert lives it — a billowing, totalizing psychic pain, "a hell for one," whose sufferers jump from the burning high-rise not desiring the fall but fleeing the flames. The essay closes with the case of Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills, seventeen years psychotically depressed past every treatment, whose fondest dream is psychosurgical anhedonia — death in life — and whose locomotive-decorated Xmas cards Kate can barely stand to think about.

What to notice

The taxonomy is the thing to hold onto: two species, not one. Anhedonia gets the book's cartographic idiom — "Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world." — numbness as living on the map with no location; and then the hinge sentence demotes it: anhedonia is "a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" — It, the feeling, which makes the world not schematic but fully animate and malignant. Every Kate Gompert scene and all of late Hal read through this distinction. Notice the essay's two acts of diagnosis: Hal is formally declared anhedonic in a single devastating sentence — Avril "hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him" — and the school's folk-etiology of JOI's suicide is flatly corrected ("not what killed Incandenza at all"), a promissory note the wraith chapters redeem. The suicide hermeneutic here is the book's most quoted mercy: the jumper from the burning high-rise — "It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames." And the culture essay in the middle — masks of ennui, hip cynicism as "some kind of fear of being really human" — is the thesis the Mario scenes argue by counterexample.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 692-693: anhedonia defined [n.280: Ribot's coinage, psychoequivalent of analgesia] — the bowler off his league, the gourmand off his feed, the Unit gone gristle; Kate's "radical abstracting" of every term the undepressed take as full and fleshy; "denotation but not connotation"; "An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location" — Boston AA's Unable To Identify.
  • p. 693: the E.T.A. folk-reading of JOI's microwave as attainment-anhedonia — "in fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all"; the kids invoke it as psychic bogey while still worshipping the ordinal carrot ("'Hey there, how are you?' 'Number eight this week, is how I am.'"); only LaMont Chu excepted; "It may well be... more invigorating to want than to have."
  • pp. 693-694: Hal — no bona fide interior emotion since he was tiny; joie and value as variables he manipulates "well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull"; "far more robotic than John Wayne"; Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks it's him; "he is lonely."
  • pp. 694-695: the culture essay — millennial U.S. arts sell anhedonia as hip; peer-hunger, masks of ennui fitted to fictile young faces; "Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent"; The American Century as Seen Through a Brick's thesis that naïveté is millennial America's last terrible sin; Hal's private theory that hip cynicism is "really some kind of fear of being really human," the despised inner thing "not-quite-right-looking... dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes" [n.281: his Pump-Room abstraction — we're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for].
  • p. 695: the Brick's key-image — the infantile thumb dampening the piano-string's high sweet D; later the thumb's removal, the pure tone going sick-sweet and overripe until we pray for the natal thumb to return and shut it up.
  • pp. 695-696: It — anhedonia as remora on the Great White Shark of pain; predator-grade depression as a feeling, not an absence: "a nausea of the cells and soul," the world un-map-like and wholly malignant, "an almost mystical unity... with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self"; the double bind in which every alternative of human agency is horrible; "It is a hell for one" [n.282: why people in pain are unpleasant to be around].
  • p. 696: the psychotic-depression torture analogy — both screamers' screams are appropriate; the current "both applied and received from within"; the burning-high-rise account of suicide — "It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames"; nobody on the sidewalk can understand the jump; the absurdity of halfway-house Suicide Contracts.
  • pp. 696-698: Ernest Feaster — model trains, devout wife, seventeen straight years of It; Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin comas, S.S.R.I.s [n.283], Quadracyclics, E.C.T. — "Some cases of depression are beyond human aid"; the limbic-yank psychosurgery whose promise of total numbness is the dangled carrot keeping him on the windowsill; weeping nightly in his praying wife's arms; the Xmas cards with excruciating watercolor locomotives, signed Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA.

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: the book's definitive taxonomy — anhedonia vs. It, the burning-high-rise suicide logic, Feaster as limit case; every Kate Gompert and late-Hal scene reads through this essay.
  • Communication and Solipsism: It is "lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed"; the closed circuit, the hell for one; Hal "in there" but unreachable, Avril conversing with her own echoes.
  • Irony and Sincerity: the mask-of-ennui sociology — U.S. arts as a how-to for hip emptiness; cynicism-vs.-naïveté exposed as a "queerly persistent U.S. myth" via JOI's Brick.
  • Maps and Territory: anhedonia rendered cartographically — "The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location"; conversely It makes the world "fully rich and animate and un-map-like" and predatory; demapping vocabulary made clinical.
  • Family and Hamlet: the Incandenza system at the essay's core — the misread father-suicide, the mother who can't perceive her son's emptiness, the son lonely inside the family's perfect surfaces.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The American Century as Seen Through a Brick was on Hal's V.R. 6 playlist the same week (scene 132, p. 686); its naïveté thesis is the theory of which Mario — and Wave Bye-Bye, and the AA banality-that-works doctrine (pp. 357-374) — are the practice.

Forward

  • Kate Gompert's clinical presentation (pp. 68-78, scene 024) is this essay's case material; her present Withdrawal walk is scene 136, immediately following — the essay is mounted between Day's comic Unit-survey (scene 134, whose "feelingless gristle" it echoes within lines) and Kate on Prospect St.
  • The corrected JOI-suicide etiology ("not what killed Incandenza at all") is the narrator's promissory note — what did kill him unspools via the wraith's figurant/silence material (pp. 829-845, scene 162) and Hal's Accomplice! meditations (pp. 945, scene 179ff); JOI's suicide date per ruling: 1 April YTSDB.
  • Hal "more robotic than John Wayne" and lonely-for-something-unmet (n.281) seeds his YG opening claims ("I am in here."; scene 001, p. 3) and the Pump-Room/withdrawal slide of n.321 (digested at scene n321).
  • "It" as Kate's name for the predator links to her marijuana-Withdrawal framing (p. 695) and forward to her concussion and Marathe encounter (pp. 774, scene 156ff); the burning-high-rise paragraph is the book's master statement on suicide, glossing JOI, Clipperton (pp. 430-434, scene 089), and the Feaster-like yearners.
  • Mrs. Feaster's daily Mass and beads against unhelpable It — counterpoint to Boston AA's pragmatic Higher Power (and to scene 139's biscuit-sandwich God four scenes later).

Notable passages (10)
  • pp. 692-693: "It's a kind of emotional novocaine... Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world." — anhedonia defined; maps-territory anchor.
  • p. 694: "His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely." — the Hal diagnosis in one sentence.
  • pp. 694-695: "what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human" — Hal's private theory; irony-sincerity core.
  • p. 695: "dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain." — the taxonomy's hinge.
  • p. 696: "It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames." — the burning-high-rise passage; essential anthology passage, the novel's suicide hermeneutic.
  • pp. 697-698: the Ernest Feaster case ("his fondest dream was anhedonia... death in life") — the two depressions joined in one ruined life; the locomotive Xmas cards.

Endnotes digested here

  • n.280 (p. 1053): anhedonia coined by Ribot (19th-c. Psychologie des Sentiments) as the psychoequivalent of analgesia.
  • n.281 (p. 1053): Hal's Pump-Room abstraction — "we're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for"; how else explain missing somebody you've never met?
  • n.282 (p. 1053): why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around.
  • n.283 (p. 1053): S.S.R.I.s, "of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors."

What links here Timeline events here (12) · Echoes (8) · Connected from (9) · Passages quoted here (40) · Motifs (4)

Timeline events here

Echoes

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs