Question

The cruise ship has been a key image in the representation of modern leisure spaces in spite of its being�or because it was�a newcomer to the game of leisure space production. Its status as a novelty, one celebrated not only as an escape from the hectic pace of modernity, but also as an example of the unparalleled ingenuity of modern science and technology, was from the beginning fraught with the same contradictions within modernity itself. Less than ten years after the sinking of the unsinkable cruise liner Titanic, Le Courbusier cited such liners as the paradigm for modern architecture, calling them the first concrete example of the aesthetic he champions in his utopian yet fascistic vision, Towards a New Architecture. Could one use the cruise ship as a lever into the current academic debate over the relationship between modernism and fascism? Using both fictional and non-fictional accounts, discuss the image of the cruise ship as simultaneously a site for discipline and death as well as for freedom and exploration, and suggest what this discussion could offer to the critical debate about fascism and modernism.

Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde

Intro

• 1999 “New Modernisms” conference made him realize that for all the push towards otherness and the relief that now we can get “beyond” fascism and modernism, we are still caught up in the same cycle: the endless economic cycle of renewal, under the belief of progress and overcoming, which is the underpinning of, guess what, fascism.
  • My initial problem: but fascism is a response to that economic imperative.
    • He uses Marshall Berman’s characterization of modern economic atmosphere of constant changing and crisis to get to new heights with the ruling class having a “Vested interest” in crisis and disturbance and uncertainty
    • “Aesthetic creationism” of constant creation therefore supported this economic logic
    • While “aestheticization” is a “constant production and consumption of difference” that drives the system, “totalitarianism” is 1) no alterity and 2) “a rhetoric that privileges a certain kind of alterity as necessary to a socio-economic order already in place” 6
  • Us saying we’ve gotten beyond it is the same logic that modernism itself was: newness and novelty, the high modernist “ceaseless activity of interpretation of production of meaning”
  • Romantic creative struggle is thus analogous to the struggle of the nation: war
• Romantic modernism and Classical modernism
  • We’ve been seduced by romantic modernism: “aesthetic wholeness” “expressivity and otherness” but it “is most closely aligned with the totalitrianism of the twentieth century, whether that totality is figured as static purity or constant change.”
  • “Classical modernism, with its emphasis on contingency and limit, has been wrongly dismissed by scholars” and yet it is what gives us the alternative that we need: “contains the origins of a more inclusive, dialectical experiences” that makes us rethink art, the subject, and politics
• London: atmosphere had gone “Stale” in years around WWI: calls to newness “seemed empty” or “treacherous” so they are suspicious, disillusioned
  • B/c you are about to be swallowed up into the world you want to critique: even Lewis by this time complains about the revolutionary mind being “the dullest thing on earth”
  • B/c the new and revolutionary is absorbed by the market
  • Individual expressivism thus is emptied of its power and appeal, and we’re looking for some alternative
    • And what is this alternative? Acceptance of limitation (Hulme, “finiteness, this limit of man” who jumps but “returns back” always); we must stop and think
• The Classical Work of Art
  • “regrounds idealism within its particular socio-historical context”
  • “possibly [can] redirect the violent production…of the modern world”
  • “expose the human presence” behind the art “to reopen the latter back into history”
  • “both the culmination and antithesis of its productive moment, as both a rigid monument and ultimate negation of modernity’s terrifying order” 8
  • dehumanized (many scholars say this is protofascist b/c it is seen as reactionary): into a stasis that is actually critical b/c it does NOT promise to fulfill you, blocking you from its coldness for identifying with it, so you see the art as other, as not the same as life. Thus, the artwork (as Nicholls recognized) opens up a “wedge.” For Comentale, it critiques modernity, but “also to model and inspire alternative forms of identity and community”
  • Lots of models and politics and fields; Lewis, Hulme, D H, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf
  • two diff kinds of production: “one excessive and violent, the other tempered and conscious”
    • romantic ideology of production will merely make things worse
    • but classicism will make it stop, dream up alternatives
  • tension, not form; phenomenal, not subject/object; communal negotiation, not private/public; embodied consciousness, not idea/thing p 20
• So what’s wrong w/classicism? Within history, you have the “Tension” within the individual, a value for Hulme Lewis Pound Yeats Eliot, but they “give way to increasing demands for social control” 23
  • “An initial awareness of contingency leads first to a sense of necessary political engagement and then to the possibility of planned totality. Because identity…was seen to be easily manipulated, it was believed that it can and must be manipulated into durable shapes and forms.”
  • This change occurred during early WWI b/c violent experience turned suspicion to open hostility
    • Me: I would suggest economic turmoil of the 30s is a better moment for this.
    • Him: War fuels production and reproduction, fueling the fire; so the artists want “more programmatic order of restraint, as such took shape as fascism, is informed by this paranoia and trauma….centralization, directed by an elite group of artist-planners, would help to restrain and remold the increasingly chaotic desires unleashed by the market” 23-4
      • Me: well collapse of the market would be better, in late 20s and 30s
    • Comentale: so it’s actually more like socialism (I agree), esp when labor movements fail and thus turn to fascism
    • Ultimately, he says, it doesn’t mean that classicism is inherently fascist or totalitarian 24 (sure)
• Me: I like that you say that the classical response is against fascism, but then how can you say that the “real” fascism was the romanticism that fueled the economy? That’s weird for me. Of course, romanticism might be allied w/economy, but to suggest that it’s the “real” fascism is to mess up your understanding of fascism’s relationship to modernity. His argument hinges on whether constant chaos can be understood as a kind of totality.
• Me: but what if the problem is not that you can’t get onward and onward, but that you don’t want to accept what is the true next level for humanity: death? That might be why the symbol of human progress is also that of death.

Chapter One

• Marinetti admits futurism “a purely financial consciousnesss…mountains of goods and a shrewd, wealthy, busy crowd of industrialists and businessmen” qtd 36 and “A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes…is more Beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”
• Fascism, pp 38
  • “intense mechanization of public and private life, the aesthetic hardening of an otherwise disorganized socius”
  • “order, hygiene and efficiency serves to counter the decadent flux of hte modern world”
  • against feminism, socialism, the market
  • yet also “cult of violence and war, its productive madness, its romantic vitalism and rather mystical energy”
  • “anarchic will to power” breaking down rationalism and reformism
  • “a contradictory order that serves to objectify flow and thus mimics the organized chaos of the marketplace” 38 and in the end “tried to master the market and shape it into a national order that is both total and progressive”
    • I object: I think you’re taking the rhetoric too seriously and not looking at the actual embedding w/in historical context
  • hatred of bourgeois values: “universalism, individualism, progress, natural rights, and equality” so it keeps the economy of liberal modernity but not its philosophy says Zeev Sternhall quoted 39
    • instead you get sacrifice for the nation
  • why is fascism like the market? belief in “sustained violence” and it will exaggerate the market’s qualities of violence and destruction and change
• Link to Bloomsbury
  • Roger Fry can only affirm the significance of the individual in its creation of new art, new expression 53 so you have to keep expressing
    • And your imagination has to do “violence” on Nature through art so you can prove your own worth, your own creationism 54. Art is production, which is a toady to the market.
  • And art’s supposed lack of utility begins to look like utility for Comentale, and it begins to look like “constant, willful manipulation”
    • Fry’s romanticism makes it a “spiritual transvaluation” of violence but it’s still violent
  • Woolf: Lily Briscoe’s art as constant struggle; the creation of the artist by being put through pressures, and the lack of otherness b/c Mrs. Mc Nab?’s work becomes mute, unsung, while Mrs. Ramsay’s upper class labor becomes “framed” in Lily’s picture
• Avant-garde is where affirmation is found in “scientifically perfect and ceaselessly renewed” violence which does not oppose but merely “spiritually transfigures a specifically capitalist logic, reconceiving technology as spirit, competition as consciousness, and alienation as freedom.” 68 Great!

What does Comentale do?

• Gets me into the topic of modernism and fascism. Begin this essay by summing up Comentale, which will give you the excuse to write about leisure spaces. And you will use the cruise ship b/c 1) it’s one of the most modern inventions, 2) it is wrapped up in art and representation, 3) its design is allied with visions of fascist order, and 4) the fact that it floats is interesting for modernity. At this point you will transition to talk about Casarino.
• Show how life and death, growth and stasis, liberalism and fascism, can look very similar under a regime of capitalism
  • When affirmation of life turns out to be an undercover affirmation of constant change and progress, it reveals itself as a violent will towards destruction, and an even deeper need for totality than you initially thought fascism capable of.
  • Constant change requires constant destruction.
• For Comentale, fascism also wants the destructive creation of the market, but it wants to control those movements. It wants the production w/out all the individuality, liberalism, equality, etc.
• What Comentale leaves open: If you can stop the constant need for production, then you could possibly get out. What about leisure? This is where my work comes in.
  • whatever ever is fascist is allied for comentale with production at all costs: so what about non-production?

Modernity at Sea

• But Casarino is largely talking about the working ship, and if we want to talk about the issue of non-productivity, we should talk about the cruise ship.
• What connects Casarino and Comentale is this idea of capitalism as “Crisis.”
  • But I would definitely like to make this picture of crisis a little more detailed, and a little less a sense of complete disorganization. 1) uneven development rather than total change, 2) larger order of the market, at least that you’re forgetting Marx’s point that people are actually in charge, 3) the fact that it’s capitalism’s actual order around the profit motive, 4) that the representation of modernity as crisis is just that, a representation, a rhetoric, an argument: not to be taken for granted.
• Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis
• “Doubles” keep being produced in the heterotopia of the ship
  • Secret homosexual relations
• Sea narrative in 19th century stages debates about sexuality
• Marx, Bersani, Foucault, D & G
• Ship space = multiple cultural practices
  • “all-male disciplinary heterotopia”
• Trying to imagine a time before capital
  • “Crisis of pleasure” as counter-attack on capitalism
• Ship is the space of modernity at crisis
• In Conrad, ship as “Closeted space” with “dialectical economy of desire”
• Conrad, Youth: “This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate”
• Thesis
  • “The nineteenth-century sea narrative constituted a crucial laboratory for that crisis that goes by the name of modernity…in which a new historical era was problematized, that is, was turned into a problem for thought.”
    • Two experiments: creating representations of modernity; conceptual constellations “that resisted both modernity and representation.” The sea narrative is a result of both of these
  • Modernity as crisis b/c it is capitalist
    • Takes from Hardt and Negri, rather than say Marx or Berman: “Modernity is the history of a permanent and permanently incomplete revolution: a contradictory development in which there has always been an alternative between the development of free productive forces and the domination of capitalist relations of production.” Liberation of productive forces has occurred since Renaissance, at the expense of transcendent interpretations of life, and is split between human cooperation and the reproduction of life on the one and, on the other, hierarchy, organization, and power. Modernity as struggle between these two forces: “Freedom and subjugation” in form of “collective constituent power of the masses” versus “constituted power.” And the dialectic itself is merely a sublimated form of this primary struggle. qtd 2
    • “nineteenth-century sea narrative not only as an engagement with the multifarious manifestations of this dialectic [capital and labor] but also as an anticipation of the breakdown of this dialectic in our time and as a foreshadowing of that historical-materialist affirmation of crisis…a real state of emergency” 3
  • Economic context: industrial capitalism emerging from “cocoon” of mercantile capitalism b/c free labor (people not tied to land) and free capital (not vested in land or in state) both appear, symbolized by 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws
    • The sea becomes more turbulent b/c it was central in mercantile capital (b/c exchange is what ruled, it was the central site for the mode of production…wow for me that means I can argue that the cruise ship acts like a sign of nostalgia, a laugh by industrialists on the part of colonizing the old ruler of the economy by using it for its leisure space); and now it’s crucial, but NOT CENTRAL, for industrial capital to create global economy 4
      • obsolescence: whaling, sail shipping… I’ll make the comparison here to agricultural revolution which had happened a few decades before, where they had to innovate and adapt
• Political economy of the sea
  • had anticipated the next form of capitalism:
    • 1) wage labor is invented at sea, also making them the prototype for organized labor associations
    • 2) “first international, multiethnic, multilingual, and also increasingly multiracial labor force since at least the Renaissance” 5
  • during the mid nineteenth century, the ship is a site of multiple capitalisms: “the persistence of mercantile capitalism as one of the cogs in the machinic assemblage of industrial economy was largely articulated through the continued and contradictory importance of the world of the sea: these two modes of production met and interpenetrated at sea” 5
• And the sea narrative? it was itself “an archaic form of representation that suddenly began to perform according to new narrative structures and to fulfill new cultural imperatives, and that, hence, played a direct role in the production of the emergent cultures of modernity” 6
• My reactions?
  • His ship is all-male, but mine is emphatically not.

Thackeray and Representation

• Artistic complicity
• Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Great Cairo
  William Makepeace Thackeray
• Basis
  • 1846 from a 1844 journey from a company that began to offer packages in 1842, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (the P & O)
  • “a land and sea tour” of Malta, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beirut, Jaffa, Alexandria
  • Thackeray invited so they could get publicity
  • would take a few months
• Cruises
  • Very expensive until the 1930s; only the rich could afford them
  • Middle class would make do with fake ones: smaller ships go to only a few near places and aren’t well-appointed
  • ship as “floating hotel”
  • 1833: prearranged itinerary takes 80 passengers from Naples to Istanbul…people were constantly fighting.
    • http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O225-cruiseship.html “two duels are yet to be fought, when the voyage terminates” says one diarist
• Definitions
  • cruise ship: where you have destinations that are prearranged, although the timing might be off
    • you spend more time on these and so they are luxurious
    • passenger cruise ships begin to be made purpose-built between the wars
  • the same ship could be used for both, as ocean liner and as cruise ship
  • cruising more invested in by shipping companies when airlines are popularized b/c the experience of journeying itself could be an excuse to keep them in business
• Stuff from Writers, Readers, and Reputations by Philip Waller
• Hall Caine (writer) popularized Isle of Man around turn of century, just as Thackeray had done
  • also ocean liners that are scheduled to arrive somewhere at certain times. Excursionist begin landing on the isle just to meet him, he’s a celeb.
  • Wrote guide book for the steamship company serving the Isle.
• Carlyle’s reaction to Thackeray: compares is “to the practice of a blind fiddler going to and fro on a penny-boat to Scotland, and playing tunes for the passengers for halfpence.” b/c he accepted a free passage in return for his book (or more specifically the laudatory preface)
• Douglas Sladen writes On the Cars and Off for the president of the railway in return for free fares for him and his children 1895
  • And his Sicily, the New Winter Resort 1904
  • White Star Steamship Company bought copies of his Italian guidebook for their passengers going from America to Italy
• Not all artists were happy about such publicity: Tennyson says when visitors pitch camp opposite his house, “It’s horrible the way they stare” 1884
• The Iberia, autumn 1844
• Preface
  • The company is noble, the captain affable and courageous
  • Neat: he says that for authors “bullion is more rare a commodity than paper” so asks for him to accept this book rather than the more traditional tankard or bullion or piece of metal that passengers give captains at the end of the voyage.
  • Would he go? worries about being able to afford it, but he’s at a dinner and they keep drinking wine and soon enough he’s enthusiastic, and they say I bet you can get your passage as a present
  • Says that they would see as much as Ulysses did but it wouldn’t take ten years. What a self-conscious literary one-upsmanship. “back in London by Lord Mayor’s Day” thank god.
  • “easy…charming…profitable”
  • especially recommends it to young men fresh from college: that is, he is recommending it as a replacement for the grand tour!
• Rest of book
  • Mostly a regular book of travel
  • One chapter for each leg of the trip: Smyrna, Jerusalem, etc; with commentaries on religion, descriptions of characters, sightseeing, storytelling, tales of rulers and kings, entertainment descriptions, songs, scene-painting; all interpreted within recognizable European literary heritage (Homer, Keats, and a host of contemporary writers forgotten today), shy local beauties, English and French outposts, variety, yet a consistent training of the land to its ancient history rather than its current history, a harem, Jewish history taking a comfortable three pages
  • Constantly interpreting it as a picture, which ends in opportunities for ejaculation ! !!
  • He asks the reader DIRECTLY, wouldn’t you like to be lolling around doing nothing like these Greeks? trading your tophat for a crown of roses?
  • Beirut has civilization along the English embassy: first he mentions its commodities, then its politeness and fashions
  • “A Ball on Board” when a Turk comes in ask what was the meaning of their fireworks, they seize him and make him join the dance, which he joins in “wonder” and ends up drinking champagne
• ODD: More of less silent about the ship itself. Why? Well they weren’t that well appointed yet. The less said, the better.

The Voyage Out

• It’s a yacht but it will help to serve to gauge the cultural cachet around ships
• Ends in death, but off the ship. The ship led to a shore, but then to nowhere: the end of bildung, which is also Woolf’s own maiden voyage for writing.
• The Euphrosyne pp 8-90
• First description
  • A space of hospitality: Rachel dreads her first clumsy attempts at “entertaining” her father’s friend, hasn’t seen them in a while
  • “One a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost. And be killed” her first guest says.
  • We have the mixture of ritual, intense social intercourse, and death. Already on the table
  • And her first actual clumsy move at hospitality directly comes after another mention of death (possibility of dying of rhematism) and then right after they find out Jenkinson of Peterhouse is dead
    • “Rachel was too still for a hostess”
• Ships seem to have a social life of their own “answering” one another’s signals
• As the ship pulls out, Ridley Ambrose, “I have a weakness for people who can’t begin” – like Rachel, she’s doomed
• Ship makes London look like it’s “eternally burnt…a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser” 12
• Voluntary inside/outside: out of ship, completely diff b/c exposed to the elements, while ship is enclosed
  • However, No real rooms: “nothing of the shut stationary character of a room on shore” b/c all objects too carefully arranged not to fall, but with little reminders of civilization: “the kind of lamp which makes the light of civilisation across dark fields to one walking in the country”
• Rachel is too quiet, not confidential enough, but then too many predictable confidences, then not polite enough (too direct, no social graces): she is “weak” but “inquiring” “more than normally incompetent for her years” and too vacillating and didn’t make Mrs. Helen Ambrose excited, actually she ends up dreading her intercourse with Rachel, so “impermanent”
  • we see Rachel through an older, skeptical woman w/more experience (2 kids, married)
  • then we see her w/romantic images…mooning about
  • she’s unresponsive to people, yet inwardly way too romantic: “I’m going out to t-t-triumph over the wind” she says (to spend time on deck)
• Ridley Ambrose is being forced not to work: they are arranging his cabin to not allow him to work and make him relax 16
• approx one month voyage, from London to Santa Marina in S America
  • she is the daughter of a big ship-owner and factory-owner
• representative society: has its scholar, its businessman, its wife, its unmarried young woman, and its lower classes (Mrs. Chailey)
• The Ambroses: the voyage is “six weeks of unspeakable misery” 25 says Ridley… why? b/c his books won’t fit in: you must resign yourself to leisure
• The first days are “cheerless”
• People from shoe are glad that they are not out in the water, while the people in ships see England as “a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned” where people are “Swarming” almost “over the edge” brawling with each other. All continents are “shrinking.” 27
  • While the ship is “an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few inhabitants” lonely but “mysterious, moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources”
    • FANTASY OF SELF-CONTAINMENT

Brideshead Revisited

• One of the changes that modernism brings is a denial that the traveling atom of the self can actually change anything, the growing doubt of the freedom and individuality and self-determination of the person-unit. A Room with a View, one of Forster’s social comedies, lets the ordinary but sweet and ingenuous Lucy Honeychurch revolutionize her life, but by this time, leisure spaces are ones that tempt you to believe you can change your life yourself. You can move around, but eventually something will call you back home. The death of her father takes Julia Mottram back on shore, as it were, and their romance falls to the ground as she must face the whole context of her brother Sebastian her mother’s control, her father’s mute last wishes, etc.
• He can escape from his wife, Celia,
• All the “trophies” are evidence of the cruder social life found on board
• In “real life he says he and Julia “could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few mules distant, the same rural horizon, could have a liking for one another, a mild curiosity…and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other’s pillow…yet be restrained from the doing so by the centripetal force of our own world,s and the cold, interstellar space between them”
  • The possibility for shaking up his life was already there, but seemed impossible b/c of the sheer inertia of the life-process.
  • But as soon as you get on ship, the desire and need is created.
• Ship “huge without any splendor, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and preposterously magnified” with ornaments “like the trade mark of a cake of soap” with tables “designed perhaps by a sanitary engineer” with soft, upholstered textures and soft lighting “no shadows”
  • “Where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity” 237
  • No more glorious wealth
    • And yet the ironic rejection of such wealth is partly what brings the two together; their mutual trouble with the ostentation
  • And wealth: you have to have the water iced; it’s seen as a delicacy, but here it’s forced
• But OUTSIDE the whole “Trying to symbolize money crudely” thing, you do have opportunity
• Only in the ship does he look at her beauty “not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be idle to itemize and dissect her beauty” b/c she’s been separated from her context
• Little control: “There was a little red-headed man whom no one seemed to know, a dowdy fellow quite unlike the general run of my wife’s guest” and he’s suspecting him, and he tursn out to be a criminal
• “It was the theme of the evening that we should all be seeing a lot of each other, that we had formed one of those molecular systems that physicists can illustrate”
• The obligatory storms that make everyone sea-sick sets apart the passengers into two groups, leaving the healthy ones to join together in a secret, temporary brotherhood: that’s what gets the couple together
  • Sick ones: Celia, Charles’ wife, “the air of a maternity ward” where she makes herself feel special
  • This gives him the chance to start the affair: “alone as though the place had been cleared for us” 25
• “What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?” going to masseuses and sending roses to each other, champagne with lunch
• Mysterious stranger they never see again when the sea calms down: “But for this we might never have met. I’ve had some very romantic encounters at sea in my time.” 254 And the healthy ones, “nothing in common except an immunity to sea-sickness,” get intimate fast and have a rip-roaring party where everyone is drunk and sleeping in the wrong rooms..

• 235-264
• Where Charles Ryder’s life changes gear again. The chance for romance, for one last chance at trying again, which was denied to the poor anti-hero of A Handful of Dust is for a moment given to Charles. Ultimately they cannot get married but the ship is an environment where other things can happen, at least temporarily.
  • Because of the limited population of the ship, and the ability to manage your existence very carefully, and the deus ex machina of the “sick day.”
    • You are stripped down to your little self, just for the moment; selfhood concentrated, meeting and confronting other atom like folks as well. The interpersonal, though, is diff from the social, which you have to get back to.
  • He is at least released finally from the grips of his productive life: his wife and children and his production of endless series of paintings that first save the dying English country house from complete destruction, and then once it exhausts them goes abroad, going out further and further into the wilds to be able to produce.
    • Like Comentale’s “classical modernism,” the production cycle is halted for a bit
      • But he will end up on the destructive side: he narrates this story as a military officer, waiting to be sent out to war. Sometimes you won’t like it if you get what you wish for.
    • It was that temporary stasis between production and destruction where human relationships were reimagined. Sebastian and Charles’ doomed relationship is reimagined (with Julia Mottram) as one that can be consummated openly, not only b/c of its heterosexuality but more importantly b/c of her more well-adjusted attitude, not (at that time) doomed from her Victorian (or is it fascist?) controlling mother.
• The sub-economy of gifts makes social evaluations easier to understand, make visible.
• The gratuitous arrest at the end of it, which seems imported from one of Agatha Christie’s “Ship” novels which end in an arrest, is perhaps the gesture towards social totality, which must have some crazy or illegal element to it to truly constitute a totality.

Death on the Nile

• Poverty/Envy of Wealth
  • Poverty can be dramatic, like Jackie’s or Cordelia’s family, or undramatic, like the Allertons’, just a fading away (158)
  • Christie implies that it’s better not to complain, for she gives the uncomplaining wealth to the “good” people, Mrs. Allerton and Cordelia, and the “bad” or caricatures to the people who do complain (Lord Dawlish, or the murderers)
    • She caricatures Marxists by showing our Marxist to be a spoiled lunatic who is hypocritical: they’re rich and pretend not to be
• Being rich makes you the subject of envy, often malicious
  • Rosalie is jealous of her having everything, not just the two townsmen at the beginning (42)
  • Wealth seems itself to cause the problems:
    • Says Poirot: “See you, around a person like Linnet Doyle there is so much—so many conflicting hates and jealousies and envies and meannesses. It is like a cloud of flies, buzzing, buzzing.” (216)
• Wealth often shoves “improvements” on people without asking them: Joanna calls it “compulsory benefit” (and being a “tyrant”) 17
• Credit: you can get it if you pretend not to know anything about money and if you act extravagantly—even if you don’t plan to pay! 24
• Marxism
  • The Marxism of Lord Dawlish, who makes friends with the workers and says that it’s great that these useless women have been killed b/c they are “parasites,” even the maid
  • He’s called “our socialist friend” who “tell[s] everybody exactly what the thought of the capitalist system” (79)
  • Marxism seen as a real incentive to murder! Shows cultural anxiety about Marxism and socialism
  • He sees the great monuments in Egypt as exploitation: “useless” blocks of stone to help the “egotism of a bloated king” (78)
  • He refuses to see Poirot’s work of the mind to be work at all (97) and asks him where his body is, where violence is, in that kind of work
• Work/Leisure
• Jackie has been reduced to working, yes, despite former leisure: 11
  • It’s a murder waiting to happen, when money changes hands
• In this book, Poirot himself is on vacation but ends up working 14
  • So he can’t actually ever take a break: cf Adorno Free Time about inability to rest
  • “I am, alas, a man of leisure,” he said sadly. “I have made the economies in my time and I have now the means to enjoy a life of idleness.”
  • “I envy you.” (says the restaurant owner)
  • “No, no, it woudl be unwise to do so. I can assure you, it is not so gay as it sounds.” (14)
  • For Poirot, he doesn’t even really desire the break at all but thinks work is better because it allows you “to escape the strain of having to think.”
    • Yep, Adorno would see this as symptomatic, even though it’s consciously symptomatic: he has been trained not to enjoy his leisure. Poirot WANTS tragedy to happen.
  • Linnet says that she can buy him off vacation: “That could be arranged,” she says, when Poirot refuses to help her by working. You must always be bribeable, capital demands. (51) Though Poirot resists, he can’t for long because she does get murdered. It’s like capital is telling him not to take a break.
  • Even Fanthorpe is just pretending to be on vacation:
    • “And your reasons for visiting this country?”
    • There was a pause. For the first time the impassive Mr. Fanthorp seemed taken aback. He said at last—almsot mumbling the words, “Er, pleasure.”
    • “Aha!” said Poirot. “You take the holiday; that is it, yes?”
    • “Er—yes.” (140)
    • Hilarious!!
  • Travel solves the difficulty of leisure: what to do with it
• Demonstrated attitudes towards tourist spaces
  • Peace
  • Awe
  • Humility
  • Disgust (savage!)
  • Indifference
  • Curiosity
  • Fear
• What leisure spaces do:
  • They accelerate the social
    • You are never alone there (74)
    • Opportunities to witness what otherwise would be private (44)
    • People are literally closer together (171)
    • Changes of activities make you recombine into different groups constantly, even unexpected formations (103)
    • Why does it matter?
      • Each successive move to the “next” leisure space will be seen as either “getting away” from something bad (whether it’s normal life or yet another leisure space) or as “bringing to the boiling point” new or old tensions
      • Depending on context, it brings relief or takes it away: but it usually doesn’t give relief: that is the exception
      • It’s usually that they expect to be freed, but that they really just get embroiled further
    • They make you think you will get past superficial acquaintance and actually get intimate (82)
  • They discipline (as you tour in orderly fashion 101)
  • They make you display your cash
    • Pearls displayed
    • Dresses displayed
    • Travelers often bring extra moeny on reserve 208)
    • Because Egypt is expensive, it makes the $ differences quite clear 21

The Supposedly…

• 1995, Harper’s paid him to go on a Celebrity Caribbean Cruise
• Hyperreal (everything too blue)
  • Surreal scale: everything so big
• Organized to the minutiae; micromanaged
  • Constant activity: “hard play” has replaced “hard work”
• Luxuty: fruit bowl mysteriously refilled; 11 types of meals a day plus room service; no smells in the room at all; vomit police during rough seas
• Pamper + diaper connotation = make you a child, infantile
• Designated dinner companions: kind of gets to know people
• “Alternate reality,” from the Frank Conroy informercial
• Cruise seems to want something from him: death-denial, death-transcendence
  • But he just feels guilt: can’t accept the pampering b/c it’s not done out of love for him, but instead from institutional rules
    • He can’t be happy b/c it’s like they’re trying to erase his being (cleaning up too fast after him)
• Bovine
  • Guests made to be bovine
  • Americans are bovine, but a kind of “bovine carnivore” species that only Americans are!
  • Mentions this as they herd out of ship to go on shore for shopping in poor Mexican port, C.
• “Unbearably sad”
  • Infinite sea
  • Shows you that humans are small and weak
• Transcendence, denial of death
  • Corrosive sea water not on these ships, but on all others
• Making you an infant
  • “Near-parental” control
  • Robbing you of adult conscience and agency; “supplant” your “adult agency”
  • “Authoritarian” cruise staff
  • You WILL do what they say
  • Maximize fun, stifle conscience or American guilt about having fun and relaxing
  • They even “interpret” your experience for you (Frank Conroy essay); they even “articulate” your experience for you
• Eliminate “choice, error, regret”
• Nevertheless, hints of death and decay
  • Salmonella and various rumors of diseases
  • One notable suicide of teenager a few years before
  • Hints of sharks: the ones Wallace wants to see and pursues people about (querying the staff obsessively about this, as well as waste control)
• “Heads no longer their own” 351
  • Hypnosis show is his grand symbol for it all, planting in people “fantasies so vivid” they don’t even know they’re fantasies
• Central Lie
  • That you could ever be fully sated
  • That the infantile desiring part of you will ever get satisfied
  • And what kills you is that as they pamper you, your minimum level of satisfaction rises and rises, threatening your ability to be happy in outside world
    • Yet he gets to avoid it by going into a kind of trance for final day, by having a vision of the ship swimming through the sea
• What Does Leisure Mean
• Do not have to deal with consequences of your behavior: people pick up after you so much
• “A rest from unpleasantness”
• “Triumph over death and decay”
• Americans having to justify leisure
  • The first conversations among patrons involve making an excuse why you could possibly take this luxury vacation
  • Either say they were pressed to b/c of the overbearing stress of life or because they’ve been saving up or working hard just to “earn” this vacation; to “salvage sanity”
• Disgusting Americanness
  • He won’t disembark at Caribbean ports because of his morbid consciousness of not being able to escape his own Americanness
  • Loud, pushy, rich, shallow
• My Comments
• Wallace’s essay linguistically recreates the wasteful abundance of the cruise itself
  • It’s a bloated essay so the luxury and huge-ness of this work: the many examples, the moment-by-moment calendar that creates the last fifteen pages
  • The large, abundant, frequent footnotes, which even have footnotes for footnoes
• He talks about Frank Conroy’s “essaymercial” about it, but is his essay any different?
  • Conroy’s essaymercial: bad b/c essay supposed to be for readers
    • Connex with workers’ constant empty Smiles and rest of cruise despair b/c it’s the kind of aggressive happiness thrust upon you
  • Clearly he wants it to be: he has been paid like Conroy, but his goodwill has not been bought
    • He maintains what he considers journalist ethos: that his responsibility is ultimately to the readers, so give them truth
  • And yet the descriptions he gives of the luxury still sound like an advertisement: has satire and critique been made impossible? to subtle?
• Note the “sea-sickness immunity” that I’ve noted in other cruise ship books (The Voyage Out, A Handful of Dust)
  • 279: he just happens to be one of them, of course

Concluding

• Make the connection between artistic representation and the cruise ship clear here, incl. the paying off
  • Go back to the Thackeray
• Make the connection between ship and death clear here
  • Go back to the Voyage on the Nile, mention the Voyage Out
• Then talk a little about the symbol of the Titanic
• Relation of art and voyage: we can associate the “Essaymercials” condemned by Carlyle and by Wallace, but what they really do is point out the false promises that these voyages contain
  • It’s less that the artist has sold out, but that the artist has given up the objectivity to tell the truth about the limitations of choices
  • Facscism and death too: necessity is rapidly overtaking freedom, and the increasing luxury of the cruise ship is merely a mask of its sanitary job, that is to “clean up” the reputation of culture and act like you have alternatives
  • It’s the fake voyage that you can succumb to.
• Second chances at life always end up being your last chance: Rachel Vincey dying, Simon and Jacqueline dying instead of getting back together, the heroes of Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust trying unsuccessfully to escape their horrid lives with new romance
  • Death is really the fear that there is no change
• Signifies the lack of control, about no matter how far you voyage you will never actually leave home.