Andrew's Wiki
Supposedly Fun

1995, Harper’s paid him to go on a Celebrity Caribbean Cruise

Description

• 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.

Upshot

• “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

Leisure

• 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