On "Shipping Out"

Every time I read this essay, I think I'm going to be annoyed, or over it, or exhausted by DFW's exhaustive style, annoyed by his ripping on everybody. But I'm not. I never am. I'm always lured in, amazed at how he not only creates a sense of place--the plush blue carpets, the wet/dry vacs sucking up vomit, bodies in various stages of sagginess slathered with lotion, toilets that "hurl" contents away from you, the wondercloset, the workers, the basket of fruit with its blue saran wrap, etc. etc.--but a sense of experience. He's not just explaining what the cruise was like and the absurd levels of luxury and the ridiculously dogged urge of the crew to please, but he's explaining the experience of realizing that what his experience was. The meta-moments of this essay are my favorite--when he realizes that his experience actually isn't his experience, but has been co-opted by Frank Conroy's essay-mercial, that he can't look at the sky without thinking of it as the "vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky." And then of course, the epiphany of the piece when the Dreamward sidles up next to the Nadir, where we get to experience a sort of mirror-stage along with DFW, where he wakes up out of a pampered delirium like a baby realizing they are not the center of the universe into the harsh realization that:

For this—the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS—is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that the promise will be kept but that such a promise isn’t keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. ...In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the insatiable-infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction (51-52).

 (All the uterine imagery I could probably give or take, but I really like what he does in that moment, how even though he's moment-by-moment reflecting what he's seeing all around him, we still need that other ship to roll in and reflect back the greed and absurdity. Dreamward gives him something to WANT, and subsequently the grand realization of wanting-ness.)

I keep thinking about the (very brief) conversation we had in class the other day about DFW in relation to Colson Whitehead, and I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly how DFW "gets away with it," how he gets away with calling out Americans on their Americanness, calling out the absurdity of these particular subcultures (or just cultures, I guess), the way he does with tourists in "Consider the Lobster," and probably anybody in anything he writes. I know he doesn't get away with it for some people--teaching DFW always reminds me that some people are just going to hate it and remind themselves to never read anything else by him as soon as they're out of my class. Yet for many of us he succeeds brilliantly, and I keep wondering: is it  1. that he's genius as long as you already agree with all his critiques?  and/or 2. Is it because he implicates himself? I feel like it must be so much more complicated than either of those or a combination of those, and I guess it's also in part because 3. He actually provides a really in depth report of ship; he provides the straight narrative that you'd expect from a journalistic article. I think it's easy to forget this aspect of his writing because I keep looking for the bigger ideas, the criticisms of society, the postmodern techniques, that I forget that it's also just really good reporting. I get a better sense of this cruise--from trapshooting to dining experience to entertainment to dimensions--that I do of Chicago's World Fair in all 400 pages of Larson's book. Yes, perhaps I like it because I'll probably never go on a luxury cruise and I therefore enjoy seeing DFW jab the people who are so gung-ho about it, but I actually get a perverse enjoyment from learning about everything from the dimensions of his room to the vastness of the boat. I kind of want to try trapshooting off the back of a cruise ship some time.

But going back to how he gets away with it--he's directly harsh on people like Mona and Mr. Dermatitis, but what seems like it's potentially crueler is how he pokes fun at people like Captain Video on page 49, one of the eccentrics on the boat. But then he turns around and says how this guy sort of reminds him of himself. (And it's true, I probably would be sketched out by DFW if I ran into him on a cruise ship.) So there's the self-deprecation thing going on. But he's also genuinely loving with some of the characters in the piece. There's Trudy, who despite the fact he describes her as “Jackie Gleason in drag,” he says she has a “particularly loud pre-laugh scream that is a real arrhythmia-producer, and is the one who coerces me into Wednesday night’s conga line, and gets me strung out on Snowball Jackpot Bingo” (40). He paints her and Esther's exchanges with precision and compares their discernment over the meals with Mona's flat-out complaining. I come away from this piece liking her. Same with Tibor:  “There was no hauteur or pedantry or even anger as he addressed us. He just meant what he said. His expression was babe-naked, and we heard him, and nothing was perfunctory again” (48). And then later: “I’d just about die if Tibor got into any trouble on my account” (49). I don't get as simply cold and calculating critique here; I get a complex and nuanced look at a group of people. And on top of it I get the satisfaction of a good hard look at American culture and the peculiarities of human desire, and the phenomenon of wanting to be pampered to death.