The Howling Fantods

David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97

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David Foster Wallace on the Vagaries of Cruising

[Sorry for the lack of updates recently - thanks to those of you who have been mailing me links they'll appear over the next few days. I've been taking a bit of a break from the site, mostly to get things organised in our new home, but also while the 'Gee some of Wallace's non-fiction wasn't 100% accurate let's get all worked up about it' blows over. You know what? It isn't news to long time readers, or those who've actually read his essays closely... I've got a post in the works about it, with some interesting bits and pieces that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.]
 
So anyway...
 
Megan Garber wrote an article about Wallace's cruise essay for nieman storyboard, “Why's this so good?” No. 16: David Foster Wallace on the vagaries of cruising [18/10/22], and it's worth your time if you haven't already read it:
 
What makes “Shipping Out” such a fantastic specimen of literary journalism is how insistently un-literary it is. It is not delicate; it is not subtle. Wallace, given his remarkable talents, could easily have Shown Not Told and Onion-Peeled and Sublimated his way through the story, suggesting, through the intricacy of his diction and the elasticity of his prose, all the little ironies and oddities that a Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise (line: Celebrity; class: Luxury) might convey. He could have made the cruise a metaphor – for death, for life, for capitalism, for colonialism, for America – and called it a day. (Or seven.)
 
Had “Shipping Out” been written by someone else – had it been written, actually, by anyone else – the result would probably have been a perfectly lovely magazine essay embodying the kind of rhetorical doubling that perfectly lovely magazine essays tend to strive for: on the one hand a travelogue with a transformative narrative arc and appropriately Dickensian details…and on the other a cultural critique of the m.v. Zenith, its curiosities, its context, and the various Global Phenomena it represents: economic entitlement, imperative leisure, people who use “cruise” as a verb.
 
 
 
 
 
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