The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace by Adam S. Miller

Author:Adam S. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

17

Sewage

The head is restless. It has trouble sitting still. And this is true regardless of pleasure or circumstance. There is, as Wallace notes of himself, some “ur-American part of me that craves and responds to pampering and passive pleasure: the Dissatisfied Infant part of me, the part that always and indiscriminately WANTS” (SF 316). This dissatisfaction presents as a human-shaped hole. The creeping despair that overtakes Wallace on his Caribbean cruise follows from how the cruise systematically brings the entire entertainment-satisfaction-industrial complex to bear on filling this hole. His despair is generated partly by the impossibility of their succeeding but, more, his despair is also generated by how successful the cruise is, with all its well-funded machinations, at relieving him of the very thing that makes him human.

The cruise ship’s commitment to cabin cleaning epitomizes much of the ambivalence that’s been fueling Wallace’s despair. Whenever he leaves his room for more than thirty minutes—and Wallace stages a whole series of comic experiments to precisely determine the time frame—his cabin, no matter how disheveled, is inspection-ready when he returns. The ship’s attention to detail strikes him as almost motherly. This is a pleasant effect, but it’s also troubling.

I submit that there’s something deeply mind-fucking about the Type-A personality service and pampering on the Nadir, and that the manic invisible cabin-cleaning provides the clearest example of what’s creepy about it. Because, deep down, it’s not really like having a mom. Pace the guilt and nagging, etc., a mom cleans up after you largely because she loves you—you are the point, the object of the cleaning somehow. On the Nadir, though, once the novelty and convenience have worn off, I begin to see that the phenomenal cleaning has nothing to do with me. (SF 298–299)

Wallace’s worry becomes especially pointed when it acquires a bit more specificity:

(It’s been particularly traumatic for me to realize that Petra is cleaning Cabin 1009 so phenomenally well simply because she is under orders to do so, and thus (obviously) that she’s not doing it for me or thinks I’m No Problem or A Funny Thing—in fact, she’d clean my cabin just as phenomenally well even if I were a dork—and maybe conceivably behind the smile does consider me a dork, in which case what if in fact I really am a dork?—I mean, if pampering and radical kindness don’t seem motivated by strong affection and thus don’t somehow affirm one or help assure one that one is not, finally, a dork, of what final and significant value is all this indulgence and cleaning?) (SF 299)

A luxury cruise messes with your head. On the one hand, it offers the promise of care, relaxation, and satisfaction. But on the other hand, it only offers these things as a paid service. It both aims to meet your deepest personal needs and only to meet them out of a sense of impersonal, contractual obligation.

This smarts especially, for Wallace, in terms of the personal connection he feels to Petra, his beautiful cabin steward. Is she cleaning the cabin for him? Yes and no.

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