A supposedly moisturizing thing you’ll never do again
Lauren Oyler, David Foster Wallace, and the self-defeating evasion of influence
Lauren Oyler has a good essay in the latest issue of Harper’s on taking a special "Goop" wellness cruise that culminates in a visit from the Goop goddess herself, Gwyneth Paltrow. Its major, though not fatal, failure comes near the top, when she confronts the ghost lurking in the room of every contemporary essay about going on a cruise: David Foster Wallace's 1996 essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,” which is about going on a cruise. I’m sure there are other examples of a single essay that looms as large over a whole sub-genre in the way that that essay looms over the cruise sub-genre, but I can’t think of it at the moment (the comments are open if you have other examples). Everyone who would be in a position to write a new cruise essay knows that the Foster Wallace essay stands in their way, is the standard against which theirs will be compared. It has to be dealt with in some fashion, whether in the internal involutions of the author as she writes her cruise piece, or explicitly in the piece itself.
Admirably, Oyler goes right at it. She writes:
To journalists, a “cruise piece”... carries associations with the great cruise piece of 1996, “Shipping Out,” better known as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” indeed also published in this swanky East Coast magazine. To be able to unite the cruise piece with wellness writing in a single essay promised a glory and quantity of free stuff that would hearken to the heyday of print magazines, back when things mattered. What’s more, during the yearslong squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls; his reputation as both a misogynist and an author beloved by misogynists meant it was just sitting right there this whole time, waiting for anyone with grammatical flexibility and the courage to try.
A reread confirmed my suspicions: it’s not that good. But it is, fatedly, about a cruise on the same cruise line. All I’d have to do was avoid footnotes, which would be too obvious, and getting sensitive about the evils of advertising, a moment that has long passed. (We call it branding or marketing now.) The point, remember, is not to imitate DFW, but to occupy his place—in a female way. “A supposedly moisturizing thing you’ll never do again,” suggested a friend. “A supposedly fun egg I’ll never put in my vagina again,” proposed another. “A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, because I’m dead,” Boyfriend 1 supplied. I would not be putting any jade eggs in my vagina, both because of my Didion-esque self-respect and because, after Goop settled a lawsuit concerning “unsubstantiated claims” made about the medical benefits of the yoni eggs in 2018, I assumed they had stopped selling them. Anyway, I am getting paid about 50 percent more than DFW was, even adjusting for inflation, which is a win for us girls.
There's so much that's good here. I love the candor about the competition among female writers to fill Didion’s shoes. I love that she calls them all (herself included) "lady writers." That string of cracks from her friends, goop-ifying the title of the essay, is hilarious. I'm endlessly interested in writers writing candidly and stylishly about the hidden status games writers play with each other, and Oyler's good at this.
The problem, of course, is that “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is entirely that good. And to reduce Wallace to "a misogynist and an author beloved by misogynists" is cheap. Whatever else he was, and however much we should or shouldn’t care about that, he's probably the single most influential American essayist since Joan Didion, and one whose work simply isn’t reducible in any interesting way to "misogyny" or bro-ishness. He’s an amazing writer, a generational talent. Here's an exemplary passage from his essay, describing the distinctive language deployed in the ad copy for the Celebrity 7NC cruise:
Celebrity's 7NC brochure uses the 2nd-person pronoun throughout. This is extremely appropriate. Because in the brochure’s scenarios the 7NC experience is being not described but evoked. The brochure’s real seduction is not an invitation to fantasize but rather a construction of the fantasy itself. This is advertising, but with a queerly authoritarian twist. In regular adult-market ads, attractive people are shown having a near-illegally good time in some scenario surrounding a product, and you are meant to fantasize that you can project yourself into the ad’s perfect world via purchase of that product. In regular advertising, where your adult agency and freedom of choice have to be flattered, the purchase is prerequisite to the fantasy; it’s the fantasy that’s being sold, not any literal projection into the ad’s world. There's no sense of any real kind of actual promise being made. This is what makes conventional adult advertisements fundamentally coy.
Contrast this coyness with the force of the 7NC brochure’s ads: the near-imperative use of the second person, the specificity of detail that extends even to what you will say (you will say “I couldn’t agree more” and “Let's do it all!”). In the cruise brochure’s ads, you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it - they supplant it.
And this authoritarian—near-parental—type of advertising makes a very special sort of promise, a diabolically seductive promise that’s actually kind of honest, because it’s a promise that the Luxury Cruise itself is all about honoring. The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you will. That they’ll make certain of it. That they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. The ads promise that you will be able —finally, for once—truly to relax and have a good time, because you will have no choice but to have a good time.
This is that good, as is so much else in the piece. Those of us who came of age as writers after Wallace published his seminal collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, are living in a world shaped profoundly by this voice. Pretending otherwise is an evasion, as are the references to his personal behavior and the supposed misogyny of his fans. As I said above, this isn’t fatal to the piece, which overall is good, but it’s worth dwelling on because it's a characteristic evasion of our time.
If we take our art seriously, we have to deal with the anxiety of the influence of our literary mothers and fathers. We have to slay them, or at least fight them to a manageable standstill. Most of us spend years evading or failing at this task, deploying a whole host of more or less effective strategies. We do this because vanquishing our fears of falling short relative to those who came before—those who made us who are are, as artists—is really fucking hard. I understand wanting to dismiss Wallace, who is a giant, but it can’t work like this. We can’t wish away the influence that artists have had on us, or on the way that we will be read and measured, because of them, by our readers, editors, and peers. When we try to wave it away, without really reckoning with it, it does damage to our writing. Oyler isn’t really reckoning with Wallace here; she's only appearing to.
I was reading, recently, Garth Greenwell's elegant Yale Review essay on Philip Roth's novel Sabbath Theater. The essay is both a case for the greatness of that particular novel, which Greenwell clearly loves, and an intervention in the ongoing debate around the proper relationship between art, morals, and politics. Greenwell's argument, which I find compelling if not wholly persuasive (but who cares if it's persuasive; I'm not on a jury), is that both sides are rather confused about things. The art for art's sake crowd wants to draw too bright a line between the demands of art, on the one hand, and those of politics and morals and justice on the other. The other side—the puritans, the commissars—wants to draw far too straight a line, seems to want a world in which good art is an expression of “good” values. Against both sides, Greenwell insists that there is indeed a fundamental conduit between good art and the demands of morality, but it functions in a necessarily complicated, often rather excruciating way, in which the moral and political failures of the people we love and admire and are excited by is the unavoidable condition of us receiving a proper moral education. He writes:
We can bear things in art we can’t bear in real life, and so art can offer us a crucial moral training, placing us in the impossible position, which is also the only morally defensible position, of cherishing the existence of others we cannot bear. By repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath and then inviting us past that judgment, Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts. Had I turned my back on Sabbath at his first indefensible act, had I canceled him or blocked him or deplatformed him, had I cast aside the book as terminally problematic, I would have missed much that has felt useful to me, in the not-quite-articulable way art is useful: the sense of life, of manic energy, the texture of existence and the terror of the abyss. Our current obsession with purity, our sense that we cannot associate with others who do not share our political and social values, our intolerance of disagreement are not just corrosive of civil society and democratic discourse. They are also impoverishing of ourselves.
He could have added that our obsession with purity, and our discomfort with moral messiness, is impoverishing of our art. Aside from the long-term question of whether David Foster Wallace ends up in the canon of great American writers, whether the campaign against him succeeds in slowly extinguishing the flame of his legacy, there is the more urgent matter of the damage we're doing right now to our art, as artists, when we use the bad politics or indefensible actions of writers who've influenced us to evade the challenge of their influence. There is no real evasion, anyway, there’s just the masking of it, the tricks we play on ourselves and our readers to pretend it’s not there.