A Cruise Ship Named Desire

By Chris Bousquet

“Shipping Out,” David Foster Wallace’s chronicle of his time aboard the cruise ship M.V. Zenith, contains many of the elements that made me fall in love with Wallace when I was that sort of male, liberal arts undergraduate that tends to fall in love with Wallace. It is meticulously observed, cynical, and painfully self-conscious, but also incredibly funny, fun, and energetic. The sheer experience of reading Wallace is well worth the price of admission. 

In revisiting the essay thirty years after its publication, however, I want to focus on what the essay has to offer philosophically. There are a few reasons for this. The first is autobiographical: I’m a philosophy professor, so not only am I inclined to read this sort of work through a philosophical lens, but I’d be out of my depth talking about much else. The others are more substantive. Like many other fiction writers, Wallace’s philosophical commitments are elusive. He tends to sprinkle in enough philosophical content that you come away thinking that there’s something there, but his musings tend to be scattered and impressionistic, rather than making a clear argument. I want to see if I can pinpoint what Wallace is saying here and whether it stands up to scrutiny. Finally, the reflections in “Shipping Out” seem to reflect enduring preoccupations of Wallace’s, so insofar as one thinks he is worth engaging with as a thinker in addition to as a writer, they merit consideration.

The philosophical core of the text develops as Wallace observes another cruise ship, the Dreamward, docked next to the Zenith (which he quickly rechristens “the Nadir”). Looking out from the deck, Wallace can’t help but notice the Dreamward’s numerous advantages over his comparatively shabby watercraft: its whiter hull, aerodynamic snout, cleaner pools, cabin decks, basketball court, and army of Nordic towel guys. He writes, 

“I am suffering here from a delusion, and I know it's a delusion, this envy of another ship, but still it's painful. It's also representative of a psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten steadily worse as my Luxury Cruise wears on, a mental list of dissatisfactions that started off picayune but has quickly become despair-grade. I know that the syndrome's cause is not simply the contempt bred of a week's familiarity with the poor old Nadir, and that the source of all the dissatisfactions isn't the Nadir at all but rather that un-American part of me that craves pampering and passive pleasure: the dissatisfied-infant part of me, the part that always and indiscriminately WANTS.”

What Wallace describes here is the phenomenon of the hedonic treadmill. When introduced to a novel luxury, we tend to experience a temporary uptick in pleasure, but eventually become inured to our shiny new toy. Unless we find an even newer shinier toy, we’ll go back to our baseline happiness. In fact, we might even end up worse off, because we become dependent on this new thing, suffering its absence when we don’t have it. This is, of course, not really a new or distinctively American phenomenon. Rousseau thought it started as soon as human societies had enough time to start making luxuries. As he explains in the Discourse on Inequality, “these conveniences having through use lost almost all their aptness to please, and even degenerated into real wants, the privation of them became far more intolerable than the possession of them had been agreeable; to lose them was a misfortune, to possess them no happiness.”

A cruise, however, offers a promise of total desire satisfaction, of an escape hatch from the hedonic treadmill. This promise articulated most luridly in a brochure written by Iowa Writers' Workshop Chairperson Frank Conroy, which relates a cruise experience in which “fantasies and expectations were to be exceeded, to say the least.” Wallace’s growing indifference to the Nadir’s sumptuous offerings and correlative desires for things bigger, brighter, and more extravagant belies this promise. He writes, 

“Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we're maybe now in a position to appreciate the falsehood at the dark heart of Celebrity's brochure. 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 this promise will be kept but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie.”

Indeed, in a footnote, Wallace suggests that this might not just be A Big Lie, but “It might well be The Big One, come to think of it.” What might seem like a mundane psychological fact about us, for Wallace, lays bare a great myth about human existence. The looming concern here is that this human insatiability applies not just to luxuries, not even just to material goods, but to everything. Happiness, for us, will always be one step away: we think we just need to wrap our hands around the next big thing, satisfy the next desire, but once we do, we won’t really enjoy it and will just want the next thing. 

This worry is a fixation of Wallace’s. In his Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water,” he tells his audience of grads that no matter how much fame, money, or achievement you find in life, “you will never have enough.” In Infinite Jest, he invents an apparent solution to the hedonic treadmill, The Entertainment, a movie so perfectly captivating and satisfying that it puts watchers into a state of perfect catatonic pleasure. The fact that even this solution to the hedonic treadmill will not strike readers as particularly gratifying pushes the problem to the point of paradox: even perfectly satisfying your desires will not be satisfying.  

Our culture has, of course, expended incredible time, energy, and money in its quest to conquer endless desire. By offering us a steady dopamine drip, social media companies have created a hyper-efficient mechanism for creating and satisfying desires, speeding up the hedonic treadmill by reducing the time between a desire’s arrival and its sating to milliseconds. In the physical world, delivery apps put everything from a lug nut to a steak dinner right at our fingertips. AI promises to bring the efficiency of digital desire satisfaction into our material life, creating a frictionless world in which everything we could possibly want is delivered seamlessly to us without our expending an ounce of effort. That these developments have, on balance, made us more miserable is solid evidence for Wallace’s theory. 

If merely satisfying our every desire is not particularly gratifying or meaningful, what’s the alternative? Wallace’s most personal reflections on this question come in his interview with Charlie Rose. Asked by Rose about his personal struggles, Wallace says, 

“The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention and I got it really quick and realized it didn't make me happy at all, in which case, "Hmm. Why am I writing?" You know, What's the purpose of this?...I, this is what's very interesting is I, there's part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn't really make very much difference to me because I learned in my 20s that it just doesn't change anything and that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway. So a lot of my problem right now is I don't really have a brass ring and I'm kind of open to suggestions about what, what one chases that, there are real abstract ideas about you know, what art can be and the redemptive quality of art and, you know, kindness to animals and, you know, all the cliches that we can invoke.”

For Wallace, even achieving his lofty career aspirations failed to satisfy, which has sent him looking for something else to fill that void. But even if he’s right about the emptiness of desire satisfaction, his proposed alternatives are decidedly half-assed. Perhaps he’s serious when he mentions the redemptive quality of art, but it’s almost like he catches himself being objectionably earnest and saccharine, such that he must denigrate this suggestion as a cliché and throw in “kindness to animals” as a joke. 

It is this dilemma (or as Wallace might call it, “double-bind”) that I want to unpack a bit further. On the one hand, Wallace finds that sating even his deepest desires is not satisfying, because it always leaves him wanting more. On the other hand, he cannot find an alternative source of meaning that does not strike him as trite, sappy, and self-serving. Is there a way out?

Across his work, Wallace expresses equivocal relationship to clichés. In Infinite Jest, Don Gately observes, “It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.” Wallace himself endorses a similar idea in “This is Water”: “Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.” And yet, in his conversation with Rose, he cringes in the most exaggerated way every time he says something that sounds remotely cliché or pretentious, as if it is physically painful for him to get the words out. 

Wallace’s ambivalence, I think, actually reflects something true about clichés, especially those that have to do with meaning. The proposition that a meaningful life is to create, to connect, to experience, to love and be loved is at once true and deeply unsatisfying. For insofar as this supposed nature of meaning is regimented in any concrete set of conditions, it ceases to be meaningful. Imagine that philosophers finally developed a (supposedly) true theory of meaning, declaring once and for all “Meaning is X.” Would you find following their recommendations and achieving X particularly meaningful? 

I doubt it. Meaning would start to feel like a set of obligations to fulfill— stand up straight, tuck your shirt in, say thank you—rather than an essentially spiritual and mysterious quality. Meaning is the sort of thing that once you’ve articulated it, it slips through your fingers. 

In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of special beings set out to find an “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," and so build a supercomputer, which works on the question for 7.5 million years. Finally, the computer finds an answer: “42.” The joke is that no matter what the computer answered, it could not possibly be true. Its truth would be undermined by its very articulation. As Wittgenstein put it, “the sense [or meaning] of the world must lie outside the world” (TLP, 6.41). 

That is not to say that nothing useful can be expressed about meaning. But it is something you have to sneak up on and even then, you can still only hope to land a glancing blow. It is in helping with this task that clichés earn their keep, as Wallace recognizes. Clichés help because they allow us to find our way in to meaning, to sneak into a space where you can feel a piece of it. Wittgenstein famously distinguished between showing and saying. “Propositions cannot represent the logical form,” he argues, yet “The propositions show the logical form of reality” (TLP, 4.121). Something similar might be said about clichés and meaning: they don’t so much describe the nature of meaning as show us a way in. 

This doesn’t always work, however. Much of the time, clichés will just sound naïve and dumb and fail to spark much response at all. A cliché can be, to borrow Zen Buddhist Stephen Batchelor’s term, a “dead word.” A dead word is a mantra, uttered unthinkingly and out of habit. A live word emerges “from your gut,” as Batchelor puts it. A cliché can be a dead word for a long time, then suddenly open up and reveal its depths. “One day at a time” can mean one thing when you hear it from your high school football coach and another thing entirely when you hear it at an AA meeting, as Wallace’s Gately knows well. 

The way out of the dilemma then, as best as I can reckon, is to wriggle your way into meaning, rather than starting with a roadmap to follow. It is to find live words rather than dead ones. And these words may not convey meaning by representing a proposition, but rather by taking you experientially to a different place. Incidentally, Wallace is provoked to such an experience at the end of his cruise by an unlikely source. A British hypnotist named Nigel Ellery performs, and while Wallace goes to great mental pains to avoid being hypnotized, he is sent into a different sort of trance:

“I find myself, in my plush seat, going farther and farther away, sort of creatively visualizing an epiphanic Frank Conroy-type moment of my own, trying to see the hypnotist and subjects and audience and ship itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, imagining the m.v. Nadir right at this moment, all lit up and steaming north, in the dark, at night, with a strong west wind pulling. the moon backward through a skein of clouds--the Nadir a constellation, complexly aglow, angelically white, festive, imperial. Yes, this: it would look like a floating palace to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, treading water, out of sight of land.”

After this almost cinematic out-of-body experience, Wallace describes “feeling a little bit dulled but mostly good—good to be on the Nadir and good to know that soon I would get off the ship, that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way).” He reports that “reentry into the stresses and demands of quotidian landlocked real-world life wasn't nearly as bad as a week of absolutely nothing had led me to fear.” What is it that throws Wallace into this blithe contentedness? Gratitude? Mindfulness? Beauty? 

None of that seems quite right…