‘A Supposedly Fun Thing’ as Meta-Ethnography
By Nick Hollander
One of the more challenging aspects of travel writing—or any kind of embedded re-telling of an experience—is capturing something authentic. To be a writer is to be an observer living outside of whatever experience one hopes to capture. Closing the gap between observation and experience is the challenge that makes good ethnographies as rare as they are compelling: stepping outside oneself and experiencing the very set of circumstances worth cataloguing is nearly impossible. At a public reading in 2004, a fan once compared David Foster Wallace’s work to ethnography on account of the amount of detail Wallace includes in his pieces.¹ The fan’s question was about Wallace’s fiction, but the comparison seems even more appropriate to his travel writing, particularly his essay detailing his voyage on a luxury cruise ship entitled: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
Readers can be forgiven for mistaking A Supposedly Fun Thing (henceforth ASFT) for true ethnography. Wallace has a gift for including details about his environment that lesser writers might consider irrelevant. His visceral physical descriptions (the smell of suntan lotion on hot flesh)² combined with his dedication to the precise retelling of language (see his emblematic use of the Latin “sic”)³ seem to deliver the kind of intimate and authentic retelling of an experience that successful ethnography conveys. Mistaken interpretations misidentify the experience that Wallace is interested in communicating. ASFT is not an ethnography about what it is like to go on a seven night luxury cruise, nor would Wallace ever claim it to be. It is rather a meta-ethnography about what it is like to observe a seven night luxury cruise. Understanding this difference will help skeptical readers understand what makes ASFT so compelling.
The meta-ethnographic structure in ASFT grants readers immediate access to Wallace’s critical observations of his surroundings; they get to simultaneously consume the experience and the analysis in a way not granted by genuine ethnography nor traditional travel writing. The most compelling evidence of this structure in ASFT is Wallace’s psychic analysis. It would be immediately arresting to a seasoned reader of genuine or anthropological ethnography to stumble upon a multi-page digression about the theorized psychic woes of the people around them. Not only is this common place in ASFT but it makes up a sizable portion of the essay. Whether analyzing himself, the other passengers, or even generalizing to humanity as a whole, Wallace primarily seems interested in the psyches surrounding the experience rather than the experience itself, and he does anything but bury the lede with regard to this sort of analysis appearing in the essay. In the early pages, he clearly declares what I take to be the decisive analytical claim of the essay: there is something “unbearably sad” about a luxury cruise that causes “despair.”
Wallace gives ASFT a much needed structure by embedding the psychic analysis throughout the chronological recounting of his days on the ship. This allows the reader to imagine themself as Wallace and to live through his own words. A traditionally successful piece of travel writing does this, too. An author might describe the comforts of their hotel room or the you-had-to-be-there whiteness of a sandy beach. While Wallace does this too, to be sure, he lures the reader into a false sense that these descriptions are objective by blurring the lines between the descriptive and the analytical. He includes a surfeit of detail about his own internal analysis that frames each of the experiences that he catalogues.
The descriptions are such that one begins to trust Wallace to identify the important details of the experience just as they would have and to draw the same conclusions. One of the things that makes ASFT so enticing is its implication of skillful reader; being privy to Wallace’s analysis nearly convinces readers that they are thinking his thoughts in real time. Regardless of if you are someone without the ability to be that observant, or one who turns away from that ability, Wallace has a way of drawing you back out and forcing it upon you. It is not a kind of forcing that has so much to do with power, but more about exposure. Wallace, certainly in his own estimation, is opening people’s eyes.
There is something at the same time indulgent and compelling about this kind of writing. It is indulgent perhaps because Wallace is taking up a role that many of his readers would like to take up themselves and, for a number of reasons, fail to achieve. For some, this practice might even seem unethical or problematic. Reading ASFT amounts to, say some, participating in a kind of voyeurism. For others, it is a merely a matter of observational ability. One of Wallace’s talents—I would go as far as to say unique talents— is his ability to pick out the pertinent details of a scene. He seems to conjure meaning in the mundane in a way that feels almost nauseating. My guess is that the nauseous feeling is a kind of realization that everything he is saying has been right in front of you the whole time. The way it parks itself deep in your lower intestine in a way you cannot ignore is but recognition that you have been going through life in a way that is less than forthright, willfully or otherwise ignoring the unpleasant truths that are right in front of you.
Some readers undoubtedly refuse the nausea and in doing so deprive themselves of what makes ASFT great. By understanding how Wallace hides a low-grade despair within his relentlessly witty prose, readers will be equipped to decouple Wallace’s conclusions from their own and scrutinize them effectively. While Wallace can be rather persuasive, one does not need to agree with all or even one of his conclusions in order to see why A Supposedly Fun Thing is brilliant.
Works Cited:
1. David Foster Wallace, “Free Library of Philadelphia,” Reading and Q&A, June 22, 2004.
2. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, First Back Bay edition. (Back Bay Books, 1998), 256.
3 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing, 264.