Despair beneath the managed fun — the anhedonic substrate
echoes
From: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
- Early text: "There is something about a mass-market Luxury
Cruise that’s unbearably sad"; "on board the Nadir … I felt despair"; "The
word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and
I’m using it seriously"; "It’s wanting to jump overboard." [sec. 3] — framed by
the sixteen-year-old's actual overboard suicide that opens the section.
- IJ echo: IJ's clinical-depression / anhedonia substrate — Kate Gompert's
account of the "It" of depression as a will toward death; the novel's
insistence that despair is a serious, specific, killing condition, not a
mood; Hal's own sealed-off desolation. The cruise essay's despair — a
serious yearning-for-death felt precisely amid engineered comfort — is the
same condition IJ dramatizes and the affective ground the Entertainment
exploits.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation