IJ study archive

The cruise as paid consciousness-obliteration and the amnion of pure pleasure — the Entertainment's…

echoes

From: DFW interviewed by Terry Gross — Fresh Air, NPR (March 5, 1997)

  • Early text: [scene] The cruise exchange: you buy a week in which everything but the pleasurably stimulated nerve endings is switched off — they even do your whistling-in-the-graveyard for you [00:02:32]; vacation's task-and-reward mythology has you float, one week a year, in an amniotic bath of pure pleasure to recharge [00:03:20]; plus the essay-derived infantilizing verdict — so little demanded of him that a supermarket line became an unendurable ordeal [00:03:20]
  • IJ echo: the adjudicated contents core of the Entertainment — the crib's-eye wobbled lens, the maternal figure inclined over the viewer-as-infant (scene 178, pp. 938–941) — and EUP's anaclitic/fetal-viewing-posture bridge already at author force
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation