IJ study archive

Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All

source

TL;DR

Wallace's 1994 report on the Illinois State Fair, written for a "swanky East-Coast magazine" while IJ was in composition. Sent back to the downstate Illinois he grew up in, Wallace files pith-helmeted "anthropological reporting" that turns, mid-essay, into a theory of Midwestern mass pleasure: where the "Megalopolitan East-Coaster" vacations as a flight-from (escape from crowds, noise, spectacle), the rural Midwesterner, "Away all the time" in emptied farmland, vacations as a flight-toward — "the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd." Hence the Fair is "For-Us. Self-consciously so," "Us showing off for Us," and "The real Spectacle that draws us here is Us." The essay advances no theory about IJ (it predates the novel's publication and never names it), but it is a nonfiction sibling to the cruise essay's managed-pleasure critique: it documents engineered mass leisure, sensory-overload consumption (a "Bataan March of docile consumption"), a crowd "expending months of stored-up attention," and — at the carnival's Near-Death rides — the same pay-to-be-managed paradox the cruise essay diagnoses, inverted into terror: "Why pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive?" Underneath the reportage runs the cruise essay's anhedonic note: amid mass gratification Wallace records "the first time I’ve felt truly lonely at the Fair." It doubles as autobiographical Midwest substrate (flat gridded land, corn, wind) alongside "Derivative Sport."

Key claims

  • The Fair is a communal spectacle, not a private treat. Wallace's governing thesis: "The State Fair here is For-Us. Self-consciously so. Not For-Me or -You." "The Fair’s deliberately about the crowds and jostle, the noise and overload of sight and smell and choice and event." "It’s Us showing off for Us." "The real Spectacle that draws us here is Us."
  • Flight-from vs. flight-toward. The essay's central theory: East-Coast vacations are "literally getaways, flights-from—from crowds, noise, heat, dirt, the neural wear of too many stimuli," an escape the essay's title puns on. In the emptied rural Midwest, where "you’re pretty much Away all the time," the vacation-impulse manifests as a flight-toward: "the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd." "Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public Event."
  • Managed mass pleasure and sensory overload. The food gauntlet is a study in engineered excess ("the air deep-fried"), and the crowd is "a rare grand mass of Midwest humanity, eating and shuffling and rubbing" — "From the air we’d look like some kind of Bataan March of docile consumption." The communal We is a crowd "expending months of stored-up attention."
  • The pay-to-be-managed paradox (terror edition). At the Near-Death rides Wallace states the rhetorical move that also drives the cruise essay: the world "divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not," and, at the SKY COASTER, "Why pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive?"
  • Despair beneath the gratification. Amid a crowd "radically gratified, vivid, actuated, sponges for sensuous data, feeding on it all somehow," Wallace records estrangement: "It’s the first time I’ve felt truly lonely at the Fair."
  • Autobiographical Midwest. Wallace "actually grew up around here, just a couple hours’ drive from downstate Springfield" — though "I never did go to the State Fair, though, growing up—I pretty much topped out at the County Fair level." The landscape is the flat gridded plain of "Derivative Sport" — "The land here is big. Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction." — and rural life is "marooned in a space whose emptiness starts to become both physical and spiritual." The Fair offers "a vacation from alienation, a chance for a moment to love what real life out here can’t let you love."

Theories & evidence

None — the essay advances no interpretive claim about an IJ crux (it never names the novel). Its IJ-bearing signal is preoccupation, carried in the CONNECTION blocks below; every connection runs essay → novel. Locators are the essay's own dateline/timestamp headers (e.g. 08/13/0925h, 08/13/1400–1600h, 08/15/1930h) plus position descriptors; this edition carries no usable footnote apparatus.

CONNECTION: Spectacle as engineered mass pleasure — the Entertainment cluster's consumer sibling

  • Crux: entertainment-purpose (also book-as-entertainment, eup-connection)
  • Early text: "The State Fair here is For-Us. Self-consciously so. Not For-Me or -You." … "It’s Us showing off for Us." … "The real Spectacle that draws us here is Us." [08/13/1400–1600h, the crowd-theory passage]; "Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public Event" and the crowd "expending months of stored-up attention" [same dateline, the "A theory" stretch].
  • IJ echo: The novel's Entertainment/spectacle preoccupation — pleasure and attention as the thing a culture organizes itself around, the audience as a mass that gives itself over to a show. The Fair is the benign communal version of the appetite the samizdat weaponizes: a crowd that has come to spend its attention on a manufactured spectacle. The "expending months of stored-up attention" line is the attention-economy note the Entertainment runs to lethality.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: [author]-grade. Held at shared-preoccupation, not prefiguration: the Fair's pleasure is communal and self-aware ("Us showing off for Us"), where the Entertainment's is solitary and self-annihilating — this essay supplies the spectacle/attention preoccupation, not the lethal artifact. The attention line also brushes media-prescience (attention as spent currency); interpretive, ours.

CONNECTION: The managed induction of terror — pay-to-be-managed, the pampering-to-death mechanism inverted

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality (also proposed pampering-to-death)
  • Early text: the world "divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not" [08/15/1930h, the Near-Death-rides passage]; "Why pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive?" [08/15/1930h, the SKY COASTER set-piece, final pages].
  • IJ echo: The novel's addiction/Entertainment logic of paying (with money, attention, life) for an engineered experience that consumes you — the relief-that-recreates-need and pleasure-run-to-lethality machinery. The cruise essay names the pleasure version ("survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way)" — asft-cruise-essay sec. 13); this essay names the terror version of the same paid-managed-experience-you-should-flee, with the same incredulous rhetorical question.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: This is the state-fair essay's tightest tie to the cruise essay and the reason the archive marks it as pampering-to-death's likeliest sibling. The SKY COASTER's hand-printed "$40.00. AMEX Visa MC. NO REFUNDS. NO STOPPING HALF WAY UP." sign and the East-Coast "ringer" swung "like high-altitude beef" dramatize managed dread as a paid commodity — the appetite-for-being-managed the proposed slug names, here in its terror rather than its pleasure register.

CONNECTION: Autobiographical Midwest substrate — the flat gridded plain, corn, wind

  • Crux: hal-dfw-surrogate (also ij-autobiographical)
  • Early text: "The land here is big. Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction." [08/13/1400–1600h, the flight-toward theory]; rural Midwesterners "marooned in a space whose emptiness starts to become both physical and spiritual" [08/13/0925h, the community-and-space passage]; Wallace "actually grew up around here, just a couple hours’ drive from downstate Springfield," though he "never did go to the State Fair" as a kid, topping out "at the County Fair level" [opening, 08/05/93/0800h].
  • IJ echo: The Midwest that produced E.T.A.'s and Hal's Wallace-surrogate substrate — the same flat, gridded, wind-worked Central-Illinois plane that "Derivative Sport" renders as the ground of Wallace's tennis-as-geometry and the origin of Hal. This essay is the companion documentary source: the adult Wallace returned to the landscape "Derivative Sport" mythologizes, now reporting the region's social psychology (space, emptiness, the hunger to commune) rather than its tennis.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: [author]-grade autobiographical texture. Sibling to asft-derivative-sport: "Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction" is the same Cartesian-plain imagination ("Derivative Sport"'s grids and vectors) seen from the fairground rather than the tennis court. The IJ-side link (Hal/E.T.A. as drawn from this Midwest) is the autobiographical-reading cluster, carried more load-bearingly by the tennis essays; here it is preoccupation, not a claim about a plot crux.

CONNECTION: Despair beneath the managed fun — the anhedonic substrate

  • Crux: anhedonia (oeuvre-scoped; the IJ-side dramatization keys to hal-condition — see Notes)
  • Early text: amid a crowd "radically gratified, vivid, actuated, sponges for sensuous data, feeding on it all somehow," "It’s the first time I’ve felt truly lonely at the Fair." [08/15/1930h, the nighttime crowds-in-the-Hollow passage].
  • IJ echo: IJ's insistence that estrangement and despair intensify precisely amid engineered gratification — the anhedonic ground the Entertainment-culture critique rests on (Hal's sealed desolation; the depressive substrate the Substance/Entertainment exploits). The state-fair loneliness-amid-mass-pleasure is the same paradox the cruise essay states outright ("on board the Nadir … I felt despair" — asft-cruise-essay sec. 3), in a fainter, sociological key.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: Bare anhedonia is the oeuvre-scoped crux; the IJ-side dramatization keys to hal-condition (cruise-essay precedent for the scoping). Fainter than the cruise essay's despair block — a single sentence of estrangement rather than a sustained diagnosis. Kept as its own block so the four-source anhedonia cluster stays symmetrical across the ASFT notes.

Themes

Spectacle and mass pleasure (the Fair as "Us showing off for Us"; attention spent communally) · flight-from vs. flight-toward (the East-Coast getaway vs. the Midwest urge to commune) · engineered/managed experience (the deep-fried excess; the paid "managed induction of terror") · the Midwest as landscape and psychology (flat gridded emptiness, corn, wind, space) · consumption and abjection (the food gauntlet; the vomit-flecked carnival rides) · despair and loneliness amid gratification.

Cross-references

  • asft-cruise-essay — the primary sibling: the cruise essay's managed-pleasure-that-produces-despair critique in its pleasure register; this state-fair essay is its spectacle/terror register, and its likeliest pampering-to-death co-source.
  • asft-derivative-sport — the autobiographical-Midwest sibling: the same Central-Illinois flat gridded plain ("Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction") that "Derivative Sport" renders as tennis-as-geometry.
  • e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — the spectacle/attention and managed-pleasure preoccupation shares EUP's malignant-entertainment argument; this essay is EUP's logic seen in a communal Midwestern spectacle rather than in television.
  • The Entertainment / samizdat material of the novel: the mass audience given over to a manufactured show, and the attention-economy the novel dramatizes.

Notable passages

Prose cited by the essay's dateline/timestamp headers and position. This edition carries no usable footnote apparatus for this essay; all [e-text].

  • "The State Fair here is For-Us. Self-consciously so. Not For-Me or -You." [08/13/1400–1600h, crowd-theory]
  • "It’s Us showing off for Us." [08/13/1400–1600h]
  • "The real Spectacle that draws us here is Us." [08/13/1400–1600h, the "A theory" passage]
  • "Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public Event." [08/13/1400–1600h]
  • "the vacation-impulse in rural IL is manifested as a flight- toward" [08/13/1400–1600h] — NOTE: the raw hyphenates as "a flight- toward" (a stray space); quote the surrounding clause byte-exact, not a space-normalized token.
  • "the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd" [08/13/1400–1600h]
  • "expending months of stored-up attention" [08/13/1400–1600h]
  • "From the air we’d look like some kind of Bataan March of docile consumption." [08/13/1235h, the food-gauntlet]
  • "those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not" [08/15/1930h, Near-Death rides]
  • "Why pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive?" [08/15/1930h, SKY COASTER]
  • "radically gratified, vivid, actuated, sponges for sensuous data, feeding on it all somehow" [08/15/1930h, the crowds-in-the-Hollow passage]
  • "It’s the first time I’ve felt truly lonely at the Fair." [08/15/1930h]
  • "The land here is big. Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction." [08/13/1400–1600h]
  • "a vacation from alienation, a chance for a moment to love what real life out here can’t let you love" [08/13/0925h, community-and-space]