Engaging vs. demanding — the anti-entertainment ethic and the prostitution analogy
echoes
From: Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
- Early text: "Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging
without being at all demanding"; "Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe
even console; only artists can transfigure"; the trash writer "affords his
customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the
reader" … "without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or
artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an
important or even real activity." [the trash-fiction section] [e-text]
- IJ echo: IJ built as the opposite of the frictionless, engaging-without-demanding
artifact — a novel that demands of its reader (the endnotes, the
withheld closure, the labor), precisely so as not to be the Entertainment it
depicts. The prostitution/seduction figure here is the same one "The Nature of
the Fun" uses for the wish to seduce the reader; both are the compositional
counter-value to the samizdat's total, will-dissolving pleasure.
- Weight: prefiguration (aesthetic program)