the pleasure that requires not thinking about the suffering behind it — the ethical structure the Entertainment…
echoes
From: Consider the Lobster
- Early text:
[essay] (paraphrase; source is an image-only scan, not
quotable) The festival's pleasure — mass consumption of a boiled-alive animal —
is available only on condition that the consumer not attend to the creature's
evident distress; the essay asks whether that not-thinking is the product
of actual thought or just the wish not to be discomfited. [Gourmet pp. 50,
62, closing page — the completion of the question, "There are limits to what
even interested persons can ask of each other," recovered from Gourmet's own
online text, 2026-07-16]
- IJ echo: The Entertainment / samizdat as pleasure whose cost is exactly what
the viewer cannot bear to attend to — the medical attaché's fatal viewing and
the cartridge's lethal appeal (scene 007, 029). Wallace's lobster essay is the
non-fiction limit case of the same structure: entertainment/pleasure as
anaesthetic, sustained by a refusal to look at what it does.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation