"entertainment as reassurance" and art as self-forgetting — the discursive twin of the Entertainment's fatal escape
echoes
From: Laughing with Kafka
- Early text: Kafka's wit is inaccessible to "children whom our
culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as
reassurance", and "most of us Americans come to art essentially to forget
ourselves". [sec. 9, fn 2]
The claim is that entertainment's cultural function is anaesthetic escape.
- IJ echo: The Entertainment / samizdat as escape-to-death — the medical
attaché's fatal viewing and the cartridge's anatomy (scene 007, 029); the
novel's whole thesis that fun engineered to let us forget ourselves is
continuous with, not different in kind from, real television.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation