the Fackelmann execution, eyes sewn open (pp. 979–980)
the librarian-type lady was sewing Fackelmann’s eyelids open to the skin above his eyebrows. As in they were sewing poor old Count Faxula’s eyes open.
Context
Spectation made compulsory and lethal, in the most literal image the book offers. Fackelmann's eyes are sewn open to his brow while he's dosed with the anti-narcotic so he'll feel every stitch, then held before the viewer as a cartridge "about ultra-violence and sadism" plays and fluid is dropped into his forced-open eyes — a punishment engineered as inescapable watching. This is the Entertainment's captive viewer rendered as torture: the passive spectator's condition (eyes on the screen, unable to look away) made permanent with needle and thread, the surrender the cartridge induces chemically here imposed surgically. Where the Entertainment makes you unable to want to stop watching, Fackelmann is made physically unable to stop, the two forms of captivity revealed as versions of one thing. Being made to watch is the execution.