Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 15

_H^£ervisual_Standaid^f_^^

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foundation of a true expression" (1:788), and as Emerson declares,
"what a little of all we know is said" ("Poet" 239, emphasis added):
When I see the daybreak I am not reminded of those
Homeric, or Chaucerian, or Shakespearean, or
Miltonic pictures; nor of Pope and Addison and
Johnson who write as if they had never seen the face
of the country (Anthology 50, emphasis added).
A Faulkner may attempt to utilize the thundering rhetoric of the
Shakespearean "sound and fury"; but the reminder of the actual
symbol of the "human eye with an electric pupil" (Sound 388) must
always return him to the indigenous power of Light in August.
Having now given some small indication of the power and range
of the hypervisual ideal in "classic American literature"—an
omnipresence and omniscience akin to the explication of the white
whale itself as, finally, "the great principle of light" (Moby-Dick
264)—1 wish to explore in some brief detail the more difficult but
concomitant question of the role of popular culture in the above high
brow canon. Here, perhaps Washington Irving is a good place to start;
for he has too often been accused of losing his most successful stories on
"German folk tales" or "European lore" (Brooks 1:243). In truth,
Irving's most popular romances must meet the standard of the simple
American "National Lampoon Vacation" or "Animal-House"
courtships. That is to say. Rip Van Winkle's flight to the Kaatskill
mountains produces a vacation of immense hijinks and hypervisual
reorientation, as Rip flies "back to the future" to replace the portrait
of "King George" with that of "General Washington." In the
twinkling of an eye. Rip is transformed, in a fashion akin to the finest
of today's movie special effects, from happy-go-lucky Tory to wise
and wizened Whig—an immediate and absolute shift from European
to American: "'Every thing's changed, and I'm changed, and I can't
tell what's my name, or who I am!"' ("Rip" 1:249). For Rip, the
popular pastime of day-dreaming has become the reality of The
American Dream; and Rip, formerly a hen-pecked husband, can now
assume his rightful "manifest destiny" as a couch potato "on the
bench at the inn door" where he is rightfully "reverenced as one of
the patriarchs of the village."