Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 21

Hypervisual Standard of Popular Culture

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dissonance or smoke screens. The hypervisual American Revolution
may very well depend as much upon "Revlon" as revolt, and has
certainly produced a radically "surprising conversion" and American
neologism, the "eye-opening" experience:
The Garment of Surprise
Was all our timid Mother wore
At home—in Paradise (578).
Here it is impossible, in an essay of moderate length, to attempt
to exhaust the manner in which our "classic American literature" has
employed the materials and standards of New-World pop-ocular
culture—how Hemingway, for example, amalgamates the excitement
of the bullfight with the ideal transparent prose—"purity of line
through the maximum of exposure" (Sun 168)—or how Fitzgerald turns
outdoor advertising into Super-Vision, featuring the "gigantic pale
blue eyes" of the optometrist-deity. Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, with "retinas
one yard high" (23); or how Updike finds in popular sports the
opportunity for player-hypervision, as Rabbit Angstrom, "when hot,
could see the separate threads wound into the strings looping the
basketball hoop" (Rabbit, Run 37), or as Rabbit watches his tee shot,
"hung way out, lunarly pale against the black blue of storm clouds . . .
sphere, star, speck" (134), or as Rabbit, engaging in the "swinger's
sport" of wife-swapping, finds even anal intercourse to be an
opportunity for microscopic voyeurism, probing through "the
nothingness seen by his single eye" (Rabbit is Rich 419). Here, I
simply conclude this part with a few remarks on one of the
outstanding exponents of this pop-ocular culture, Kurt Vonnegut in his
Breakfast of Champions. Not only, of course, is the title itself
immediately recognizable as a formerly popular trademark of
General Mills; but in this novel, as Vonnegut's "fiftieth birthday
present" to himself, the author crams his pages with actual
illustrations or veritable cave-drawings of the most commonplace
Americana, from the "ice-cream cone" torch on the Statue of Liberty,
to the well-known but vapid Holiday Inn sign, to a final huge eye and
tear. It is as if Vonnegut wishes to leave a kind of primitive record of
our culture for future generations, and these crude pictures offer a
better chance of survival and veracity than any exposition in words—
as if, too, Vonnegut is telling our own generation, as Kilgore Trout