Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 22

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shouts-"Open your eyes, open your eyes!" (233-4). The New World
must, as Vonnegut senses, demand a new aesthetic: "The Creator of
the Universe wanted to test a new sort of creature” (173, emphasis
added)-that species of "visible Christians" that Edwards to u t^ : or
that species of Tralfamadoreans introduced in Vonnegut's previously
illustrated Slaughterhouse-Five, creatures with heads composed of a
"little hand with a green eye in its palm" and possessing a radically
new literature that is strictly visual, not verbal: "an image of life
that is beautiful and surprising and deed . . . many marvelous moments
seen all at one time" (76, emphasis added), just as the transparent
eyeball had "seen all" and thus become "part or parcel of God."
Indeed, when Vonnegut wishes to make his most astute point or when
he reaches the end of his literary rope, he turns to the "simplicity"
that Thoreau demanded, even if he could not always accomplish it
himself: Vonnegut reports—
It looked like this.
O Say, then. Can YOU See, in light of all of the above, why we
continue to sing, "O SAY, CAN YOU SEE" at both our most common
rituals and our most awesome Superbowls? O Say, Can YOU See why
our most popular "Western" writer, Zane Grey, worthy to be included
in any contemporary anthology of American literature, confronts his
heroine with the shocking power of New-World hypervisuality:
Her vaunted images of European scenery changed to
operetta settings. She had nothing with which to
compare this illimitable space.
"OhI-America!" was her unconscious tribute (Call
Beaumont, Texas

William E.H. Meyer, Jr.

Works Cited
Baldwin, James. "Many Thousands Gone,” Black Literature in America. Ed.
Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. 310-15.
Brooks, Cleanth, ed. American Literature: The Molars and the Making. 2
vols. New York: St. Martin's, 1973.