Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994

12 _Po£ularCultureRe^^ IL High Culture and the Common Eye Why should I wish to see God better than this day? (Whitman, Leaves of Grass) In the first place, whether we take the literary canon presented to us in Brooks’ and Warren's American Literature: The Makers and the Making or in Blair's and Miller's The Literature of the United States, we are confronted with a riot of ocularity unparalleled in the history of cultures. From Edward Taylor's ejaculations—"Oh, if His Glory ever Kiss thine Eye" or "Oh! that I had but halfe an eye to view/This excellence of thine, undazzled" (130)—to Cooper’s Deerslayer transformed into Hawkeye, to Poe’s "Deep into that darkness peering" ("Raven" 1:371), to Thoreau's lust for "morning air!" (1:781), to Whitman's scintillating catalogues, to Stephen Crane's ray of golden sun bursting through "the hosts of leaden rain clouds" (538), to Hemingway's desire to "telescope it all into one paragraph" ("Snows" 68), to Stevens' demand that the ephebe "see the sun again with an ignorant eye" (207), to Flannery O’Connor's protagonist, who shouts, "What you see is the truth! . . . I’ve seen the only truth there is!" (103), to Vonnegut's "Deadeye Dick," we have an amazing continuum of hypervisual heritage which paradoxically eschews all tradition and traditional literary senses for the jealous god of American aesthetics: Roethke praysIf I must of my senses lose___ Take Tongue and Ear—all else I have— Let Light attend me to the grave (8, emphasis added). Here, for example, it is no accident that the perhaps two greatest nineteenth-century American novels, Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter, exist entirely as extra- or intro-spective explorations—"A sharp eye for the White Whale!" (218) or the lurid "Interior of a Heart" (142). Here, too, it is no accident that time and time again the American author laments the poverty or irrelevance of language and European models to pay tribute to the hypervisual ideal, as Thoreau confesses that he "cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the

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