Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 8

Popular Culture Review

Thomas Wolfe's depictions of New York ghettos. Here, the key
remains the popular, everyday ocular experience; and Hemingway's
famous short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," can finally only
have enduring relevance to us and to our students if it points, on sonte
primary level, to that often-puritanical hypervisual standard which
is necessary for the continuation of American art and life as we know
it. Without acknowledging the presupposition of this eye-ideal, we
not only remain enslaved to its terrific power, but we also continue to
mire our "English" classes or history classes or town-meetings in
methodological tedium or irrelevant procedures. No words can serve
as our basis for communication unless these words be informed by the
unique American logic of vision. Emerson simply called this popular
ideal our "genius in America, with tyrannous eye" ("Poet" 238); and
George Bush would come to refer to it —albeit mockingly distorted by
his critics—as the transformation of the citizenry of the United
States into "a thousand points of light."
In what follows, 1 shall first look briefly at the ubiquitous
hypervisual ideal informing "pop culture" per se; then 1 shall offer
some analyses of how "classic American literature" and even
institutions depend upon the original New-World monogram—the
flaming "A" of our Adulterous American Aestheticism flaunted upon
the bosom of public and private citizens from Hester Prynne to the
girls who traipse upon the scaffolds of Atlantic City seeking the
mfir.atcly popular hypervisual imprimatur and "crown."
O Say, then. Can YOU See why the popular pamphleteer,
Thomas Paine, although present in the New World for only a short
time, immediately sensed that "America thinks and acts upon a
different system" (Common Sense 30, emphasis added).
I. Our Most Popular Pop-Culture
It is no longer enough to hear rock;
only seeing is believing.
(Cover-story, Time, Dec. 26,1983)
We study popular culture to avoid accidents. Thus we know it was
no accident that our famous Liberty Bell cracked upon its first ringing
—a crack representing our breach with the lyrical "courtly muses of
Europe" and a crack which we now are quite content merely to go and