Kurt Vonnegut and The American Novel

Robert T. Tally Jr.

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Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel
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Kurt Vonnegut and
the American Novel
A Postmodern Iconography

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Continuum Literary Studies

Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Robert T. Tally Jr., 2011

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 For my father,
whose own copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels
were stolen by his firstborn son long ago.

So it goes.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Preface: And so on . . . xii

Chapter 1: A Postmodern Iconography 1

Untimely Meditations 3
The Machine Age 7
Some Real Characters 10
Read It and Weep 12
Harmless Granfalloonery 15
Chapter 2: Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and
The Sirens of Titan 18
The Thing about Utopia: An Introduction 18
The Work of Man in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction 21
The Fate of the Messenger 29
Chapter 3: Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night 37
Authentic Existence 39
Introducing Uncertainty 42
A Man Without a Country 46
“We are what we pretend to be” 49
Chapter 4: The Dialectic of American Enlightenment:
Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater 53
Disaster Triumphant 54
The Tragedy of the Commonplace 61
Chapter 5: Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics:
Slaughterhouse-Five 70
Nietzsche’s Tralfamadorian “Thought” 71
Tralfamadorian Style 75
Tralfamadorian Ethics 83
viii Contents

Chapter 6: Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions 85

Breakdowns in the Signifying Chain 87
Adapting to Chaos 91
Etc., or, the Sense of an Ending 94
Chapter 7: Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the
Political: Slapstick and Jailbird 98
The Family Romance as Political Strategy 100
The Joint-Stock Company as Political Strategy 107
After the Political 111
Chapter 8: Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard 114
Neutrality 115
Abstract Expressionism and the Real 121
“Strange and Clever Little Animals” 128
Chapter 9: Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos 131
The Thing Was . . . 132
Apocalypse Revisited 136
Big Brains 139
The Era of Hopeful Monsters 142
Chapter 10: Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake 148
Epitaphs and Enumeration 148
Waking the Dead 153
And So On . . . 157

Notes 160
Bibliography 176
Index 183
 Acknowledgments

In my view, the single most important concept that Kurt Vonnegut intro-
duced to the world is that of the granfalloon. A granfalloon, as explained in
Cat’s Cradle, is a Bokononist term for an artificial karass. Whereas a karass is
a team of humans, established by God for a particular purpose which
remains unknown (as does the makeup of one’s team) in this life, a gran-
falloon is formed by humans themselves in an attempt to create bonds
among one another, bonds which are not random, mysterious, or ordained
by God, but may seem so to its members. Vonnegut mentions “Hoosiers”
(i.e., people from Indiana) as one example: “Other examples of granfalloons
are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the
General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and
any nation, anytime, anywhere.” Many readers, picking up on the mildly
derisive tone here, embrace the concept of the karass (as real) and dismiss
the granfalloon (as false), and hence manage to make one of the most
famous secular humanists in America into an apologist for “real” religion—
even though the religion in question is based on foma or lies; Bokonon
himself encourages us to give only ironic credence to the notion of karasses.
I think that they have missed the point. The granfalloon is a marvelous con-
cept because it is not real, precisely because it is an artificial, manmade
grouping, with all the failings that things of such construction inevitably
have. God may have established, once and forever, before time began, who
we are and who is in our karass (or whatever non-Bokononists call it), but we
humans create these artificial communities, for better or, quite often, for
worse. As Vonnegut’s own critique, as well as his affirmation, of the concept
suggests, the granfalloon is no less meaningful to its members for being man-
made. (Just attend a Hoosiers’ basketball game, for instance, to see for
yourself.)
The acknowledgments section of a book seems a perfect spot for some
harmless granfalloonery, for everyone—named or unnamed here—who has
helped make this book possible is part of a special granfalloon of our own
x Acknowledgments

often inadvertent making. And, as with any granfalloon, some of the connec-
tions seem natural, some less so, but all are happily established through the
human, all-too-human relations that make life so dreadfully messy and
painful and wonderful and worthwhile all at once.
I was privileged to take part a few years ago in the founding of the Kurt
Vonnegut Society, surely the most ironic yet entirely appropriate granfalloon
out there, and I have been pleased to serve as its vice president. In organiz-
ing the Society’s panels for the American Literature Association’s annual
convention, I have been able to meet a host of scholars and critics of Kurt
Vonnegut’s writings, and I am delighted to report that their ranks are grow-
ing daily, it seems. I have benefited enormously from working with a num-
ber of eminent Vonnegut scholars (including Rodney Allen, Kevin Boon,
Lawrence Broer, Susan Farrell, Marc Leeds, Donald Morse, Loree Rack-
straw, Charles Shields, and Dennis Williams), and I have also enjoyed meet-
ing the many graduate students and emerging scholars who are enlivening
the field of Vonnegut studies. I am grateful to Donald C. Farber for his
unwavering support for the Society. I have also received support from my
colleagues at Texas State University, among whom I mention only two
here—Michael Hennessy and Ann Marie Ellis—whose indefatigable hard
work makes my work easier, and whose consistent encouragement has
helped me through any temporary spells of professional doubt. My students
have also contributed mightily to my thinking and my own learning.
I would like to thank my parents, who engendered a love of reading and
thinking that brought me to Kurt Vonnegut’s work early on. My mother
instilled in me a desire to know more and better, and encouraged me to
read, especially when video games and baseball seemed preferable. My
father also insisted on book learning, especially with respect to philosophy
and to the classics; moreover, his collection of Vonnegut novels got me
started down this road. I recall how the cover art depicting a little Howard
W. Campbell, Jr. riding a Dachshund on my father’s paperback copy of
Mother Night piqued an interest in Vonnegut’s work that continues even
now. My brothers, Richey and Jay, are also big Vonnegut fans, in addition to
being accomplished musicians, and their conversations with me have cer-
tainly affected my views over the years. The healthy recognition of the ran-
dom absurdity of all things has been underscored on a daily basis by Dusty
and Windy Britches. And, above all, I owe the most to my wife, Reiko, whose
intelligence, engagement, and love make these attempts at understanding
possible.

* * *
 Acknowledgments xi

I would like to give special, double-thanks to Colleen Coalter of Continuum,

who has gracefully shepherded not one but now two of my books through
the editorial process. Her editorial aid and encouragement have done much
to improve my work. Any remaining errors, omissions, misunderstandings,
awkward phrasings, or just plain foma are, of course, my responsibility
alone, perhaps with partial blame assigned to divine Improvidence (as
David Lodge has called it).
Earlier versions of Chapter 3 and Chapter 9 have appeared in slightly dif-
ferent forms, respectively, as “ ‘We are what we pretend to be’: Existential
Angst in Vonnegut’s Mother Night” in Teaching American Literature: A Journal
of Theory and Practice 3, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 94–115, and “Apocalypse in the
Optative Mood: Galápagos, or, Starting Over” in New Critical Essays on Kurt
Vonnegut, edited by David Simmons (New York and London: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2009), 113–31. Many of the ideas discussed in Chapter 1 and
throughout this book are based on an earlier exploratory essay, “A Post-
modern Iconography: Vonnegut and the Great American Novel” in Reading
America: New Perspectives on the American Novel, edited by Elizabeth Boyle and
Anne-Marie Evans (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008),
163–78. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers and editors of each of these
essays.
 Preface

And so on . . .

Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy affair, fraught with immeasur-

able responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness?
Nothing succeeds without high spirits having a part in it.
Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

In this book, I argue that Kurt Vonnegut’s 14 novels represent literary

experiments conducted in order to provide a comprehensive image of
American experience in the postmodern condition of the late twentieth
century. I propose that, contrary to the conclusion of some other critics,
Vonnegut is not himself a postmodernist, but that his works create, describe,
and mobilize various images or icons of American life and that the larger
picture produced in his oeuvre as a whole forms a postmodern iconography.
Vonnegut’s tone, sensibility, ethos, and even style are, I argue, more modernist
than postmodernist, but the world he depicts in his novels is decidedly post-
modern. Vonnegut’s famously heterodox narrative techniques—employing
collage, temporal slippages, drawings, authorial interventions, and the mix-
ture of fiction and nonfiction—represent the novelist’s formal explorations
of the means useful for developing a comprehensive vision of “America” in
a world and in an era in which that abstraction is increasingly difficult
to represent satisfactorily. Like his predecessors in this endeavor, such as
Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway, Vonnegut attempts
to grasp the plenitude of America in the novel form, trying to register the
nation’s shifting and evanescent identity, and discovers the “great American
novel” to be an ungraspable phantom.
In what follows, I revisit each of Vonnegut’s novels, examining specific
iconic elements and drawing connections among them in order to re-present
Vonnegut as an untimely figure, a modernist in a postmodern condition,
 Preface xiii

who develops an iconography of American experience while ultimately

resigning himself to the impossibility of the project. My approach is some-
what less psychological and biographical than many other studies of
Vonnegut, although certain correlations between Vonnegut’s life and writ-
ings seem inevitable. Also, unlike many Vonnegut scholars, who have fre-
quently eschewed such areas, my argument draws on works of literary and
critical theory. While such theory informs my readings, this study is not
meant to be merely a literary-theoretical approach to Vonnegut. Rather I
hope to show that the formal analysis of Vonnegut’s novels, combined with
a philosophical or theoretical examination of the modern and postmodern
conditions, will disclose a more interesting image of Vonnegut’s project as
well as a more useful vision of the role of the writer in grappling with the
contradictions of his age.
What follows will also necessarily involve some underlying considerations
of the theory of the novel, although limited to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut
and limited further by my focus on the novel as a means of imaginatively
representing certain aspects of a social totality. This partially explains why I
am looking at Vonnegut’s novels, and not at his many short stories, plays,
nonfiction essays, or other works (such as his “autobiographical collages,”
Palm Sunday and Fates Worse than Death). I am particularly interested in how
Vonnegut uses the novel form to construct his postmodern iconography.
Undoubtedly, many of his writings in other forms contribute to this overall
project. I am thinking especially of those short stories collected in Bagombo
Snuff Box and Welcome to the Monkey House (which incorporates all but one of
the stories previously collected in Canary in a Cathouse). These tales offer
great insights into Vonnegut’s imaginative social theory, particularly as
applied to the quiet desperation of middle-class life in the United States in
the 1950s and early 1960s. They also display a good deal less misanthropy in
that misanthropic humanism I locate in his early novels, and thus constitute
variations on the themes established in Vonnegut’s long-form fiction. Yet,
the novel as a literary form aims for overview and comprehensiveness, and
so these and other short stories register something more like punctual
interventions into the critique of American society, rather than a critical
survey of that society. Such interventions have great value, and certainly
contribute to Vonnegut’s overall project in often fascinating ways, but they
do not attempt the same experiments that his novels do.
In the end, the fact that Vonnegut largely avoided magazine writing—
due in no small part, I concede, to the drying up of that market—and chose
instead to concentrate on novels and book-length works in the last half or
two-thirds of his career, indicates that the novel was likely the genre that he
xiv Preface

felt was best suited for his project. Indeed, I would argue that the novel is
the only real form available for the project Vonnegut attempts, and that his
work must therefore be seen in the context of the aims and scope of the
American novel in the twentieth century.
Similarly, but for another reason also, I take little interest in the posthu-
mous collections, Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), Look at the Birdie (2009),
and the forthcoming (as I write) While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction
(2011). As every biographical account—including the forthcoming biogra-
phy by Charles J. Shields, which I have not seen as of this writing, but which
I believe will immediately become the standard against which all other biog-
raphies of the author will be measured—points out, Vonnegut took his role
as a professional writer quite seriously, and was rather savvy when it came to
the business of writing, right down to contract law and marketing. In fact,
Look at the Birdie unaccountably includes a letter from 1951 in which
Vonnegut expressly states his preference for the type of writing he wishes to
do: rather than forego “fat checks” in pursuit of a lofty reputation, Vonnegut
writes, “I’ll stick with money.” (In a brief notice available on the Kurt
Vonnegut Society’s website [www.vonnegutsociety.net], Shields explains
that this letter is erroneously listed as a letter to Walter J. Miller, when it was
in fact written to Vonnegut’s Cornell University friend S. Miller Harris—the
“Dear Harris” greeting might have been a clue—and regrets that this misat-
tribution by the editors of Look at the Birdie will undoubtedly “bedevil
Vonnegut scholars for years to come.”) If, after a few years, much less 40 or
50 years, Vonnegut continued to leave notes, drafts, and even complete
manuscripts unpublished, presumably they were not meant to be published.
That does not, of course, mean that they do not have any value and cannot
become resources for scholars, as well as becoming valuable additions to
the personal bookshelves of Vonnegut’s many fans, entertaining and
delighting them as they will. But it does mean that they are more likely to
be anomalies in the Vonnegut canon. And, regardless of the intentions of
the publishers, these posthumous collections inevitably have the whiff of
the graverobber about them.
As for my own study of Vonnegut and the American novel, the overarch-
ing argument about Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography addresses all
14 novels; however, I do not want to lose touch with any of them. As such, I
have organized my study of the novels, with one exception, around the
standard chronological order of publication—not very Tralfamadorian of
me, I know—while also speaking of Vonnegut’s overall project more gener-
ally throughout. Each novel, as I see it, makes a similar attempt to map
postmodern American culture, yet each novel also executes the project
 Preface xv

differently, with different goals and results as well as different characters

and plots. Each novel tries to grasp the essence of American life at its
moment, and, in the aggregate, Vonnegut’s novels depict the mobile ele-
ments or icons of such a comprehensive image in a variety of constellations.
Each novel fails, by the way, but each fails in interesting ways. The 14 “failed”
experiments yield a postmodern iconography that helps us better under-
stand ourselves and the world today.
A brief overview may be worthwhile. In Chapter 1, “A Postmodern Ico-
nography,” I will discuss certain iconic images or concepts, circulating in
the everyday spaces of twentieth-century American life, that Vonnegut
establishes in his novels. These include those familiar to American Studies,
such as the pastoral ideal and the question of technology, the individual
subject’s relationship to a broad social totality, the demands and responsi-
bilities of art, political and economic forces, and above all the promise of an
“exceptional” nation in a multinational world system. I will then examine
Vonnegut’s own role as an iconographer and iconoclast, and discuss why
Vonnegut’s iconoclasm is not specifically a postmodern stance, but neces-
sarily involves the critique of the postmodern condition in the “American
Century.” This chapter also shows how Vonnegut’s own “great American
novel” does not materialize, but Vonnegut’s novels nevertheless contribute
greatly to such an unattainable project.
In Chapter 2, I examine Vonnegut’s first two novels, Player Piano and The
Sirens of Titan, and argue that Vonnegut develops a theory that might be
called, using a paradoxical and parodic phrase, “misanthropic humanism.”
Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism can be seen throughout his entire oeu-
vre, but in these first novels, Vonnegut seems at his most frustrated and pes-
simistic in trying to make sense of the human condition in the postwar
period. Player Piano (1952) conforms in many ways to the dystopian works
of science fiction, and it is frequently compared to such works as George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. One
might also add a book like Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,
inasmuch as Vonnegut’s critique of modern society is here completely
bound up in his critique of corporate, middle-class culture—the age of
managers and engineers, more than of capitalists and proletarians. Yet
Vonnegut goes further than the critique of corporate or industrial society,
extending his criticism to all forms of liberation as well. The revolution
against the dehumanization of industrial civilization concludes with the
postmodern Luddites delightedly rebuilding the very machines they had
smashed. For Vonnegut, the revolution cannot save us, since the problem
lies not with the political, social, or psychological oppression or repression
xvi Preface

of one’s humanity, but with humanity itself. This is what it means to be, in
Friedrich Nietzsche’s elegant phrasing, human, all-too-human.
Similarly, in The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut presents a failed revolu-
tion in what seems to be an all the more fantastic genre. The Sirens of Titan is
perhaps Vonnegut’s most ostensibly science-fictional work, what with its
futuristic setting, its chrono-synclastic infundibula, and its space travel to Mars,
Venus, and the moon of Saturn indicated in the title. Yet Vonnegut always
maintained his opposition to the label science fiction, arguing that it was mis-
applied to writers who took technology seriously and that it tended falsely to
distance writers and literary works from the world of their readers. In fact,
Vonnegut’s second novel uses such science-fictional motifs as space- and
time-travel to shine the light directly on 1950s Americanism, with its critique
of class hierarchy, work and play, war, and relations between the sexes. In this
work Vonnegut undermines the very conventions he employs to broaden
his critique of everyday life, and reveals his sympathy for the human, all-
too-human condition, which is also shown to be utterly absurd. Bookending
that curious decade, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan present the struggles
of middle-class America in its attempt to deal with the profound changes that
a postmodern society in formation is experiencing. Both novels deal with the
failures of utopia, and the uncertainties of human communication; as such,
both resonate with the hopes and the anxieties of a prosperous society in
transition. These works conclude with a theme sounded in all of Vonnegut’s
subsequent work, but here with a sort of bitterness associated with the failed
promise of modernism, that the liberation of humanity is thwarted by human-
ity itself. Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism offers a model for understand-
ing this condition, while also forcing the writer and the reader to look for
other avenues leading to one’s sense of purpose in the world.
In Chapter 3, “Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night,” I
examine Vonnegut’s existentialism, which is offered not as a solution to the
problem of misanthropic humanism, but as a framework for understanding
it and the world it confronts. The moral of Vonnegut’s third novel, as he
puts it in his introduction, is “We are what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut’s
most overtly existentialist novel, Mother Night (1961) explores the related
themes of alienation, identity, and authenticity in order to analyze carefully
the illusions and self-delusions of a man (and, by extension, of others) who
believes himself to be good while involved in the most hideous of crimes.
Vonnegut’s critique of identity thus undergirds his exploration of morality.
But, following Theodor Adorno’s critique of contemporary German phi-
losophy at almost exactly the same time in the early 1960s, I argue that the
“jargon of authenticity” in Mother Night is used to make Vonnegut’s more
 Preface xvii

profound point that authentic existence is largely impossible, and the desire
for such amounts to a delusional, even dangerous, condition. In setting
himself up as the genuine article in a world of caricatures and phonies,
Howard W. Campbell, Jr. assumes the role of the false martyr, and betrays
his own hollow sense of being. By undermining and reevaluating the
concept of authenticity, Vonnegut’s existentialism unfolds into a critique of
modernity itself.
Vonnegut’s critical assessment of everyday life in contemporary American
society moves subtly from a devastating exposure of middle-class morality
and personal self-regard to a broader critique of the modern and postmod-
ern condition itself. In Chapter 4, “The Dialectic of American Enlighten-
ment: Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” I take up Vonnegut’s
own version of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous critique,
in which they note that—contrary to one’s expectations or to its promise—
while “the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear
and establishing their sovereignty,” yet “the fully enlightened earth radi-
ates disaster triumphant.” Drawing on anthropological and sociological
observation, Vonnegut’s farcical critique of science and religion in Cat’s
Cradle (1963) presents a sort of dueling dialectics, with various figures in
motion to point out the absurdity, but also necessity, of the human condi-
tion at the end of the world. This end-of-the-world masterpiece is supple-
mented by what might be termed “the tragedy of the commonplace” in God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). Eliot Rosewater dramatizes the utopian
impulse of American society, while also serving as an ambiguous avatar of
Americanism. Partially under the influence of Kilgore Trout, who makes
his first appearance in this novel, Rosewater attempts to transform a com-
monplace, seemingly realistic, or even banal life, into one of extraordinary
import. Vonnegut here shows his own development since Player Piano, as
the tragedy and comedy merge seamlessly into a fastidiously real world of
science, religion, money, and power. The ambiguities of Cat’s Cradle’s dia-
lectic of Enlightenment and Rosewater’s “pearls before swine” open up the
terrain of the fundamentally ethical philosophy unveiled in Vonnegut’s
most celebrated work.
Chapter 5, “Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-
Five,” examines that novel’s conception of a spatial history, which enables
the text to function as a “time-travel” narrative while not actually involving
time at all. In establishing both the narrative form and the Tralfamadorian
content, that is, by presenting the novel as a mode of alien storytelling,
Vonnegut lays the groundwork for a moral project, gaining its force from
something much like Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return. As Nietzsche
xviii Preface

notes, the idea of the eternal return derives from a cosmological principle
of pre-Socratic atomism, but it functions as basis for ethical action. And, as
Gilles Deleuze has elaborated it, what returns is difference itself, as the infi-
nite variation and proliferation of difference makes possible Vonnegut’s
weirdly comprehensive vision of postmodern American life. Indeed, by vir-
tue of its Tralfamadorian narrative structure, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the
book that might appear to be Vonnegut’s most postmodern novel to that date,
actually comes closest to fulfilling the modernist project of representing
and reintegrating the fragmentary, perhaps chaotic, pieces of a culture than
no longer appear to fit together in any natural pattern. The schizoid nature
of this experience is reintegrated into a meaningful image by virtue of the
Tralfamadorian point of view and an ethical program rooted in the abso-
lute affirmation of life.
Following the successful integration of time and space in Slaughterhouse-
Five, Vonnegut’s seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973), shatters the
tenuous and ephemeral Tralfamadorian unity by extrapolating a thoroughly
schizophrenic narrative. In Chapter 6, “Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland,” I
analyze this marvelous and eccentric novel in connection to Deleuze and
Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. The
protagonist of Vonnegut’s novel, Dwayne Hoover, cuts the perfect figure of
the “schizo out for a stroll,” and the multiple cast members—among them
such recurrent or iterated characters as Francine Pefko, Rabo Karabekian,
Kazak (the dog), Kilgore Trout, and the author (“The Creator of the Uni-
verse”) himself—form a mobile army of perplexed “schizoanalysts.” Break-
fast of Champions marks the turning point in Vonnegut’s career, with his own
admission that the novel is an attempt “to clear my head of all the junk in
there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants.” The novel also represents
Vonnegut’s most powerful engagement with madness, with schizophrenia
in a psychological and cultural sense. In his schizoanalysis, Vonnegut mobi-
lizes nearly his entire iconography and leaves the text with an open-ended
cri de coeur, and an unambiguously salient “ETC.” In its ultimate refusal to
incorporate the profusion of fragmentary icons into an imaginary whole,
Breakfast of Champions goes furthest down the road toward the typically post-
modern novel, yet in its persistently elegiac tone, the novel attempts to
establish an almost premodern or Renaissance unity, figured forth in a new
humanism that places the author’s own biography and politics front and
center.
In the scholarship on Vonnegut’s career, a line is often drawn between
early and late, with either Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions as the
definitive turning point. Vonnegut himself acknowledges that his work, or
 Preface xix

he himself, became more optimistic, though his optimism is often odd, and
only achieves its apotheosis later in Galápagos. With the aftermath of his
fame and the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut became—like it or
not—a public spokesman, and his post–Breakfast of Champions works are
much more explicitly political. Yet, as with his critique of religion, Vonnegut’s
critique of politics employs a bittersweet recognition of the need for, but
inevitable failures of, a sense of purpose and of community.
Chapter 7, “Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the Political,” exam-
ines Vonnegut’s Slapstick and Jailbird. In Slapstick (1976), Vonnegut posits
the value of what he had in Cat’s Cradle called a “granfalloon,” an arbitrary
organization that provides a false sense of collectivity or belonging. The
novel depicts the familial breakdown, symbolized in the splitting of the her-
maphroditic unity of the “single mind” of Wilbur and Eliza Swain, along-
side a national breakdown as Wilbur serves as the very last President of the
United States in an apocalyptic postnational condition. But envisioning
“imaginary communities,” Benedict Anderson’s evocative term used to
describe the conceptual basis of nationalism, Vonnegut re-imagines the
roles of both families and nations in American life. The “family romance”
as a political strategy is, of course, problematic, and Wilbur’s utopia does
not really fare better than Vonnegut’s earlier utopian schemes. Indeed, in
his post-Watergate exploration of the political in Jailbird (1979), Vonnegut
offers a bleak assessment of the postmodern American scene, specifically
introducing the correlations between geopolitical forces and multinational
capitalism. Jailbird is Vonnegut’s most overtly political novel, with a refugee
of the Nixon White House as a narrator and the labor history of the United
States for its ancillary subject matter. However, the political vision of the
postmodern condition—and Vonnegut’s epigonic modernist response—is
revealed in Walter Starbuck’s grumbling quiescence. Here what had seemed
a somewhat hopeful embrace of political granfalloonery in Slapstick becomes
a wholesale dismissal of politics as a transformative force.
Chapter 8, “Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard,” explores
Vonnegut’s aesthetic turn in two surprisingly powerful novels from the
1980s, Deadeye Dick (1982) and Bluebeard (1987). Each deals specifically with
the roles of art and of the artist in the context of modern or postmodern
American civilization, which is why I have chosen to make a temporary
break from the chronological examination, allowing Bluebeard to leapfrog
Galápagos (1985) for the moment. Possibly Vonnegut’s most underrated
work, Deadeye Dick attempts a kind of phenomenology of spirit, complete
with a philosophy of history, the dramatization of historical forces, and a
meditation on the dialectic. The central theme of the neutral (from the
xx Preface

Latin, ne-uter, “neither one nor the other”), plays out in Rudy Waltz’s self-
imposed neutering, as well as in the neutron bombing of his home town. In
a sense, this commitment to the neutral offers its own kind of utopian vision,
even as it paints a picture of a world still in formation and in need of better
illumination. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut most fully realizes his own vision of
history—both the substance of history and the formal aspects of storytell-
ing—concluding, as in Cat’s Cradle’s “read it and weep” punch line, that the
Dark Ages continue. Yet, in Bluebeard, Vonnegut’s long-time interest in
abstract expressionist art forms a backdrop to the story of Rabo Karabekian,
a character who made his debut in Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut is inter-
ested in the struggles of an artist in a world where art no longer seems to
matter. The cosmic irony in Karabekian’s career, that his most famous paint-
ings disintegrate thanks to the Sateen Dura-Luxe paint of inferior quality,
presents an iconic vision of the conflicts between art and life, between
abstract idealism or expressionism and the real. Vonnegut’s meditation on
abstract art leads him to cautiously embrace a representational or highly
mimetic art that glories in a kind of idealism grounded in realism, a utopian
image of art and the artist. Bluebeard has Vonnegut’s happiest ending yet,
with an almost Bokononist hymn to Vonnegut’s humanism. Yet it also reveals
the degree to which, in order to find this harmony, Vonnegut first needed
to retreat into the neutralized and ideal space of the aesthetic, in order to
emerge in the salubrious ambiance of the human, all-too-human.
In Chapter 9, “Apocalypse in the Optative Mood,” I examine what I take
to be Vonnegut’s most optimistic novel, Galápagos. The epigraph to Galápa-
gos also reveals the novel’s overall theme: “In spite of everything, I still
believe people are really good at heart.” That the line comes from Anne
Frank’s diary makes it all the more powerful, since we know exactly to what
the “everything” refers. Galápagos shares with Vonnegut’s other works a poi-
gnant critique of the follies of man, a sense of the absurdity of life, but
emphasizes an element previously much more understated: hope. Here
Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism resolves itself by removing the anthro-
pos, and his apocalypse finds salvation in a not-quite-Deleuzian “becoming-
animal,” whereby humanity sheds its all-too-human nature and, in so doing,
becomes vastly more humane. By inaugurating an “era of hopeful mon-
sters,” Vonnegut completes his modernist, utopian vision for a happily
resolved post-postmodernity.
One almost wishes that Galápagos and Bluebeard had been Vonnegut’s final
novels, ending as they do with such hopeful and forgiving images of post-
human humanity and post-abstract-expressionist affirmation of an embod-
ied realism. In Chapter 10, “Twilight of the Icons,” I look at Vonnegut’s final
 Preface xxi

two “novels,” Hocus Pocus and Timequake; I place the word in “scare quotes”
because the latter is not quite a novel at all, and arguably represents a peter-
ing out of, rather than a conclusion to, Vonnegut’s postmodern iconogra-
phy. Hocus Pocus (1990), whose very title betrays its philosophical argument,
offers a Mother Night–like confession, with an ostensible Vonnegut-as-editor
collecting fragments of Eugene Debs Hartke’s reflections. These fragments
provide a formal counterpart to the fragmentarity of postmodern America,
also serving as a jeremiad without hope. In the blink of an eye—hocus
pocus!—all that functioned as the image-repertoire of America becomes a
nightmare of fractured archetypes. This is an aesthetic of disintegration
whereby the modernist celebration of loss (à la William Butler Yeats’s “things
fall apart, the center cannot hold”) reaches its height in Vonnegut’s project.
In the “twilight of the icons,” Vonnegut’s ambiguous Timequake, not quite a
novel and not quite a memoir and not quite a collection of curmudgeonly
aphorisms, marks a suitably incomplete final intervention in a lifelong proj-
ect to understand “America” by means of iconography. Kilgore Trout, scrib-
bling “novels” on scraps of paper, which are immediately tossed in the
garbage, finds himself soothing a confused and terrified humanity, and is
once again confronted by the “creator of the universe,” to whom he delivers
a final sermon, with its unifying theme of a heavenly soul. The “postmodern
harlequin” (as Todd Davis names him) turns out to be a late-twentieth-cen-
tury Descartes. Timequake indeed!
Vonnegut is an untimely figure, this poetic modernist in a most prosaic
postmodernity, a misanthropic humanist, secular and even atheistic reli-
gious nut, a technophilic Luddite and technophobic technologist. Vonnegut’s
postmodern iconography, developed through and on display in his novels,
represents a bizarre, almost quixotic, attempt at the sort of comprehensive-
ness and unity assayed by the most wide-eyed utopians of the early modernist
period, yet Vonnegut’s world remains more fragmentary and unfixed than
the elegiac modernists imagined. Hence, Vonnegut makes a botch of things,
but, as Herman Melville had once put it while writing Moby-Dick and refer-
ring to his own failed attempts at meaningful representation, “all my books
are botches.” The “America” Vonnegut depicts cannot be easily pinned
down. Vonnegut’s failure to achieve his iconography is largely based on the
ungraspable ideality of the thing itself, the “America” he hoped to compre-
hend. The iconography cannot really represent it, and its very unrepresent-
ability points to a different project for the post-American century: no longer
relying on icons, iconography, and iconoclasts, but perhaps projecting a pro-
visional, mobile constellation better suited to making sense of the human
condition of the twenty-first century. And so on.
 Chapter 1

A Postmodern Iconography

“Call me Jonah.” The opening line of Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s end-
of-the-world masterpiece, unmistakably echoes that of Moby-Dick, Herman
Melville’s end-of-the-world masterpiece. Indeed, such echoes are audible
elsewhere in Cat’s Cradle, from the “cetacean” Mount McCabe, which looks
like a whale with a snapped harpoon protruding from it, to the great Ahab-
like quarrel with God, humorously figured in Bokonon’s thumb-nosing ges-
ture at the novel’s end. In pointing to Moby-Dick, as likely a candidate as ever
was for the “great American novel,” Vonnegut registers his own entry into
the contest, but here it is also bound up in the laughable impossibility of
the project.
The novels of Kurt Vonnegut are not generally the first to come to mind
when one thinks of the great American novel. Indeed, this elusive object—
impossible and, perhaps, not even desirable—has long been a bit of a joke,
the sort of thing an aspiring writer claims to be working on, or (even more
likely) something a writer’s parents, friends, and others say he or she is
working on. The great American novel is always a dream deferred; it cannot
really exist, it seems, for that very reality would probably undermine any
novel’s greatness. The notion of the “great American novel” really belongs
to the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. It existed there as a dream of
writers and critics, desperate to carve a distinct national culture from the
variously influential European traditions. By midcentury, many writers
claimed that the great American literary tradition, one that would surpass
its European forebears, was already beginning to emerge. Melville himself
wrote, in 1850, that “men not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this
day being born on the banks of the Ohio.”1 The closing years of that cen-
tury are filled with lamentations that the messianic promise of an earlier
generation had not come to pass.2 The ideal great American novel would
express an “American spirit,” which is not the same as expressing a particu-
lar patriotic or nationalistic theme. It did not need to be set in America or
even to feature Americans as its principal characters. It had, in a sense, to
2 Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel

capture the essence of “America” in its totality. In the language of the nar-
rator of Moby-Dick, the range must include “the whole circle of the sciences,
and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present,
and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and
throughout the universe, not excluding its suburbs.”3
Few writers have attempted the task as set forth in Moby-Dick, but many
writers have tried to evoke its intent in partial renderings. Although the
“great American novel” is by now a joke, the underlying project seems to
animate the works of many twentieth-century writers, from John Dos Passos
to Thomas Pynchon to Don DeLillo and so on. Each age writes its own his-
tories, of course. In the postmodern era, an epoch defined in large part by
the perceived impossibility of comprehensive representation, a fragmented
version of that vision seems the only feasible way to go. Vonnegut’s entire
career might be characterized as an attempt to produce something like “the
great American novel,” but of its own time. Rather than depicting a repre-
sentative American symbolic narrative, comprehensively bound in a single,
emblematically American work, Vonnegut’s novels as a whole offer a post-
modern iconography, a sustained though fractured narrative of characters
and themes that underlie that older project. Like Moby-Dick, Vonnegut’s
novels present a sprawling image of the complexity of American life,
expressing the human, all-too-human, condition of its varied inhabitants.
Perhaps recognizing, as did Melville, that comprehensiveness is not really
possible, Vonnegut presents a collage of figures, icons whose meanings are
gently elicited by the plots rather than being clearly drawn on their faces.
Vonnegut’s collage is also indicative of the characteristically postmodern
pastiche, in which the various styles of older art forms reappear in surprising
places.
Such pastiche extends also to Vonnegut’s use of genres. Although his
existential themes and heartbreakingly poignant sense of everyday life have
won him critical praise, Vonnegut has often couched his observations in
literature that seems marginal, featuring such B-list genres as science fic-
tion, dime-store magazine writing, slapstick comedy, and even soft-core por-
nography (or, in the case of Breakfast of Champions, all of the above).
Vonnegut employs these genres, but his work cannot be contained by any of
them. That is, it is not really viable to describe Vonnegut as a “science fic-
tion” or “comic” author. Indeed, Vonnegut is not a typical novelist, and there
is no type of novel that fits neatly with his sensibilities. Hence, Vonnegut’s
career may be seen as generically uncategorizable; it too seems like a col-
lage, with bits of science fiction, pop psychology, personal memoir, and so
on, all pasted together in artful ways to present an overall image.
 A Postmodern Iconography 3

This uncategorizable oeuvre thus functions as a postmodern iconography,

a scattered and critical portrait of American life at the very moment of its
seeming transcendence, the postwar period which began America’s reign
as a leading world power, with all the absurdity and horror that accompa-
nies such a position. Throughout his career, Vonnegut’s iconography
advances a literary project—far too highfalutin a term, perhaps—to pro-
duce what Melville and others imagined the American novel could accom-
plish: an expression of the multitude and diversity of American life in its
time. This is the goal of the ever-elusive great American novel, and although
Vonnegut has not captured this legendary creature, he has reasserted the
value of attempting such a project in the postmodern world.

Untimely Meditations

Vonnegut’s work is frequently labeled postmodern, and the postwar America

that provides the content for all of his novels is a primary social and cultural
terrain of postmodernity. It is far from certain that Vonnegut would charac-
terize his own work as postmodern, although legions of sympathetic critics,
from Jerome Klinkowitz to Todd Davis, have been happy to embrace the
adjective in characterizing his writings. Certainly Vonnegut’s oeuvre does
manifest many elements that are associated with postmodern fiction, such
as metafictional techniques, use of collage or pastiche, disruptions in the
narrative timeline, genre-blending, and so on; however, Vonnegut has
eschewed certain aspects of the postmodern and embraced many others
that we tend to view as modern or modernist. David Cowart has suggested
that Vonnegut’s work be viewed as a bridge between modernism and
postmodernism.4 This seems to me much more plausible, inasmuch as
Vonnegut’s apparently formal postmodernity is thoroughly infused with
a modernist content. Nevertheless, it is also clear that Vonnegut’s work
embodies a kind of postmodern sensibility, a feeling for its place and time,
that marks it as postmodern in a recognizable way. Understood historically,
Vonnegut’s work cannot function in the same way as that of the modernists.
Of course, historical understanding may already be a modernist concept.
In my view, Vonnegut’s novels are not exactly modernist or postmodern-
ist. They do not so much represent a bridge between the two aesthetic or
cultural forms as they do an unresolved tension between them. Assiduously
of his time, Vonnegut cannot escape his own postmodernity, with its perva-
sive fragmentarity and stubborn resistance to comprehensive meaning, but
he remains a modernist who desires a form of completeness and semic
4 Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel

stability that remains elusive. Indeed, Vonnegut is untimely insofar as he

insists on a modernist aesthetic while trying (perhaps often failing) to make
sense of a postmodern condition in which all of his work is situated. His
postmodern iconography is therefore a powerfully modernist project.
The term “postmodern” has a notoriously slippery meaning, owing in
part to the variety of uses to which it is put and the contexts in which it is
asserted. In literature, the term began to be used by critics to identify post–
World War II writers who were quite distinct from the modernists of a
previous generation, modernists whose work was beginning to dominate
academic literary criticism. Thus could the Beats, for instance, be distin-
guished from James Joyce and William Faulkner. In France, especially fol-
lowing Jean-François Lyotard but drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze,
Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, among others, postmodernism
became a label with which to describe the cultural and philosophical condi-
tion of a world in which “le grand récits” of modern societies (here under-
stood in terms of those ideological and rational theories from the
Enlightenment) no longer held true. And, perhaps most famously, in archi-
tecture the term carried a polemical meaning, also hinted at in these other
usages, directly attacking the conventions and pretensions of modernism.5
In all cases, the label was meant to register a break with the modern, not
merely to indicate posteriority. The point was not merely that these post-
modernist ways of thinking, writing, building, or what have you, appear after
the modernist ways of doing things, but also that they are somehow self-
consciously aware of their differentiation from modernism.
With its comprehensive attempt at a synthetic and synoptic overview of
the various phenomena gathered together under the rubric of the post-
modern, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism as the “cultural dom-
inant” of the era of late capitalism offers one of the most useful theories of
the postmodern. By grounding the aesthetic and cultural dimensions in the
socioeconomic bases of modes of production and distribution, Jameson
does a better job than most of historicizing postmodernism while also dis-
closing its connections to globalization.
Jameson specifically understands postmodern art as being fully integrated
into commodity production. Whereas the modernists struggled with the
problem of the work of art in the machine age, inventing forms that, in
some cases, were meant to fully resist commodification, the postmodern
condition is one in which the artistic and the commercial have become
inextricably intertwined. (Here one almost inevitably thinks of Andy Warhol
and Campbell’s soup.) Architecture, of course, lends itself most effectively
to this condition, since architecture always requires a mixture of aesthetics
 A Postmodern Iconography 5

and economics; the great postmodern buildings are monuments—in more

ways than one—to the economic system in which they are produced. It is no
wonder that finance capital and bank buildings come together in such
gaudy skyscrapers, or that the flow of global capital can be articulated so
forcefully in lavish hotels designed for the collective wish-fulfillment of
international travelers.
In addition to labeling a historical period, postmodernism has several
aspects that distinguish it from its predecessors, in literature and other
mimetic arts, modernism and realism especially. Any enumeration of such
aspects is doomed to remain incomplete, since the very nature of the post-
modern involves seemingly endless proliferations, like the monotonous
lists found in DeLillo’s novels or the almost numberless brands of colas
found in supermarkets. However, a few salient features are worth observing
here. For one thing, as Jameson notes frequently, postmodernity is charac-
terized by a certain lack of historical sense. As Jameson says of his own analy-
sis, “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to
think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think his-
torically in the first place.”6 The domination of the “now” and the inability
to think historically have a haunting, almost elegiac sense, at least from the
modernist perspective; there is a disconnection with the past, a loss of
shared history, that inevitably involves a break with a perceived community.
Vonnegut touches upon this aspect of the postmodern condition again and
again.7
This lack of historicity leads to a second characteristic of postmodernism:
the subversion of time by space. Postmodernism is often characterized by a
profound sense of spatiality. Whereas modernism is the era of time, of
temporal flux, memory, and historical possibility, the postmodern is all
about space, juxtaposition, extension, and positions, as Foucault famously
described it.8 In the postmodern, space has usurped time’s constitutive role
in human experience; one must then figure out one’s place in an ever-
more-complex network of interrelations.9 In Vonnegut’s novels, one dis-
cerns a profound sense of homelessness, of being out of place. Much of the
bewilderment encountered by characters in the novels has to do with their
sense of being lost, of not knowing where to go. To be sure, that homeless-
ness existed before; it can be seen in Don Quixote and in the novels of
Thomas Wolfe. But in the postmodern, there is an even more alarming
realization: there may not be any underlying referent. That is, not only can
you not go home again, but there was never a home to begin with.
Hence, a possibly crucial distinction between the modernist and post-
modernist sensibilities: whereas the modernist eulogizes a lost home,
6 Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel

community, or prelapsarian stasis, bemoaning the fragmentation of what

was once whole, the postmodernist recognizes—in some cases, celebrates—
fragmentarity as the state of being, denying the existence of a prior, Edenic,
pure, and wholly circumscribed state in the first place. If both modernists
and postmodernists highlight the disintegration of contemporary social
life, then the difference lies primarily in one’s attitude toward this condi-
tion. In most modernisms, the integrated whole is a thing of the past, an
idealized community, that has been torn asunder by the forces of modern-
ization, such that the world is now no longer whole, no longer intrinsically
meaningful, and is—in Georg Lukács’s wonderful phrase—a “world aban-
doned by God.”10 For the postmodernist, whether engaging in a celebration
of the fragmentary or a condemnation of it, the “lost” wholeness is a chi-
mera. Vonnegut, in some ways, seems to straddle the two. In his persistent
longing for a perceived, former unity, in “forever pursuing Eden” (which
Leonard Mustazza has somewhat convincingly argued characterizes
Vonnegut’s entire corpus),11 Vonnegut betrays his thoroughgoing, elegiac
modernism; however, his formal techniques and his more philosophical
content suggest an insinuation of the more postmodern vision in Vonnegut,
where the author seems to admit that such comforting ideas of past glory
are nothing but what Bokonon dubbed foma, useful lies.
A third characteristic of the postmodern condition, what might be
thought of as the psychology of the age, is visible in the seeming fragmenta-
tion of the individual subject. The age of realism might be characterized by
the process of individuation, by the birth of the modern, bourgeois indi-
vidual. The modernist era is marked by the intensification of that individu-
ality, most visible in the form of interiority—expressed through such formal
literary techniques as stream-of-consciousness—which, at its extreme, is
associated with a kind of madness. If neurosis, or paranoia, is emblematic of
the modernist condition, then schizophrenia is surely the model of post-
modernism. The idea, most fully developed and even celebrated in Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, but also articulated in any number of postmod-
ernist literary productions (e.g., those of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon,
and Vonnegut himself), seems most fitting in the present era, an era char-
acterized in part by its being so very “in the present.” Without history and
without home, the subject breaks up into so many little fragments, lacking
coherence.
A final point about the postmodern condition, one perhaps with special
relevance to Vonnegut, has to do with the notion of pastiche. Pastiche, or
the imitation of past styles or genres, has come to characterize the postmod-
ern (especially in architecture, but by extension, the other arts as well); in
Another random document with
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error; and I found that the best way was to increase still more the
deviation in the first instance. As this accident occurred most
frequently while I was recovering from a severe attack of fever, I
thought my near-sighted eyes were threatened with some new
mischief; and this opinion was justified in finding that, after removal
to my present house, where, however, the papers have no very
formal pattern, no such occurrence has ever taken place. The
reason is now easily understood from your researches.”[36]
Other cases of an analogous kind have been communicated to
me; and very recently M. Soret of Geneva, in looking through a
trellis-work in metal stretched upon a frame, saw the phenomenon
represented in Fig. 25, and has given the same explanation of it
which I had published long before.[37]
Before quitting the subject of the binocular union of similar
pictures, I must give some account of a series of curious phenomena
which I observed by uniting the images of lines meeting at an
angular point when the eye is placed at different heights above the
plane of the paper, and at different distances from the angular point.
 Fig. 26.
Let ac, bc, Fig. 26, be two lines meeting at c, the plane passing
through them being the plane of the paper, and let them be viewed
by the eyes successively placed at e‴, e″, e′, and e, at different
heights in a plane, gmn, perpendicular to the plane of the paper. Let
r be the right eye, and l the left eye, and when at e‴, let them be
strained so as to unite the points a, b. The united image of these
points will be seen at the binocular centre d‴, and the united lines ac,
bc, will have the position d‴c. In like manner, when the eye
descends to e″, e′, e, the united image d‴c will rise and diminish,
taking the positions d″c, d′c, dc, till it disappears on the line cm,
when the eyes reach m. If the eye deviates from the vertical plane
gmn, the united image will also deviate from it, and is always in a
plane passing through the common axis of the two eyes and the line
gm.
 If at any altitude em, the eye advances towards acb in the line
eg, the binocular centre d will also advance towards acb in the line
eg, and the image dc will rise, and become shorter as its extremity d
moves along dg, and, after passing the perpendicular to ge, it will
increase in length. If the eye, on the other hand, recedes from acb in
the line ge, the binocular centre d will also recede, and the image dc
will descend to the plane cm, and increase in length.

Fig. 27.
The preceding diagram is, for the purpose of illustration, drawn in
a sort of perspective, and therefore does not give the true positions
and lengths of the united images. This defect, however, is remedied
in Fig. 27, where e, e′, e″, e‴ is the middle point between the two
eyes, the plane gmn being, as before, perpendicular to the plane
passing through acb. Now, as the distance of the eye from g is
supposed to be the same, and as ab is invariable as well as the
distance between the eyes, the distance of the binocular centres oO,
d, d′, d″, d‴, p from g, will also be invariable, and lie in a circle odp,
whose centre is g, and whose radius is go, the point o being
determined by the formula

gm × ab
go = gd = .
ab + rl
Hence, in order to find the binocular centres d, d′, d″, d‴, &c., at
any altitude, e, e′, &c., we have only to join eg, e′g, &c., and the
points of intersection d, d′, &c., will be the binocular centres, and the
lines dc, d′c, &c., drawn to c, will be the real lengths and inclinations
of the united images of the lines ac, bc.
When go is greater than gc there is obviously some angle a, or
e″gm, at which d″c is perpendicular to gc.
This takes place when
gc
Cos. a = .
go
When o coincides with c, the images cd, cd′, &c., will have the
same positions and magnitudes as the chords of the altitudes a of
the eyes above the plane gc. In this case the raised or united
images will just reach the perpendicular when the eye is in the plane
gcm, for since

gc = go, Cos. a = 1 and a = 0.

When the eye at any position, e″ for example, sees the points a
and b united at d″, it sees also the whole lines ac, bc forming the
image d″c. The binocular centre must, therefore, run rapidly along
the line d″c; that is, the inclination of the optic axes must gradually
diminish till the binocular centre reaches c, when all strain is
removed. The vision of the image d″c, however, is carried on so
rapidly that the binocular centre returns to d″ without the eye being
sensible of the removal and resumption of the strain which is
required in maintaining a view of the united image d″c. If we now
suppose ab to diminish, the binocular centre will advance towards g,
and the length and inclination of the united images dc, d′c, &c., will
diminish also, and vice versa. If the distance rl (Fig. 26) between
the eyes diminishes, the binocular centre will retire towards e, and
the length and inclination of the images will increase. Hence persons
with eyes more or less distant will see the united images in different
places and of different sizes, though the quantities a and ab be
invariable.
While the eyes at e″ are running along the lines ac, bc, let us
suppose them to rest upon the points ab equidistant from c. Join ab,
and from the point g, where ab intersects gc, draw the line ge″, and
find the point d″ from the formula
ge″ × ab
gd″ = .
ab + rl
Hence the two points a, b will be united at d″, and when the angle
e″gc is such that the line joining d and c is perpendicular to gc, the
line joining d″c will also be perpendicular to gc, the loci of the points
d″d″, &c., will be in that perpendicular, and the image dc, seen by
successive movements of the binocular centre from d″ to c, will be a
straight line.
In the preceding observations we have supposed that the
binocular centre d″, &c., is between the eye and the lines ac, bc; but
the points a, c, and all the other points of these lines, may be united
by fixing the binocular centre beyond ab. Let the eyes, for example,
be at e″; then if we unite a, b when the eyes converge to a point, Δ″,
(not seen in the Figure) beyond g, we shall have
ge × ab
gΔ″ = ;
rl - ab
and if we join the point Δ″ thus found and c, the line Δ′c will be
the united image of ac and bc, the binocular centre ranging from Δ″
to c, in order to see it as one line. In like manner, we may find the
position and length of the image Δ‴c, Δ′c, and Δc, corresponding to
the position of the eyes at e‴e and e. Hence all the united images of
ac, bc, viz., cΔ‴, cΔ″, &c., will lie below the plane of abc, and extend
beyond a vertical line ng continued; and they will grow larger and
larger, and approximate in direction to cg as the eyes descend from
e‴ to m. When the eyes are near to m, and a little above the plane of
abc, the line, when not carefully observed, will have the appearance
of coinciding with cg, but stretching a great way beyond g. This
extreme case represents the celebrated experiment with the
compasses, described by Dr. Smith, and referred to by Professor
Wheatstone. He took a pair of compasses, which may be
represented by acb, ab being their points, ac, bc their legs, and c
their joint; and having placed his eyes about e, above their plane, he
made the following experiment:—“Having opened the points of a pair
of compasses somewhat wider than the interval of your eyes, with
your arm extended, hold the head or joint in the ball of your hand,
with the points outwards, and equidistant from your eyes, and
somewhat higher than the joint. Then fixing your eyes upon any
remote object lying in the plane that bisects the interval of the points,
you will first perceive two pair of compasses, (each by being doubled
with their inner legs crossing each other, not unlike the old shape of
the letter W). But by compressing the legs with your hand the two
inner points will come nearer to each other; and when they unite
(having stopped the compression) the two inner legs will also entirely
coincide and bisect the angle under the outward ones, and will
appear more vivid, thicker, and larger, than they do, so as to reach
from your hand to the remotest object in view even in the horizon
itself, if the points be exactly coincident.”[38] Owing to his imperfect
apprehension of the nature of this phenomenon, Dr. Smith has
omitted to notice that the united legs of the compasses lie below the
plane of abc, and that they never can extend further than the
binocular centre at which their points a and b are united.
There is another variation of these experiments which possesses
some interest, in consequence of its extreme case having been
made the basis of a new theory of visible direction, by the late Dr.
Wells.[39] Let us suppose the eyes of the observer to advance from e
to n, and to descend along the opposite quadrant on the left hand of
ng, but not drawn in Fig. 27, then the united image of ac, bc will
gradually descend towards cg, and become larger and larger. When
the eyes are a very little above the plane of abc, and so far to the left
hand of ab that ca points nearly to the left eye and cb to the right
eye, then we have the circumstances under which Dr. Wells made
the following experiment:—“If we hold two thin rules in such a
manner that their sharp edges (ac, bc in Fig. 27) shall be in the optic
axes, one in each, or rather a little below them, the two edges will be
seen united in the common axis, (gc in Fig. 27;) and this apparent
edge will seem of the same length with that of either of the real
edges, when seen alone by the eye in the axis of which it is placed.”
This experiment, it will be seen, is the same with that of Dr. Smith,
with this difference only, that the points of the compasses are
directed towards the eyes. Like Dr. Smith, Dr. Wells has omitted to
notice that the united image rises above gh, and he commits the
opposite error of Dr. Smith, in making the length of the united image
too short.
If in this form of the experiment we fix the binocular centre
beyond c, then the united images of ac, and bc descend below gc,
and vary in their length, and in their inclination to gc, according to
the height of the eye above the plane of abc, and its distance from
ab.
 CHAPTER VII.
DESCRIPTION OF DIFFERENT STEREOSCOPES.

Although the lenticular stereoscope has every advantage that

such an instrument can possess, whether it is wanted for
experiments on binocular vision—for assisting the artist by the
reproduction of objects in relief, or for the purposes of amusement
and instruction, yet there are other forms of it which have particular
properties, and which may be constructed without the aid of the
optician, and of materials within the reach of the humblest inquirers.
The first of these is—

1. The Tubular Reflecting Stereoscope.

In this form of the instrument, shewn in Fig. 28, the pictures are
seen by reflexion from two specula or prisms placed at an angle of
90°, as in Mr. Wheatstone’s instrument. In other respects the two
instruments are essentially different.
In Mr. Wheatstone’s stereoscope he employs two mirrors, each
four inches square—that is, he employs thirty-two square inches of
reflecting surface, and is therefore under the necessity of employing
glass mirrors, and making a clumsy, unmanageable, and unscientific
instrument, with all the imperfections which we have pointed out in a
preceding chapter. It is not easy to understand why mirrors of such a
size should have been adopted. The reason of their being made of
common looking-glass is, that metallic or prismatic reflectors of such
a size would have been extremely expensive.
 Fig. 28.
It is obvious, however, from the slightest consideration, that
reflectors of such a size are wholly unnecessary, and that one
square inch of reflecting surface, in place of thirty-two, is quite
sufficient for uniting the binocular pictures. We can, therefore, at a
price as low as that of the 4-inch glass reflectors, use mirrors of
speculum metal, steel, or even silver, or rectangular glass prisms, in
which the images are obtained by total reflexion. In this way the
stereoscope becomes a real optical instrument, in which the
reflexion is made from surfaces single and perfectly flat, as in the
second reflexion of the Newtonian telescope and the microscope of
Amici, in which pieces of looking-glass were never used. By thus
diminishing the reflectors, we obtain a portable tubular instrument
occupying nearly as little room as the lenticular stereoscope, as will
be seen from Fig. 28, where abcd is a tube whose diameter is equal
to the largest size of one of the binocular pictures which we propose
to use, the left-eye picture being placed at cd, and the right-eye one
at ab. If they are transparent, they will be illuminated through paper
or ground-glass, and if opaque, through openings in the tube. The
image of ab, reflected to the left eye l from the small mirror mn, and
that of cd to the right eye r from the mirror op, will be united exactly
as in Mr. Wheatstone’s instrument already described. The distance
of the two ends, n, p, of the mirrors should be a little greater than the
smallest distance between the two eyes. If we wish to magnify the
picture, we may use two lenses, or substitute for the reflectors a
totally reflecting glass prism, in which one or two of its surfaces are
made convex.[40]
 2. The Single Reflecting Stereoscope.
This very simple instrument, which, however, answers only for
symmetrical figures, such as those shewn at a and b, which must be
either two right-eye or two left-eye pictures, is shewn in Fig. 29. A
single reflector, mn, which may be either a piece of glass, or a piece
of mirror-glass, or a small metallic speculum, or a rectangular prism,
is placed at mn. If we look into it with the left eye l, we see, by
reflexion from its surface at c, a reverted image, or a right-eye
picture of the left-eye picture b, which, when seen in the direction
lca, and combined with the figure a, seen directly with the right eye
r, produces a raised cone; but if we turn the reflector l round, so
that the right eye may look into it, and combine a reverted image of
a, with the figure b seen directly with the left eye l, we shall see a
hollow cone. As bc + cl is greater than ra, the reflected image will
be slightly less in size than the image seen directly, but the
difference is not such as to produce any perceptible effect upon the
appearance of the hollow or the raised cone. By bringing the picture
viewed by reflexion a little nearer the reflector mn, the two pictures
may be made to have the same apparent magnitude.
 Fig. 29.
If we substitute for the single reflector mn, two reflectors such as
are shewn at m, n, Fig. 30, or a prism p, which gives two internal
reflexions, we shall have a general stereoscope, which answers for
landscapes and portraits.
 Fig. 30.
The reflectors m, n or p may be fitted up in a conical tube, which
has an elliptical section to accommodate two figures at its farther
end, the major axis of the ellipse being parallel to the line joining the
two eyes.

3. The Double Reflecting Stereoscope.

This instrument differs from the preceding in having a single
reflector, mn, m′n′, for each eye, as shewn in Fig. 31, and the effect
of this is to exhibit, at the same time, the raised and the hollow cone.
The image of b, seen by reflexion from mn at the point c, is
combined with the picture of a, seen directly by the right eye r, and
forms a hollow cone; while the image of a, seen by reflexion from
m′n′ at the point c′, is combined with the picture of b, seen directly by
the left eye l, and forms a raised cone.
Fig. 31.
 Fig. 32.
Another form of the double reflecting stereoscope is shewn in
Fig. 32, which differs from that shewn in Fig. 31 in the position of the
two reflectors and of the figures to be united. The reflecting faces of
the mirrors are turned outwards, their distance being less than the
distance between the eyes, and the effect of this is to exhibit at the
same time the raised and the hollow cone, the hollow cone being
now on the right-hand side.
 If in place of two right or two left eye pictures, as shewn in Figs.
29, 31, and 32, we use one right eye and one left eye picture, and
combine the reflected image of the one with the reflected image of
the other, we shall have a raised cone with the stereoscope, shewn
in Fig. 31, and a hollow cone with the one in Fig. 32.
The double reflecting stereoscope, in both its forms, is a general
instrument for portraits and landscapes, and thus possesses
properties peculiar to itself.
The reflectors may be glass or metallic specula, or total reflexion
prisms.

4. The Total-Reflexion Stereoscope.

This form of the stereoscope is a very interesting one, and
possesses valuable properties. It requires only a small prism and
one diagram, or picture of the solid, as seen by one eye; the other
diagram, or picture which is to be combined with it, being created by
total reflexion from the base of the prism. This instrument is shewn in
Fig. 33, where d is the picture of a cone as seen by the left eye l,
and abc a prism, whose base bc is so large, that when the eye is
placed close to it, it may see, by reflexion, the whole of the diagram
d. The angles abc, acb must be equal, but may be of any
magnitude. Great accuracy in the equality of the angles is not
necessary; and a prism constructed, by a lapidary, out of a fragment
of thick plate-glass, the face bc being one of the surfaces of the
plate, will answer the purpose. When the prism is placed at a, Fig.
34, at one end of a conical tube ld, and the diagram d at the other
end, in a cap, which can be turned round so as to have the line mn,
Fig. 33, which passes through the centre of the base and summit of
the cone parallel to the line joining the two eyes, the instrument is
ready for use. The observer places his left eye at l, and views with it
the picture d, as seen by total reflexion from the base bc of the
prism, Figs. 33 and 35, while with his right eye r, Fig. 33, he views
the real picture directly. The first of these pictures being the reverse
of the second d, like all pictures formed by one reflexion, we thus
combine two dissimilar pictures into a raised cone, as in the figure,
or into a hollow one, if the picture at d is turned round 180°. If we
place the images of two diagrams, one like one of those at a, Fig. 31,
and the other like the one at b, vertically above one another, we shall
then see, at the same time, the raised and the hollow cone, as
produced in the lenticular stereoscope by the three diagrams, two
like those in Fig. 31, and a third like the one at a. When the prism is
good, the dissimilar image, produced by the two refractions at b and
c, and the one reflexion at e, is, of course, more accurate than if it
had been drawn by the most skilful artist; and therefore this form of
the stereoscope has in this respect an advantage over every other in
which two dissimilar figures, executed by art, are necessary. In
consequence of the length of the reflected pencil db + be + ec +
cl being a little greater than the direct pencil of rays dr, the two
images combined have not exactly the same apparent magnitude;
but the difference is not perceptible to the eye, and a remedy could
easily be provided were it required.
Fig. 33.
 Fig. 34.
If the conical tube ld is held in the left hand, the left eye must be
used, and if in the right hand the right eye must be used, so that the
hand may not obstruct the direct vision of the drawing by the eye
which does not look through the prism. The cone ld must be turned
round slightly in the hand till the line mn joining the centre and apex
of the figure is parallel to the line joining the two eyes. The same line
must be parallel to the plane of reflexion from the prism; but this
parallelism is secured by fixing the prism and the drawing.
It is scarcely necessary to state that this stereoscope is
applicable only to those diagrams and forms where the one image is
the reflected picture of the other.

Fig. 35.
If we wish to make a microscopic stereoscope of this form, or to
magnify the drawings, we have only to cement plano-convex lenses,
of the requisite focal length, upon the faces ab, ac of the prism, or,
what is simpler still, to use a section of a deeply convex lens abc,
Fig. 35, and apply the other half of the lens to the right eye, the face
bc having been previously ground flat and polished for the prismatic
lens. By using a lens of larger focus for the right eye, we may
correct, if required, the imperfection arising from the difference of
paths in the reflected and direct pencils. This difference, though
trivial, might be corrected, if thought necessary, by applying to the
right eye the central portion of the same lens whose margin is used
for the prism.

Fig. 36.
If we take the drawing of a six-sided pyramid as seen by the right
eye, as shewn in Fig. 36, and place it in the total-reflexion
stereoscope at d, Fig. 33, so that the line mn coincides with mn, and
is parallel to the line joining the eyes of the observer, we shall
perceive a perfect raised pyramid of a given height, the reflected
image of cd, Fig. 36, being combined with af, seen directly. If we
now turn the figure round 30°, cd will come into the position ab, and
unite with ab, and we shall still perceive a raised pyramid, with less
height and less symmetry. If we turn it round 30° more, cd will be
combined with bc, and we shall still perceive a raised pyramid with
still less height and still less symmetry. When the figure is turned
round other 30°, or 90° degrees from its first position, cd will
coincide with cd seen directly, and the combined figures will be
perfectly flat. If we continue the rotation through other 30°, cd will
coincide with de, and a slightly hollow, but not very symmetrical
figure, will be seen. A rotation of other 30° will bring cd into
coalesence with ef, and we shall see a still more hollow and more
symmetrical pyramid. A further rotation of other 30°, making 180°
from the commencement, will bring cd into union with af; and we
shall have a perfectly symmetrical hollow pyramid of still greater
depth, and the exact counterpart of the raised pyramid which was
seen before the rotation of the figure commenced. If the pyramid had
been square, the raised would have passed into the hollow pyramid
by rotations of 45° each. If it had been rectangular, the change would
have been effected by rotations of 90°. If the space between the two
circular sections of the cone in Fig. 31 had been uniformly shaded,
or if lines had been drawn from every degree of the one circle to
every corresponding degree in the other, in place of from every 90th
degree, as in the Figure, the raised cone would have gradually
diminished in height, by the rotation of the figure, till it became flat,
after a rotation of 90°; and by continuing the rotation it would have
become hollow, and gradually reached its maximum depth after a
revolution of 180°.

5. The Single-Prism Stereoscope.

Although the idea of uniting the binocular pictures by a single
prism applied to one eye, and refracting one of the pictures so as to
place it upon the other seen directly by the other eye, or by a prism
applied to each eye, could hardly have escaped the notice of any
person studying the subject, yet the experiment was, so far as I
know, first made and published by myself. I found two prisms quite
unnecessary, and therefore abandoned the use of them, for reasons
which will be readily appreciated. This simple instrument is shewn in
Fig. 37, where a, b are the dissimilar pictures, and p a prism with
such a refracting angle as is sufficient to lay the image of a upon b,
as seen by the right eye. If we place a second prism before the eye
r, we require it only to have half the refracting angle of the prism p,
because each prism now refracts the picture opposite to it only half
way between a and b, where they are united. This, at first sight,
appears to be an advantage, for as there must always be a certain
degree of colour produced by a single prism, the use of two prisms,
with half the refracting angle, might be supposed to reduce the
colour one-half. But while the colour produced by each prism is thus
reduced, the colour over the whole picture is the same. Each
luminous edge with two prisms has both red and blue tints, whereas
with one prism each luminous edge has only one colour, either red or
blue. If the picture is very luminous these colours will be seen, but in
many of the finest opaque pictures it is hardly visible. In order,
however, to diminish it, the prism should be made of glass with the
lowest dispersive power, or with rock crystal. A single plane surface,
ground and polished by a lapidary, upon the edge of a piece of plate-
glass, a little larger than the pupil of the eye, will give a prism
sufficient for every ordinary purpose. Any person may make one in a
few minutes for himself, by placing a little bit of good window glass
upon another piece inclined to it at the proper angle, and inserting in
the angle a drop of fluid. Such a prism will scarcely produce any
perceptible colour.
 Fig. 37.
If a single-prism reflector is to be made perfect, we have only to
make it achromatic, which could be done extempore, by correcting
the colour of the fluid prism by another fluid prism of different
refractive and dispersive power.
With a good achromatic prism the single-prism stereoscope is a
very fine instrument; and no advantage of any value could be gained
by using two achromatic prisms. In the article on New Stereoscopes,
published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Arts for 1849,
and in the Philosophical Magazine for 1852, I have stated in a note
that I believed that Mr. Wheatstone had used two achromatic prisms.
This, however, was a mistake, as already explained,[41] for such an
instrument was never made, and has never been named in any work
previous to 1849, when it was mentioned by myself in the note
above referred to.
If we make a double prism, or join two, as shewn at p, p′ in Fig.
38, and apply it to two dissimilar figures a, b, one of which is the
reflected image of the other, so that with the left eye l and the prism
p we place the refracted image of a upon b, as seen by the right eye
r, we shall see a raised cone, and if with the prism p′ we place the
image of b upon a we shall see a hollow cone. If we place the left
eye l at o, behind the common base of the prism, we shall see with
one-half of the pupil the hollow cone and with the other half the
raised cone.
 Fig. 38.

6. The Opera-Glass Stereoscope.

As the eyes themselves form a stereoscope to those who have
the power of quickly converging their axes to points nearer than the
object which they contemplate, it might have been expected that the
first attempt to make a stereoscope for those who do not possess
such a power, would have been to supply them with auxiliary
eyeballs capable of combining binocular pictures of different sizes at
different distances from the eye. This, however, has not been the
case, and the stereoscope for this purpose, which we are about to
describe, is one of the latest of its forms.
 Fig. 39.

Fig. 40.
In Fig. 39, mn is a small inverting telescope, consisting of two
convex lenses m, n, placed at the sum of their focal distances, and
op another of the same kind. When the two eyes, r, l, look through
the two telescopes directly at the dissimilar pictures a, b, they will
see them with perfect distinctness; but, by the slightest inclination of
the axes of the telescopes, the two images can be combined, and
the stereoscopic effect immediately produced. With the dissimilar
pictures in the diagram a hollow cone is produced; but if we look at b
with the telescope m′n′, as in Fig. 40, and at a′ with o′p′, a raised
cone will be seen. With the usual binocular slides containing portraits
or landscapes, the pictures are seen in relief by combining the right-
eye one with the left-eye one.
 The instrument now described is nothing more than a double
opera-glass, which itself forms a good stereoscope. Owing, however,
to the use of a concave eye-glass, the field of view is very small, and
therefore a convex glass, which gives a larger field, is greatly to be
preferred.
The little telescopes, mn, op, may be made one and a half or
even one inch long, and fitted up, either at a fixed or with a variable
inclination, in a pyramidal box, like the lenticular stereoscope, and
made equally portable. One of these instruments was made for me
some years ago by Messrs. Horne and Thornthwaite, and I have
described it in the North British Review[42] as having the properties
of a Binocular Cameoscope, and of what has been absurdly called a
Pseudoscope, seeing that every inverting eye-piece and every
stereoscope is entitled to the very same name.
The little telescope may be made of one piece of glass, convex at
each end, or concave at the eye-end if a small field is not
objectionable,—the length of the piece of glass, in the first case,
being equal to the sum, and, in the second case, to the difference of
the focal lengths of the virtual lenses at each end.[43]

7. The Eye-Glass Stereoscope.

As it is impossible to obtain, by the ocular stereoscope, pictures
in relief from the beautiful binocular slides which are made in every
part of the world for the lenticular stereoscope, it is very desirable to
have a portable stereoscope which can be carried safely in our
purse, for the purpose of examining stereoscopically all such
binocular pictures.
If placed together with their plane sides in contact, a plano-
convex lens, ab, and a plano-concave one, cd, of the same glass
and the same focal length, will resemble a thick watch-glass, and on
looking through them, we shall see objects of their natural size and
in their proper place; but if we slip the concave lens, cd, to a side, as
shewn in Fig. 41, we merely displace the image of the object which
we view, and the displacement increases till the centre of the
concave lens comes to the margin of the convex one. We thus
obtain a variable prism, by means of which we can, with the left eye,
displace one of the binocular pictures, and lay it upon the other, as
seen by the right eye. We may use semi-lenses or quarters of
lenses, and we may make them achromatic or nearly so if we desire
it. Double convex and double concave lenses may also be used, and
the motion of the concave one regulated by a screw. In one which I
constantly use, the concave lens slides in a groove over a convex
quarter-lens.

Fig. 41.
By employing two of these variable prisms, we have an Universal
Stereoscope for uniting pictures of various sizes and at various
distances from each other, and the prisms may be placed in a
pyramidal box, like the lenticular stereoscope.

8. The Reading-Glass Stereoscope.

If we take a reading-glass whose diameter is not less than two
inches and three quarters, and look through it with both eyes at a
binocular picture in which the right-eye view is on the left hand, and
the left-eye view on the right hand, as in the ocular stereoscope, we
shall see each picture doubled, and the degree of separation is
proportional to the distance of the picture from the eye. If the
distance of the binocular pictures from each other is small, the two
middle images of the four will be united when their distance from the
lens is not very much greater than its focal length. With a reading-
glass 4½ inches in diameter, with a focal length of two feet, binocular
pictures, in which the distance of similar parts is nine inches, are
united without any exertion of the eyes at the distance of eight feet.
With the same reading-glass, binocular pictures, at the usual
distance of 2½ inches, will be united at the distance of 2¼ or even
2½ feet. If we advance the reading-glass when the distance is 2 or 3
feet, the picture in relief will be magnified, but, though the observer
may not notice it, the separated images are now kept united by a
slight convergency of the optic axes. Although the pictures are
placed so far beyond the anterior focus of the lens, they are
exceedingly distinct. The distinctness of vision is sufficient, at least to
long-sighted eyes, when the pictures are placed within 16 or 18
inches of the observer, that is, 6 or 8 inches nearer the eye than the
anterior focus of the lens. In this case we can maintain the union of
the pictures only when we begin to view them at a distance of 2½ or
3 feet, and then gradually advance the lens within 16 or 18 inches of
the pictures. At considerable distances, the pictures are most
magnified by advancing the lens while the head of the observer is
stationary.

9. The Camera Stereoscope.

The object of this instrument is to unite the transient pictures of
groups of persons or landscapes, as delineated in two dissimilar
pictures, on the ground-glass of a binocular camera. If we attach to
the back of the camera a lenticular stereoscope, so that the two
pictures on the ground-glass occupy the same place as its usual
binocular slides, we shall see the group of figures in relief under
every change of attitude, position, and expression. The two pictures
may be formed in the air, or, more curiously still, upon a wreath of
smoke. As the figures are necessarily inverted in the camera, they
will remain inverted by the lenticular and every other instrument but
the opera-glass stereoscope, which inverts the object. By applying it
therefore to the camera, we obtain an instrument by which the
photographic artist can make experiments, and try the effect which
will be produced by his pictures before he takes them. He can thus
select the best forms of groups of persons and of landscapes, and
thus produce works of great interest and value.

10. The Chromatic Stereoscope.

The chromatic stereoscope is a form of the instrument in which
relief or apparent solidity is given to a single figure with different
colours delineated upon a plane surface.
If we look with both eyes through a lens ll, Fig. 42, about 2½
inches in diameter or upwards, at any object having colours of
different degrees of refrangibility, such as the coloured boundary
lines on a map, a red rose among green leaves and on a blue
background, or any scarlet object whatever upon a violet ground, or
in general any two simple colours not of the same degree of
refrangibility, the differently coloured parts of the object will appear at
different distances from the observer.

Fig. 42.
Let us suppose the rays to be red and violet, those which differ
most in refrangibility. If the red rays radiate from the anterior focus r,
or red rays of the lens ll, they will emerge parallel, and enter the eye